"The Flamenco Academy" (25 page)

Gradually, as I watched Doña Carlota and the
more advanced dancers who practiced on the lawn outside the old
gym, dancers like the mesmerizing Liliana, I came to realize that
each stamp, clap, hand flick, hip bump, twirl, jump—no matter how
apparently frenzied—hit one of the very precise beats of the
compás
clock.

Soon, I was hearing
el compás
everywhere—in a car’s clacking transmission, in the hum and bump of
a fan, in the pelting debris tossed around by a windstorm. Bit by
bit, I began to see that flamenco was like haiku. Instead of
seventeen syllables, though, the dancer, the singer, the guitarist,
each member of flamenco’s holy trinity, we all had a dozen beats,
in however long or short a series we chose, within which to express
what was in our hearts. Those beats were both the yoke that bound
dancer, singer, and guitarist together and the instrument that
transformed random movement into forward propulsion that could take
them wherever they wanted to go. They were the one essential
element in flamenco.

And Didi couldn’t get them.

“God! I hate the fucking
compás
!”
Didi burst out on a day when we left class and stepped into the
glory of a New Mexico autumn that I’d somehow missed completely
until that moment. The world, bathed in crystalline light, was a
place so crisp and sharp, it was like being nearsighted your whole
life, then putting on glasses and seeing clearly for the first
time.

Doña Carlota had humiliated Didi that day.
She’d stopped the entire class as we were trying to follow her
through a routine and shouted, “Tempesta, you are
fuera de
compás
!”

Didi had, once again, committed the greatest
sin in flamenco; she was off the beat, out of
compás
.

“Can you count?”

Didi refused to answer and Doña Carlota
asked her again, “Tempesta, I’m asking you can you count? Did you
learn numbers or is that too boring for La Reina Oh-Fay-Lee-YUH! Is
it?”

“Yes, of course, I learned to count.”

“Good, she can count. So why don’t you? Why
don’t you count? One, two,
three
! Four, five,
six
!
Seven,
eight
! Nine,
ten
! Eleven,
twelve
! In
Spain, we are doing this in our sleep.”

Didi tried again but, although her heels
cracked loud as a rifle shot and her arms were supple as silk and
her expression was fierce as a Kabuki mask, she could not stay on
the beat to save her life. That was when I truly trusted that Didi
would never really invade my flamenco world. Knowing that she would
never get it, I started in earnest that day to teach her
el
compás
.

We took to walking everywhere
en
compás
. I would call out the beats of the different
palos
, styles, to her in whatever scat improvisation I liked
at the moment. “Tah-kah-tah-kah-
tah
!
Tah-kah-tah-kah-
tah
! Pah-tah-
pah
! Pah-tah-
pah
!
Tah-
pum
! Tah-
pum
! Tah-
pum
!”

Didi could stay
en compás
as long as
I was hitting the beats hard for her, but the second I turned it
over to her, she was lost. “I don’t hear it,” she moaned. “All this
tah-kah tah-kah shit, it’s an urban myth.”

“How can you say you don’t hear it? You can
sing it. I’ve heard you.”

“Shit, I can mimic anybody. But this?” She
did a spazzed-out imitation of my footwork. “This is utterly
insane.
Vámonos
! There’s a chile cheeseburger at Frontier
calling my name.” She ran ahead. I followed, but found that even
when I tried not to, my footsteps fell into
compás
.

I had almost given up, resigned myself to
never hearing another word of the story that was Tomás’s story,
when, one Friday, Doña Carlota swept into class, clapping before
she was even through the door. She walked in demonstrating the
sequence she wanted us to learn. “
Golpe
!
Golpe
!
Tacón
!
Palmas secas
!”

My heart sank. There would be no more of her
story that day.

“You, Metrónoma, you like the story the
best, don’t you?” With no warning I occupied the spot I hated most
in all the world: the center of attention. The place where Didi
bloomed so extravagantly made me writhe and shrivel. “I will let
you be the one to decide if we hear more of it today.” She clapped
out a rhythm. “
Dígame
! Tell me something and I will
continue.”

Her request stunned me. Tell her something?
I glanced at Didi, hoping for a clue. Didi mimed dancing. I turned
back to Doña Carlota. What? What did she want me to dance? I echoed
back the
alegrías
Doña was clapping, but my hands patting
together felt wooden. The rest of my body was even stiffer. I
couldn’t move, much less dance. From the corner of my eye, I saw
Didi urging me on by holding up her skirt and drawing my attention
to the simple
paseo
she was executing. How ironic that it
was a sequence I had drilled into her head. Holding on to the
compás like a handicapped railing, I dragged myself from one beat
to the next. Though I hit every pulse on the head, it was a stilted
color-by-numbers affair until, gradually, I loosened up and began
to flow.

“
Vamos ya
!” Blanca, the
sweet-tempered girl, yelled out encouragement.

The praise both unnerved and inspired me. I
ducked my head, but pretended that, instead of hiding my cheeks
flaming with embarrassment, I was only looking down to gather my
skirt. Recovering, I swirled the material in a brisk countertempo
to the one I hammered into the wooden floor.

“
Todas
!” Doña Carlota ordered and the
entire class picked up the
taconeo
I was executing. When we
were all pulsing in time like one many-chambered heart to a beat
that I set, Doña Carlota awarded me the equivalent of a blue
ribbon: she nodded her head. I felt as if I might incinerate on the
spot from an overheated combination of pleasure and embarrassment.
The attention was a trophy that threatened to crush me.

I glanced over to see if Didi had noticed La
Doña’s approval, but she was absorbed in her own improvisation.
Though she was wildly off the beat, a magical force streamed
through Didi, animating every stamp of her heel, twining of her
wrist, and fanning of her fingers. It was impossible not to stare
at her; she embodied all that was savage and free in flamenco. She
was so mesmerizing that I literally stumbled over my own feet.

Doña Carlota grimaced as if I had caused her
actual physical pain and clapped her hands to stop the ensuing
chaos. My wings had melted; it was a lesson I wouldn’t forget
soon.

She started us back on a simple beat with
some simple marking steps, then, without any further preamble,
began to tell the story. “My mother was fourteen when I was born.
Fifteen when my sister was born.
Gemelos de gitanos
, Gypsy
twins they call this in Spain. Is it any wonder that she, my
mother, remained a child all her life? Charming and cruel, stupid
and crafty, selfish and sacrificed?
Y doble
.”

She doubled the rhythm her feet were
creating and we all kept up, stamping and listening twice as
hard.

“Her name, Delicata, fit my mother
perfectly. All little girls believe their mothers are pretty, but
everyone said my mother was as beautiful as a saint. Even though
she was
gitana por los cuatro costaos
, Gypsy on all four
sides, still her skin was not typical
calé
skin, tough and
brown as ox hide. She had the skin of an English lady, pale as
milk. My mother stayed away from the sun like an owl. Next to her
pale skin, her lips were pomegranates, with the same red in her
cheeks. The long ruffled skirt she wore had once been that same
pomegranate red, but it faded to an even prettier pink. Over this
she wore a white apron that she had embroidered with red poppies.
Her black shawl with the long fringe was crossed over her breasts,
the ends tucked into her apron. She wore her hair, glossy and black
as a leopard, in fat curls in front of her ears called
caracoles
, snails.

“Don’t think about what your feet are doing!
Just let them follow the rhythm!
Óle
.” She spoke the word
softly, more in resignation than approval, and I allowed not just
my feet but my heart to follow her rhythm, her words. I became the
Gypsy with milk skin and pomegranate lips, the woman Tomás would
fall in love with.

“Because I saw her with six babies after me,
I knew how I had betrayed my mother. How we all had. With each new
chaboro
, that was our Gypsy word for baby, I saw her joy
born again as well. While they were tiny, she loved nothing more
than washing the babies’ soft skin, oiling their tender bodies,
sniffing the sweet-smelling spaces at the back of their necks. She
even pointed out to me how their curdy shit did not stink. But,
eventually, like me, all the new babies disappointed her. They
refused to stay clean and sweet-smelling. Their downy hair matted
and filled with lice. Fleas chewed scabs onto the chubby ankles.
Their shit began to stink. Soon, the new babies weren’t new. Soon
they became as grimy as everything else in
la cueva
and it
was as if, one day, my mother was no longer able to distinguish her
newest child from the hole in the dirt that was our home.”

Though what Doña Carlota told us seemed
fantastic, it also rang truer than any words we’d heard spoken in
any classroom we’d ever been in. The experience was embarrassing
and mesmerizing. With each word, she drew us into a world we’d
never imagined. With each
golpe
, she cracked away a bit more
of the shell of Anglo reserve that kept us and our true stories
hidden from one another.

“My mother was a prisoner in our cave. She
had been the most beautiful, the best
bailaora
, the best
dancer in a town of the most beautiful, the best
bailaoras
in the world, Sevilla.
Seh-vee-yah
.” Doña Carlota trilled
and caressed the syllables.

“Then my father took her away and forbade
her ever to dance again for strangers. She spent hours gazing out
the opening of our cave, not speaking, not giving any sign that she
knew her children were there. I would cook a pot of stew and bring
her a bowl with a crust of bread to use as a
cuchara de pan
,
but she would just let it sit in her lap.

“Sometimes, when my father was gone, I could
creep up to her and, if I was quiet enough and her dreams deep
enough, she would begin stroking my hair, easing the tangles out of
it with her fingers, splitting the lice between her nails. As she
smoothed my hair, braiding order into the wild strands, she would
speak. Always about her home, about Sevilla.”

It would be hard to say exactly how she did
it, but with just a few minute adjustments in her carriage, her
voice, Doña Carlota transformed herself into Delicata, her
beautiful, spoiled mother. When she spoke, she spoke as
Delicata.

“ ‘Granada is a gray town filled with gray
people,’ my mother would tell me. ‘Don’t you see how stocky and
short and serious they are? The thumb of God has squashed them. In
Sevilla, ah, Sevilla, people know how to laugh. They know how to
dance. To sing. In my neighborhood, Triana, you can’t turn a corner
without hearing
cante
. Sevillanos have
chuso
.
Chuso y gracia
. Granadinos don’t even know what humor and
grace and charm are! Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans,
Moors, Christians, they all loved Sevilla. They all tried to
conquer her. But she always belonged to us, her people.’

“ ‘To walk along the Río Guadalquivir where
the galleons sailed in bringing the treasures of the New World. To
gaze upon the Moors’ shining Golden Tower. To stroll down the
Alameda de Hércules and hear singing and laughter pouring out from
every café and bar. This is to live. Everywhere there is laughter,
gaiety, with enough to eat for everyone and more than enough for
those with talent. Sevilla, my Sevilla. I would have been queen of
Sevilla. They all said it, “Delicata, you will be queen of the
cafés cantantes
!” ’

“At the mention of the singing cafes, I
would nestle in more deeply between my mother’s knees. This is what
I wanted to hear about, the magic world of the
cafés
cantantes
. But first she would always tell me about my
grandmother.

“ ‘Your grandmother was the true queen. La
Leona they called her, the Lioness, because she ruled the world of
the
cafés cantantes
as surely as a lioness rules the jungle.
Four performances a day, that is how often my mother and I danced
with our
cuadro
.
Cuadro
, that is the proper term for
a person’s dance group, not this
zambra
nonsense these
Granadino animals in their caves use. These stumpy, dreary—’

“ ‘Four performances a day?’ I would prompt
my mother, not wanting to lose her to the endless litany of
grievances she had against Granadans, against Granada.

“ ‘Yes, and more,’ she would answer. ‘
Los
adinerados
, the rich ones with their cigars and whiskeys and
walking sticks, would always select a few of their favorites to
continue in
los cuartos
, the private rooms, after the
regular performances. And my mother and I were favorites. Oh yes,
they called for us,
los adinerados
. Many a time, we crossed
the bridge to our Gypsy neighborhood, to Triana, with the sun high
overhead, but we were back again at eight that evening.

“ ‘Back at the Café del Burrero, Café de
Novedades, Café Filarmónico. Such beauty. You can’t imagine such
beauty, here in this miserable hole in the ground. The cafés were
heaven. All of us dancers with our hair piled into gleaming
caracoles
, our waists tucked in by corsets, bustles rustling
beneath the yards of fine silk and crinoline. The audience, always
men, with their derbies and cigars. Some of the grand
señoritos
, the true patrons, with capes over their dark
suits, white spats, and high-buttoned shoes.