by Sarah Bird
I was in command again and ordered yet another escobilla. I increased the tempo, not believing myself how fast my heels were striking. Tomás leaned forward, strumming faster to give me the propulsion I needed. Yet, as my feet slammed harder and faster, time slowed and I felt myself escaping the gravity of everything I’d ever known. Fog, mists, clouds fell away until I was out of any atmosphere I’d previously breathed.
I looked around and saw every detail of the room. I noticed that my teachers were clapping palmas, snapping pitos for me. They were shouting jaleo, praise and encouragement: Óle! Así se baila! Eso es! Que toma! Que toma!
In slow motion, I saw a bead of sweat roll down the side of Tomás’s face, tracing the beautiful, dark curves of his hairline until he leaned forward and it trembled for a moment at the edge of his eyebrow before dropping onto his guitar. There was only one thing I wanted any longer: for Tomás to keep playing. I knew then why Vicente Romero had died onstage dancing one last escobilla. I knew why cantaores had drowned in their own blood singing one last letra.
These deaths no longer seemed tragic to me. I understood every one. I felt I was on the verge of piercing a veil, learning the unlearnable, knowing the unknowable, when Tomás began to stare at me. Not at a dancer he was trying to follow, at me. His gaze drew me back into the present. I stared back and found what I had to express contained within that second: desire.
In some distant corner of my mind, I was ashamed of the desire that I was revealing more nakedly than if I’d stripped off my clothes. My mother’s face, pinched, silent, stoic, floated into my consciousness. I stamped my shame down until it turned to rose petals beneath my heels, filling the studio with their fragrance.
I finished with a thunderous closing that Tomás had to labor to keep pace with. When it was over, we stared at each other, panting. It wasn’t that I knew then we would be true lovers; we already were.
How does a small tree kill a big tree?
You take the sun away from her.
Chapter Thirty-one
Tomás stood, took my hand, and we left without a word passing between us. After the volumes we’d just communicated there was no need. As we passed Didi shouted high-pitched congratulations, pretending that she’d intended my triumph from the start. I closed my ears to her. My heart had already been shut.
Tomás drove an old Ford truck that looked like a piece of turquoise, faded blue with streaks of rust running through it. The companionable chug of its engine was the only sound as we drove down Central Avenue. He passed several motels and didn’t stop until we reached the Ace High, just as if he, too, had spent the last years working to return to this place. When he came back to the truck with a room key that bore the number 312, my heart soared. What else could I conclude but that he remembered? It was as if we’d agreed, all those years ago, to meet back here as soon as we could, to return the instant I had learned all the secret flamenco codes and signals, rituals and rhythms that would allow me to enter his world.
We stepped into room 312. Tomás closed the door. At the second our bodies joined, time, the time that had stopped when he left me standing on Carlisle Avenue all those years ago, started again. In the glass of the balcony doors, I saw our reflections. The dim light behind us shone on the drapes, turning the mustard color gold. They were half open, framing Tomás and me as if we were onstage at the moment the curtains parted and the second act began. His head was bent above mine, his dark hair swinging forward, his face buried in my hair. My arms were raised, embracing him. He kissed me. I closed my eyes, but the image of us together remained, growing brighter, more golden, in the dark on the other side of my eyelids.
His smell was exactly as it had been the first time, sweat and marijuana and oranges. He tugged down the zipper on my skirt and it slid to the floor, a black shadow that I stepped over without a thought. I raised my arms high and he pulled the stretch top over my head. I pushed his clothes away.
The feel of his naked skin against mine was such a relief that I couldn’t remember how I had existed without it for any second of the past three years. It was both an immediate essential necessity and the most voluptuous luxury imaginable.
In the reflection on the balcony doors, he knelt, dark head bowed, his hands drawing me to him. My pale fingers were icicles melting into his black hair. I had been chosen. I was the one odalisque, the one girl out of the five hundred whose dance had won the sultan.
He stood. The intricate pull and bulk of his back muscles came alive against my palms as he bent to kiss me. I tasted myself on his lips. His flesh inside of me was a formality, the signature on a pact we’d made in this room all those years ago, the fulfillment of a contract we had already written in twelve beats. We fit together with an inevitability that made each touch, each kiss as familiar as it was thrilling. The night was of one continuous piece as we reenacted every note, every pulse, every advance, every retreat of the dance we had already choreographed.
When the room filled with murky predawn light, I watched as he slept. He lay on his right side, facing me. His lips, severe and disdainful when he was awake, puckered needful and plump as a baby’s in sleep. The black scrolls of his hair fell to either side of a broad shoulder and tangled with the gold chain around his neck. The chain jumped in rhythm to his heart beating through the vein at his neck. Women generally know better than to fall in love with beauty, the thing that the whole world can see and covet. They know to find what is only there for them alone. I tried to pick out flaws, tiny snags in his beauty that could be mine alone to love. Perhaps his nose was a bit too long? The furrows between his eyes, might they not deepen unattractively as he aged? His teeth were tanned by coffee and cigarettes, they were not perfect American teeth. His lower lip was dimpled and darkened at the spot where he always held his cigarette. All these flaws did was to make his beauty more memorable.
Tomás woke, caught me staring, and kissed each lid. We made love one last, exhausted time; then he wrapped his arms and legs around me and laid his head on my shoulder like the famous photo of John and Yoko. I toyed with his dark curls and breathed in his smell. He spread his hand across my heart.
“You might be the palest woman I have ever known.”
“I know. I’m an albino.”
“You’re beautiful. Rae. Rae. Ray of sunshine. X-ray. Can you see through me, X-ray? Pale, pale Rae.” He studied his dark angers curving around my breast, fascinated as a child making shadow animals against a wall. “Güera, rubia, gabacha, gringa.” He crooned the words that meant “pale,” that meant “other.” “Vermeer would have painted you. Scarlet here.” He traced a finger over my lips. “Lapis lazuli here.” My eyes. “Cream and rose here.” My cheek, throat, shoulder. He sighed and whispered, “I have to get back to the gym.”
His words were so at odds with his touch that I couldn’t reconcile the two. “Why?”
“A few more auditions.”
“But yesterday? There was no one after me. I was the last.”
“I know, you should have been. But you know the flamenco grapevine. Once word leaked out, Alma started getting calls from all over. Una bailaora from New York was supposed to have flown in last night. Another is driving down from Denver. There’s a pretty good scene in Denver. You’d be surprised.” He kissed my shoulder, sat up, and lighted a cigarette. The odor of Ducados, harsh and strangely Oriental, filled the room. He clasped the cigarette between his lips and, shutting one eye against a coil of smoke, pulled on his shirt.
“No. Don’t.”
Flipping his hair out from under the shirt collar, he froze.
“Don’t see any other dancers. Pick me. Take me with you.”
Motion started again. He buttoned his shirt. “X-ray, you are definitely in the running. I promise. Definitely. You are insanely fuerza en compás. Really, one of the strongest I’ve ever seen.” He offered the cigarette to me. I took it, dug out one of Didi’s joints, lighted it from the cigarette’s glowing end, inhaled as deeply as I could, closed my mouth over Tomá
s’s and exhaled.
Passing the Ducado and the blunt back and forth, we fortified ourselves with the illicit airs of flamenco. Tomás sagged back against the pillows, eyes closed, mouth gone slack. I lay beside him, unbuttoned his shirt, and trailed my fingers along his chest as I murmured in his ear, “Take me, Tomás. I am what you need. You might find a better dancer than me, but you will never find a better canvas for painting your art.” All those missions with Didi. All the flattery, the cajolery. These were Didi’s weapons. I took them and armed myself. “Your tour is to introduce the greatest guitarist in the world to America. Not the greatest dancer.”
I had clung to Guitos’s secret. Hoarded and harbored the knowledge that Tomás was driven by the fear that the Gypsy heritage he’d built his reputation on was a lie. It was time to use the one advantage I had: his secret. “I will be the light that exalts your darkness. I will be the pretender who proves your legitimacy.”
Tomás opened his eyes. Skepticism tautened his features. I had overreached. I was certain he suspected I knew his secret and would now hate me for possessing that knowledge. “Ozu!” he expelled the Gypsy curse on a snort of laughter. “What kind of shit do they teach you girls at that university? Lah-jit-tuh-mah-say?” He mocked the word with an exaggerated homeboy pronunciation. “What kind of shit is that?”
“Stupid shit. Kind of shit that says Tiger Woods can’t be the best in the world. Kind of shit that says he has to decide if he’s black or Asian or white. Kind of shit that says everyone has to declare themselves and be whoever their grandfathers back to Adam were.”
“Kind of shit that says a white girl can’t dance flamenco.”
“Kind of shit that says a white girl can’t dance flamenco.”
His grin, white in the dark room, was a goofy, stoned flag of surrender. I had done it. I had used his secret to turn us into allies. “Fuck it. When did I say I wanted to spend two days looking at dancers? I never told Alma that. Come here, güera.”He tugged me on top of him, sucked a hit from the joint, and exhaled it into my mouth. Flamenco communion. We’d both taken it. We both surrendered, sinking into the voluptuous abandon that was the birthright of all those born into flamenco. And all who could learn how to decipher its code.
We didn’t leave room 312 of the Ace High Motel. We stayed all day and made love. But Tomás never recalled that he had been there before. That he had met me before. Why should he? Why should he have remembered the girl he’d met once many years ago when I myself had now forgotten who she was?
Chapter Thirty-two
The curtains that had been gold were mustard-colored in the early morning light. A shaft of that light illuminated Tomás. Hunched over his guitar, playing softly, he looked like a young monk bent over his prayers in a medieval cathedral. His music rose fragrant as incense toward the heavens. He had made love to me with the same pure intensity.
“Did I wake you?” He put the guitar aside and crept toward me in a jokey, panther-stalking-his-prey way that turned serious as he slid beneath the covers.
“We’re good together,” he said, later, holding me. He put two fingers lightly on my neck and two on the carotid artery on his own neck.
“What?” I asked, but he shushed me as he concentrated, his lips moving as he counted.
“Just like I thought. Our hearts beat in compás. The exact same palo. Gypsy compás.” Just saying the word Gypsy was a struck nerve and he bounded out of bed, dragging me with him. “Vamos ya! We have to start rehearsing. We should have started a month ago. The tour is already completely booked. I have to call the promoter and give him your name for advertising.” He clapped his hands like a director calling for a new scene to begin, for action to commence. “Okay, do we need to stop by your house? You have your shoes, a skirt? Do you need anything else?”
Didi might be there, in the small house on the alley. I didn’t want to see her. If I saw Didi, she would convince me that she had not betrayed me. Had not tried to steal my chance with Tomás. She would say she had not seen my signal that I was ready to step back into the lead. That whatever she’d done had been for me. I imitated Didi’s laugh, heedless, taunting, and answered, “Shoes, skirt. What else does a dancer need?”
“Ándale pues.” Let’s go then.
It was late afternoon when we emerged into a sunless day knifed through by a north wind. The worn seats of his old truck creaked from the cold when we sat.
“Takes a minute to warm up,” he said, turning the key in the ignition. I shivered in the cold. “Here.” He took his jacket off, wrapped it around my shoulders, and buried his face in my hair. The sun, already slumping down onto the West Mesa, broke through the clouds and lasered slices of light onto Central Avenue. Each crummy business—the Winchester Ammunition Advisory Center, the Leather Shoppe, the Pussycat Video, the Aztec Motel—was gilded in the dazzling illumination of late afternoon.
“Wait until you see this place where I’m staying,” he said as we sailed along I-25, high above a dusty plain that stretched out to our west all the way to Mount Taylor, a distant, snow-capped blue. “It’s mi primo’s from up north. He lets me stay there whenever I’m in town.” Though I’d driven I-25 dozens of times, that day was the first time I noticed that painted on the side of a cinder-block building was a woman in a flamenco pose, her hand tossed to the sky.
“What’s your cousin do?” It was a stupid question that I asked mostly to show him that I knew what primo meant.
“Little of this, little of that. Family business, you know. The kind of business they have up north.” He tipped his chin up, toward a north where family business was conducted that anyone who was enterao wouldn’t be stupid enough to ask about. “He’s not really my cousin,” he added, turning away to indicate that the subject was closed. At least to a white girl who wouldn’t understand the intricate gradations of northern New Mexican primos.
The sun isolated everything on the fields below in shimmering radiance: a cemetery, white crosses stippled into a barren field; a lot holding acres of repossessed cars inside high curls of concertina wire; a factory that made bandages; another that manufactured wooden pallets; a tow truck impaled on a thirty-foot pole; the dusty filigree of dirt bike trails looping over the knobby earth that sprouted little aside from rabbitbrush, Russian thistles, and old tires. Monolithic pylons marched across the landscape unspooling loops of silver power line. The light haloed Tomás sitting behind the wheel of a truck like a normal human being. I kept looking away, then back again, just for the shock of seeing him beside me.
Erotomania, I screamed in my mind at the therapist, Leslie. Here he is. He’s chosen me. But Leslie slipped away. It was Didi I wanted to tell, the only person on earth who knew that I had climbed Mount Everest, won seven Olympic gold medals, and been awarded a Nobel Prize. No one else knew what I’d done to win, who I’d had to become.
We turned on Rio Bravo. “Vive Como Un Rey.” Tomás read the message on a billboard urging us to live like a king, drink Budweiser.
He scraped open the ashtray, pulled out a partially smoked joint, lit it, and, holding it out to me, joked, “Vive Coma Una Reina.”
I laughed. Yes, I would, I would live like a queen.
We crossed the Rio Grande. It flowed beneath us, a broad swath of dull, aluminum-colored water bordered by cottonwoods grown to primeval size. On Rio Bravo, we turned off and made our way through a tangle of ever-smaller streets, lanes, and paths running along the river. We finished the joint and the day turned much jollier.
“Did you see that?” I asked, pointing to a row of a dozen identical navy blue T-shirts flapping on a line. They suddenly held a comic significance only Tomás and I understood and we laughed until Tomás ran off the dirt road. That made us laugh even more. As did a piñata in the shape of a pirate hanging forlornly from a big elm. As did a miniature horse nibbling a flake of alfalfa. The midget horse made me laugh until I was afraid I’d wet my pants. We stopped laughing long enough for me to point to an artfully spray-painted graffito swirling
in hectic gang-style script across the side of a metal storage shed that carefully instructed all viewers, FUCK YUO.
The thought of some homeboy misspelling his rage against the machine then became the funniest thing either of us had ever seen. As we reached the house where Tomás was staying, he was pounding my back and I was trying to catch my breath. We stopped outside a high adobe wall and he punched a code in. A wrought-iron gate swung open.
On the other side was a compound with a massive adobe hacienda tucked into the shadows cast by several prodigious cottonwoods. The estate’s walled isolation made me recall Tomás referring to the “family business,” and the words drug lord’s palace appeared like a crawl beneath the unkempt opulence of the property. That suspicion was confirmed when we went inside. The house seemed to have been decorated by a thirteen-year-old boy with an unlimited line of credit: plasma TV, round bed with black satin sheets, monster sound system. Walk-in closets were filled with every article of clothing that FUBU and Sean John had ever manufactured.
“Can you believe this shit?” Tomás asked, laughing. Next to him a pump kicked on, powering a six-foot-high acrylic sculpture that sent tendrils of orange and magenta oil droplets shimmying up a wavy panel where lights and bubbles vibrated. “Mis primos from up north are pretty basic guys.”
I knew he was talking about the village in northern New Mexico that Guitos had told me was Tomás’s one true home. I wanted to ask about it, about his primos and their “family business,” but I didn’t. I was an alien trying to slip through customs with forged papers, trying to enter a country where I did not belong. I was not going to call attention to my outsider status by asking questions. Not about northern New Mexico, not about flamenco, not about los primos, not about anything.
Still, answers to my unasked questions were in the simple acts Tomás performed. When he built a fire, he had the practiced expertise of someone who has risen on many cold mountain mornings in places where warmth came from wood. Piñon wood. The fragrance of piñon filled the house, warming it even more than the fire.