by Sarah Bird
“Secrets?” Tomás’s laugh was odd, almost manic. “The old lady thought the Gypsies could keep a secret. Shit. There are families up here who’ve been lighting candles on Friday and never eating pork and saying prayers with words no one understands anymore and burying their dead under Stars of David for centuries. They’ve been doing it for so long they don’t know why they do it anymore. They would be baffled if you said the word crypto-Jew to them. All they understand is that you keep your secrets in the family. They understood that when the government came in and tried to set up public schools and they refused. They understood that when rich Anglos appeared and built vacation homes that mysteriously burned down. They understood that when anthropologists and folklorists came to study them and they made up stories to tell the outsiders and kept the truth for themselves.
“This was the world mi papi came from, and that and his money made him exactly what the old lady was looking for, a rich man who believed in keeping secrets. I don’t know why he fell in love with her. Maybe he had a thing for her fancy Castilian lisp. Whatever, once they were married, the old lady made certain that she and her new husband were the highest of High-spanic. They were married in the Santuario de Guadalupe and paid for a front-row pew at St. Francis Cathedral so at Sunday Mass, they could sit next to families who’d lived in Santa Fe for a dozen generations. She ordered her groceries at Kaune’s on Washington, bought her shoes at Dendahl’s on the plaza. And just like that, the flamenco dancer transformed herself into Doña Carlota Montenegro de Anaya, the perfect Santa Fe doyenne.
“Who knows why she wanted a child?” Tomás asked. “I grew up with one story. From mis primos, I heard another one. This story was about a girl who was fifteen and pregnant. The girl’s devoutly Catholic parents were frantic. They talked to the one member in a family that sprawled across the state who had done exceedingly well, an elderly relative who was known for his generosity. They needed money to send the girl away. The relative and his fancy wife solved their problems by offering to pay for everything and to adopt the child on one condition: complete secrecy. The parents agreed and the girl was sent away to Las Esclavas del Divino Corazón de Jesús, the Slaves of the Divine Heart of Jesus, a home for unwed mothers in Guadalajara.
“When the time came, according to mis primos’ story, my aunt told a few women of her acquaintance, not quite friends since I never knew her to have any true friends, that she was going to Spain to adopt the child of a distant relative. The mother was a heroin addict, disappeared after the birth, probably dead. Like so many of her people, the Gypsies. ‘Gypsies?’ the women had said. ‘Why, we had no idea you were Gypsy.’ ‘No, of course not. Where I grew up, it was dangerous to be Gypsy.’ My aunt swore the women to secrecy. But she was a connoisseur of secrets. She knew which ones would be kept and which ones would be spread. Always in confidence so strict the secret was immediately accepted as absolute truth.
“There was no trip to Spain. Instead, Tío Ernesto and my aunt went to Guadalajara, to Las Esclavas del Divino Corazón de Jesús. From there mi papi took home a son and my aunt procured an instant heritage. Funny story, huh?”
“Tomás, I saw your birth certificate. You were born in Spain. I think your mother is the daughter, granddaughter, of Doña Carlota’s friend, Rosa.”
Tomás sawed off a bitter rasp of laughter. “Ah, the birth certificate. Was it on the wall?”
“No, it was locked in a box.”
“Locked in a box. Good. That’s a good dramatic touch. Heighten the revelation, right? Rae, I grew up with that birth certificate hanging on the wall above my bed. It wasn’t until I heard this other story that I had to ask, ‘Who puts a child’s birth certificate over his bed?’ Someone who gives an answer so the question won’t be asked, that’s who. With my birth, she was reborn. As a Gypsy. As the real thing. I became the answer to the question she couldn’t allow to be asked. And you know what the hell of it is? She honestly thought she was giving me a gift.”
Tomás had told me his story. He offered it to me. If I accepted, I would serve his story, the story that was also Doña Carlota’s, for the rest of my life. Instead I said, “You could have gotten a blood test.”
“I was scared of what I’d find out.”
“Scared you’d find out you weren’t Gypsy and couldn’t be the Great Brown Hope?” It was exhilarating to challenge him. Exhilarating and terrifying. I was resigning from his cheerleading squad. There would be no other place on the team for Cyndi Rae Hrncir.
“No, I was afraid I’d find out I was. One way I’d lose my professional identity; the other way I’d lose my soul. I guess I was scared of finding out which one mattered more to me. Rae, there is darkness in my life, there always will be. That’s why I have to have you to light it. You’re the only antidote to the darkness. Rae, I love you.”
It was the truth. I saw it in his face. He needed me. He loved me. The door was open. All I had to do was walk through it. A siguiriyas began to play. Even coming tinny and shrill as the ring tone on Tomás’s cell phone, the palo was unmistakable. He checked the number. “It’s Alma.”
“Answer.”
Tomás’s eyes held mine as he greeted Alma in Spanish. He walked to the nearest window, switching to English and plugging his free ear as he said, “Alma, I can’t hear you. You’re breaking up. You’re breaking up. I’m only getting every fourth or fifth word. Alma, who died? Alma, I can’t hear you. Alma!”
He held the phone out as if I might be able to resolder the lost connection. “Rae, someone died.” For a moment, his face made me think of the lonely, dutiful boy in the photographs in his aunt’s living room.
I took the phone from his hand and snapped it closed. “We’d better go.”
Chapter Forty-three
We walked like a dozen brides down the narrow aisle. I led the procession as it slowly approached the coffin placed in front of the altar. Ancient planks creaked beneath our feet. The full skirts of our floor-length black dresses swept against the sides of the pews filled with mourners. Each of us held a candle, globes of light in the darkened chapel. A doll-faced virgin, green-winged angels, and a variety of saints, all originally carved and painted a quarter of a millennium ago, measured our progress.
She had always planned every detail of every performance and, a diva to the end, her final one, this misa flamenca, flamenco Mass, was no exception. The coffin was plain, lid closed as she’d directed. The altar was blanketed in roses so red the ones in shadow appeared black. The name of the variety was Carmen. That had been specified as well.
The scent of roses blended with the incense curling from the priest’s censer. At the altar, we divided into two. We placed our candles in standing holders and took seats on straight-backed chairs facing the congregation, six dancers on each side of the altar.
Tomás, seated in front of the banks of roses, looked up from his guitar, nodded to me, and I began palmas, clapping out the slow, sonorous beat for the canto entrada. He made it a song of mourning, of death. The other dancers, then most of the congregation, joined in and the sharp slap of practiced hands rang in flawless cadence through the chapel. Everyone in the chapel knew the code, the girls I had danced with for years, the guys who had played for us, those who’d sung, those who’d listened, those who’d watched. Most of the Spanish luminaries from the festival were there as well. Everyone was enterao. We had shared the pulse and it had bound us.
I accelerated the tempo. Blanca, steady, kind Blanca, picked up the beat and twined a counterrhythm through it. A volley of finger snaps popped through the new rhythms. Knuckles rapped on the back of pews. Fingernails clicked. The sound was the sound of a stream rippling over rocks, of water pattering from a fountain designed by thirsty people, desert people. By gitanos. By Andalusians. By Arabs. By Indians.
Tomás plucked an E chord that announced he would start on the sorrowing side of a soleares por bulerías and we fell silent. His toque was terse, elegantly dry, a hymn to the spaces in between. He played a dirge for what
had been held and was lost, what had been reached for and was never grasped. Three rolling rasgueados, then a simple statement of the first compás, was all he needed to play to state this fact: he had loved her. In his own way. In spite of everything. He had loved her.
Guitos, who’d arrived late the night before, stood and began his temple, singing the “Ay” that warmed his voice and opened his soul. He had been scheduled to open La Convocación in Madrid, an austere gathering of flamenco legends that was held once a decade. Though it was el arte’s highest honor to perform for the convocation, he had canceled the instant Tomás called to tell him that she had requested he sing. Guitos’s voice quavered, freighted with grief more than a thousand years old. He shed the tears Tomás couldn’t and his cante grew even harsher. A burble of clapping flowed into the silencio when he stopped. I picked up the beat, stamping my heels, tilting my ear upward, allowing the rhythm to fill my head. Tomás followed my lead and increased the tempo.
I took four compases to stand, just as Doña Carlota had taught us. With each one, my memory of the old woman who raised Tomás became clearer. I felt her in my arms, in my blood as the sacred rhythms coursed through me in the same way they’d coursed through her. I deciphered the history encoded in each compás. Wisdom surged up from my feet and, for that moment, the space of four compases, I understood why the old lady had given her life, why she’d tried to give Tomás’s, to el arte.
One by one, each of the other twelve bailaoras stood and joined me. Alma, the soul of the flamenco program; Liliana, the star from the class ahead of ours; Blanca, the sweet one; Yolanda; we all stood. Didi was the last. She was wobbly and gray as pavement. Her nose was still red where they had fed a tube into her stomach. She faltered and everyone in the chapel leaned forward to catch her. But she found her balance, took her place beside me. In unison, we twined our arms up, dragging up scoops of perfumed air with each languid twirl.
Behind us Doña Carlota rested in her coffin as cold as Queen Isabel ever was lying beside Fernando and her mad daughter, Juana, in the chilly fastness of Granada’s cathedral shadowed by the castle of vanished Arabs floating in the sun above the city.
Didi and I danced, side by side. We’d done these steps so many times that she didn’t need to look at me. I didn’t need to look at her. We followed the pulses Tomás strummed on the guitar as if they were pitons hammered into a wall of sound guiding our hands, our feet. We reached a hand up, grabbed for the next one, and lifted ourselves higher.
A choir sang from the loft above our heads, releasing an avalanche of crystalline sound.
Señor, Dios de la vida
Concédele a mi alma
Tu gracia divina
Lord, God of life,
grant my soul
your divine grace
Porque soy pecador
Dios mío de mi alma
Ay! Ten compasión!
Because I am a sinner,
God of my soul,
Ay! Have compassion!
Five guitarists fanned a ravishing guitar introduction to the Kyrie. They fell silent and Tomás plucked a series of falsetas so poignant and ethereal that they turned the small chapel in La Viuda into the grand cathedral in Granada. Guitos’s temple, the plangent warble of Ay, transformed it into the Judería, the Albaicín, the Jewish, the Moorish neighborhoods echoing with the quavering voices of cantors, of muezzins, in the days before the Moors and Jews were expelled. He sang and made us all walk the dusty paths of Sacromonte.
Señor, ten piedad, Señor, ten piedad.
Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.
Señor, ten piedad, Señor, ten piedad.
Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.
Señor, ten piedad, Señor, ten piedad.
Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.
I turned and faced Didi. It was astonishing how well we two had learned the code. Every flick of her wrist, every stamp of her heel, held meaning. I translated each dot, each dash. Didi hung back on the beat, allowing me to surge forward to take the lead in a dance that had no lead. All we had was the solitary promise flamenco ever makes, the promise of eternity if you can create one moment beautiful enough to be called true.
That moment the compás unlocked not the truth of my brain, but the truth buried in my bones. I remembered Didi with the tips of her hair dyed lime green. I remembered the first morning she picked me up in the Skankmobile. I remembered squatting next to her on the West Mesa above a puddle of my own tears while she forced me to say that Daddy would always be with me. I remembered and I danced my joy that she was alive. Behind the anger, disappointment, and betrayal, there was that truth to tell: I was happy that she still breathed. In the end, I had not wanted her dead.
Didi’s dance was hectic, out of compás. A flurry of apologies, an atonement not for any of the things she’d done, but for being the person who’d had to do them. Behind the frenzy the truth Didi danced was that, in spite of everything, she loved me more than she loved herself. It was the imperfect love of a girl who had lived her life on the pitchfork of renown, who’d believed she wasn’t there if no one was watching. It was the love she had to give. She gave it to me.
We twelve dancers twined about one another. Our skirts rose and fell in perfect time, forming a child’s curlicue of breaking waves. The chorus joined Guitos and sang, “You are the voice of the way. The joy of life. The light of the world. The salt of the earth.”
I danced my gratitude for all the doors Didi had opened and pulled me through. All the stuffy rooms she had dragged me out of. I danced for the four of us, Clementina and Rosa, Didi and me. We four had been girls who’d wanted real families, real mothers. What we had found was each other. And flamenco.
We raised our arms to honor Doña Carlota Clementina Montenegro de Anaya’s life. I honored it in all its manifestations. All its contradictions. I honored her fierceness. Her talent. I honored the truth she had told, the truth she had not been able to tell.
Tomás’s head bent over his guitar. His compases were so sturdy that time itself danced on them. He sliced time in half, then thirds, then again, until each moment expanded in front of me and I had time enough for everything. Time to put triples on all the footwork. Time to understand. Tomás looked up from his playing and made the one request that flamenco makes: Dame la verdad. Give me the truth.
I waded again into the familiar sea of his toque and danced. It was time to tell my truth.
Chapter Forty-four
I walked out of that tiny chapel in northern New Mexico almost two years ago. The truth I’d finally told was that I had a hole in my brain and Tomás had the key and Didi had the key and, one way or another, we would all be locked together forever if I remained. I wanted to put an ocean between us, but the most I could afford was one international boundary. Vancouver has an unexpectedly vibrant flamenco scene. I found a teaching job the first week I was here. The studio pays me in cash since I don’t have a work visa. My real job, though, is learning how to be the major player in my own life. I’d been a member of the supporting cast for so long that it was awkward at first. For the first few months, I let myself be guided by the question WWDD?—What would Didi do?—and extrapolated from the answers.
Since the first thing Didi would have done was find her own supporting cast, I started a dance troupe. We melded instantly: a pair of sisters from a Hong Kong banking family; a Ukrainian guy with a blond braid thick as my wrist; a chunky Japanese girl who had studied flamenco in Tokyo since she was four; a belly dancer from Marrakech; an assortment of grunge kids with blond dreadlocks, tattoos of salmon, and multiple piercings; an African Canadian who can’t stay en compás to save her life but has almost more stage presence than anyone I’ve ever seen. Almost. I tell her she reminds me of someone but don’t tell her who. Didi’s isn’t a name I’m ready to start dropping. We make a good troupe, we flamenco misfits. We fight. We laugh. We dance. We’re a tribe.
For the first year, I would come nearly every morning to watch the sunri
se. It was a way to keep myself from answering Didi’s letters, Tomás’s phone calls. A way to keep from going back. I never hid from them. That would have been clinging and I was letting go.
I have careful conversations with my mother. I call once a week on Tuesday evening and we speak from precisely eight until eight-twenty. Safe within that cage of minutes, my mother feels free to expand. She tells me which quilt patterns are selling the best. She tells me who has become a “disruptive influence on the community.” She tells me that they are doing well with the herbs, the radicchio, and organic blueberries they grow now to support “the work.”
It is impossible not to keep up with Tomás and Didi. Tomás called his last CD El Norteño and dedicated it to “La Viuda and the true people of my blood.” The interviews that followed kicked up quite a storm. Tomás renounced all claims to Gypsy heritage, stating that he was “Nuevo Mexicano por cuatro costaos,” As a “New Mexican on four sides,” Tomás was embraced even more wholeheartedly than he had ever been before. An entire continent, not just a rarefied clique of aficionados, saw him as their own. His story was irresistible. The story alone would have propelled him to regional fame. His talent and beauty guaranteed an ocean of national, then international, ink with its attendant adulation.