The Flamenco Academy

by Sarah Bird

  We stretched, reaching out our arms, our torsos, to drag more of this story our way.

  “Is that cruel? No. For a Gypsy, a gitano, a calé, the only insult is not giving someone a nickname because then they don’t belong, and for a Gypsy, not to belong to the tribe is to stop existing. When I was a girl growing up on the Sacromonte, on the Sacred Mountain outside of Granada, the gitano way was to let the goats raise the children. We learned that knives were sharp by getting cut and fires hot by being burned. Our mothers did this because Gypsy children suffer so much in the payo world that we have to be stronger than los payos.

  “My family lived in a cave. Yes, a cave in Sacromonte. Since there were no toilets, we all found abandoned caves to relieve ourselves in. Everyone joked that my brother Mono found his the hard way. He was two, old enough that he had stopped existing for my mother and would not start again until he was strong enough to do chores for her. As soon as he was able to step over the threshold at the door of the cave that was supposed to keep out most of the scorpions and some of the millipedes, he was off, exploring the dusty paths that ran through our anthill of a neighborhood.

  “One day he toddled across what he thought was a pile of hay and fell down the chimney hole of an abandoned cave. Every year children died this way, either from the fall itself or from being trapped in an old cave where the earth has closed over the door opening. But my brother survived and screamed loud enough to bring help and that is why he liked his nickname, Mono, because it reminded everyone that he was tough enough to fall down and squash his face flat and still walk away. Besides, having a squashed nose did something to his voice. Made it different, special, so that eventually Mono became a singer. I liked being Miracielos because it told everyone, it told me, that I had my eye on something higher, something better. Chubby, you should like your nickname because in flamenco the biggest compliment you can give a dancer is to say she dances con peso, with weight.

  “Bien, okay, you are wondering when I’m going to start teaching this.” She ripped off a machine-gun blast of heel stamping. “No!” She abruptly stopped. “A baboon can learn this. I am here to teach you flamenco and you will learn more about flamenco just listening to me tell the story of my life than any payo teacher with a hundred heel-toe combinations will ever teach you. Now, you will start the right way, the proper way. You will start the way I started. The way all true flamenco starts: with el cante. I’m going to sing the first song I ever heard, the song my father sang. Will! Por siguiriyas!”

  The guitarist nodded nervously to acknowledge the style Doña Carlota had called for, then studied her intently as she clapped out an intricate pattern to a beat slow as a dirge. He began to play a lovely melody ornamented with expressive frills and she shook her head violently. “No! No! No pretty falsetas. None of that mierda.”

  Will stopped, his pink cheeks turning scarlet with embarrassment.

  “Just this,” she ordered him, pounding her feet. She led him through the pattern several times, listening as he tried to repeat the pattern, shaking her head and muttering, “Qué feo,” how ugly. “Listen to the stresses!”

  Will played it several times as she shook her head and clucked. Finally, when he’d abandoned every bit of ornamentation and was banging at his instrument with all the strings dampened, she brightened. “Sí, hombre! Eso es! Vamos ya!”

  She closed her eyes and clapped softly for one minute, two, hands held next to her ear as if she were listening for the ocean roaring inside a seashell. She swayed, her feet rooted not just to the floor but to the ground deep beneath it, and sucked energy from that dark place. Then an unearthly sound, deep and low, ripped from her throat. Just one word, “Ay,” that seemed not so much sung as exhumed from a world that was not Western, not modern, not the one I was standing in. Then she began:

  We are the wretched calés

  poorer than larks in the sky:

  citizens and guards, alas,

  deny us even our own shade.

  Her song was more a cry, a scream set to complex harmonies I had never heard before. It reminded me of High Mass and Jewish chanting and a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer, but it was none of those things. It was Arabic, African, ancient, nothing so trivial as a song, a melody, and it cut straight into my soul. Dark emotions rose up from the dark place where this song originated and I felt them without thinking about Tomás, about Didi, about my mother, about my father. The sound became the leathery rustling of bat wings beating deep within me. They whirred, whisking the dust from all that was too painful to consider. For one excruciating second, I wanted her to stop more than I’d ever wanted anything on this earth. I would walk out of class and never think about flamenco or Tomás Montenegro again. I would pack away the grief and longing forever. I would take only accounting and math classes and have a safe life. That second was followed by all the rest in which, more than anything on this earth, I wanted the singing never to stop.

  I glanced around, expecting the rest of the class, the ballet swans, the jazz princesses, to be as obliterated as I was. Mostly what I saw on the other faces was embarrassment at having emotion so raw and dark spilled forth in front of them. A few of the Latinas seemed to hear what I was hearing. But it was Didi whose face mirrored mine. The tears pooling in her eyes kept me from fearing that I was in the middle of a psychotic break.

  Doña Carlota’s cante, her song, resonated through the classroom long after she fell silent and Will stopped playing. She stared into each of our faces. The embarrassed dance princesses’ eyes skittered away from hers. Didi though, Didi was another story. I watched her in the minor. She studied Doña Carlota in the same omnivorous way she watched Madonna and Cher, the same way she read Sylvia Plath and studied Frida Kahlo’s painting, the same way she absorbed anyone’s work when the creator, the woman, had become bigger than the work. Didi knew a diva when she saw one and Doña Carlota was her first chance to study one up close.

  When the old woman’s dark gaze found mine, I stared back, asking for more information, more clues about what had happened.

  “You,” she said, pointing at me, “come to the front,” then at Didi, “and bring your friend.” She pushed a couple of the swans toward the back and installed us directly in front of her. “These are your spots. Those who can understand what flamenco has to say must be close enough to hear.” She addressed the whole class. “That was cante. That was the last time I will sing to you in English. That was the song my father sang. Why aren’t you stretching?” She stood on one foot and worked the other.

  We all copied her, standing on one foot, then the other.

  “STRETCH those metatarsals!”

  She clapped another rhythm, which the guitarist tried to pick up, then turned to me and asked, “What palo, what style am I calling for?”

  The weird number decoder chip in my brain translated the soft claps, the accented louder claps into the almost-Western four-beat count and put them together with what I recalled of the names she’d called out last class. “Tango?”

  She dipped her head, acknowledging my answer. “Increíble! An American girl who can actually hear el compás.”

  I bit my lip to keep from beaming with pleasure at the old lady’s praise.

  “Reach with the top of the head! Lengthen the body! Lengthen! My father didn’t have a guitar for his cante. Like all the good Gypsy men on Sacromonte, he was a blacksmith and beat his rhythm out with his iron hammer, his martinete. Some believe that little children, infants, don’t remember anything. I remember, I remember everything.” She signaled and Will softened his playing.

  “At night, in the old days before the factory came, I looked out onto our city of caves and I knew what hell was. Flames licked out of the earth as if the world were on fire. As if we Gypsies were the devils los payos believed we were and we could make dirt burn.

  “They weren’t the flames of hell, they were the fraguas, the forges where the blacksmiths beat metal all day and all night. They say that those born within the sou
nd of the Gypsy hammers hear them all their lives. That is true. I tried to escape the constant pounding and failed. I was six when I tried the first time. I went all the way up the hill to the Alhambra, where for eight hundred years the Moors ruled Spain. I sat where jasmine blooms over the tombs of los moros. Where the stone walls have been carved into lace. Where las sultanas listened to the lutes of the eunuchs. Even there, I still heard the pounding. I hear it still. Everyone who wants to dance or sing or play flamenco guitar must hear it as well.”

  She clapped.

  “One, two, three! Four, five, six! Seven, eight! Nine, ten! Eleven, twelve! El compás. I will clap it for you, loud, con palmas secas. One, two, three! Four, five, six! Seven, eight! Nine, ten! Eleven, twelve! El compás, the Gypsy clock. This was the time my mother set my heart to beat to before I was ever born. I never had a choice but to dance flamenco.

  “Clap with me. Come on, clap. You will be terrible. Just do it. Don’t think about it. Don’t listen to your hands. Listen to the story.”

  I listened, of course, I listened. But what I heard wasn’t her story, it was his. The story of the world he came from. The world I had to enter to win him. Watching Didi’s face in the mirror, I saw that she was just as avid as I to enter this secret realm.

  When we were all clapping, Doña Carlota started again. Sighing, she whispered, “Granada, ah, mi Granada, a city both sadder and more glorious than any other. The greatest poet of this century, Federico García Lorca, said that the hours are longer and sweeter in Granada than in any other Spanish town. And though I was the last person who loved Lorca to see the poet alive, I must disagree. The hours are longer and sweeter in Granada than in any other town anywhere on this earth.

  “I knew the Granada of poets, but I did not live in it. At this time, the time I speak of, Sacromonte was not a show for tourists. It was a garbage dump on the edge of the city where we gitanos were tossed out with the rest of the trash. Eventually tourists, aficionados, from all over the world would come like pilgrims to see the real, the true Gypsy flamenco dancing. But they never saw the only true flamenco who ever lived in Sacromonte, the only one who didn’t care about making a show for the tourists, my father, called El Chino because his eyes slanted like a Chinaman’s.”

  Still beating out the rhythm with her feet, Doña Carlota stopped clapping and raised her arms, winding them upward in time to the beat. Without a word, the class followed her. At the top of the arc, she snaked her hands in languid circles above her head and we all copied her.

  “My father was the smallest blacksmith on the mountain. But strong. Stronger than any two men. Just as with everything else, my father kept his muscles hidden. His hair was like a black ram’s, a thousand tight curls. His skin was the color of old coffee, a color with sheens of purple and blue in it. He had a strong Gypsy nose, like me. Good for filtering the sand out of desert air. And his eyes. He had the eyes of a poet. When I pumped the double bellows hard enough, the flames leaped up and made the gold in his dark irises flicker to life.

  “His cante was a tree, an ancient olive tree that has stood since the Romans ruled Spain. Since the Moors invaded. Since ships laden with gold from the New World sailed up the river Ebro. This old tree had roots that went farther into the earth than any other tree. Roots that went all the way to Hell and drew up the boiling water of the demons who torment us all. When my father sang, no one could pretend they had angel hearts because his songs made the demon blood boil in their veins.”

  She pointed at me and spanked her palms together. “You, clap louder. You are the only one here who is en compás. You are a natural. Get these burros back in time.”

  Blushing, I blocked out everyone else’s faltering attempts—especially Didi’s, since Didi, standing next to me, was way off—and clapped the beat Doña Carlota dictated. The blood rushed so loudly in my ears that it was hard to hear myself. I was a natural! I imagined Doña Carlota telling her nephew those very words, that a new student of hers was a natural. It didn’t matter that Tomás had disappeared and wasn’t speaking to his aunt. Somehow, he would know.

  She started singing and writing on the board, translating the words as she went.

  In my life I have known

  The sorrows of this world

  Others often have a look

  But not the knowing

  “The words of my father’s coplas, his lyrics were not the silly words of folk songs about pretty girls with high combs and mantillas throwing a rose from her balcony. No, his cante came from him like a rusty nail pulled from an old board. His voice was what we called la voz afillá. Like sandpaper. A good gitano voice, muy rajo, very rough. But, more than rough, it was powerful and it was true. Do you know the worst thing you can say about someone in flamenco? No me dice nada. He didn’t say anything to me. He didn’t speak to me. No one ever said that about my father.”

  Didi studied herself in the mirror, watching the effect of each hand twirl.

  It thrilled me to see Doña Carlota note Didi’s self-absorption with a quirk of her eyebrow. Didi would not outshine me. Doña Carlota was on to her already.

  “When my father sang, Gypsy men tore their clothes and Gypsy women scratched their faces because my father’s voice reminded them that for more than a thousand years our people have had no home. His voice made them remember again that we were thrown out of India and forced to wander strange lands. Beaten, tortured, jailed, enslaved, and driven away. That even in Andalusia, where poets write poems about us and composers compose operas, even there, la guardia civil will throw a Gypsy man into jail for stealing a handful of grapes and let his wife and children starve. No place wants us. No place on this earth wants the Gypsy. When my father sang, the people heard their great-grandfathers in prison crying for their wives and children. They heard the whip that tore the flesh from his back. They heard the woman, all alone with no man to defend her, cry when the soldiers came to do what they will with her and her daughters.”

  She turned to the board and wrote CANTE JONDO.

  “Cante jondo. Deep song. This is a song that must come from not only your broken heart, but the hearts of ancestors broken for a thousand years. The hungrier my father became, the louder the cries of his babies, the deeper his cante became.”

  Doña Carlota sang a lament so heartrending, the translation she wrote on the board was superfluous.

  One judge cried: “Let them die.”

  Another answered “Why?”

  Poor, pitiful Gypsies

  What is the harm they’ve done?

  All the world cries out to God for health and liberty;

  I cry out to God for death

  But he will not harken to my plea.

  As Doña Carlota sang, she began some footwork. I could not copy it and clap at the same time. Didi was the only one who followed her. Doña Carlota moved over in front of her and Didi mirrored her moves. They were sloppy, imprecise copies, but like everything Didi did, she executed them with confidence bordering on arrogance and her own reckless style.

  “Óle!” Doña Carlota called out, accenting the o.

  Didi blossomed under the praise and her arm-twining and foot-stomping became more frenetic. She even started a deep, guttural humming moan to accompany Doña Carlota’s singing. La Doña stamped to a finish and Didi followed.

  She barked a question in a rapid burst of Spanish. Didi shot back a reply. As if she already knew what the answer would be, Doña started nodding before Didi had finished.

  “Bueno, mujer, bueno. You have something to say. You don’t say it in the proper form, but that will come. You have the fire. You are La Tempesta. And you”—she stuck her chin out at me—“you are coma un metrónomo. You will be La Metrónoma.” She waved a finger at us. “The two elements of flamenco. Fire” she pointed at Didi—“and ice.” Of course, that was me. “The head and the heart. Together you are the perfect dancer. Apart?” She gave an Old World shrug that dismissed both our chances.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Pa
using only to change shoes, I rushed out of class without waiting for Didi. Flamenco was my one bright and shining thing and Didi was snatching it away from me. The ducks quacked, demanding a handout as I stormed past the pond. I didn’t pause at the Robert O. Anderson School of Management where my Intro to Financial Accounting class would start in five minutes.

  Metronome? I was the Metronome and Didi was the Tempest?! Screw it. Screw her. She can keep her own fricking books. La Tempesta!

  With no idea exactly where I was headed, my feet carried me across campus until I was staring down Lomas to the West Mesa, where the distant black cones of extinct volcanoes spiked the horizon. Didi’s hangout. To the east were the Sandia Mountains. I headed toward them down Lomas Boulevard. The street was on fire. Pyracantha bushes flamed with orange berries, tall shafts of pampas grass were plumes of smoke in the diamond-sharp sunlight, chamisa blossoms blazed a molten yellow. I was back in the quiet neighborhood Tomás had taken me to before I realized that my destination was the jewel of a park hidden away like a harem beauty behind thick walls. I rushed down the street and found the narrow, unmarked path that snaked between two nondescript houses. Not until I was again within the park’s secret expanse could I take a full breath.

  The cottonwood with the giant’s swing hanging from it anchored the park. As if it were an object of veneration I could not approach, I skirted around the place where Tomás had held me and found a spot at the park’s edge. I sat on grass green and velvety from sprinklers as I recalled every detail of that night with Tomás. I stroked the grass as I remembered his hands on me, holding me as we swung up to the stars. The grass caressed me in return. It was soft, full, and green, unlike any other in the high desert city. It was fairy-tale grass.