"The Flamenco Academy" (36 page)

I learned that in flamenco, the more you
learned, the more you realized how much you didn’t know. How much
you would never know. I learned that in flamenco, Spanish rules:
Spanish language, Spanish heritage, Spanish blood. I learned that
Hispanic is better than Anglo. That Spanish is better than either,
but Andalusian is a royal flush, and in the flamenco hierarchy
Gypsy trumps everything. That, ultimately, the best any one of any
other ethnic extraction could hope for was to be an amusing
novelty. I learned that I had started studying a dozen years too
late ever to be really good. I learned that if I practiced
el
arte
a lifetime, I would never be Gypsy, I would never be
Andalusian, I would never even be Hispanic.

Still, I hadn’t entered the harem to become
the best belly dancer. All I wanted was to attract the sultan’s
attention. The higher up the flamenco food chain I went, the more I
heard Tomás’s name. It was always whispered with reverence. He was
the heir apparent to the crown of King of New Mexico Flamenco and
he had disappeared. Vanished. So, even if I’d wanted to, Tomás
wouldn’t have been easy to track down. Rumors flew, though. He had
been spotted at the National Guitar Fingerpicking Championship,
where he’d wowed the crowd of ten thousand, then disappeared before
the judges could award him first place. That the Soka Gakkai Min-On
Concert Association had organized a tour for him of a dozen
Japanese cities and his fans in Tokyo had demolished the hall where
he’d appeared. Every few months someone whispered that he was in
rehab. The rumor that cropped up most often, though, was that Tomás
had come home. Not to Doña Carlota’s home, but to some mountain
hideout in the north of the state. There was one other rumor, that
he had OD’d.

I never believed the last one. I was certain
that the moment Tomás Montenegro left this earth, I would know it.
I would look into the sky and both Ursas, Major and Minor, would be
gone, heart-shaped leaves would stop appearing on cottonwoods, and
my own heart would settle back into its former dull rhythm and
never beat again in time to
el compás
.

When Alma strode in and took over Doña
Carlota’s class, Didi and I started to learn flamenco the American
way. Alma picked up a piece of chalk and wrote on the board the
names of all the things Doña Carlota had already taught our bodies
while our brains were busy listening to her story. Knowing that the
high-chested stance we had absorbed from Doña Carlota was called
la postura
did not make us stand up any taller. That all the
magical stuff we’d been doing with our feet was called
taconeo
did not improve how we meshed it with our
brazeo
, arm work. Though I did like knowing that the word
for the way we fanned our fingers,
floreo
, was related to
the word for flower, that didn’t make my fingers unfurl into any
more beautiful blossoms.

After the beginning class, I moved on to
intermediate, technique and repertory. I took specialized classes:
bulerías, tangos, alegrías, alegrías por bulerías
. I studied
with singers and guitarists, learning the intricate code a dancer
used to signal when she was ready to begin,
entrada
; when
she would mark time,
marcaje
, while the singer sang; when
she wanted to solo with some fancy footwork,
taconeo
; and
how to call for any of these changes,
llamada
.

For me every dance class I attended, every
Carlos Saura videotape I watched and rewatched until I could dance
each step in perfect time with Cristina Hoyos, every Paco de Lucía
CD I listened to, every Donn Pohren book I read, every García Lorca
poem I memorized, took me one step closer to entering flamenco’s
most blessed state:
enterao
. To be
enterao
was to be
in the know, a true, initiated member of the flamenco community,
someone worthy of admission to Tomás’s world.

It is possible, probably likely, that I
would have gotten over my obsession with Tomás if I’d never set
foot in the Flamenco Academy. I would have been a straight business
major. I’d have taken tennis for my PE requirement. Maybe a
semester or two of German with the thought that it might somehow
help me on some hypothetical trip back to the Old Country to find
my roots. I would have dated nice guys who drove Hondas and
Toyotas, cars with good service records. Guys who never in a
million years would have led me around the city on the darkest
night of the year into a hidden park. Who would never have been
able to joke with low-riders or hold me while we flew to the
stars.

The memory of that night would have faded
because, outside of flamenco’s hothouse world, I might never have
heard Tomás’s name again and my infatuation would not have flowered
into such a dark blossom. But Didi had said it best: “Flamenco is
obsessive-compulsive disorder set to a great beat.” Everything
about
el arte
fed my fixation. It fattened my infatuation
until it metastasized into a full-blown mania. Until my every
thought was metered out according to its ancient rhythm. Until my
heart did beat to
el compás
. Until flamenco and Tomás
Montenegro had become interchangeable.

Didi was remaking herself for the unseen
audiences of thousands, millions, who would one day idolize her. I
was remaking myself for an audience of one. Flamenco was always a
means to an end for both of us.

By our junior year, Didi had acquired what
she’d always dreamed of having, an entourage. Not friends, but a
coven of ambisexterous hangers-on who fawned on her in the way she
liked being fawned on. When they went out—all the chattering boys
and heavy-lidded girls—they wore whatever uniform Didi specified.
One night she would declare that they were wearing shawls thrown
over the right shoulder in the style she had affected. Another
night they’d all have on denim jackets embroidered on the back with
La Virgen de Guadalupe that they’d picked up on a trip to Juárez.
The next night the boys would do themselves up like homegirls with
platform sneakers and velvet running suits, the girls like homeboys
with giant droopy shorts, wallets on heavy chains, forearms covered
in prison tattoos they drew themselves, smearing ink from a
ballpoint in authentic designs cribbed from a master’s thesis on
the topic.

Me? I became one of the novitiates I’d seen
the first day I walked into the Flamenco Academy. A flamenco nun,
my long skirt whispering against the floor as I went from class to
studio to rehearsal hall to the small stages where I performed
student pieces with student groups. Who had time for trips to
Juárez?

Of course, Didi charted a much different
course. From coffeehouses, bakeries, and bars, Didi graduated to
winning every poetry slam she entered. Who else
danced
their
poems to a flamenco beat? And if the beat was off, who at a poetry
slam would ever know? Or care? A regional house published two
chapbooks of Didi’s poetry and helped arrange a one-woman show to
promote it. The show was Courtney Love meets Carmen Amaya by way of
Sylvia Plath. There was even talk of a short LA/NY run. But that
never materialized. The main venue for Didi’s flamenco poetry
became the rarefied world of spoken-word performances. She was in
demand at small colleges, women’s studies festivals, and
celebrations of Latina writers.

Everywhere she appeared, Didi left droves of
devotional fans in her wake, all clamoring for more. They bought up
her slender volumes by the dozens, had Didi write intimate messages
in them, and gave them to sisters, mothers, lovers. The regional
press that published her work was already talking about a boxed
set. Didi acquired a rising star literary agent who was negotiating
with several New York houses to reprint the slender volumes.

Instead of reveling in the acclaim, however,
Didi became even more driven. The adulation only reminded her of
how far she still had to go, how short she was falling of true
stardom. When the dance critic from the
Albuquerque Journal
wrote a mash note of a review of her one-woman show, Didi leaped
for joy, whirling around the Lair until the space heater rattled,
then suddenly stopped dead and demanded, “What the fuck is the
dance
critic doing reviewing me? I should be on either the
book page or theater page. That is so like Albuquerque not to take
my work seriously. They’re trying to turn me into a freaking dance
monkey. Yeah, make the little Latina into your pet exotic. It’s
just another way not to take us seriously.”
Us
. Didi had
used her ability to reshape reality into whatever form she believed
it should take to fully transform herself into a Latina. No one in
her entourage, least of all me, would have ever mentioned Didi
Steinberg, the little girl who wanted AC/DC to play at her bat
mitzvah.

Didi’s growing fame made her a target of
controversy in the Flamenco Academy. For the purists, Didi was a
travesty, a fraud who couldn’t stay
en compás
if her life
depended on it. Didi came to classes when she wanted. She worked
when she wanted. She showed flashes of brilliance between long
stretches of thudding incompetence. As Doña Carlota had told me the
last time I’d seen her, the great goal of flamenco is to show
yourself, and that was always something Didi excelled at. An
exhibitionist by nature, she was a transparent conduit of emotion.
Joy, rage, sorrow—they flashed through her bold as neon. She always
kept up her end of the flamenco conversation. There were heated
debates among insiders, though, about whether what she did could
even be considered flamenco. There was no argument, however, about
the fact that audiences, especially nonflamenco audiences, loved
her. For them Didi was a star. For them Didi was their introduction
to and embodiment of flamenco. They came to our student
performances especially for her. It was a source of extreme
irritation that the one standing ovation of the evening would
always be for Didi.

It drove the purists mad to see how
thoroughly charisma trumped technique. Watching her beaming in the
hot lights, her devotees throwing long-stemmed red roses at her
feet, her dark hair dyed even darker, a mantón of slinky black lace
tied around her shoulders, no one could deny that Didi was the
perfect amalgamation of every Spanish, Gypsy, Jewish flamenco
fantasy. She so
looked
the part. Was it any wonder she
hooked
the part? Was it any wonder that newspapers around
the state, tired of writing the same story about the Flamenco
Academy, fastened on this new hybrid, the flamenco poet Ofelia? Of
course not. Stories about her appeared in successively larger
publications:
Daily Lobo, Santa Fe Reporter, Albuquerque
Tribune, Albuquerque Journal, Santa Fe New Mexican.
AP picked
up the last one and it ran all over the country. In short order,
Didi became the public face of the Flamenco Academy.

What bothered the purists most, though, was
that Didi really didn’t care about flamenco. She would never form
her own little
cuadro
and steal dancing gigs from the
regulars at El Mesón or El Farol in Santa Fe. She had not the
tiniest desire to open a studio and teach housewives to dance
sevillanas
. She didn’t dream of being invited to the
Olympics of flamenco, the Sevilla Biennale. No, flamenco was merely
set dressing for a much larger show. Didi was simply passing
through Flamencolandia on her way to true stardom, collecting
souvenirs to lend authenticity to her flamenco poet persona.

Though her appearances around the Flamenco
Academy became increasingly rare as her career blossomed, the one
event Didi always made time for was the International Flamenco
Festival. The festival was an annual miracle that Alma
Hernandez-Luna managed to bring forth each summer at UNM. Over the
previous sixteen Junes, every major international, which is to say,
Spanish, star had made an appearance.

Years of catering to rock gods and their
entourages made Didi a much sought-after volunteer during the
festival. As always, I was her second-in-command. Together, we
would pick up the Spanish superstars at the airport, fetch the
endless
cafés cortos
they required, and keep up a steady
supply of Ducados, Ace bandages, cold packs, heating pads, Advil,
marijuana, speed, and Tampax. In the classes our visitors taught,
we would translate, take attendance, and maintain studios at the
sweat lodge temperatures the AC-phobic Old Worlders demanded,
usually over the protests of their gasping American students.

When they were not teaching or performing,
we drove the Spaniards to the little villages in the northern part
of the state so they could be astounded by how much the landscape
resembled parts of Andalusia and astonished by hearing the
blue-eyed, blond-haired descendants of the conquistadors who’d
battled up the Camino Real and fizzled out in the Sangre de Cristos
speak a Spanish that hadn’t been uttered back in the Motherland
since the seventeenth century. Didi always made the most of her
time with our visitors by picking up the latest styles in Spanish
divahood and establishing connections to be used at her
convenience.

“Laying groundwork” was what she called it.
That is what I had been doing as well in my own private way: laying
groundwork. By our junior year I did not believe I was ready yet to
actually see Tomás again, but I was ready to begin the search. I’d
had a series of work-study jobs on campus to cover expenses. I
didn’t need much since I had been awarded several scholarships
based on need and was still living in the Lair. But that year, I
sought out a job in Zimmerman Library cataloging recent
acquisitions. I was ready to make contact with Tomás and needed to
have unlimited access and time for my research. Because news about
el arte
barely made it into print and never onto the Web, I
not only had to read actual printed material in a library but had
to be in a position where I could order obscure items of possible
interest. I immediately insisted that the university subscribe to
every flamenco magazine printed as well as acquire any publication
with the remotest of flamenco connections.