The Flamenco Academy

by Sarah Bird

  I screeched around a corner and slammed on the brakes, my tires slipping on the road still slick from the rain. An old man in a crumpled felt fedora and a white shirt buttoned up over the cords in his neck wandered down the center of the road ahead, oblivious of my presence. Houses crowded the road so tightly that I couldn’t pass him and had to slow down to match his crabbed pace as he ambled down the street. I was close enough to see his shoulder blades raise bony wings on either side of the X where his suspenders crossed his back. He heard the engine and looked back, turning his entire upper torso, so that I saw the winged shoulder blades in profile. His eyes widened in surprise and he hopped like an injured bird across the frost-buckled road.

  The motor labored on the steep uphill grade outside of town. Perched atop a ridge, the road was as thin as the backbone of a starved dog, ribs of erosion digging into its side. A few houses were tucked away in the green crotch of a deeply shadowed valley far below. Their tin roofs winked in the fading rays of the sun, sending silvered greetings from a world left behind hundreds of years ago.

  Next to the road, strips of red ribbon bleached pink fluttered from a weather-grayed cross. CIPRIANO ARCHULETA. KILLED IN A CRASH, JAN. 6, 1969. In the distance an abandoned adobe chapel melted back into the earth it had sprung from. A scrap of dirty rag, once a curtain, blew out of the empty socket of a window where a congregation had once prayed amid the cold beauty their grandchildren would abandon.

  A truck lumbering up the mountain blocked me for several miles on the narrow road. The truck spit bullets of wet gravel that pinged off the windshield. Each one jangled my nerves, caused my heart to accelerate. A stab of pain in my neck made me aware that I was gripping the steering wheel so tightly that my nails had dug deep grooves into the flesh of my palms.

  I followed the directions on the hiker’s map and turned off onto an unmarked gravel road. For a time, the cratered road aimed straight at Agua Fria Peak. One face of the peak was scorched black from the forest fire. The scarred crag shifted in and out of my vision as the road wobbled eastward.

  I was nearly on top of the procession before I made myself understand that it was not a mirage. Gravel spattered as I jammed on the brakes. A priest in purple vestments led the windblown group. Behind him a stocky man, face as long and brown as a Tiki war god, fought the wind to keep a flapping white satin banner appliquéd in purple with INRI from being torn out of his callused hands. On the other side of the banner was a Sacred Heart wreathed in piercing thorns and stabbed through with a wooden cross. Perfect tears of crimson blood hung from the organ like plump fruits. Old women wearing head scarves and plastic shoes fingered rosaries. The cut-glass beads slipping between the women’s fingers glinted in the harsh mountain sunlight as corrugated lips slid over the cycle of prayers. The road widened, giving the faithful enough room to allow me to pass.

  “Gracias a Dios del cielo: porque es eterna su misericordia!” The priest, the youngest in the group by several decades, intoned a prayer of gratitude for God delivering his flock from the fires. His followers repeated his words.

  The road rose higher and low-cropped piñon and sage gave way to tall ponderosa pines, their trunks reticulated like a herd of frozen giraffes. As I drew closer, then entered them, the mountains turned from dusty pine green to the cold blue of granite. I slid into a canyon that abruptly blocked out the sun. At the corner of my vision, a magpie cartwheeled high above, black then white, catching the bugs darting through the last flashes of sun.

  The road was walled in by tall pines, their trunks banked with old, humped snow, black in the shadows. I downshifted when the tug of the engine grinding up the mountain became a groan. The lower gear engaged with a shudder that shimmied through the car body to the sensitive space between my legs. An artery of pain opened between my jaw and a soft spot behind my earlobe. I shifted my jaw from side to side, but the pressure didn’t ease until I pinched my nostrils shut, blew, and swallowed. My ears crackled, popped, and cleared. I went higher.

  Darkness had begun melding all the trees into one black shape by the time I found the final turnoff. The few dusty houses that composed La Viuda hugged the road even more tightly than those of other villages. The village had one store and it was boarded up. Its flaking sign read EL NORTEÑO, The Northerner. The name wasn’t referring to the northern part of the state of the New Mexico. It was talking about the people who’d settled La Viuda and the south they were northerners to was Mexico. La Viuda was the last outpost of a fallen empire, the residents still commemorating the home in Mexico their ancestors had left to claim this territory for New Spain.

  I drove past the houses of the descendants of the conquistadors. All were made of adobe, all were dissolving back into the earth. Jerky television light flickered in the windows. In the driveway of a house at the end of town, an old man was hunched over an engine working in the harsh illumination of a light hooked to the raised hood. The car he was working on was Doña Carlota’s old Buick. The mechanic glanced up and raised a hand in greeting. It was Teófilo, Doña Carlota’s brother-in-law.

  I parked and approached. The old man greeted me in a mixture of English and Spanish of the archaic type that charmed visitors from Spain. The kind that must be like hearing backwoods Appalachians speak Elizabethan English. I told him I was trying to find Tomás’s cabin and asked if he could give me directions.

  At the mention of Tomás’s name, Teófilo’s friendliness vanished. He looked away and concentrated on wiping his hands. I thought he hadn’t understood and repeated my question. In the silence that fell, I watched a nighthawk swoop down, diving after the bugs darting through the corona of illumination cast by the light hooked onto the raised hood. Far off, a coyote howled. The night fell completely silent again before the old man asked why I wanted to know where “Tomasito” lived.

  I sorted through several answers. “Friend?” “Former girlfriend?” Finally I answered that we had toured together. I was a flamenco dancer.

  He peered at me skeptically, and though he smiled, it was obvious I did not look like a flamenco dancer to him. All I looked like was one of the outsiders he and his norteño ancestors had been repelling for centuries. He shrugged and smiled a smile meant to deflect me and my question.

  For several minutes the old man tightened bolts; then, with no warning, he said, “You’re her. You’re Rae.”

  “I am.”

  “He’s waiting for you.” He pointed to a light winking in the distance. “Tomasito,” he confided, then asked me to wait a moment. If I was going up there, he wanted me to take something to his sobrino. He hobbled into his house. The air had turned cool, almost cold, and smelled of rain and doused fire.

  Teófilo came back cradling a Mason jar wrapped in a dish towel, handed it to me, and explained that it was his special posole, made from his brother’s, from Ernesto’s, recipe. Tomasito had loved his posole since he was a little boy. He walked me to my car, pointed several more times to the light in the mountain above, rattled off descriptions of turns, estimations of mileage, then sent me on my way.

  I drove slowly and only found the road by connecting what looked like a dirt path to the flicker of light that was Tomás’s cabin. In places, pine branches had grown completely across the rutted road. They scraped the windshield and the sides of the car with shrieking sounds.

  The cabin was a solitary lantern, glowing alone in the dark night. As I pulled up, a door opened and Tomás stepped onto the porch. The headlights illuminated the sparse calligraphy of dark hair that flicked around his clavicles, the bow of his upper lip, the clean slope of his nose. It etched every wrinkle on his face in dark shadow. He seemed tired, bruiseable as he walked to the car, more a stranger to me than he had been the night we’d met at the Ace High. I switched off the engine but didn’t get out. The window beside me was open and he came to it.

  Before he could speak, I said, “I didn’t come for you. I came for myself.”

  My hand rested on the door. He put his next to it. His nails, the lo
ng nails on his right hand, the hand that played rasgueos and plucked picado, were gone, cut now as short as a surgeon’s. He said, “I miss you.”

  If I had moved my hand one millimeter toward his, if I had so much as willed the epidermis to thicken in his direction, we would have flowed together like pools of mercury. As we’d done all those times when he’d returned to me smelling of another woman, I would have tried to retrace and eradicate the geometry of betrayal. Where Didi had put her hand. Where his mouth had gone. We’d have reconstructed a painstaking model of the entire affair just so that he could smash it to bits, repudiate it, tell me it meant nothing. That I was the one true god and he would have no other gods before me. Then he would build a cathedral to me on the site of the false idol’s temple. We would have melted into a trembling clump and I would not have been able to identify which molecules were mine and which were his.

  We would have done all that because melting back together was the true reason I was there. I had a hole in my brain and he was the key that fit it. I shoved the door open, pushing him away. I had to because he was what I desired most and must never have again. His cell phone was ringing as we entered. The ring tone was a sprightly alegrías.

  “Are you going to answer that?”

  He shook his head no.

  “Maybe it’s about...” I didn’t have to say Didi’s name. We both knew who it would be about.

  “It’s not. Don’t worry. I’ve got Alma’s number programmed to play por siguiriyas. She said she’d call. If there was any change.”

  The smell of the piñon fire burning in the fireplace and of the century of piñon fires before it drenched the old cabin. We sat in front of the fire on straight-backed, wooden chairs made by people who had been dead for a hundred years before either one of us had been born. I studied Tomás in the firelight and realized what had changed: he looked mortal.

  He said, “I’m sorry.”

  And I answered, “We’re not going to talk about that.”

  “It’s not enough, I know. Nothing will ever be enough.”

  “You are who you are. Didi is who she is. Neither of you will change and you will devour me if I let you. I can’t let you. Only one thing has ever really connected us, Doña Carlota’s story. I am going to give it to you. Then we will be done.” If, in all the time we were together, I’d ever looked into and seen the hunger I saw when I told him I was going to give him Doña Carlota’s story, I’d have known we could be together. But I hadn’t. I never would. Whatever we’d had was a spindly offshoot of a tree so massive it cast everything else, even Didi, into shadow.

  He knew that revealing his hunger was a strategic mistake and said, “Rae, this is the beginning for us, not the end.”

  “Doña Carlota’s stories, her lies, I used them as passwords to gain admission to your world. It’s time to surrender them. You are their rightful owner. I don’t have the entire story, but I will give you what I have.”

  Tomás barely breathed as I spoke. It was the first exchange we’d ever had that wasn’t essentially sexual and it was stilted and formal. That was as it should have been. I was fulfilling an obligation akin to the ceremonial returning of bones to an ancestral burial ground.

  Piñon is a fragrant wood, hard and long-burning. The logs blazed, then burned down to embers in the time it took me to tell Tomás that what he’d considered his birthright, the tale of Gypsy ancestors with the power to make the earth burn and poets weep, belonged to a servant girl named Rosa. He was rapt but not surprised by the details of his great-aunt’s lonely and illustrious childhood, its abrupt end in the back room of a mansion in Granada, her flight with Rosa to Sevilla.

  When I had told all that I knew, he was silent for a long time. His eyes twitched as if adjusting to a changing light. Finally he said, “I’ve heard all those stories before. I grew up with them. But my great-aunt was always the dirty little girl in the cave.”

  The obligation of dispatching my duty as well as I could bound me to say, “I think the next part of the story, the part she would have told me if she’d had the strength, was that Rosa might be your grandmother.”

  Tomás looked at the ceiling and shook his head, exasperated. “And think that she chose to lose her strength at the point that best suited her. Rae, she made me who—what—I am. That’s what I want you to understand. I want us to be together. Jesus, this is hard.” He put his open hand on the top of his head as if he were trying to contain the thoughts burbling up. “I don’t know how to start. Tía Carlota didn’t like me to speak.”

  It struck me that that was the first time I’d heard Tomás speak the name of the woman who had raised him.

  “When I asked for something to drink, she’d stick a guitar in my hand and tell me to make her feel my thirst. And to do it en compás the way a real Gypsy boy would. I grew up with stories of how her family had lived in a cave in Sacromonte. How she saved herself and her family from poverty with her dancing. She told me the stories of the sufferings of her people. Of our people. My people.

  “I grew up like one of the Romanovs. Like I had hemophilia, something in my blood that made me special but was a curse. That was how I thought of flamenco. That I was doomed to flamenco because I was gitano por cuatro costaos. She told me that my real mother was a relative, a great-niece or the daughter of a cousin. The story changed. When I was old enough, she told me my mother had been a drug addict who didn’t want her identity revealed. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that I was gitano por cuatro costaos and that my mother had given me up on one condition: that I be raised as un flamenco. That I learn our people’s art, flamenco, but flamenco puro.

  “She stuck a guitar in my hands when I was three and told me that Sabicas had started when he was two and I was already behind. When I was hungry, she wouldn’t feed me until I could make her feel my hunger. Play my hunger for her on the guitar. When I got tired, bored, she’d ask me what would have happened if our people, exiled from their home, wandering for centuries, for so long that they even forgot where home was, despised and persecuted wherever they went, what would have happened if they had given up?

  “Flamenco was all I knew growing up. School was my reward. If my playing was going well enough, she allowed me to go to school. If not, no school. We didn’t have a TV in the house, most of the books were in Spanish. Biographies of Carmen Amaya, of Sabicas. I didn’t learn to speak English that well and the Spanish I learned from her and Tío Ernesto was like something out of another century. Something that made me an outsider to the other kids in Santa Fe. So I didn’t have friends. I had flamenco.

  “This.” He stopped and looked around at the cabin, lantern light flickering across the thick, round logs that formed the walls. “This was my sanctuary and my salvation. Mine and Papi’s. Papi, that’s what I called Tío Ernesto when we came here. I never called him father back in Santa Fe. Never in front of her. But when we were here together, he was mi papi. Papi and I would come up here without her. Everyone was related to Papi and that made them all my cousins, mis primos. This was Anaya land. It was just far enough from Santa Fe and from Taos to escape being developed out of existence. The young people always left La Viuda. They had to. There was no way to survive up here. But they always came back at holidays and during the summer. Then we’d have huge pachangas. Lots of beer. Lots of food. The women would bring pots of posole, green chile stew, chicos, calabacitas. No Paco de Lucía. I got to listen to Duran Duran and Van Halen like a normal kid. Mis primos were my best friends, my only friends.

  “When we left Santa Fe and came up here, Papi would always pack the guitar just like she ordered. But he’d leave it in the trunk of the car. No one in La Viuda cared about flamenco. To them a compás was something to help you find your way out of the forest. No one cared if I was gitano por cuatro costaos, if I had the ‘blood of the pharaohs’ flowing in my veins. Uncle Ernesto was mi tío, mi papi, and that was all they needed to know. In La Viuda, I was family. They loved my uncle and they loved me. I was part of a pack
here, just one of the primos, one of the swarm of boys who would throw Black Cat firecrackers at the girls we liked, who’d sneak out to the morada and spy on the penitentes’ secret ceremonies, who’d hike up into the foothills and hunt for musket balls left by the conquistadors, for arrowheads left by the Indians the Mexican soldiers had killed.

  “When you’re young, you don’t question anything. You don’t question the world you are born into, especially when you are allowed to see very little outside that world. Especially when you are the little prince of that world. It’s hard to ask questions when you’re a kid and a concert hall full of adults is standing up to applaud you. I was a tiny phenomenon in a tiny world. I was the great New World hope. I would be the one to show Sevilla, Madrid, Jerez that we colonials could do flamenco as well as anyone back in the Motherland.

  “When Tío Ernesto died when I was nine, she really went crazy. School became a luxury then. I’d play and she’d dance for hours every day, drilling the palos into me until all she had to do was clap two beats, three, and I could follow anything she danced. She’d read that Paco de Lucía practiced eight hours a day so she made me practice nine because he was a payo and a ‘real Gypsy boy’ will always be better than a payo because flamenco is in our blood. That was my childhood. They saved me, mis primos. They were always there to take me away when I called. We were badasses together. Me and the primos. Drugs. A lot of drugs. Some of the people I love best in the world are in prison. Some are dead. They are the true flamencos. Not these kids at the university smoking imported cigarettes. Right here in this tiny village, in all the places like it where the dreams of the Spanish Empire died, here in New Mexico, this is the only place where the old lady could have made all her dreams come true. Because there weren’t any Cities of Gold, right?”

  He leaned forward and an excitement I’d never seen before, not when he’d played, not when we’d made love, animated his face as he preached a lesson that was more autobiography than it was history. “They came for the gold, right? All those Spaniards in their bloomers, up through Mexico they came. And all they ever found was this amazing land. So they settled it. They spread across it and made it their own. Los norteños, my people, didn’t slaughter the natives and enslave the survivors. They married them. They didn’t leave behind silver mines and sugar plantations. They left children, generations of children who called themselves Hispano. Children who would make their little corner of the earth the one place in America where the most Spanish of arts would be truly embraced.