The Flamenco Academy

by Sarah Bird

  “In response to my father’s verses, their message, their structure, my taconeo hammered out a celebration of our people. Lorca nodded his approval of my collaboration with El Chino. This was true flamenco and he knew true flamenco.

  “Stepping backward and silencing my feet, I called my father back in. He was ready. He sang beautiful verses, tragic verses that told the tale of a simple blacksmith who journeyed to Sevilla to trade horses. Once there he was bewitched by a dancer from Triana whose baile was a tornado whirling about two precious stones, the emeralds that were her eyes. The tornado tore his heart from his chest. He sang about how he would die without his heart. How in claiming his heart, he’d had to steal the dancer too. It was sad to snatch la bailaora from Sevilla and lock her away in a cave, but how could a man live without his heart? Tell him, please, and he would do it. Tell him how he could set the dancer free and still go on. Tell him how a man could live without his heart?

  “I didn’t hear the words in my brain. I heard the tragedy of my parents’ lives in my body and I danced it. Slow, a medio tempo. I lost track of everything and everyone around me, my mother, the poet, the fine ladies from Granada. Because I was only aware of my father’s song and telling the sad story of his love for my mother, I was momentarily thrown off by the unevenness of the tiles on the floor. Then I realized that I was dancing over coins and not flimsy centimos or even pesetas, but duros! Heavy silver coins, some with the banished king’s portrait on them, some celebrating the new government in Madrid, the Second Republic.

  “In spite of the coins, though, I didn’t make my mother’s mistake. I didn’t keep hammering my feet faster and faster like a cheap tin windup toy gone mad. I took a bold step back to signal what I wanted to the guitarist. Then I enfolded the wild calliope of movement, scooping it out of the air with my arms and drawing it all back in. In a split second, I froze the motion, holding it ticking inside of me.

  “The poet’s group pounded their hands together, but he silenced them, both his hands thrown out to stop every sound. Now he watched. Now he listened with his eyes, waiting to learn if I had anything to say. I had waited all my life for this. I opened my arms and released the motion, let it whirl me away until I was a tornado, until I had whirled every heart in that cave out of every chest and claimed them as my own.”

  Doña Carlota clapped her hands with a sharp crack like a hypnotist waking his subject from a trance. “That’s all the time for today! Next class we talk about my friend, Federico García Lorca.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Outside, Didi ran past. “Gotta blast,” she yelled back at me. “Jeff’s helping me put a new piece together.” She stopped. “You wanna come? You’ve hardly heard any of my new stuff.”

  I shook my head no. All I wanted to do was stand in the sun and enjoy the spell Doña Carlota’s story had cast over me.

  “What? You’re just going to hang here and pretend that you’re the emerald-eyed dancer and the heart you steal belongs to Tomás Montenegro?”

  “No.” She was, of course, exactly right. That was precisely the fantasy I was looking forward to.

  “Oh great,” she said sarcastically. “Then that means you’re actually planning to do something real about the Tomás obsession.”

  I pulled a foot out of the sandals I’d changed into and displayed my calluses, bunions, and blisters like they were merit badges. “And these aren’t real enough?”

  “Hey, girls who cut themselves get real scars.”

  “That is so ridiculous! That is a completely different thing al—” But before I could finish saying altogether, Didi left, waving her fingers at me over her shoulder as she went.

  More to prove to myself than Didi that she was wrong, I moved without thinking. Thinking was a problem for me since it always led to nothing, to me daydreaming in the sunshine. So I didn’t stop long enough to think, I simply made myself run to the faculty parking lot just in time to see Doña Carlota’s driver pull up to the back of the academy, jump out of the Buick, and race around to open the back door for the old lady.

  Because it was the last thing on earth I wanted to do, I called out, “Doña Carlota!”

  It is possible that I hadn’t called out loudly enough for her to hear me. That I’d only called out loudly enough to say that I’d done it. That I had tried. But the handsome, silver-haired driver with the unplaceably ancient face did hear me. He stopped and looked my way. The thrill of recognition that I had always expected when looking into Doña Carlota’s face hit me in the instant my eyes met this old man’s. The eyes. It was like looking into Tomás’s eyes. The ridiculous suspicion that he might be related to this old man was what alerted me to how dangerously overwrought I was. If the driver had not already been turning Doña Carlota’s attention my way, I would have fled. But she was beckoning me to come to her and the driver was walking away to give us privacy, so I stepped forward.

  “Metrónoma, yes, what is it?” Her tone, her expression, her bearing, all the eloquence a great dancer can bring to bear expressed how highly irregular and irritating my appearance was.

  What would my lie be? A question about Lorca? About the bulerías desplante? Stopping her after class when she’d made it quite clear she didn’t want to be stopped after class or any other time was bad enough. Now I had to compound the offense by asking an idiotic question. Nothing I could say would be any worse than the truth. So, because, it was the one word always at the center of my thoughts, I blurted out the name that was all questions rolled into one, “Tomás—”

  “Tomás?” She cut me off, leaping at his name with the same ardor I spent my days hiding. “What have you heard? Do you know something? Has he been in contact with you? Someone you know? He’s sent a message through you? He’s done that before. Sent messages through unlikely sources. Where is he? Do you know where he is?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. I don’t really know him. I—”

  “Ah, I see.” The moment of excitement, hope, was gone, replaced by an Old World knowing that added my name to what was surely a very long list of breathless girls. “But you would like to know him, is that it?”

  I shook my head no. This was my nightmare. I had tipped my hand. This was what I had decided from the very beginning never to do: I was a groupie. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bother you. Have a good weekend.” I was babbling. I was an idiot. I backed away, twiddling my fingers in a silly wave, ducking my head to keep her from seeing how my cheeks now scorched with embarrassment.

  “Wait. Come back. You just did the one thing you have to do in flamenco: you told me something. When you said my nephew’s name, you showed me more about yourself than you’ve revealed this entire semester. That, that is what flamenco is all about. And that is what you never do and what your friend does all the time. Show yourself. Tell me something. Tell me something true. Digame la verdad.”

  “Didi’s not telling the truth. She hasn’t even told you her real name.”

  “You think that matters? You think it matters that her truth is lies? I will tell you something.” She waved me closer. “You could be a great dancer.”

  My heart clutched. These were astonishing words from a woman whose most fulsome praise was usually “No es feo.” It’s not ugly.

  “But...”

  Of course there was a but.

  “... you never will be. Technically, you are estupendosa. But great?”

  She shook her head and muttered, “Nunca, nunca.” Never, never. “Why? Why will you never be great? Because of her.”

  There was no point in even pretending that I didn’t know who “her” was.

  “Flamenco is yo soy.” The gravel of the parking lot crunched beneath the old lady’s foot as she stamped the earth, taking, demanding her place on it with the essential Spanish declaration: I am. “Flamenco is yo soy. You are waiting for her permission to be. Why? Why do you stay in her shadow? She is too big a tree. You are barely a sapling. You will never have enough light because you will never have enough
courage to grow past her and reach the sun.”

  She leaned in even closer, close enough that I smelled Maja soap, lavender, sweat, and, underneath, another odor I couldn’t identify. It contained elements of the sweetish fragrance Daddy had about him toward the end, plus the spike of what I’d come to identify as an almost hormonal surge when Didi’s ambition went into overdrive, all combined with the dusty scent of ancient books and rooms that have been closed for a long time. “I too once had a friend like Ofelia. From her I learned a secret, a secret that you must learn.”

  Suddenly, what she had to tell me seemed more important than anything, more important in that moment than even Tomás.

  “She needs you more than you need her. Because of that, she will never release you. You will have to either live forever in her shadow or—” She made a swift, brutal hacking motion, an ax hacking down a tree.

  How, I wanted to ask her, does a small tree kill a big tree?

  But, as if she had literally slashed through some vital energy source, the gesture seemed to have exhausted Doña Carlota. Without the bristling nimbus of energy that always whirled around her, she shrank into herself, suddenly old and a bit confused. Mumbling, she turned away. Abruptly, her voice rose and she declaimed, “What had to be done, had to be done. Rosa, what other choice was there?”

  “Excuse me? Doña Carlota, did you say something?”

  But when she looked up again, her eyes were glazed. She hadn’t been speaking to or even seeing me.

  Her driver, sensing her disorientation, rushed forward. Murmuring soft words in Spanish, he led her toward the car. Before he closed the door, she turned to me and held a quivering hand out as if she were offering something unspeakably precious.

  Or asking for it back.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  At Doña Carlota’s next class, we found a note taped to the studio door saying we were to meet in the academy’s main classroom. Once we’d settled in along with all of the other flamenco students, the director of the program, Alma Hernandez-Luna, swept in, brimming with an illegal amount of energy. “I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news for those of you in the beginning class is that Doña Carlota had a minor stroke yesterday and though the damage is not serious, she will not be able to finish what remains of the semester. I will be taking over her classes.”

  “What?” I gasped. She hadn’t even gotten close to Tomás’s part of the story.

  Didi shrugged. “End of story time.”

  “The good news is that we have with us today the great flamencologista, Don Héctor Arribe y Puig. Don Héctor has come to this country to write the history of flamenco in the New World. Let’s all welcome our distinguished guest, Don Héctor Arribe y Puig.”

  As Don Héctor took the podium, Didi turned to me and whispered, “Hercule Poirot.”

  She was right. Don Héctor was the very embodiment of Agatha Christie’s hairnet-wearing detective. The professor was a diminutive man of a type that had either never existed in or had vanished long ago from the New World. A pince-nez would not have looked out of place clamped across the bridge of his thin nose with its quivering nostrils. More than that, though, Don Héctor Arribe y Puig was the embodiment of the compleat flamenco aficionado of the obsessive-compulsive type. There is no exact equivalent in our country to the true, the puro, flamenco aficionado. The comic book collector, the baseball trivia nut, the Civil War reenactor, the Star Trek fan, yes, the aficionado is all of those things but more. With flamenco’s emphasis on el puro, its love of bloodlines, the mystical handing down of el arte through families, preferably Gypsy families, the die-hard aficionado also has something of the racetrack handicapper, the genealogy authority, and the slave-owning plantation owner about him as well.

  Don Héctor started off by drawing a great tree on the blackboard. With much emphatic underlining, he labeled the roots, INDIA. Brushing chalk dust from his hands, he turned to his audience with a pugnacious tilt to his little chin like a backstreet brawler ready to take on all comers. He seemed deflated when we copied the tree into our notebooks without a question.

  “The long debate over where los gitanos originated is over. A study at Hospital Puerta de Hierro, Madrid, Spain, examined the HLA class I and class II antigen distribution in a sample of seventy-five Spanish Gypsies and seventy-four Spanish non-Gypsies. They found that Gypsies have a statistically significantly higher frequency of these antigens, which proves that Spanish Gypsies are closer to Indian Caucasoid populations than to the Spanish non-Gypsy population?”

  He looked around, expecting a fierce reaction to what he obviously considered a bombshell revelation. All he saw were students either dutifully scratching down what he’d just said or muffling yawns. I, however, was electrified. He was talking about the exact issues of blood and authenticity that haunted Tomás. This was the problem I could solve for him, the one that would win his love. I scribbled frantically as the professor continued.

  “Gypsies migrated from or were cast out of India around the eleventh century. Records exist of their arrival in Spain as early as 1425. They named themselves Children of the Pharaoh, Egyptians, los egipcianos, a label that eventually became los gitanos. Many of the Gypsy chiefs called themselves conde or duque de Egipto, count or duke of Egypt, and traveled with their bands under forged letters of safe conduct, claiming to be pilgrims. They carried out this fabrication for so long that even the gitanos themselves forgot that they were not really Egyptian pilgrims, sons and daughters of the pharaohs.

  “After the Reconquest of Spain in 1492, when the Moors were driven from the peninsula, an official persecution began against all non-Christian groups. The same year that America was discovered, Jews and Gypsies became hunted people. They were either expelled or forced to hide their identities. The Jews became conversos, practicing their religion in secret, or they fled. Gypsies had nowhere to flee.

  “For three centuries, Gypsies were subject to laws and prejudice designed to eliminate them from Spain. Settlements were broken up; Gypsies were required to marry non-Gypsies. They were denied their language and rituals as well as being excluded from public office and from craft membership. In 1560 Spanish legislation forbade gitanos from traveling in groups of more than two. Gypsy dress and clothing were banned. Around this same time there were nearly a million Gypsy slaves in Eastern Europe, and Holy Mother Church owned two hundred thousand of them.

  “Not surprisingly, Gypsies were driven into a permanently submerged underclass from which they are still emerging today. Just as hardship, however, nurtured the blues music of your persecuted African Americans, in my country it led directly to the creation of flamenco song, dance, and guitar.

  “During the twentieth century in Spain, General Franco continued the persecution of Gypsies, as did the Nazis, who enacted laws twice as strict against Gypsies as against Jews. By 1933 Hitler was already sterilizing Gypsies in Germany. Eventually, a third of all Gypsies living in Europe, nearly one million people, were annihilated. A proportion as great or greater than the number of Jews murdered, yet not one single Gypsy was called as a witness at the Nuremburg Trials. Not one single Gypsy was ever compensated.”

  Don Héctor summarized the story of flamenco’s beginnings among the outcasts of Andalusia: Jews, Moors, and Gypsies. He followed the trunk of his great tree to limbs forking out to ever smaller branches to, finally, the farthest extension, the one that bore the golden fruit that we were all feasting upon, flamenco in Nuevo México.

  “According to my sources, flamenco truly took root in New Mexico in a club outside of Tesuque, a town on the edge of Santa Fe. The name of this club was, appropriately enough, El Nido, The Nest. Here, for a handful of aficionados, the godfather of New Mexico flamenco, Vicente Romero, danced. He danced his famous twenty-minute escobilla, the machine-gun footwork that would eventually kill him when, overweight and trying to keep up with a young Pepe Greco, Romero died onstage at the Joyce Theater in New York.”

  Didi turned to me, her eyes popping at thi
s fabulously dramatic bit of New Mexican flamenco history.

  “But Romero left behind several talented guitar-playing brothers and also inspired two dancers of seminal importance. The first, of Chippewa/Puerto Rican heritage, María Benítez, would go on to become one of the most acclaimed dancers in America. The second is your own Señora Alma Hernandez-Luna.”

  At this the tiny professor bowed his head and extended his arm to Alma and the entire audience burst into spontaneous applause for our beloved homegirl.

  “But the real reason I have journeyed to your state, to your Tierra del Encanto, the actual focus of the book I will be writing, is—” The professor turned back to the blackboard and drew one final branch. Beside this last branch he chalked in the name Doña Carlota Montenegro de Anaya, bailaora.

  Didi’s eyes popped open and she hissed in my ear, “Yes!”

  I waved my hand to silence her, terrified that I might miss a single word.

  “Not only was Doña Carlota the first to bring flamenco puro to New Mexico, she gave el arte its first academic home in the New World. Doña Carlota has established a dynasty of New Mexican dancers who are, even now, forcing flamenco to evolve in directions both unexpected and, for many traditionalists, unwelcome. But we shall save that controversy for another time. For now, let us examine the reasons why flamenco took root here in your majestic state as it did nowhere else in America, or the world, for that matter. Why was el arte embraced by Hispano residents in a way that no other Latino population in the New World has? The reason is contained in their very preference for the designation ‘Hispano.’ Not Latino, not Chicano, Hispano. Though it is not a popular contention in this country, some would say that something in the blood of your Hispanos, those descended from Spanish settlers, responds to flamenco. They hear, in its ancient rhythms, songs of home.

  “Let us leave, for now, the fascinating question of why New Mexico, and turn to the other great gift that Doña Carlota has given us.”