"The Flamenco Academy" (18 page)

Inside the front door was a bulletin board
blanketed with flyers for concerts and ads for henna tattooing,
piercing, and a band seeking “Bass player into neo-funk.” I
pretended to be interested in an ad for “body modification” and
wished Didi were with me as I sneaked peeks at the store, searching
for a bin labeled FLAMENCO. I couldn’t see one and tried to slip in
unnoticed, but the clerk, a chunky guy with tattooed calves peeking
out from beneath long homeboy shorts that held a wallet on a long
chain, immediately lumbered over. “Need some help?” he asked, his
attention on reordering the old vinyl records in the bin next to
me.

I could not imagine saying
Santuario
out loud, much less uttering Tomás’s name, so I shrugged and
answered, “Just looking.”

I guess the clerk didn’t get many just
browsers because he snorted and said, “Whatever,” leaving me to
search through all the bins that I thought might apply: Guitar.
Instrumental. Latin.

I was about to give up when the clerk
appeared beside me again. “Sarah McLachlan, Liz Phair, Indigo
Girls, Lisa Loeb.” He pointed down the aisle. “I’ve got them all
quarantined over there in a special Lilith Fair section I just
created.”

“I’m not looking for them.”

The clerk made a face at me to express both
disbelief and disgust.

“I’m not,” I protested. “I’m looking for
Santuario
, by—”

“Tomás Montenegro. Put out by the
now-defunct Kokopelli label. They went belly-up before the release.
No promotion. Underground hit among the dozen or so aficionados who
managed to snag a copy before the IRS seized everything. Not my cup
of tea but a very tasty product. I’ve got one copy over in...” He
went to a bin labeled WORLD MUSIC and pulled out Tomás’s CD.

Once I had it, I was glad that Didi wasn’t
around. She would have yanked it out of my hand and thrown it into
the player in her car just as if it were any old CD. I rushed back
to the Lair and didn’t even take the wrapping off until I was
ready. I wondered if he might have touched that very CD. Maybe he’d
delivered it to the store personally. The moment was so private
that I couldn’t even bring myself to play it over the speakers. I
clapped Mr. Steinberg’s old headphones on and carefully placed the
shimmering disc on the player. Every click and whir was magnified.
My heart was racing by the time the sound of his fingers on guitar
strings reached my ears. The instant it did, I was back at the Ace
High, my head against his guitar as he fed rhythm and passion,
mastery and excess directly into my brain.

Since listening to
Santuario
and
daydreaming about Tomás took all my energy, I had none left over to
find a better summer job than working at Puppy Taco. So when
Alejandro, who’d opened a new location across town, offered me the
manager spot, I took it. Unfortunately, the only interest I had in
the Puppy Taco anymore was that it was across the street from the
Ace High. All I did for entire days, long, hot days when the sun
turned the stand into an oven, was stare at the motel and recall
every second of The Night. I took out each moment I’d spent with
Tomás as if it were a jewel on a black velvet tray and examined it
from every angle. I replayed each word we’d exchanged, wringing a
semiotician’s range of meaning from every utterance. I felt his
presence constantly. He was the invisible audience for which I
played my life. I searched all the cars that pulled in, stupidly
expecting to see his face. I lost my ability to juggle five orders
at a time and calculate tax in my head. Alejandro assumed it was
because Didi had left, and he didn’t fire me. I was grateful for
his patience and for my paycheck since it had been months since my
mother had sent me anything from HeartLand HomeTown other than
prayers and predictions of how badly I would suffer in the next
life unless I accepted Jesus.

With Didi gone, I got homesick and even
started to miss my mom a little. But it was Daddy I really missed.
I wanted to talk to him, to tell him about Tomás even though I knew
that, if he were still alive, I never would have breathed a word to
him. Didi always said that you got through the tough times with
distraction. Fortunately, for the first time in my life, I had a
distraction powerful enough to wash everything, even missing Daddy
and Didi, out of my mind. I bought some guitar strings and rubbed
them until my fingers smelled like his; that scent alone was enough
to block out any other thought for at least an hour.

But the best distraction ever invented was
flamenco. I played Tomás’s CD night and day. During the day, I
listened to it on my player while I fried burgers or hauled tater
tots out of hot grease. At night, I cranked it on Mr. Steinberg’s
old stereo while I surfed the Internet reading everything that
popped up when I entered
flamenco
. I haunted the library,
checked out the few books they had that mentioned flamenco, and
ordered all the rest.

It took almost a week for Mrs. Steinberg to
notice that her daughter was gone. She accosted me as I left for
work, “Where Didi?” Her once-beautiful Natalie Wood face was puffy
and perfectly outlined by a seam of gray at the base of her
overpermed, dyed-black hair.

“She’s gone to this sort of music camp?” I
didn’t know how much she understood or how much I could improvise,
so I embellished with some feeble hand gestures somehow meant to
convey
music
and
camp
. “To learn how to write songs
and sing songs and do all the things that a rock star does.” I
tried to translate as much as I could into Spanish, but I doubted
that
campo
meant “camp.”

“With boy in Jaguar?” It took me a minute to
realize what she’d said since she pronounced Jaguar the Spanish
way,
hag-wahr
.

“Paco? Right. He’s going to the camp too. He
gave Didi a ride.”

Mrs. Steinberg bunched her eyebrows
together, increasing her resemblance to a Pekinese dog. Then she
said something in Spanish that even I could understand:
“No se
llama Didi. Se llama Rachel.”
Mrs. Steinberg pronounced it the
Jewish way, Rah-hel.

I repeated it in English, mostly so I could
hear it myself and understand. “Didi’s name is not Didi, it’s
Rachel?”

Mrs. Steinberg nodded vigorously, so pleased
by our exchange that she ventured a bit more English. “Yes, father
say Rachel but Rachel not good name of star. Not famous people’s
name. Didi good name of star. Since little little girl she only
want to be star. You good friend. You be good friend, okay?”

I nodded. “Yes, okay.”

Mrs. Steinberg’s computer dinged loudly. She
nodded and left.

The heat that summer broke records that had
stood for a hundred years. The ravens, disoriented by thirst, came
down from the mountains to seek out sprinklers. But the city
started water rationing and soon no sprinklers were allowed. Lawns
turned crispy and brown. Raven bodies appeared in the gutter. I
felt insulated inside a bubble where heat waves, sound waves, and
my obsession made the world around me wobbly and out of focus. Only
the memories of the night I had met him and dreams of when I would
meet him again remained Arctic sharp.

I passed the hours at work in a fog that
lifted the second I stepped back into the Lair and worked
feverishly on my strategy. Didi would have directed a frontal
attack. We’d have tracked Tomás down and laid siege as if he were
an ordinary groupie target. That was unthinkable. From the very
beginning I wanted only one of two things: Either I wanted to
worship him from afar and never speak to him again, leaving the
memory of our night together the one, shining moment in my life. Or
I wanted to own him. I wanted us to spend every second of the rest
of our lives together, then be buried in the same coffin.

That meant that I would never see Tomás
again, never allow him to see me, until I had transformed myself
into the woman he could love.

I decided on a three-pronged attack. First
was body modification. I had to completely change the way I looked.
Fortunately, between the jangly excitement that kept my stomach
sealed and the lack of edibles at Didi’s house, weight loss took
care of itself. The jittery excitement fueled marathon exercise
sessions. I bought every workout video on the market and did them
all, marveling at how my bread pudding of a body firmed up into a
solid new consistency.

His work houses and his love houses are
inseparable. Can’t have one without the other: His work is who he
is and who he’s gonna fall in love with.
I knew Didi was more
right about that astrological projection than she could have ever
dreamed. The path to his heart was through his work. In order to
transform myself into the woman he would love forever, I had to
learn everything I could about what he loved most, flamenco.
Obviously that involved learning Spanish.

Third, I had to learn everything I could
about Tomás.

Only after I had accomplished all three
things would I even attempt to find him. Maybe most people,
certainly Didi, would have moved the last element up. But like most
people, Didi would have missed the point. I did not want to see
Tomás, did not want him to see me again, until I was ready, until I
had transformed myself into the person he would fall in love with.
There would simply be no point in ever seeing him again if I wasn’t
that person.

I bought a set of Spanish-language tapes and
managed to tear myself away from
Santuario
long enough to
play them. The teacher would say, “
El libro
,” and I would
imagine handing Tomás a book so dazzling it would change his life
and make him swoon at my feet. I said, “
La pluma
,” and
imagined saving Tomás’s life with the click of a Bic.

I sought out Didi’s mom for help with
pronunciation. She was delighted that I was learning Spanish. As a
teacher, speaking in her native language, Mrs. Steinberg was a
different person, a surprisingly chatty person. She laughed in a
good-natured way at my pronunciation, then chattered away at me in
Spanish. I couldn’t understand most of what she was saying. But
since she was usually blasted, it didn’t really matter. We were
both blotto, really, she on frozen margaritas, me on Tomás. It was
enough to build a friendship on. That and we both missed Didi.

Flamenco wasn’t like anything I had ever
studied before. Through Interlibrary Loan, I borrowed all of Carlos
Saura’s flamenco movies on videotape. Flamenco dance was a
revelation. All the wild, inexplicable, irrational, undeniable
emotions roiling inside me were there, splashed across the screen
as vivid as a painting of my interior landscape.
Carmen
was
my favorite. Platoons of dancers surged through it, stampeding
ferociously across wooden floors, driven by flamenco’s beat. It was
like seeing my heart choreographed. I watched
Carmen
so many
times that streaks began to appear where the tape became
demagnetized.

Over and over, I listened to Antonio Gades,
the ravishing dancer who played the director of the dance company
staging a flamenco version of Bizet’s opera, as he coached his
student, the succulent Laura del Sol. “Your arm should rise
smoothly and meaningfully. The hips must be detached from the
waist. The breasts are like a bull’s horns, warm yet soft. Heads
up... a princely posture.” I put Tomás in Antonio’s place, molding
my arms, my hips, my breasts into the perfect receptacle for his
art. For him.

Everything I learned showed me how much I
didn’t know. All of flamenco was written in code, secret rhythms
that could be read only by Gypsies and Spaniards. What I didn’t
learn in all my research was how a blond, blue-eyed Texan Czech
living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, could ever break into this
secret world. I perused the Yellow Pages under DANCE STUDIOS and
found one that offered flamenco lessons. But when I called, the
instructor had a Southern accent and two names just like me: she
could never guide me into any world Tomás inhabited. I knew I would
never get any farther in my quest in New Mexico. I was calculating
how many years I’d need to put in at Puppy Taco to save enough to
study in Spain when the Mustang died and I had to have it towed to
a service station. While I waited for a new battery to be
installed, I picked up a week-old copy of the Albuquerque Journal.
Of course, Catwoman didn’t have a subscription to the local paper.
If she had, I might have already known that the answer to my prayer
was in my own backyard. I found that answer in an article that
read:

In a sun-drenched studio in a gymnasium on the UNM
campus an instructor’s dark ringlets bounce tempestuously as she
stamps her feet in front of two dozen students. No, she’s not
throwing a temper tantrum. Alma Hernandez-Luna is demonstrating
flamenco footwork, or zapateado.

“Bodies up, eyes forward,” the energetic Albuquerque
native commands, clapping her hands rhythmically. “Heel! Heel!” she
commands. “Heel! Heel!” again, like some mantra. Finally, the magic
words: “Muy bien! Muy bien! Olé! Olé!”

Though Hernandez-Luna, 38, is the energetic director
of the only university-level flamenco program in the world, she is
quick to divert all credit to Carlota Anaya, who founded the
program eighteen years ago. Though Anaya, contacted at her Santa Fe
home, was unavailable for comment due to poor health,
Hernandez-Luna maintains that “Doña Carlota is our goddess. She is
the real thing. Born in Andalusia—some say seventy, some say eighty
years ago, who knows? With someone of her vitality age is
irrelevant. What is relevant is that both her parents were
full-blooded Gypsies immersed in el arte, in the art and lifestyle
of flamenco. Sadly, a lifetime of dancing has taken its toll and
she was forced to retire and stop teaching ten years ago. But her
true Gypsy spirit lives on here. In the program she established.”
The lithe and vibrant Hernandez-Luna stretches her arms out to
encompass the studio filled with dancers stamping furiously.