by Sarah Bird
From somewhere outside the bunker, the sound of a guitar being played echoed in. As she turned to leave, I grabbed her arm. “Listen.” Didi paused as the music wafted into the tunnel. “What if that’s him?”
The playing was rough and amateurish. “Rae, if that’s him, I’d say he’s a pretty shitty guitarist. Don’t worry, he’s not here. That’s some student practicing. Okay?”
I nodded.
“Rae-rae, you’re not breathing.”
“Deeds, I can’t do it. I can’t go out there.”
“Then you’ll never get him.”
“Then I’ll never get him.”
“You mean you’re not even going to try?”
“I can’t. I just can’t.”
“Even knowing that he’s not going to be in that class.”
“It’s not a logic thing.”
“Whoa! Whoa! I’m the last person in the world who is going to insist something has to be logical. Logical shit is easy. It’s the illogical shit that controls our lives.”
“I can’t. I can’t do any of this. I’ll just wait for you at Frontier.” I started to walk out the opposite tunnel.
“Rae, come on. I’ll go with you.”
I stopped. I didn’t really want Didi to go to the class with me, didn’t want to share it with her. But I would never walk into the class by myself. “Just to walk in the door?”
“Sure. Walking in the door is always the hardest part. Then you’re on your own, though, okay? The big pink bird thing is your perverted fantasy. I have enough of my own to keep track of. Deal?”
“Deal.”
The Flamenco Academy was a recent addition to the back of Carlisle Gym, a two-story Pueblo-style adobe building painted a soft fawn. Didi pushed through the turquoise blue front door and I followed. The old gym looked like opening night of a Broadway musical. Dancers from tap, jazz, and African classes crowded the main hallway, changing into practice skirts, slugging down water, putting on makeup, and taping their gnarly, wrecked feet. The place smelled of decades of girl sweat and hair spray.
“Jazz hands! Jazz hands!” Didi whispered to me, waggling her fingers beside her head in a cheesy dance move. Although she was mocking the frenzy of activity, I could hear the thrill she was hiding behind the fake cynicism. Didi grabbed my course schedule out of my hand and read, “Studio 110. Instructor Alma Hernandez-Luna. Let’s try that way.”
Black wrought iron curled out the words THE DOÑA CARLOTA ANAYA FLAMENCO ACADEMY above a set of carved wooden doors so new they still smelled of varnish. Didi shoved them open and we found a larger-than-life-size oil portrait of a flamenco dancer staring down imperiously at us. She looked like a silent-movie star, a dark-eyed vamp from the twenties or thirties wearing a flat-crowned black hat with a veil of pom-poms ringing the crown, spit curl plastered to her cheek. I assumed this was the legendary founder of UNM’s flamenco program, Doña Carlota. Even in the two dimensions of a portrait, she seemed ready to explode into motion. Back arched regally, her bosom heaved against the tight, scarlet fabric of her dress. A ruffled train cascaded off the back of the dress. The front of the dress was cut up high to reveal strong, muscled legs. Her ferocious gaze challenged my right to be there. I did not belong.
Dancers from the advanced classes, almost all Latina, rushed past us. Slender inkbrush ripples in their long, dark skirts, their long, dark hair; they belonged in a flamenco academy. As their skirts brushed against the polished floor, they strode forward with the single-minded devotion of novitiate nuns hurrying to chapel. As with Didi, if you’d taken a picture of any one of those girls, then looked at the negative of that photo, the exact reverse of all things flamenco, you would have seen my broad, pale Czech face, the evidence that, not terribly far back in my genetic lineup, there were generations of dozy, strawberry blond milkmaids, all pale as steam. I felt fraudulent. I was a support person. What the hell was I doing here even considering taking a dance class? I’d never taken a dance class in my life. All I wanted at that moment was to leave. I imagined the safety of an accounting class. Of being hidden in the last row, letting strings of numbers soothe the jittery anxiety scraping every nerve in my body. I would have left, but Didi was already heading down the long hall, searching for the right number.
She pushed through the chaos and I followed her to studio 110. “So, here you are.” When I didn’t move, Didi shook her head like an exasperated yet amused mother. “Rae, you have that scared-shitless look.” She grabbed my arm and dragged me into the studio. “See? No Mystery Man.”
I glanced quickly around the studio, found it completely populated by females, and started breathing again. The studio smelled new, untouched. High windows flooded the big room with morning sunlight that refracted off mirrors covering the walls. Brand-new wooden floors gleamed like a lake of honey. It was the most beautiful room I’d ever entered.
“Oh Jesus, look, ballet swans.” Didi pointed a surreptitious finger at a clutch of girls in a far corner. Years of ballet training were obvious in the way they stood with their toes turned out like ducks. They had their hair skinned into ballet buns at the back of heads that wobbled atop freakishly elongated necks. The swans hooked pointed feet over the barre that ran the length of the room and folded themselves into the sort of stretches favored by Hindu yogis and serious dancers.
Didi nodded her chin toward another group of obviously experienced students and did jazz hands to identify their subtype. The jazz dancers performed scary head rolls, whipping their skulls around on rubberized necks. It all looked intimidatingly professional. I started to panic.
Didi shook her head. “I thought you said this was a beginner’s class.”
“It’s supposed to be.” The incipient panic broke into a full gallop and I started to turn. Didi grabbed me.
“Where are you going?”
“I can’t stay.”
“The hell you can’t. No one runs my girl off. Especially not a bunch of binge-purge princesses like this pack here.” With that, Didi jerked me down onto the floor where the good dancers were stretching. What they were really doing was checking one another out, sizing up the competition with sidelong glances, heads resting on kneecaps or upside down on the floor between straight legs. Then they pushed their stretches even further. Didi stressed every ligament in her body, attempting to reach farther and lower than any of them.
I flopped down next to her.
“This is a certified freak show.” Didi’s comment calmed me. It was like being back in the Mustang with her while she categorized all the different varieties of Whore-nut at Pueblo High School, putting each one in its place and all of them a safe distance away from us.
The door flew open and all the girls backed off the stretch competition as we waited for Alma Hernandez-Luna, the local-girl-made-good and current director of the flamenco program, to step through the door. Instead, an ancient birdlike woman crept in. Her hair, dyed an inky black, was plucked back into a tight braid at the top of her head that stretched her skin, tugging her eyes up until they had an Asian cast.
“Instant face-lift,” Didi whispered to me.
It was hard to tell exactly how old the woman was from her face—over fifty, under a hundred—but her hands gave her away. Age-spotted, they were as twisted as a miniature bonsai tree.
“I didn’t know that the university was hiring bag ladies?” I touched a finger to my lips to silence Didi. She rolled her eyes.
The class buzzed with whispers that were all versions of “Where is Alma?”
The old woman tottered to the front of the class, squared her shoulders, and took several long moments to gather herself. Bit by bit, as if she were sucking energy up through the floor and out of the very air, the old lady stood up straighter and taller, until she looked as rooted and strong as a cottonwood down by the river.
“Buenos días, señoritas.” A trilling Castilian majesty whipped through her words. When all we did was look at one another, baffled, she repeated the greeting even more imperiously.
“Buenos días, señoritas.”
Didi stared the woman right in the eye as she led the response. “Buenos días, señora.”
“Bueno. If you want to learn ballet, you must speak French, no? Well, if you want to learn flamenco, you must speak Spanish.” Actually, what she said was, “Buono effa jew wan to lairn flah-MEN-ko! Jew mus espick espanish.”
Didi caught my gaze and rolled her eyes in reaction to the comical accent and I whispered to her, “You can leave.”
“Are you kidding? A world-class freak show like this?”
A girl with the giraffe posture, bun at the back of her neck, duck-toed turnout, and bulimia-gray teeth of the Serious Dancer, subgroup Ballet Swan, asked testily, “I thought our teacher was supposed to be Alma Hernandez-Luna?”
At the girl’s peevish tone, Didi, now highly amused, leaned toward me. “Wow, who put a toe shoe up her ass?”
The old woman stood even taller as she answered. “Señora Hernandez-Luna has much more important things to do than teach you burros.”
The little ballerina’s face screwed itself into furrows of further annoyance as the old lady trilled the r’s in burros until they rattled like machine-gun fire.
“Yeah, but—”
“But how can I teach?” the old woman snapped. “Is that what you want to know? How can I teach when I am old? How do I dare show myself when I am not young and tender? Because my face is wrinkled and I have here”—she held up an arm, which was surprisingly well muscled, powerful in fact; I had a second look at her legs and saw that the old woman had the calves of a soccer forward—“spots. Because my body is old, how can I not crawl into a corner and cut my wrists? Is that what you are asking?”
“Uh, no. I was only—”
“You are only an American girl whose mamá neurotica gave her her first tutu before she could walk. Who has studied jazz and modern and tap and African dancing and then, one day, she sees Joaquin Cortés with his shirt off and she thinks, Oh, jes, flamenco. So she decides she will put on the red dress and learn flamenco. Except that, coño!...”
Some of the Hispanic girls in the class flinched at the curse.
“Here is this old lady and she is not part of your flamenco fantasy. Well, phhtt on your fantasy.” The old woman dismissed the little ballerina with a swirl of her fingers in front of her face in a gesture that was European, ancient. “How can such an old lady teach you?” She drew herself up, dropped her shoulders until her chest seemed to broaden to twice its size, and answered her own question. “Because I am flamenco.”
“She ‘jam’ flamenco?” Didi asked, mocking the woman’s accent. “Who is this whack job?”
I was embarrassed that Didi was there to see how ridiculous my flamenco fantasy really was. I knew her patience was wearing out because she stepped away from me and moved to the back of the class. I was certain that, any second, she’d wave bye-bye over her shoulder to me and the entire class and saunter out. I was glad to see her edging away.
Most of the class had started grumbling, all asking whispered versions of Didi’s question. “Who is this whack job?”
“As a favor to Señora Hernandez-Luna, you, burros, shall be the first class I teach in ten years. Because it is a continuation of all that has come before, everything in flamenco begins with one word: ‘and.’ And so, we begin.” She raised her gnarled hands, froze them in position until we were all silent, then, with great gravity pronounced, “Y!” and clapped. That was all. She just clapped. She clapped out a count of twelve with odd accents thrown in, sometimes coming down hard on the three, six, eight, and ten. Sometimes the one, four, seven, and ten. With each change of beat she’d shout out “Por alegrías! Por soleares! For bulerías! Por tangos!”
After several more minutes of the unexplained clapping, the testy ballerina and some of her friends walked out, which seemed to please our teacher enormously.
“Bueno, now that las impostoras are gone, we can begin. Those of you who remain must be able to hear the one essential of flamenco: rhythm, beat, el compás. El compás is everything. Todo, todo, todo. What is this?” she asked, raising her skirt, then stamping her feet so fast they blurred and all that emerged was a sound like a subway hurtling through a tunnel, like a hailstorm, like the Industrial Revolution hitched to a pair of human feet. As she stamped out a rhythm too complicated for any of us to follow, the flesh on her face, jowls, cheeks, even her forehead, bounced authoritatively, but she didn’t break a sweat or get the least bit out of breath.
“This”—she pointed at the astonishing blur of her feet—“this is nada! Mierda!”
She brought her arms up, twining her hands like an odalisque dancing for the sultan. “All this is,” she went on, hands and feet moving together, “is just to say something about this.” She stopped dead and began to clap. “One, two, three! Four, five, six! Seven, eight! Nine, ten! El compás! Now you.”
We tried to capture the beats, but they came in puzzling, unpredictable bursts.
“Come on, you American burros, you’re already sixteen years behind. Little Spanish girls clap patty-cake en compás. Vamos! Más fuerte! Let me hear you! If you’re gonna make a mistake, make a loud mistake! Dígame! Tell me something! Dame la verdad! Give me the truth!”
In response to our feeble clapping, she waved her arms. “Stop! Stop! I can’t stand the sound of those sick kitten paws!” She mocked our attempt, patting her hands together with pathetic taps. In the mirror, I saw Didi grinning as if the teacher were making a joke. The old lady shot her a look fierce enough to make the grin fade. After that challenge, I was certain Didi would leave.
Following ten more minutes of clapping, a girl who’d come to the class hoping for a good cardio workout threw her hands up in disgust and walked out. Our teacher followed her exit with a series of eloquently mocking claps, chirps, and finger snaps before turning back to us and starting the odd beats that she’d called el compás again. The entire time, she counted, “One, two, three! Four, five, six! Seven, eight! Nine, ten!” Numbers. That was what I did. I grabbed hold of the digits and, as always, they hauled me to safety. It was incidental that I was clapping and stamping my feet instead of punching figures into a calculator. It all still tunneled directly into the odd packet in my mind where numbers did curious dances that tranquilized my anxieties.
Figuring out this old lady’s code of claps and snaps absorbed me to such an extent that I didn’t have any mental energy left to be embarrassed about Didi witnessing such a ludicrous display. I was so intent upon duplicating the rhythms and counterrhythms this strange old woman was feeding us that I lost awareness of anything or anyone else in the class.
One by one, all the others gave up and dropped out until only one other pair of hands besides mine returned the teacher’s rhythms. Doña Carlota stood directly in front of me and accelerated her clapping. I did the same, slapping the fingers of my right hand against my left palm until it reddened and stung. She indicated that I should continue the rhythm, then stepped back to the other remaining clapper. It was Didi.
Even more surprising, Didi was rapt with attention. Gone was her mocking detachment. She was immersed in a way I’d seen only when she was either on a groupie mission or working on her music. The teacher clapped. Didi wasn’t able to copy it exactly as I had done. She came close to missing the basic beat structure completely. What she did, though, was return the rhythm with some topspin on it that was all her own. Perhaps the mockery wasn’t gone entirely. It might have been embedded in the saucy smacks that Didi improvised on the spot. The two of them went back and forth, Doña Carlota backing up as they went, leading Didi forward until she stood next to me again at the front of the class.
It was Didi who finally ended the clap-off with a few comically exaggerated off-beat claps. A buzzer sounded, signaling the end of class.
“Esperad!” our teacher yelled at the students scrambling to escape. She strode to the chalkboard at the side of the room and, pronouncing as she went, wrote, Sino. “Sino. Fate. My people b
elieve that each of us has our own sino that cannot be altered. If your sino is to dance flamenco, know this: you will never again set foot in my class unless you are properly attired.” With a piece of chalk, she scraped out an address on the blackboard. “Go here. See Teresa. She will know what I require. Your assignment for next class is to begin reading Federico García Lorca. Not only was Lorca Spain’s greatest poet, but he is the only writer anywhere who has ever been able to put flamenco on paper. It is a miracle to behold.”
We were again rushing for the door when she stopped us for a second time. “This will never happen again. Flamenco is an expression of respect for that which has survived. Out of respect that I have survived to my advanced age, no one who wants to be my student will ever leave a classroom before me. And no one who wants to be my student will ever address me by anything other than my full name.” She bore down so hard on the piece of chalk that it screeched as she printed out the legendary name I already expected to see: Doña Carlota Anaya.
“That is my married name.” Then, with more screeching and great gravity, she chalked in an arrow and in front of Anaya and separated from it with de, she added her maiden name: Montenegro.
Chapter Sixteen
“Montenegro?!” I shouted the instant Didi and I were standing outside the old gym.
“Yeah, major affectation, don’t you think? Very High-spanic to add your maiden name like you’re from a royal house or something.”
Cigarette smoke wafted over from the dancers gathered around a guitarist sitting in the shade of a tall spruce tree. They clapped along in a soft, patty-cake way and sang in warbling Spanish. Those who weren’t playing, singing, or clapping were smoking cigarettes from a blue and white packet with the brand name, Ducado, printed on the front. They smelled harsh even from a distance. Didi’s attention was strangely riveted on the group.