"The Flamenco Academy" (2 page)

“
Bailar o morir.”
As the guitar
player pronounced the words, his lips stuck on his dentures,
tugging them up, holding them rolled under so that he looked like a
very sad, very old marionette. “Dance or die. Dancing was the only
thing that kept her alive.”

“
Bailar o morir.”
He was right. I had
to start dancing again. The last few weeks had brought me too close
to the alternative. For the first time, I was happy I’d agreed to
teach. But that was tomorrow. Tonight, it was essential that I be
gone before the lights came up. I glanced at the exit and debated
whether I should leave.

When I looked back, though, a clip from one
of Carmen’s glitzy Hollywood movies was playing. I settled into my
seat; I would risk a few more scenes. Carmen was dancing in a
nightclub in New York. She wore a short, cabin boy-style jacket and
high-waisted white pants that jiggled about her legs as she pounded
the wooden floor, creating an entire steel band’s worth of
percussion.

“Before Carmen Amaya,” a narrator intoned,
“flamenco dance was a languid, matronly twining of arms, legs
rooted to the earth like oaks. Eighty years ago, Amaya’s father, El
Chino, put her in pants and Carmen broke the spell that had frozen
the lower half of
las bailaoras’
bodies for all of
flamenco’s history.”

The narrator pronounced
bailadoras
the cool Gypsy way,
bailaoras
. To show that we were
insiders, we did the same, using Gypsy spelling and pronunciation
whenever we could. Dancer,
bailadora
, became
bailaora
; guitarist,
tocador
, turned into
tocaor
; and once we’d gobbled the
d
in
cantador
, singer, it emerged as
cantaor.

The guitarist returned and stated
unequivocally, “She never rehearsed. Never, never, never.”
Nunca, nunca, nunca
.

The other dancers in the theater snorted at
that statement. We knew how ridiculous it was. It was like boasting
about a Chinese child never rehearsing before speaking Chinese. We
knew better. We’d read the biographies. Like all good Gypsy
mothers, Carmen’s had clapped
palmas
on her belly while she
was pregnant so that her baby would be marinated in flamenco
rhythms in utero. Carmen danced before she walked and was
performing in cafés in Barcelona by the time she was six years old.
As the other dancers leaned their heads together to whisper and
laugh, I wished I were sitting with them. We would all share our
favorite complaint, the near impossibility of a
payo
, a
non-Gypsy, ever being truly accepted in flamenco. Compared to
Carmen Amaya, Gypsy on four sides, even those Latinas who believed
they had an inside track were outsiders.

I counted few of the dancers as friends. I
knew this world too well. Friend or not, I would be the subject of
hot gossip and, since I’d been asked to teach at the festival,
envy. There were those who believed that the honor had been
bestowed out of pity.

Pity—that was what would be the hardest of
all to deal with. No, tomorrow would be soon enough to face them
all. At least then, when I was teaching, I would have my flamenco
armor on, my favorite long black skirt, my new Menke shoes from
Spain with extra
claves
—tiny silver nails—tapped into the
toes.

On the screen, home movie footage from the
fifties played. The colors of the old film had faded to sepia
tones. A much older Carmen sat on the concrete steps of a porch and
held her arms out to a chubby-legged toddler in sandals who
staggered toward her. Offscreen, an ancient voice recalled, “Carmen
couldn’t have any children of her own so she asked us for our son.”
That image, a little boy, just learning to walk, wobbling toward
the most famous flamenco dancer ever, one who had earned her crown
with blood, caused the polarity in the room to reverse. The air
beside my head trembled as the secret beating in my chest
recognized its double on that screen.

Carmen couldn’t have any children of her own
so she asked us for our son.

The home movie ended and the speaker, an
elderly Gypsy man identified as Carmen’s nephew, appeared. The
harsh light glistened off his bald scalp, sweating beneath a few
wisps of ash-colored hair.

His wife, portly and silent, nodded. Her
husband continued speaking. He was as passionate as if he were
pleading his case before a jury, though the incident had occurred
half a century ago. “Why did she ask that of us? It was like he was
hers anyway. We were all one family anyway. Why did she need to
adopt him? Simply because she wanted a child who was of our
blood?”

The old man finished and a rustling swept
through the auditorium as heads steepled together and whispers
hissed back and forth. A few dancers, those who knew the most,
craned their necks searching the auditorium. Doña Carlota was who
they really wanted to see, to search her face for a reaction. When
the other dancers discovered that she wasn’t in the theater, the
glances sought me out. I ducked my head, hiding until the bat-wing
skitter of attention had dissipated.

When I looked up again, Carmen Amaya’s
funeral procession was winding across the screen. It snaked for
miles down through hills thick with rosemary, leading from Carmen’s
castle on a bluff above the Costa Brava to her burial plot in the
town of Bagur. This home movie footage was old and jerky, but
rather than fading out, the colors had intensified into a palette
of cobalt blues and deepest emerald greens. The devastated faces of
thousands of mourners were masks of grief as profound as if each
one had lost a sister, a wife, a mother.

The documentary returned to Carmen in the
last year of her life. A clip from a Spanish movie played. She was
only fifty, but Carmen’s ferocity had been blunted. The feral lines
of her face were swollen with fluid her infantile kidneys could not
eliminate. She sat at a rickety wooden table in a dusty
neighborhood, a slum, like the one in Barcelona where she’d been
born in a shack. She was surrounded by Gypsy children as dirty,
ragged, and hungry as she once had been. She began to tap the
table. One knock, two. Just enough to announce the
palo
, the
style. Then in flamenco’s code of rhythms, she rapped out a
symphony that held the history of her people during their long
exile from India. She told all the secrets her tribe kept from
outsiders. All the secrets they had translated into rhythms so
bewilderingly beautiful that they lured you in like the honeyed
drops of nectar hidden in the throat of pitcher plants. You got the
nectar, that’s true, but you could never find your way back out
again. You never
wanted
to find your way out again. All you
wanted was to burrow even deeper, to break the code, to learn one
more secret.

In that moment, watching Carmen, it was
still all I wanted. Even after everything that had happened, all I
wanted was one more sip of nectar.

“
Mi corazón,”
a singer wailed the
start of a verse in the background behind Carmen’s image fading
into history, into legend. I knew the
letra
, had danced to
it dozens of times, and my cheeks were wet before the translation
appeared in subtitle: “My heart has been broken more than the Ten
Commandments.”

The line sung in flamenco’s unearthly quaver
stabbed straight into my chest because I realized then that my own
heart was not broken so much as missing entirely and no secret,
however carefully interpreted, would ever return it. I was groping
in the dark, ready to escape, when the lights unexpectedly came up.
I had missed my chance. I was scrubbing tears off my cheek when a
hand grazed my shoulder. Thank God it was Blanca, universally
recognized as the least bitchy of all the serious dancers. We’d
started out together back when Doña Carlota had taught the
introductory class.

“Rae, how are you doing?” Blanca patted my
shoulder and stared with the damp sympathy I’d dreaded.

“Pretty good.” I injected as much pep as I
could into my answer, gesturing toward my reddened eyes. “Allergies
are bothering me. All the smoke from the forest fires.” There was
no smoke in the air inside the theater.

Blanca nodded. “It’s good to see you, Rae.
Really good.” She put too much emphasis on the last
good
,
speaking to me as if I were a patient who doesn’t know yet that
she’s terminal. But Blanca was nice. I’d discovered far too late
that I should have put a much higher priority on nice. I should
have been friends with someone like Blanca instead of Didi.

“Keep in touch, okay?” she said. Her
solicitous question was drowned out by the thunder of applause that
erupted when the incandescent Alma Hernandez-Luna, director of the
flamenco program, bounded onstage. “
Bienvenido a todos nuestros
estudiantes
. Welcome, welcome, welcome to the more than two
hundred students who are with us this summer from China, Germany,
England, Belarus, Tokyo, Canada, and nearly every state in the
union. We welcome you all to the country that we will create for
the next twelve days. The country of flamenco!”

The applause fell briefly into
compás
and the audience laughed at us all speaking the same language with
our hands.

“It is strange to be welcoming you. For the
past fifteen years our founder, Doña Carlota, has always opened the
festival. She cannot be with us here tonight in body, but her
spirit fills this hall! We are all here because of Doña Carlota
Anaya. She created the first academic home for flamenco in the New
World.”

That part was true.

Alma continued, “The festival is her baby.”
That part wasn’t true.
Alma
means soul, and Hernandez-Luna
had been the soul of the program for years. The festival was
entirely her baby. Through her connections, she was always able to
lure
la crema del mundo flamenco
to our little sun-blasted
campus. Whoever the reigning god or goddess of flamenco was, Alma
would hunt them down and bring them to the festival to perform and
teach. I was one of only a handful of locals on this year’s
faculty. The night should have been a triumph for me. I knew it
wasn’t going to be that, but, until the film, I had thought the
festival would be an opportunity for me. An opportunity to learn
where Tomás was. To start using my secret. The film, the image of
the coveted child toddling toward the world’s greatest dancer, had
changed all that.

“I hope everyone has their tickets for Eva
La Yerbabuena’s show”—a burst of applause for the acclaimed dancer
interrupted Alma—“because they’re going fast. I would like to thank
our visiting documentarian”—the maker of the Carmen film stood to a
hearty round of applause—“for helping us to kick off this summer’s
festival with that astonishing film. Okay, gang, the fun is
over.”

Laughter erupted.

“Tomorrow we get down to work.”

The loudest applause yet broke out.

“But before that could you, all you
visitors, please, join us in a moment of silent prayer. Pray for
rain, okay? Because if we don’t get some rain
Dios
only
knows what’s going to happen to our poor state.”

As the theater fell silent, Alma stared at
her palm. When the moment of prayer was over, she read the note
she’d written there. “Oh, big announcement, people. It’s about
Farruquito.” A chorus of squeals greeted the name of the Elvis of
flamenco, a young dancer with the talent and, more important, the
right genes, to be crowned the Great Bronze Hope. Like Carmen
Amaya, like all the members of the true inner circle, Farruquito
was
gitano por cuatro costaos
.

Alma gestured for the squealing girls to
calm down. “This is a good news–bad news sort of deal. We’re not
going to have time to publicize this, but I think we can probably
fill the KiMo Theatre just with word of mouth. We have a
last-minute change in the lineup.”

For the second time that evening, my skin
began to prickle and the air around me seemed to become denser, the
molecules slowing down as if the barometric pressure had suddenly
dropped the way it does before a storm. Because it was the worst
thing I could imagine, I knew before Alma said the words what her
announcement would be.

“The bad news is that Farruquito has had to
cancel.”

A wave of groans swept through the crowd at
learning that the boy wonder of flamenco and heir apparent to the
title of king of old-school flamenco,
flamenco puro
, was not
coming. The deadened thud in my chest accelerated with a rhythm
like horse hooves pounding nearer.

“But the good news is that our most famous
alumna has agreed to fill in.”

I prayed, I begged all the flamenco deities
to, please, stop what I knew was coming. They ignored me.

“So let’s spread the word. Ofelia is coming
home!”

That name, those syllables,
Oh-fay-lee-yuh
, filled my head with a rushing like storm
water surging down a drain. It blocked out the sound of clapping. I
had to leave. Immediately. I staggered to my feet. Heads bobbed in
front of me like a collection of people-shaped piñatas, a gauntlet
I had to run.

Outside the theater, I tried to inhale,
tried to make myself breathe. The scorched air chafed my lungs as I
ran across the campus. I was coughing and my eyes were streaming by
the time I jumped into my truck, which I’d left in the Frontier
Restaurant parking lot. I pounded my hands on the steering wheel to
drive that fraud of a name, Ofelia,
Oh-fay-lee-yuh
, out of
my head. One name, that was her entire life’s goal, to be a
one-name celebrity. I refused to give her that, to think of her as
Ofelia. To me she would always be Didi. Didi Steinberg.

A long time ago she had been my best friend.
Not so long ago she stole the only man I will ever love.