"The Flamenco Academy" (21 page)

In response to our feeble clapping, she
waved her arms. “Stop! Stop! I can’t stand the sound of those sick
kitten paws!” She mocked our attempt, patting her hands together
with pathetic taps. In the mirror, I saw Didi grinning as if the
teacher were making a joke. The old lady shot her a look fierce
enough to make the grin fade. After that challenge, I was certain
Didi would leave.

Following ten more minutes of clapping, a
girl who’d come to the class hoping for a good cardio workout threw
her hands up in disgust and walked out. Our teacher followed her
exit with a series of eloquently mocking claps, chirps, and finger
snaps before turning back to us and starting the odd beats that
she’d called
el compás
again. The entire time, she counted,
“One, two,
three
! Four, five,
six
! Seven,
eight
! Nine,
ten
!” Numbers. That was what I did. I
grabbed hold of the digits and, as always, they hauled me to
safety. It was incidental that I was clapping and stamping my feet
instead of punching figures into a calculator. It all still
tunneled directly into the odd packet in my mind where numbers did
curious dances that tranquilized my anxieties.

Figuring out this old lady’s code of claps
and snaps absorbed me to such an extent that I didn’t have any
mental energy left to be embarrassed about Didi witnessing such a
ludicrous display. I was so intent upon duplicating the rhythms and
counterrhythms this strange old woman was feeding us that I lost
awareness of anything or anyone else in the class.

One by one, all the others gave up and
dropped out until only one other pair of hands besides mine
returned the teacher’s rhythms. Doña Carlota stood directly in
front of me and accelerated her clapping. I did the same, slapping
the fingers of my right hand against my left palm until it reddened
and stung. She indicated that I should continue the rhythm, then
stepped back to the other remaining clapper. It was Didi.

Even more surprising, Didi was rapt with
attention. Gone was her mocking detachment. She was immersed in a
way I’d seen only when she was either on a groupie mission or
working on her music. The teacher clapped. Didi wasn’t able to copy
it exactly as I had done. She came close to missing the basic beat
structure completely. What she did, though, was return the rhythm
with some topspin on it that was all her own. Perhaps the mockery
wasn’t gone entirely. It might have been embedded in the saucy
smacks that Didi improvised on the spot. The two of them went back
and forth, Doña Carlota backing up as they went, leading Didi
forward until she stood next to me again at the front of the
class.

It was Didi who finally ended the clap-off
with a few comically exaggerated off-beat claps. A buzzer sounded,
signaling the end of class.

“
Esperad!
” our teacher yelled at the
students scrambling to escape. She strode to the chalkboard at the
side of the room and, pronouncing as she went, wrote,
Sino
.
“
Sino
. Fate. My people believe that each of us has our own
sino
that cannot be altered. If your
sino
is to dance
flamenco, know this: you will never again set foot in my class
unless you are properly attired.” With a piece of chalk, she
scraped out an address on the blackboard. “Go here. See Teresa. She
will know what I require. Your assignment for next class is to
begin reading Federico García Lorca. Not only was Lorca Spain’s
greatest poet, but he is the only writer anywhere who has ever been
able to put flamenco on paper. It is a miracle to behold.”

We were again rushing for the door when she
stopped us for a second time. “This will never happen again.
Flamenco is an expression of respect for that which has survived.
Out of respect that I have survived to my advanced age, no one who
wants to be my student will ever leave a classroom before me. And
no one who wants to be my student will ever address me by anything
other than my full name.” She bore down so hard on the piece of
chalk that it screeched as she printed out the legendary name I
already expected to see:
Doña Carlota Anaya
.

“That is my married name.” Then, with more
screeching and great gravity, she chalked in an arrow and in front
of
Anaya
and separated from it with
de
, she added her
maiden name:
Montenegro
.

“Montenegro?!” I shouted the instant Didi
and I were standing outside the old gym.

“Yeah, major affectation, don’t you think?
Very
High
-spanic to add your maiden name like you’re from a
royal house or something.”

Cigarette smoke wafted over from the dancers
gathered around a guitarist sitting in the shade of a tall spruce
tree. They clapped along in a soft, patty-cake way and sang in
warbling Spanish. Those who weren’t playing, singing, or clapping
were smoking cigarettes from a blue and white packet with the brand
name, Ducado, printed on the front. They smelled harsh even from a
distance. Didi’s attention was strangely riveted on the group.

“Didi? Montenegro?” How could she have
forgotten? “That’s his last name.”

“Oh, right,” Didi muttered, distracted by
her intense study of a regal beauty at the center of the group of
smokers, a slender Latina dancer. We overheard the guitarist call
out her name: “Liliana.”

“Didi? Did you hear what I said?”

“Montenegro. Mystery Man’s name. The old
lady and Mystery Man, probably related. Not surprising, really. I
mean, there can’t be many flamenco professionals in the state.”
Didi didn’t take her eyes off Liliana, who had started slowly
twining her arms up, fanning out her fingers, in time with the
music. Holding her thumbs and forefinger up to make a square, Didi
held it over her eye like a director framing. “Liliana is the head
flamenco bitch,” she announced and made a sound like a camera
clicking a photo.

Her intense interest worried me. “Uh, Deeds,
you seem pretty into this whole big pink bird thing.”

“Rae-rae, I’m only trying to help you. What
am I good at? Costuming, right? I have to know how you’re supposed
to look. If you don’t look the part, you don’t hook the part,
right?”

Hearing Didi talk in her usual way about
fame and how to achieve it comforted me.

She concluded her study of Liliana, clapped
her hands, and announced, “Let’s go shopping.”

In a small shopping center near campus, we
found the shop Doña Carlota had told us to visit, La Rosa y la
Espina.

“The Rose and the Thorn,” Didi
translated.

A bell above the door tinkled as we entered.
The shop smelled of sandalwood and oranges and was filled with all
things flamenco and Spanish—fringed shawls, long skirts, ivory
combs, intricately painted fans, mantillas, rosaries carved from
jade, pottery decorated with Moorish designs, silverwork filigreed
like lace.

Didi beelined immediately to a rack of
skirts and riffled through them.

A black skirt with several rows of ruffles
and an inset of black polka dots swirling around it caught my eye.
I plucked it off the rack. “What about this one?”

Didi removed the two-toned skirt from my
hand, tilted her head to the side, and appraised it. “Uh-uh, I
don’t think so.”

“I just thought—”

“What?”

“I would, you know, stand out. That he’d
notice me in that skirt.”

“Sweetie, we don’t want him to notice you
because you look like a barber pole. Here.” She handed me a heavy
black skirt with no ruffles, no polka dots, just a series of gores
inset. It was the exact skirt Liliana had been wearing. “Buy that
one,” Didi ordered.

“May I hang that in the dressing room for
you?” a friendly middle-aged Latina with a bad perm asked, taking
the skirt from my hands. I figured she must be Teresa.

“And this,” Didi said, finding the same
skirt in her size and passing that to Teresa. To me she explained,
“Just to keep you company.” She zeroed in on a slinky wine-colored
top, then added a stretchy black lace number and a couple of
fringed shawls to the pile.

“And shoes?” Teresa asked, taking the
clothes from us to hang in the dressing room.

“Shoes!” Didi answered. “Yes, of course,
shoes! We’re both eight and a half B.” As Teresa left, Didi called
out after her, “Bring lots.”

Teresa returned with a stack of boxes that
she separated into two piles: semipro and pro. Of course, the pros
were a lot more expensive, but those were the ones I wanted. I
couldn’t appear in front of Tomás in anything less. When she
removed the lids and folded back the crinkly tissue paper, the
pricey smell of high-quality leather wafted out.

“This style is the Fandango,” Teresa said,
taking from its box a pair with a clever cutout at the base of the
strap. She showed us other shoes, other styles, but before they
were even in my hand or on my foot, I fell in love with the
Fandangos—velvety black leather with a double strap across the
front of the arch, medium heel. If I had never met Tomás, if I had
never taken Doña Carlota’s class, I would have laughed at the idea
of paying more than two hundred of the dollars I’d earned sweating
at Puppy Taco for a pair of shoes. But I had, I had met Tomás and
he made the shoes sexy, exotic, and unbearably necessary. I turned
the shoe over. On the bottom were dozens of tiny nails.

“
Claves
,” Teresa explained as I
rubbed my thumb over the silver dots sprinkling the toes and heels
like glitter. “Means nails. They make the sound,” she added.

Didi and I wore the same shoe size, which
had made borrowing easy over the years. Now she slid her feet into
a pair of Gallardos and began tapping them on the tile floor. She
caught my eye, winked at me, and asked Teresa casually, “Doña
Carlota—she’s not by any chance related to—”

There was no need to pump any further.
Teresa was already primed. Shaking the fingers of her right hand
beside her head as if she’d just burned them, she gushed forth.
“Tomás? The
tocaor
?
Dios mío, qué
hunk.” Her gesture
gave me a strange, dislocated feeling as if she could see the film
that had been playing in my head nonstop since the night I walked
through the gold curtains.

Needing no further prompting, Teresa
continued, “The old lady? Doña Carlota, she adopted him from some
distant relative back in
España
, no? Practically bred him
from birth to inherit the crown or something.” She leaned forward
and added conspiratorially, “Just that I don’t think her boy wants
to be the little prince.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Who knows? One of his
primos
, his
cousin or something—you know how they are up north, everyone is
everyone’s
primo
—anyway, one of his
primos
told my
aunt that he went to this wild party in Albuquerque and never came
back. Just took off with some
güera
. Oops, no offense. Some
Anglo chick he met at the party and went off hitchhiking. He was
supposed to be going home to Doña Carlota in Santa Fe, but he never
showed up. No money. No car. Just gone. Been some stories about him
playing at biker bars. The old lady’s furious. She raised him to be
the next Paco de Lucía, not play in biker bars. You’ve got to
wonder what the
primo
told Boy Wonder. See how those
fit.”

As I stood, Didi asked me, “Didn’t you say
Mystery Man told you that that night was the worst night of his
life?”

I shot Didi a look that said
Shut up
.
I couldn’t believe she would talk about Tomás in public like that.
I wished I had never told her anything. I wished I were alone so I
could pore over this new treasure, this revelation that he had been
adopted into flamenco. This was what Tomás had been talking about.
This was the blood problem.

But Teresa was already asking, “You know
Tomás? Shit! Please, don’t tell the old lady I’ve been running my
mouth. The shop would close if she stopped sending her students.
Please.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I don’t know him.
She was kidding.”

Teresa looked dubiously at me. The doorbell
tinkled. “I’m sorry,” Teresa said, standing. “I’m the only one here
today.” She left to wait on the new customer, calling back to us,
“Your things are all in the dressing room. Wear the shoes when you
try the skirts so you get the length right. Just let me know if you
need any more help.”

“Oh my God,” Didi hissed. “Mystery Man is a
badass. I am definitely starting to see the appeal. So he dropped
off the face of the earth after he met you? What is that all
about?”

I shrugged, not wanting to talk anymore. Not
in a public place where anyone could hear. But I couldn’t silence
the fear that rose up. “What if he never comes back?”

“That kind? The bad boy? They always come
back.”

I trusted Didi’s wisdom about bad boys. More
than that, I trusted a certainty I’d never had about anything
before in my life that Tomás and I were destined to be together. It
was my
sino
, my fate.

“Besides, he’s in love with you and just
doesn’t know it yet.”

“Didi! Don’t jinx me.” More than ever I
wanted to be left all alone with this new cache of information we’d
stumbled upon. I wanted to extract every fleck of golden knowledge.
But Didi was enraptured with the flamenco shoes.

She pirouetted on her heel. “Aren’t these
amazing?”

She was right. The shoes had an amazing
effect on me as well. They didn’t just make me taller by a couple
of inches, they forced my shoulders to fall back so that my head
floated up higher. And, instead of making me wobbly the way heels
usually did, those shoes utterly rooted me to the earth as if the
tiny silver
claves
had nailed me there.

In the large fitting room, Didi announced,
“Try-on party,” like when we were at Le DAV, then tossed the
wine-colored leotard my way. “That will be amazing with your
coloring.” She plucked out the skimpy black top for herself and we
both slipped skirts on. They were heavy and slid into place with an
authority all their own.