Only in Spain

by Nellie Bennett

  The guitarist started to play a bulería, and I joined the bar in clapping compás. I noticed Juan watching my hands as I clapped. In his early sixties, he had slicked-back gray hair and wore a polo shirt under a leather jacket. I met his eye and he said, “Muy bien,” then turned his attention back to the singer.

  The waiter brought me a glass of red wine and Juan offered me a cigarette, which I declined. (Though it did occur to me that I might as well smoke my first-ever cigarette, because with the amount of smoke there was in the bar, I would passive-smoke a whole pack by the time I’d finished my drink.)

  The singer began a new song in a different style, and I switched palmas to match the new compás. I caught Juan watching my hands again. He seemed surprised to see a foreign girl who knew her compás. When the song came to an end, he ordered me another glass of wine and asked me where I was from and what I was doing in Spain. When I told him that I had come to dance flamenco, he stared at me incredulously. He told me that I didn’t look like a flamenco dancer, and I tried not to feel insulted by that.

  He asked me where I was studying and looked impressed when I said the Amor de Dios. I didn’t mention that I hadn’t taken a class in weeks. How could I explain to a stranger that I was broke and living on a diet of white rice and leftover fried banana until I could scrape together enough money to go back to dance class?

  I heard the sound of raised voices at the door and looked around to see what the commotion was. The waiter left his tray on the bar and went quickly to join the bouncer at the door. I asked Juan what was going on, and he said it was probably a group of gypsies trying to get in.

  “You don’t need to worry about this place,” Juan told me. “They only let the good gypsies in here.” Ha. That was interesting. I looked around again at the crowd. There were dozens of dark-skinned and dark-eyed men in blue jeans and suit jackets. Gold and silver rings glinted in the light as they clapped compás for bulerías.

  So these were the “good gypsies.” The respectable gypsies. The well-heeled and well-behaved gypsies… The other gypsies couldn’t get in the door. The loud, unpredictable gypsies weren’t welcome. So where did they go? I asked Juan and he told me they went to a place called Cardamomo. “Where’s that?” I asked. He looked at me a long moment, then told me that Cardamomo was no place for a girl like me.

  That was all I needed to hear. As soon as he spoke those words, I knew that I had to find this place called Cardamomo where the bad gypsies went. I wasn’t sure what I would do if I did find it. I liked to imagine myself walking in wearing a red dress and ordering a shot of something on fire, but I doubted I would actually have the courage to pull it off. I’d probably be better off setting up gypsy surveillance in a cute café opposite, preferably one that served muffins.

  The singer switched to an up-tempo rumba, and the gypsies cried “Olé!” and stamped their feet and clapped their hands. Two Spanish girls got up to dance. They twirled their arms above their heads and swished their long hair. I could count the days since I’d last danced flamenco, and a live guitar and a gypsy singer were all I needed. I got to my feet and stamped my boots on the tiled floor and danced until the guitarist strummed the final chords of the song.

  • • •

  I fell in love with La Soleá that first night. It gave me a place to go where I could live flamenco, and it made the loss of my dance classes easier to bear. I started going almost every night, and every time I walked in Juan made space for me on the bench and the waiter would come over with a glass of red wine. Juan and I would sit there until the early hours of the morning, clapping compás, and every now and again he would nod his head and say, “Bien, Australiana.”

  I gradually came to realize that Juan was a gypsy stalker just like me. He chuckled to himself about the way they spoke, trying to translate their idioms to me. He’d discreetly point out a particularly eye-catching pair of pointy-toed loafers with oversize buckles, or a massive solid-gold pendant, or some other eccentric gypsy accessory. It became a game between us to spot the most outrageous gypsy fashion.

  So even though I wasn’t going to dance class, I was getting a different kind of flamenco education. Juan filled me in on who the singers were and let me know every time an important gypsy walked into the room. And so began a most unexpected friendship. With Juan I laughed more than I had since I’d arrived in Madrid. No matter the day I’d had, if I’d had to wait an hour in the rain for a bus or arrived late to class, I’d forget all about it when he put a glass of rioja in my hand and told me a joke that he’d heard from the gypsies.

  I put him under strict instructions to call me if any famous flamenco artists showed up in La Soleá when I wasn’t there. Sometimes I’d get a call from him past midnight when I was already tucked up in bed. He’d hold up the phone so I could hear what was going on and tell me he was ordering me a drink. I’d be out of bed in a flash and halfway up the street before he’d even hung up.

  Every so often someone would walk in off the street and give a performance that I knew I would remember for the rest of my life. It wasn’t always something showy, though there was no shortage of show-stealers—gypsies who would jump up and sing their hearts out and dance a bulería. But sometimes the moments that gave me goose bumps happened at a quiet time in the early hours of the morning. Like one Friday at three a.m. when a man came in off the street with his boyfriend. The boyfriend was upset about something; perhaps they’d had a fight or an anniversary had been forgotten. To apologize the man sat down next to the guitarist and began to sing a flamenco love song.

  I’d never before seen anyone ask forgiveness by stepping off the street into a flamenco bar and singing a love song in front of a crowd of strangers. There wasn’t a person in the room who wasn’t moved almost to tears, and I sent up a silent prayer to the universe that one day someone would do something that beautiful for me.

  Anything could happen at La Soleá. Famous stars could walk in at five in the morning, and often did. This was no incentive for me to get an early night. In Madrid the weekend starts on Thursday afternoon and ends sometime around two p.m. on Monday, so Friday morning is generally a write-off. I’d already learned that teaching English. Often my Friday morning student, an auditing director at an energy company, didn’t show up at all, but I still had to go out to his office. Sometimes I slipped his grammar book into my handbag on Thursday nights, so that if flamenco magic did take place, I could stay out all night and get a coffee with the guitarist when he finished work at six a.m. before going straight to the train.

  Of course, the body will get the rest it needs whether you like it or not. The sound of the doors closing on the metro was my cue to fall into REM. Somehow my subconscious kept track of the stations I passed and woke me up when it was time to change trains. Falling asleep in class was a bigger problem. It seemed that there was no amount of coffee that would keep me awake through an hour and a half of English grammar. But if you asked me to choose between phrasal verbs and gypsy bars, what kind of a choice is that?

  THE VEGAN AFICIONADA

  Or

  No hay quinto malo

  No hay quinto malo. That was the new Spanish expression I’d learned. Literally it means that the fifth one can’t be bad. It’s bullfighting talk: at every bullfight there are three toreros (bullfighters) and six bulls, and the best bull is always number five.

  The fifth bull had just run out onto the sand. Even from my spot in the arena I could see he was a big one. I sat forward in my seat as the crowd around me cheered. This was Las Ventas, Madrid’s bullring. A huge arena, painted golden yellow and red ocher, the colors of blood on sand.

  I never really understood the bullfight. A guy standing in front of a bull, twitching a red cape—it always made me think of cartoons I used to watch as a kid. Anything red would make the cartoon bull go crazy and pitch some unsuspecting person into the air. But it was so quintessentially Spanish that I felt I had to try to understand
it. Back in Seville, Enrique once told the class that if you don’t like the bullfight, you’ll never dance flamenco. In the end it’s the same art: the dancer impersonates the torero, and the torero moves like a dancer. I had been repulsed by the idea. The bullfight had always seemed so barbaric to me. But now I could see that he had been right. The bullfighter positioned himself in front of the bull, like a dancer waiting for his cue. He had the same stance that we had learned—chest raised, shoulders pulled down, chin up. Just watching him made me long to be back in the studio.

  The bullfighter took out his red cape now, and a hush descended on the crowd. The bull lowered its horns and pawed the sand. “Ay!” the bullfighter yelled. The bull charged and the bullfighter held his position. He dragged the cape over the sand as the bull’s horns just missed him. The crowd called out, “Olé!”

  This fight was part of the Festival of San Isidro, the patron saint of Madrid, held every May. Tickets were virtually impossible to get, but mine had been a gift from one of my English students, Tomás, the director of sales at Andrés’s company. The company had season tickets to the bullfights so they could take visiting clients. This particular day he had a spare ticket and he’d given it to me.

  Tomás was a bullfight aficionado. Actually, the word “aficionado” originally meant someone who is enthusiastic about bullfighting. Tomás taught me that. In his spare time he wrote articles for a bullfighting magazine, and whenever he had a new piece published, he’d bring it to class and we’d translate sections of it into English.

  Mine was a sombra ticket, a seat in the shade. Though it was spring and the afternoon sun still wasn’t that hot, the tradition of dividing tickets into sol (sun) and sombra came from the south of Spain where the sun is scorching. The sombra tickets were the most expensive and sought after.

  I was entranced by the audience as much as by the fight itself. The arena seated twenty-five thousand people, and looking around, I couldn’t see an empty seat. The crowd seemed to ripple as thousands of women lazily waved fans. People still dressed up for the bullfight, the men in crisp cotton shirts and blazers, and I saw many polka-dot handkerchiefs poking out of pockets, red carnations on lapels, and little Spanish flag tiepins. The women wore wonderful combs in their hair like the ones the Sevillians wore to the feria.

  Sitting in the arena, I remembered a picture I’d once seen of Ava Gardner and Orson Welles watching a bullfight. They were both sucking on cigarettes and looking tanned and rumpled in the afternoon sun, just like two Spaniards. I hoped that I looked Spanish, too. Hmmm, probably not. I was so pale after the winter that Juan had nicknamed me “La Transparente.” And even with my blue eyes hidden behind my sunglasses, the mop of red hair I tried to keep back in a ponytail was a bit of a giveaway.

  The torero held out his cape and called to the bull. His weight was forward on the balls of his feet and his arm was outstretched. The bull charged, and the torero deftly twitched the cape and turned his torso so that the bull’s horns just grazed the gold embroidery of his costume.

  Watching him made me remember my classes with Enrique. That was the way he had wanted us to move. It was the distillation of drama in the subtlest movement. I half closed my eyes and felt myself back in the studio in the backstreets of the Macarena. My feet back in my red shoes, and the soft folds of my skirt against my legs. I felt myself lifting up onto one toe, trying to hold my balance as Enrique pressed one finger sharply beneath my rib cage. Gira.

  What was the passion I felt in those days? That desperate, crazy love that gripped me on the nights when I walked in and out of the bars around the bullring with flamenco in my head and the moon in my eyes? I remembered the night that Zahra and I heard the woman singing in that little bar by the river. “When you fall in love in Seville, you fall in love with Seville.” But I hadn’t just fallen in love with Seville; I had fallen in love with Spain.

  I felt that same passion again as I watched the bullfighter move around the ring like a flamenco dancer. But why? What was my link to this crazy, wonderful country? I couldn’t have been more foreign if I tried, so what was I doing, rising to my feet with a crowd of Spaniards, drawing in my breath as the bullfighter spread out his red cape and the bull, lowering his horns, pawed the sand? As it charged, the bullfighter lifted up onto his toes with the balance of a dancer and plunged the sword right between the bull’s shoulder blades.

  And all around me the crowd cried, “Olé!”

  • • •

  I climbed the stairs again, up past the butchers and grocers until the smell of fish and meat was replaced by varnish and cigarette smoke. It was mid-May, and the Amor de Dios was full of activity. Dancers were hurrying up and down the corridors, and girls in long skirts crowded around the notice board, writing down class times. I’d done my sums, and it looked like I’d have enough money by the end of the month to take a class, if I pulled my belt in an extra notch.

  I edged my way in to see what classes were up on the board, and as I gazed at all the different possibilities, a young guy squeezed in next to me and pinned up a flyer for a show. “Qué buscas?” he asked me. He looked like every other guy at the Amor de Dios, with long black hair and those dark eyes that I was starting to build up resistance to. What choice did I have, when the guy who made my coffee in the morning was a more gorgeous version of Javier Bardem, and the bus driver who took me out to the suburbs to teach was Enrique Iglesias’s long-lost twin brother? I’m not even going to talk about the riot police who wander around Madrid in their chic black uniforms. I couldn’t get weak at the knees every time I left the house.

  “Qué buscas?” He asked me again what I was looking for, and I told him that I was trying to choose a dance class. He told me to try his cousin’s class. “Muy gitano,” he said. Very gypsy. Everyone wants to be “gypsy” in flamenco. Actually, it generally goes that the whiter you are, the more gypsy you want to be… Take me, for example.

  The flyer he’d pinned up was for a show; he was the lead dancer, Diego Caballero. He handed me one, and then he mentioned that, if I was up for it, maybe we could go out one night…to a little place called Cardamomo.

  I hadn’t forgotten the name. That was the place Juan said the bad gypsies went. I took a second look at this boy. Yes, he had those high, sharp cheekbones and that strong nose, and his eyes were even darker than average… I was finally getting picked up by a gypsy.

  And he wanted to take me to Cardamomo! When I’d pressed him, Juan had told me stories he’d heard about the fights that went on there. He assured me that every gypsy in the place was armed and that the girls were more dangerous than the boys. All I had to do, Juan warned me, was dance with the wrong guy, and the gypsy girls would be outside waiting for me. He told me about girls who had been disfigured by the gypsies’ long acrylic nails. They’d attacked foreign girls before, hacking off their hair and spraying their blue eyes with purse-size hairspray.

  If you know what’s good for you, he’d told me, you’ll keep away from Cardamomo. And I should have remembered his advice as this gypsy boy wrote his number down on the flyer. I should have, but I was too busy thinking about what I was going to wear.

  THE LITTLE BLACK DRESS

  Or

  What am I going to wear?!

  Seriously! I had absolutely no idea. What does one wear on a first date with a gypsy? If anyone should know, it would be me: I’d read every article ever written on date dressing. I knew that beach walk = sundress, Sunday brunch = jeans and cashmere sweater, cocktail party = tailored pants (everyone else will be in party dresses and you’ll want to stand out). But what do you wear when your first date is to a notorious gypsy bar?

  I cast my mind back to the shots in the Harper’s Bazaar mag, those tantalizing images that set my imagination on fire. If only I had a fashionably tattered red dress…but then that would be too much. If there’s one date rule that applies to all situations, it’s to never overdress.

  But wh
at was I going to wear?

  That phrase repeated itself over and over in my head as I walked back through the streets of Antón Martin, weaving between pedestrians and stopped cars in the eternally congested streets. In my mind I was tipping my suitcase upside down and watching leotard after leotard fall out. That was all I had, apart from the jeans I was wearing and the few semirespectable white shirts I’d bought for work. There was only one thing to do: shop. So instead of walking back to the apartment, I directed my steps to the big department store in the center of town.

  You know the one…they are the same in every city in the world. More predictable than airport duty-free shops, and more comforting than Starbucks. As my dusty sneakers tramped up the marble steps, the automatic doors slid open and I was greeted by the smell of Estée Lauder Pleasures spiked with Dior Tender Poison. I let the escalators carry me up to Señoras: Women’s Fashion.

  I’d figured out what I needed: a sexy red top that I could wear with jeans and high heels. That was a look I had labeled in my mind as “understated gypsy.” And my budget was twenty euro. More than I could afford, but then it isn’t every day you get invited to a dangerous den of vice and sin. As I wandered through the racks and rails, though, I started to feel more and more hopeless. The clothing was drab, to be generous, and I didn’t want to rock up at Cardamomo looking like a dental hygienist or the mother of the bride. So I did something I knew I would regret: I went up another flight to High Fashion.

  But there are shades of regret. There are things in life that you really do regret, like missing friends’ birthdays or mixing beer and wine. And then there are things that fall into the category of mistakes you just had to make. Mistakes that add the exclamation marks to your life. And as the escalator leveled out into the world of designer fashion, I found myself staring at one such mistake.