by Sarah Bird
Behind me, Didi began doing palmas, softly clapping muted sordas, picking up the beat. I tried to force the sway of the familiar twelve counts into my body, but my nerves were logjammed.
“Something like that?” he asked me.
“Sí. Perfecto,” I answered.
“Okay, then.” He gave me a practiced smile. “De principio. Y...”
Where the warm-up chords had been a paddle rippling notes, Tomás’s soleá was a deluge. His left hand made the timeless journey from the A chord to B-flat and back while the long nails of his right hand plucked a torrent of notes that flooded the large studio with waves of precisely one dozen beats each. His ring finger struck golpes on the guitar, a surge on the three, the six, the eight, the ten, pulling against the rhythm I knew and loved. I usually found the six-beats-up and six-beats-back sway of a bulerías as easy as rocking in a hammock. Not that day. He played the entrada once, twice, three times. Each time his eyes locked on me, the dancer, the one who was supposed to conduct that performance.
Didi marked time, clapping, then stamping the heels of her boots. She was keeping time just as I had for her so often in the past. When I didn’t enter the second time Tomás played the entrada, Didi’s stamping grew louder, urged me forward more insistently. Still I didn’t move. The waves of notes kept coming. Any other time, I would have exulted in having an ocean of music to dance in. But that day, the golpes seemed dangerous, a riptide that would pull me under. I couldn’t find a safe place to dive in. The waves broke and receded, leaving me standing on the shore, terrified of drowning.
I tried to remember Doña Carlota’s story, to lose myself in the tale of the Gypsy girl dancing in the caves, but all I could recall was Guitos telling me that there had never been a pale girl like that on Sacromonte.
When Tomás played the entrada for the fourth time and I still did not move, Didi began doing the solo I’d choreographed. At first, she was inconspicuous, standing on the sidelines, performing in a subdued way, just to encourage me. But the faculty, who knew her so well, interpreted her modest hesitancy, her reluctance to embrace the spotlight as a joke, a clever comment on her renowned divahood. So, with a few laughs, a smattering of applause, the spotlight turned decisively toward Didi. And she flowered. I’d never not known this about Didi: she was a slave to attention.
Clapping, she picked up the tempo. Her months on the road, years of experience in front of audiences, had turned her natural charisma into a force of nature. It was impossible not to stare at her. Tomás stared. He looked away from me to her. Then, thumping out the golpes like a shepherd herding a scattered flock, he corralled Didi back onto the beat. He played for her. She danced for him. Her brazeo, her taconeo even flashier than usual, she took center stage beside me. Tomás smiled, pleased by the routine he assumed we were acting out, the shy wallflower being coaxed out of her shell.
I forced myself to move forward, to show some signs of life and retake the dance that was supposed to be mine. I picked up the tempo, energy returning to my legs with each stamp of my foot, and moved forward until Didi and I were dancing side by side. I caught her eye and nodded to signal to her that I could take over. But Didi and Tomás had formed the closed circuit that is essential between guitarist and dancer. He was doing for her what good accompanists do for dancers, supplying strong, steady rhythm and covering up when she made a mistake. Didi was so intent upon Tomás and he upon her that they both looked straight through me. With the stunned feel of an accident victim having trouble believing the catastrophe happening right in front of her, I wobbled out of beat and backed away.
After marking time long enough to gather myself, I moved forward more strongly. Attempting to take the lead, I reached out my arms, the universal signal for a llamada, my warning to Tomás that I was going to come in on the twelve. At the same instant, Didi surged back and brought her hands down on the ten, a clear call for a desplante that would come in on the one. Tomás flicked his eyes from Didi to me, trying to interpret the conflicting signals. He could only take direction from one of us.
Tomás had exactly the amount of time it takes to lift one finger to decide which one of us to follow. He hit a golpe on the one Didi had called for with a metallic clarity that rang like a bell signaling the end of a round. I was the fighter who went to the corner. I was out. Completely fuera de compás, more off the beat than I’d been on my first day in Doña’s class, I stumbled along, dancing as if I were wearing casts on both feet.
While Didi performed the sweeping desplante I’d choreographed, I withdrew. As I executed simple marking steps, Didi hiked up her skirt, calling for what she loved the best, an escobilla. As Didi initiated the driving footwork that characterizes an escobilla, Tomás accelerated his playing to keep pace. Didi hammered the floor, her feet stirring the dust left by years of students.
Didi’s frantic footwork had the hollow echo of a porn star, hydroponic breasts being trampolined by some gym stallion. Tomás urged her on with a hectic cascade of notes as they both struggled toward a theatrical climax. It came in a machine-gun burst, Didi jackhammering her feet, Tomás fanning triplets so furiously his hand blurred, a frenzy of motion that built higher and higher like a wedding cake with ever-more-elaborate garlands of sweet icing piped on over a tasteless base. Didi signaled and Tomás magically managed to crash down on a final chord exactly as Didi stamped to a resounding finale. The elite audience applauded. Didi had gotten it, the money shot.
Didi stood panting, her sweat and hard breathing the only part of the performance that was real. Everyone except Alma and Tomás, however, leaped to their feet applauding wildly. Alma looked at me and shook her head, her expression a combination of disdain for the praise being heaped on Didi and disappointment with me.
Didi reached out and hauled me into the winner’s circle. “Don’t forget Rae. This is really her show.” Her calculated graciousness was as transparent as an opera diva thanking her dresser and just as easily dismissed as the group continued their hosannas. Contained within their congratulations was a foregone conclusion: Tomás would select Didi. She had saved us, saved me, saved the academy; that was what was on everybody’s face. I had frozen and, in the space of one compás, I’d lost what I wanted most.
As Tomás laid his guitar down on the chair and came toward us, I saw the years, decades, stretch ahead of me. I saw that they would be spent living and reliving the moment when I had trembled on the shore, when I had not dived in and Didi had. Years that would stretch into decades when I’d struggle to find a way to believe that my blood sister had not betrayed me. If Tomás carried away the slightest impression of me, it would be as one of the worst dancers he’d ever played for. I saw that those years would commence the second he reached our circle and told Didi that, of course, she had been selected, she was the one. She would be his partner.
His great-aunt’s warning came back to me: 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.
The question I couldn’t ask Doña Carlota came back: How does a small tree kill a big tree?
Before Tomás could reach Didi’s charmed circle, I stepped out of it and stopped him. I felt as if I were at the top of a roller coaster with no memory of how I’d gotten there.
“I would like to dance.” My voice was a croak.
“You just did.”
“Not really. Not... I’d like another chance.”
Tomás glanced over my shoulder at the group waiting for him in the winner’s circle, then back at me.
“Please,” I whispered. “I know you’re not going to pick me, but I’d like another chance. I’m really not a bad dancer.”
He leaned in close to me, his lips brushing the hair around my ear, and whispered in a kind voice, “I don’t think you’re a bad dancer. But, maybe, a good dancer who is having a bad day.”
“All I want is the chance to redeem myself. Nothing more.”
He nodded and, walking back to the chair, asked over his shoulder, “What do you want to dance?”
By this time, Didi and the others had turned and were staring at us so that they all heard when a voice that was not my voice, answered, “Por siguiriyas.”
“Did she ask for a siguiriyas?” someone behind me whispered unbelieving.
I barely believed myself that I’d requested the darkest, the deepest, the most jondo of all the palos, siguiriyas, the song of lamentation, the song of mourning. It was as if a grade school piano student had announced her intention of playing Rachmaninoff. It was presumptuous and absurd, yet in that moment of losing a dream I’d named to no one except the best friend who’d just stolen it from me, the song of death was the right one to ask for.
Tomás shook his head. “No. Siguiriyas is to be sung, not danced. Siguiriyas is not for this.” He waved at the metal folding chairs, the faces, avid, ready to judge. “Siguiriyas is not for today. Not for you.” He reached for his case.
I started clapping, palmas secas, claps that rang out like rifle shots. One, two, three! Four, five, six! Seven, eight! Nine, ten! Eleven, twelve! I kept on, slamming my palms together on the eight where the siguiriyas count began. The rapping was a call, a command. Coded within it was not only the unique rhythm of the style I was demanding, but the message that I knew the password. That I had a right to ask for it. Tomás stopped closing the latches on his guitar case.
I clapped even louder, chanting out the rhythm, starting on the eight, “bomp, bom, bomp, bom, bomp, bom, bom, bomp, bom bom bomp.” I hit a counterrhythm with my foot and clucked my tongue loud as my nail-studded heel hit the wooden floor. I used every syllable of the secret language I’d spent all those years learning and I asked for this, for one last dance before I slid forever from Tomás Montenegro’s awareness.
Too late, years too late, I fought to reach the sun.
Tomás turned and stared at me for a long moment before he heaved a sigh of resignation, pulled his guitar out of its case, nestled it on his lap, then slowly raised his hands and began clapping the beat back to me. He was annoyed. I didn’t care. If I was going to disappear forever from his thoughts, at least I would mark my passing with a wrinkle or two of irritation.
Tomás curled his hands and body around his guitar and strummed. This time his playing was dry, unadorned. He wasn’t trying, I knew that. His body was angled away, as close as he could get to turning his back on me. In a world where communication had to be immediate, electric, this was the ultimate insult; he was shutting off the current. He’d already dismissed me. It didn’t matter. Dismissal fit this palo, this moment. Where his bulerías had been an ocean, the parched desolation of siguiriyas required a desert. He played a falseta of Diego del Gastor, the master of old-school flamencos from el arte’s ancient heart in Jerez de la Frontera.
I stood, keeping the rhythm with a soft, muffled palmas sordas. Then I walked toward him.
He glanced up, merely a perfunctory check asking if the tempo, the style, were right. The barest of professional courtesies. Nada más. I nodded. He settled himself. I breathed in, breathed out. Tomás started the entrada, playing the six-beat compás of the siguiriyas. Where other guitarists would have rushed in to ornament the silence with flourishes, tremolos, picado, where every note would have been frilled and filigreed, Tomás allowed the time I needed to descend to flamenco’s most profound depth.
My hands twined in languid floreos that fanned the fingers out and around the pivot of my wrist. I lifted my arms as slowly as mist rising off a dark lake, and just that, just raising my arms above my head, filled one, two, three compases.
Tomás’s elemental playing was a broad and infinite avenue to any destination I chose. On the last note of the entrada, I stepped forward, putting my foot down on the boulevard of his toque. What lay before me was not the typical dancer’s challenge. This could not be a technical exercise. In choosing to dance por siguiriyas, I had chosen flamenco’s essential challenge: Dame la verdad. Give me the truth, say something true. The one true thing I had to say at that instant was good-bye. The time that had started one night when the moon vanished was about to end and my fate now was to bid it farewell. My every movement was heavy with that inevitability in a way that made me understand at last what it was to dance con peso, with weight. Every compás, every falseta, every note I’d danced while trying to create a musical bridge to Tomás crushed down on me.
I did a twelve-count llamada, my loaded feet pounding the earth, pouring out the rhythms I would never need again. I held nothing back. I threw out every golpe-tacón-punta combination I’d learned. I tossed them away in double, triple time. When I was done, I had nothing to lose. All I had was the solitary promise flamenco ever makes, the promise of eternity if you can create one moment ravishing enough.
I was infinitely lighter walking through my paseo. Flamenco had been a yoke I’d harnessed myself to. The instant I threw it off, my shoulders rose—“Lift! Lift! Lift!” My chest expanded, growing thick and deep and, seizing control, I started the desplante precisely on the eight count.
For the first time, Tomás looked up, ready to seriously follow, ready to seriously play. He sat up, read the declaration I was choreographing before him, composed his response and struck a B-flat chord that broke every heart in the room because no B-flat would ever be played with such cruel beauty again. In it was all anyone needed to know about flamenco. The chord was played in honor of that exact instant, an instant that he and I had created that was gone before it could be noticed.
Tomás stared straight into my eyes. He studied every curl of each finger I fanned upward, read what I wrote in those twining arabesques and translated them into languages I understood, though I’d never heard them before. He was a mirror that reflected my betrayal, anger, grief. Every pluck of the string was a pact made with the eternity of now, the only place where flamenco truly exists. He was an amplifier that let me hear for the first time what my own heart sounded like. There was no possibility of lying, of hiding: I hated Didi and I danced that. She had betrayed me and I danced that. I danced my stubborn stupidity in wanting Tomás and my grief that I would never have him. I was dancing it before I saw the loneliness it had all sprung from.
Tomás stroked an A minor that made the angels weep. The past three and a half years vanished, taking with them every longing I’d ever had. Each note Tomás played was only for this second, an instant that was gone as soon as he’d thought of it. He was a lens that magnified, clarified.
An odd bubble of exhilaration rose within me like the moment when my father had taken his hand away and I’d ridden a bike for the first time. Tomás played that as well, the fear, a clutch of panic, the certainty that I was going to die the second my father took his hand away. Then soaring. I danced the wobbling, tipsy giddiness of life and the soaring that is only possible because we’re all precisely one inch of rubber away from falling forever.
My body danced the realization before it hit my brain: This is what flamenco is, knowing you’re alone, you’re going to die, and dancing anyway.
I touched my forehead, the realization overtaking me so powerfully that I fell out of compás. I glanced at Tomás, who responded instantaneously to that split second of vulnerability, playing those emotions with a tenderness that undid me even further. Seeing that I was lost, he took control and switched to A minor to signal a silencio, the section where the guitarist claimed center stage while the singer and dancer rested. Gratitude for his kindness, for rescuing me, poured out to him in the sweep of my arms.
He created an asylum for me by laying back on the driving rhythm and filling the silencio with melody. While I collected myself, I executed some simple marking steps until I was ready to call for the next sequence. He decanted strength into me with each falseta he strummed.
It saddened me to realize that I was leaving flamenco just when I finally understood it. I strode forward, decis
ively calling for the escobilla. If I’d thought about any of this in advance, I’d never have considered introducing an escobilla with its machine-gun footwork into the deepest, most jondo, of all the forms. But I hadn’t thought, hadn’t planned. I was stepping into each new second and letting whatever instant I found myself in dictate how it was to be expressed. This second demanded an escobilla.
Tomás switched effortlessly out of the melody and transformed his guitar back into a percussion instrument. His hand blurred on the strings, pouring out a flood of precise rhythm metered by rousing thumps of golpe. He was the best accompanist I’d ever heard, live or recorded. His beat was so strong, with accents as clear as stepping stones, a dancer would have to be deaf not to be able to follow its path.
I moved aside and let my feet follow the rhythm. Doña Carlota had always told us to aim for a spot one quarter inch below the floor. I aimed for hell and woke up every sleeping demon at its dark center. They swarmed up into my heels and I pounded out my fury and rage at Didi’s betrayal. Maybe it wasn’t justified. Maybe she’d genuinely been trying to help me. Maybe she’d had my back. I didn’t care. I was pissed off and danced that in my farewell dance.
I grimaced, not caring what my face did as long as my feet could do what they had to. As I hammered out my message of anger and wounded pride, I understood the arrogance in flamenco. It rose up in me, seeming to pass through every century of exile and ostracism endured by the outcast people who’d created it. I stood directly in front of Tomás and held my swaying skirt up so he could see my beautiful legs, my astonishing footwork. I wanted him to get a good look at everything he was passing up. The fool.