The Flamenco Academy

by Sarah Bird

  I forgot Didi as I realized what should have been obvious to me from the beginning: I had walked into a fairy tale. Doña Carlota’s story of Gypsies living in a world where the earth burned and everyone had names like Piglet and Monkey and Looks at the Sky, where a thousand years of a people’s history were hidden in songs and dances, that story was a fairy tale. It was Tomás’s fairy tale. It would have to become mine.

  I had been sleeping and in this secret park Tomás awakened me with a kiss. I wondered where he was, what he was looking at at this very moment. I imagined him looking at me. I imagined myself dancing for him, passionate and devastating in my long, black skirt, dancing better than anyone had ever danced. Dancing so well that I won him.

  I had to win him.

  Though I had been the one sleeping, Tomás was the beauty of our fairy tale and the hero always won the beauty.

  I would have to be the hero.

  Every fairy tale had a trial where the hero had to prove himself. My trial was flamenco. That was the field upon which I would have to prove myself. Somewhere in Doña’s story, somewhere in the very history of flamenco itself, were the clues that would tell me how to succeed, how to make my story twine around Tomás’s so tightly that they would become one.

  The sky behind the West Mesa, behind the volcanoes, turned into a dome of stained glass, violet, rose, and green, shifting to cobalt blue streaked with rose above the Sandia Mountains to the east. The air grew chilly, and damp seeped up from the ground beneath me. The colors left the sky as it darkened to navy blue.

  Stars appeared in the night sky. I found the North Star that Daddy had shown me so that I would always be able to find my way home. I started to make a wish on it, but Daddy was gone and would be gone forever. All my other wishes clumped up in my chest with a weight that pushed the air from my lungs. The only name I could give to all I yearned for was Tomás.

  “Rae! Rae-rae, are you here?”

  Didi was at the entrance to the park. Even more than I didn’t want her in my flamenco class, I didn’t want her in my, in our, secret park.

  “Rae! Rae?”

  She couldn’t see me. The second time she called my name, her voice broke and she sounded lost and scared. In the next second, she got mad at herself and, thinking no one was in the park or not caring if anyone was, she cursed herself, muttering, “Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it. Shit.”

  She was leaving when I called out from the darkness, “Didi. I’m over here.”

  “You bitch,” she said, dropping onto the grass beside me. Her nose was running and I think I saw tears on her face, but she scrubbed them off, bending her head into the shoulder of her jean jacket before I could see for sure.

  “I looked everywhere. Frontier. The duck pond. Puppy Taco. I even went to your old house and looked in the backyard. Couple of lesbians are living there now with a pack of rescue greyhounds. What would your mom think about that? It took me forfuckingever to remember about this park. Mystery Man’s secret park that you wouldn’t tell me about? Of course, this is where you’d be.” Without stopping for a breath she asked, “Why did you run off?”

  Tone, there it was again. As I’ve said, Didi and I could have done away with words altogether and just communicated everything we needed to tell each other, everything important, in the infinite vocabulary of tones and inflections we’d taught each other. We both heard in her question the admission that Didi knew exactly why I’d run off.

  It was superfluous, but I said it anyway. “You’re an asshole.”

  “Okay, I admit it. I’m an asshole. The big pink bird, that’s your thing. I’ve horned in too much on it. I’ll drop out.” She tilted her head to look at me, but I kept staring straight ahead. At the far end of the park, the sprinklers came on, sending silver arcs of water over the velvety grass. In the silence that fell between us, she counted.

  “Seventeen clicks,” Didi said.

  “What?”

  “It takes seventeen clicks for the sprinkler to make one arc. Smells like the very end of summer, doesn’t it? The grass when the water hits it?” She sucked in a deep inhalation. “It smells like watermelon.”

  I breathed in. The grass did smell like watermelon. We listened to the clicks, smelled the watermelon smell, and watched moonlight gleam on the rain of silver drops.

  “Wow, reminds me of Lorca. Have you been reading your Lorca? Doña Carlota is right. He is totally amazing. He has one, ‘Ditty of First Desire.’ Queer title. Probably a bad translation. But tell me this isn’t killer. ‘In the green morning / I wanted to be a heart. / A heart.’ ” Didi clapped the rhythm for a bulerías and repeated the words in time. “Then it goes on with how in the ripe evening he wanted to be a nightingale. A nightingale. The end will annihilate you. He tells his soul to turn orange-colored. To turn the color of love. Just that, just getting turned on to Lorca is totally transforming my work already.”

  I knew what Didi was doing. She was showing me why I should tell her it was okay for her to stay in the class. She was working me, but I could hear in her voice that she was also telling the truth.

  I didn’t say anything and she went on, her words tumbling out in a rush. “But the best, the absolute best, the most amazing thing you will ever read in your whole, entire life is his essay on duende.”

  “Do what?”

  “Duende. Oh, Rae, this is the essential thing we have to understand. This is where real art, where anything good or true comes from. It’s like inspiration or possession. But more. I can’t even explain. It’s the real deal. He said it bums the blood like powdered glass and rejects all the sweet geometry. ‘Sweet geometry.’ Do you not love that? So Lorca wrote that duende rejects all the sweet geometry we understand and it shatters styles. Isn’t that amazing? It’s not about perfection. True inspiration can be ugly and messy and radically imperfect? Sort of like us, huh?”

  “Sort of like you,” I corrected her. I was the geometry person being rejected.

  She fell silent and we studied the houses that ringed the park. Light glowed in the windows and scenes of family life played out in each one. In one a father entered holding a white paper bag of takeout. A child of around eight, maybe a boy with long hair, maybe a sturdy little girl, reached out to grab the food away. The father pivoted from the child’s grasp and the child ran around to grab from the other side. The father feinted again, then spun back, scooped the child into his arms, and swung her around. She was a girl.

  I glanced over at Didi. The same hunger I felt was on her face.

  “Fuck it,” she said, dismissing the sadness with anger. “Fuck all this shit.” She turned to me. “Rae, you are the one essential person in my life. I have to have you in my life. Nonnegotiable. If you want me out of flamenco, I’m out. No questions asked.”

  I didn’t say anything because I no longer knew what to say. No longer knew what I really wanted.

  “Rae, it’s like I said, we want completely different things out of flamenco. You want love and I want to rule the world.”

  She was right. She wanted fame and I wanted Tomás. We could dance next to each other for the rest of our lives and our paths would never cross. I knew Didi like no one else in the world knew her. I knew what she had lost, I knew where all the holes in her heart were and just how big they were. I knew she cursed when she wanted to cry and railroaded through life the way she did because she was afraid if she took things any slower she’d fall off the tracks entirely. I knew all that, but I still couldn’t share flamenco with her.

  Didi jumped up, held her hands out to me, and dragged me to my feet. There was plenty of room on the giant’s swing for both of us. I felt her hip pressed against mine work as she stretched her legs out then back, pumping the swing higher. Once we took off, she yelled, “Hang on!” and we both had to throw an arm around the other’s waist to keep from falling off. As we gained altitude, she sang Doña Carlota’s song:

  In my life I have known

  The sorrows of this world

  Others often h
ave a look

  But not the knowing

  “How do you sing like that?” I yelled as the wind whipped away the words sung in flamenco’s ululating style.

  “Melisma!” she yelled back. “I had to learn it for my bat mitzvah. Lots of warbly notes on one syllable. It’s all a version of that urban yodeling thing Whitney Houston and them do. I’ll teach you that if you’ll teach me that compass shit.”

  I didn’t answer and the swing went up, then fell back down three times. Finally, I said, “Screw it. Yeah. Okay. What’s the point in resisting. You’re the biggest brat in the world. You always get what you want.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” She used her standard line, then, grinning, put on a big push, hauling back on the rope she held in her right hand, forcing me to hang on for dear life to the rope in my left hand and to her waist with my right. When we were high enough that we suddenly seemed much closer to the stars than to the houses far below, houses where fathers brought home take-out treats and swung their daughters into the air, Didi screamed, “Fuck them! Fuck them all! Who needs normal life when you can fly above it! Fuck consensus reality! Right, Rae?”

  She didn’t want an answer and I didn’t give one. Instead, we soared together into the night sky and, just as they had with Tomás, the higher we climbed, the faster we fell and the more the stars blurred into a silver smear.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Every time I set foot in Doña Carlota’s studio, it was as if Tomás were waiting there for me. I bathed and perfumed as if I were meeting a lover. Every second of class, I felt his eyes on me. I believed that Doña Carlota was Tomás’s envoy to me, sent to teach me about the art, the culture, the blood that had formed him. Every stamp of my foot nailed him to me. Every twine of my wrist wound him closer to me. She had been sent to tell me his story, to give me the information I needed to salve all the complications in his life. Once I learned enough, I knew I could make every equation in his life balance. I could do what no one else could for him and he would need me and love me. Didi would occasionally point out how long it had been since that night. I couldn’t explain to her that it seemed I saw him or he saw me every day in class, that we were together, that everything I did was bringing us closer. It didn’t make sense then. It wouldn’t make sense later. It is impossible to explain obsession, to explain the irrational rationally.

  The weeks passed and flamenco was hammered into me until my knees ached, my spine throbbed constantly, and my wrists felt as if they would twist off my arms. Pillows of blisters formed along the outside of my big toe, across the back of my heel, and on the balls of both feet. The nail of the right big toe turned black because I pounded on it the hardest. But every one of my toes felt as if they’d been run over. The muscles of my calves and thighs burned as they grew harder with each class, with each of the endless hours outside of class that I practiced.

  Still, no more of her, of his, story was forthcoming. Doña Carlota had warned us, You will only hear more of the story when you have earned it. As the weeks passed without a single word from her that was not instruction, I began to fear that she would never consider us worthy to hear another word of the fairy tale that was hers and Tomás’s life. Instead, she spent every second of every class hammering flamenco’s diabolical rhythms into us, making our heels and toes into percussion instruments, our hands and arms into cobras curling out of a snake charmer’s basket, and our hips into an ocean of waves that never stopped rolling.

  Gradually, as I watched Doña Carlota and the more advanced dancers who practiced on the lawn outside the old gym, dancers like the mesmerizing Liliana, I came to realize that each stamp, clap, hand flick, hip bump, twirl, jump—no matter how apparently frenzied—hit one of the very precise beats of the compás clock.

  Soon, I was hearing el compás everywhere—in a car’s clacking transmission, in the hum and bump of a fan, in the pelting debris tossed around by a windstorm. Bit by bit, I began to see that flamenco was like haiku. Instead of seventeen syllables, though, the dancer, the singer, the guitarist, each member of flamenco’s holy trinity, we all had a dozen beats, in however long or short a series we chose, within which to express what was in our hearts. Those beats were both the yoke that bound dancer, singer, and guitarist together and the instrument that transformed random movement into forward propulsion that could take them wherever they wanted to go. They were the one essential element in flamenco.

  And Didi couldn’t get them.

  “God! I hate the fucking compás!” Didi burst out on a day when we left class and stepped into the glory of a New Mexico autumn that I’d somehow missed completely until that moment. The world, bathed in crystalline light, was a place so crisp and sharp, it was like being nearsighted your whole life, then putting on glasses and seeing clearly for the first time.

  Doña Carlota had humiliated Didi that day. She’d stopped the entire class as we were trying to follow her through a routine and shouted, “Tempesta, you are fuera de compás!”

  Didi had, once again, committed the greatest sin in flamenco; she was off the beat, out of compás.

  “Can you count?”

  Didi refused to answer and Doña Carlota asked her again, “Tempesta, I’m asking you can you count? Did you learn numbers or is that too boring for La Reina Oh-Fay-Lee-YUH! Is it?”

  “Yes, of course, I learned to count.”

  “Good, she can count. So why don’t you? Why don’t you count? One, two, three! Four, five, six! Seven, eight! Nine, ten! Eleven, twelve! In Spain, we are doing this in our sleep.”

  Didi tried again but, although her heels cracked loud as a rifle shot and her arms were supple as silk and her expression was fierce as a Kabuki mask, she could not stay on the beat to save her life. That was when I truly trusted that Didi would never really invade my flamenco world. Knowing that she would never get it, I started in earnest that day to teach her el compás.

  We took to walking everywhere en compás. I would call out the beats of the different palos, styles, to her in whatever scat improvisation I liked at the moment. “Tah-kah-tah-kah-tah! Tah-kah-tah-kah-tah! Pah-tah-pah! Pah-tah-pah! Tah-pum! Tah-pum! Tah-pum!”

  Didi could stay en compás as long as I was hitting the beats hard for her, but the second I turned it over to her, she was lost. “I don’t hear it,” she moaned. “All this tah-kah tah-kah shit, it’s an urban myth.”

  “How can you say you don’t hear it? You can sing it. I’ve heard you.”

  “Shit, I can mimic anybody. But this?” She did a spazzed-out imitation of my footwork. “This is utterly insane. Vámonos! There’s a chile cheeseburger at Frontier calling my name.” She ran ahead. I followed, but found that even when I tried not to, my footsteps fell into compás.

  I had almost given up, resigned myself to never hearing another word of the story that was Tomás’s story, when, one Friday, Doña Carlota swept into class, clapping before she was even through the door. She walked in demonstrating the sequence she wanted us to learn. “Golpe! Golpe! Tacón! Palmas secas!”

  My heart sank. There would be no more of her story that day.

  “You, Metrónoma, you like the story the best, don’t you?” With no warning I occupied the spot I hated most in all the world: the center of attention. The place where Didi bloomed so extravagantly made me writhe and shrivel. “I will let you be the one to decide if we hear more of it today.” She clapped out a rhythm. “Dígame! Tell me something and I will continue.”

  Her request stunned me. Tell her something? I glanced at Didi, hoping for a clue. Didi mimed dancing. I turned back to Doña Carlota. What? What did she want me to dance? I echoed back the alegrías Doña was clapping, but my hands patting together felt wooden. The rest of my body was even stiffer. I couldn’t move, much less dance. From the corner of my eye, I saw Didi urging me on by holding up her skirt and drawing my attention to the simple paseo she was executing. How ironic that it was a sequence I had drilled into her head. Holding on to the compás like a handicapped raili
ng, I dragged myself from one beat to the next. Though I hit every pulse on the head, it was a stilted color-by-numbers affair until, gradually, I loosened up and began to flow.

  “Vamos ya!” Blanca, the sweet-tempered girl, yelled out encouragement.

  The praise both unnerved and inspired me. I ducked my head, but pretended that, instead of hiding my cheeks flaming with embarrassment, I was only looking down to gather my skirt. Recovering, I swirled the material in a brisk countertempo to the one I hammered into the wooden floor.

  “Todas!” Doña Carlota ordered and the entire class picked up the taconeo I was executing. When we were all pulsing in time like one many-chambered heart to a beat that I set, Doña Carlota awarded me the equivalent of a blue ribbon: she nodded her head. I felt as if I might incinerate on the spot from an overheated combination of pleasure and embarrassment. The attention was a trophy that threatened to crush me.

  I glanced over to see if Didi had noticed La Doña’s approval, but she was absorbed in her own improvisation. Though she was wildly off the beat, a magical force streamed through Didi, animating every stamp of her heel, twining of her wrist, and fanning of her fingers. It was impossible not to stare at her; she embodied all that was savage and free in flamenco. She was so mesmerizing that I literally stumbled over my own feet.

  Doña Carlota grimaced as if I had caused her actual physical pain and clapped her hands to stop the ensuing chaos. My wings had melted; it was a lesson I wouldn’t forget soon.

  She started us back on a simple beat with some simple marking steps, then, without any further preamble, began to tell the story. “My mother was fourteen when I was born. Fifteen when my sister was born. Gemelos de gitanos, Gypsy twins they call this in Spain. Is it any wonder that she, my mother, remained a child all her life? Charming and cruel, stupid and crafty, selfish and sacrificed? Y doble.”