"The Flamenco Academy" (37 page)

Since all the magazines and newsletters were
in Spanish, it was lucky I’d learned to read the language. Speaking
was another story. I’d gone into my Spanish courses mute in the
language and had emerged in much the same voiceless state. But I
could understand virtually every word that was spoken to me and was
downright excellent with the written word. Didi, on the other hand,
who was completely fluent going in, stopped studying the language
the first time she received a failing grade because she couldn’t
read or write a grammatical word and saw no reason to learn.

Consequently, I spent a good portion of my
time on the job cataloging magazines and books from Spain. After I
entered them into Zimmerman’s collection, I would be the first
borrower. Anything that didn’t circulate, I would pore over before,
after, or during work. After a few months, I knew as much about all
the reigning deities of the flamenco world as Mith Myth had known
about her gods and goddesses. What I didn’t know anything more
about was Tomás Montenegro. To my surprise, his name didn’t appear
in any of the flamenco publications. And then, on the day before
winter break started, I found it. I found his name.

It wasn’t in an official flamenco
periodical, it was in
España Hoy
, Spain’s answer to
People
. It featured a long article about Juan Diego Amaya, a
distant relative of the legendary Carmen, and the biggest singing
star of the past decade. Like all good Gypsies, Juan Diego went by
a nickname, Albóndigas, Meatballs, shortened into the affectionate
Guitos, in honor of the meatballs the famous singer had loved as a
chubby child and continued to consume right into a corpulent
adulthood. That the nickname was also a naughty reference to the
famously homosexual singer’s manhood was an added bonus. Guitos had
been tapped to succeed the greatest flamenco star of the modern
age, Camarón de la Isla, a Gypsy singer with an affection for
heroin that some say, ultimately, proved fatal. His true fans
dispute the claim, maintaining that their idol died of lung cancer.
Tobacco or heroin, it all came down to the same thing: flamenco
offered its stars a lot of ways to go. Meatballs seemed to be
choosing the fork. He was the Pavarotti of the flamenco world in
both girth and talent.

I already knew Guitos’s work since it was a
point of honor to idolize singers among those of us who considered
ourselves hardcore
flamencos
. If you wanted to enter the
sacred state of insider status, to be
enterao
,
el
cante
was essential. We had learned from Doña Carlota that
flamenco singing is not pretty, it’s not melodic, it’s not anything
that Americans like to listen to, but it is the heart of
flamenco puro
. Dancing, guitar, percussion, it all starts
with
cante
. In the real thing, dancers dance to inspire the
singer, players play to accompany the singer.

I skimmed the article about Guitos
hurriedly. It was near quitting time and I was anxious to clock
out. I had a rare date to meet Didi and her latest conquest,
Belinda Díaz-Reyes, for dinner. Didi no longer cared in the
slightest what a person’s sex was—her basis for selecting romantic
partners was far more elemental: what they could do for “Ofelia.”
Didi had taken to speaking of herself in the third person as if
Ofelia were a worthy charity she and everyone in her world were
selflessly devoting themselves to. It seemed to work. Belinda was
Chile’s most famous poet, teaching for a semester at UNM. Poor
Belinda had seen Didi perform and fallen madly in love. She was
currently devoting herself to getting Didi published by the best
press in Latin America. “It’ll open up a whole new market for
Ofelia,” Didi had explained to me.

I was barely paying attention to the lengthy
article, in which Guitos attributed his success to a Hindu swami he
followed then swore he would never get hooked on the heroin that
had destroyed the lives of so many of “his people,” when my heart
stopped. Before the letters even had a chance to settle into TOMÁS
MONTENEGRO, my pulse was accelerating wildly. I snatched up the
magazine and read.

When the singer was asked who his favorite guitarist
is, Guitos answered in the voice roughened by life and lost love
that his fans love so dearly. “I have been fortunate to be allowed
to perform with the greatest talents the art has to offer. But at
this moment, the guitarist I most admire is a young man from New
Mexico, Tomás Montenegro. Though raised in New Mexico, Montenegro
is Gypsy on all four sides. He has the blood of the pharaohs in his
veins and you can hear it in every note he plays. I will never
perform with another
tocaor
.”

This was a gift from heaven. All I had to do
was make use of it while my courage still held. I stuffed the
magazine into my waistband, sneaked it out of the library, and
rushed over to the Flamenco Academy. Alma was just coming out of
class. Sweat plastered her dark ringlets into curlicues around her
flushed face. I stuck the magazine, open to the article about
Guitos, into her hands. “We should get this singer for the
festival.” It was perfect. I had asked for Tomás without ever
saying his name.

Months of transatlantic phone calls followed
as Alma worked her way through the rings of agents and assistants
surrounding the star, most of whom were, in the grand Gypsy
tradition, members of the great singer’s extended family. Also in
the grand Gypsy tradition, messages were never delivered, calls
never returned. Alma threatened several times to give up, that this
prima donna was simply more work than he could possibly be worth.
But I would always beg her to make just one more attempt.

“Rae, I didn’t know you had such
afición
,” she said as I pled with her to keep trying.

Afición
was an all-purpose term that
expressed whether someone had the flamenco fire burning within them
or not. Doña Carlota’s typecasting had stuck: Didi was fire and I
was ice. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” I answered. “I’m
a
ruka tan caliente
.”

Alma laughed at me calling myself a “hot
babe.” But she dialed Guitos again.

A month later, just as the first winds of
spring were starting to blow dust in all the way from Tuba City,
Alma gave me a final list of that year’s lineup for the Flamenco
Festival. The biggest name on the bill was Guitos. I searched for
his name. It wasn’t on the list.

“What about Guitos’s accompanist?” I asked,
tamping dawn my mounting panic.

Alma was disappointed, annoyed. “What? Rae,
I killed myself to get your guy. Now all you can ask about is his
tocaor
?”

I tried again. “You got him! Alma, that is
amazing!” As I thanked Alma, I had to admit that I was relieved
Tomás wasn’t coming. I still needed more information and I finally
had a decent source. There is no closer relationship than that
between
un cantaor
and his favorite
tocaor.
If I was
ever going to learn enough about Tomás to be a part of his world,
Guitos would be the one to teach me.

By the time the festival rolled around that
summer, Didi was on the road, touring with a national troupe of
slam poets. Meanwhile, I had pulled all the right strings so that I
got the assignment to pick up Guitos at the airport even though
Meatballs had specifically requested that he be met by “a young
man, handsome and charming.”

I arrived at the Sunport holding a sign that
read: BIENVENIDO AL FAMOSO GUITOS!!! SUPER STAR Y REY SUPREMO DE
LOS CANTAORES!!! Before she left, Didi had helped me make the sign
welcoming the Famous Meatballs, Super Star and Supreme King of
Singers. It manifested not just Didi’s all-around genius for
sucking up to the right people, but was also designed to deflect
Meatballs’s pique when he discovered he was not being met by the
“joven, guapo y encantando”
he had specifically requested. I
was glad Didi wasn’t around. Meatballs was my first live connection
to Tomás and I wanted to be alone with him. I clutched a huge
bouquet of red roses, the basic unit of currency in the economy of
flamenco adulation, as I waited for the singer to emerge.

Far down the airport great hall a statue of
an Indian warrior, his cape unfurling behind him, reaching out to
catch an eagle, took flight above the tangle of passengers.
Remembering the many past missions at the Sunport when we’d waited
beneath the outstretched warrior to ambush sleep-dazed rock stars,
I grew nostalgic and wished Didi were with me.

Meatballs was easy to spot. He appeared
wearing an overcoat and a muffler. Among the tourists in their
pastel cottons and spongy white tennis shoes, he looked like a bear
coming out of hibernation. He had a bear-shaped body that sloped
down from narrow shoulders and expanded to the great tub of his gut
below with an immense, bear-size head above. His hair, though, done
in a traditional old-school Gypsy style, was all Wolf Man. Thick,
coarse, and black, it swept straight back from a hairline that
started barely more than an inch above his thick, coarse, black
eyebrows and involved muttonchops that all but covered his
ears.

Even though the air-conditioning in the
terminal was barely keeping the heat below body temperature,
Meatballs acted as if he had been caught in a polar blast,
tightening the muffler around his famous throat and buttoning up
his overcoat. He saw my sign and glanced around for the young male
escort he’d requested. When it became obvious that I was the entire
welcoming committee, the singer graciously threw his arms open,
lumbered over, and wrapped me in a damp embrace that smelled of
Spanish hair pomade and old overcoat. Carried within the folds of
that voluminous overcoat, wrapped into the threads of the muffler
wound around his neck, embedded in his coarse, black hair, his
dark, blue-sheened skin, coursing through his blood were the
compass points of the Gypsy world. Tomás’s world. The world of
flamenco. He would be my guide. I embraced him back.

“
Bienvenido a Nuevo Mexico!”
I
delivered the welcome I’d rehearsed. Today, I had no choice; I had
to move from a reader and a writer of Spanish to a speaker.

The first words out of his mouth were,
“Mi compinche Tomás dijo.”
From there on it was a list of
all the places that “my buddy Tomás said” the singer had to visit
while he was in New Mexico. His buddy Tomás said that he had to eat
at Sadie’s; ride the tram up the mountain; soak in the hot springs
in the Jemez Mountains; eat some of Roque García’s
carnitas
on the plaza in Santa Fe; take the High Road to Taos. The
recommendations cascaded forth, all delivered in a hoarse whisper
that made me recall what Doña Carlota had told us about
la voz
afillá
, the raspy, genuine Gypsy voice of her blacksmith father
singing in a cave in Granada: “
La voz afillá
is the sound a
man makes when the world tries to choke him to death at birth and
he sings anyway. That is the true Gypsy voice.”

After we loaded Meatballs’s five large
suitcases in the university van, he asked me, “Happy Hocker Pawn
Shop?
Tú le conoces?
”

I told him I was familiar with the Happy
Hocker. The pawn shop was a favorite with our Gypsy visitors who
were always either buying or selling gold.

As I got behind the wheel of the van I
rehearsed the questions that would subtly lead to Tomás. Just as I
was about to speak, Guitos announced that he wasn’t going to talk
anymore. Touching his throat, he explained he had to save
“la
voz.”
At the shop, though, he didn’t bother saving his voice as
he used an array of haggling techniques that combined equal parts
charm, intimidation, flattery, lies, and threats to acquire a dozen
saddles, then paid for them with a wad of cash that would have
choked the horses that all the saddles were intended for.

Like all the visiting luminaries, Guitos was
staying at the Sculpture Garden Bungalows. Built by the university
on the edge of its golf course, the cottages were sprinkled amid a
collection of sculptures constructed from old farm machinery spread
across the grounds. I parked in front of the cabin that housed the
office and a young man appeared with a luggage cart. Guitos peeled
twenties off his wad and stuffed them into the fellow’s pocket as
he loaded up as many of the saddles as he could, then led us off to
Guitos’s bungalow. We passed fifteen-foot-high grasshoppers and
some tree-size nail clippers before we reached our destination. A
pair of eight-foot-high stone angels guarded the gate in front of
the bungalow.

“
Muchísimas gracias.”
Guitos shook my
hand and turned his attention toward piloting the cart into his
bungalow.

The mission was ending before it had even
begun. I had learned nothing. The wall of renown that usually
encased the famous singer was sealing him off in front of my eyes.
From that moment forward, Guitos would be caught up in the
festival, surrounded by fans, handlers, peppered with demands. I
would have no further access and I had not spoken one word to him
about Tomás. What I had done was confirm every accusation Didi had
ever implied or hurled at me. If I let him step away, she would be
right: all I wanted was the safety of a fantasy.

“
Señor, perdóneme.”
I had to say it
twice before he stopped and turned back to me with a surprised
expression on his face, almost as if he were startled that I’d
continued to exist once he’d withdrawn his attention.

I rushed forward and spoke. For the first
time, my brain unloosed its hold on my tongue and Spanish,
unrehearsed, ungrammatical Spanish as simple as the baby I was in
that language, poured forth.
“Tomás? Tomás Montenegro? Tú le
conoces?”
Forgetting about formal forms of address, I blundered
ahead, asking if he knew Tomás.