"The Flamenco Academy" (51 page)

“ ‘Stay with me in the back,’ Rosa whispered
to Clementina. ‘And no one will even know you’re with us.’

“Clementina did not need to be asked. She
could not keep up with the pack in the dark. Again and again, she
tripped on a root growing across the path or was stabbed by the
thorns of the cactus that hung overhead while the rest of the group
scampered ahead, nimble as mountain goats.

“Rosa’s father passed around a bottle of
aguardiente
and with each switchback, the group grew more
boisterous until, by the time they reached the bottom rung where
caves had real doors and windows, where animals were penned outside
instead of bedding down with the family, where some even had
electric lights, neighbors were yelling at them to shut up or they
would feel a knife in their livers. The only one who wasn’t
boisterous was Delicata. Not a sound came from her as she followed
the group down the twisting path.

“They all grew quiet as they came to the
bottom of the hill and passed the bottle around one more time for a
little courage before they stepped into the world of
payos
,
all those pale-skinned outsiders who existed to either exploit the
calé
or to be exploited by them. And then they set off.

“The road flattened and they were in the
city. The cobbled streets were silent and shuttered. Moonlight
shimmered on the whitewashed walls as brilliant as a veiled
sun.

“Clementina crept along with them, stunned
by this first taste of freedom that had turned so unexpectedly into
a banquet, a feast she was having increasing difficulty digesting.
With each step, Clementina grew more certain that her father’s hard
hand would reach out and trap her. Since he knew everyone in
Granada, why was there any reason to think he wouldn’t find out?
She walked in silence behind the others, who were moving now
soundless as cats, and tried to imagine what her punishment would
be when her father discovered what she had done. Since simply being
born a girl had condemned her to a life of virtual cloister, she
decided that tonight’s offense was certain to result in the real
thing. In a narrow alley, filled with geraniums hanging from
balconies, Clementina thought of spending the rest of her life
behind the walls of a convent and stopped dead.

“ ‘
Ándale!’
Rosa hissed back at her
but Clementina was frozen on the spot. Rosa, cursing her Gypsy
curses, ran back and grabbed Clementina’s hand and tried to drag
her forward, but Clementina would not budge.

“ ‘I have to go home,’ she stammered.

“And Clementina would have, would have run
all the way back to the safety of her gilded cage, except that, at
that moment, El Chino began to sing. His voice made the hairs on
the back of her neck stand on end as it pierced the darkness,
echoing off walls and summoning ghosts of the Moors and Jews who
had loved Granada more than any of her citizens before or since.
The cruel Christians had taken from them the city they had created,
and lost love is always the deepest. The voices of the Moorish dead
were in El Chino’s voice. Wailing, warbling, sobbing, they stabbed
directly into Clementina’s heart. Perhaps it was the revenge of the
exiled Moors and Jews who decided that they would enslave this
pretty young Catholic girl. Who knows? But as powerful as the spell
of the dance had been on Clementine, the magic of the
cante
was even stronger. In that instant, drunk on rapturous emotion and
the fragrance of jasmine, a lifetime in the convent in exchange for
having a sound that was the sound of all life pouring through her
head seemed a fair trade.

“Though many of the words he sang, words
from the language of Rosa’s people,
Calé
, were strange to
Clementine, she understood enough to realize that the song was
about a husband who has been betrayed and his plan to kill the
treacherous wife. Clementine saw fear on Rosa’s face, fear for
Delicate.

“ ‘Do you think he will?’ Clementine
asked.

“ ‘Kill my mother? No one in
el tribu
would blame him. She has been seen many times with El Bala when no
male member of our family was present. Husbands have killed wives
for less than that.’

“ ‘Shouldn’t we do something? Call the
guardia civil
?’

“Rosa laughed a harsh laugh. ‘What a
payo
you are.
La guardia
looks for reasons to torture
calós
. We can never give them any.’ Rosa’s eyes flickered
upward until she found the Alhambra, floating radiantly through the
night, and Clementine remembered her friend’s Gypsy name,
Miracielos, given for her habit of watching the sky, of finding the
beauty that released her from the ugliness. Now it released her
from fear. ‘Whatever happens,’ Rosa said, ‘my mother’s dance will
live on in me. No man will steal me and trap me in a cave. I will
go to Sevilla and dance in the
cafés cantantes
. The city
will fall at my feet and I will wear the crown that should have
been hers. Come on.’ Rosa grabbed Clementine’s hand and the two
friends ran through the street, their heels clattering on the
cobblestones, both ready to follow El Chino’s
cante
no
matter where it might lead.

“They entered a maze of narrow streets that
led to a pair of tall, weather-beaten oak doors, locked tight. El
Chino rapped out a complicated rhythm on the thick planks and, with
a rusty creak, a lock turned and the doors swung open. Clementine
had lived her whole life seeing plain doors open into courtyards of
unsuspected splendor whose beauty was all the greater for being
hidden. Yet the courtyard she stepped into that night rivaled the
Alhambra itself. She had no time to wonder which of the great
families might own it for the old crone who’d opened the door was
impatiently waving them inside. Filigreed columns looked like
pillars of lace with moonlight filtering through. The scent of
jasmine, rosemary, and sandalwood hung like a cloud above fountains
that pattered silver coins of water into basins decorated with
Roman maidens trailing diaphanous gowns.

“The sounds—clapping, heels hammering on
tile floors—that drifted into the courtyard once the great doors
were closed were the joyous sounds she’d learned from Rosa. The
whole
cuadro
came to life once the doors shut behind them.
They picked up the distant beat of the
flamencos
who were
already performing and followed it to its source. With Rosa
clapping beside Clementina just as if they were on the patio back
home, Clementina’s fears melted away. Nothing bad could happen
tonight. She clapped along with her friend as the whole group
capered through the courtyard to a side entrance where they crowded
together, walking up a flight of stairs to a room on the second
floor. Clementina had never been as happy as she was at that
moment. For the first time in her lonely life, she was part of a
group laughing and making noise.

“The old woman opened the door at the top of
the stairway.
‘Pásele! Pásele!’
she hissed. Delicata was the
first to enter. She stepped into the private room as regally as a
queen. Her entrance was hailed by a roomful of drunken Spanish
aristocrats,
señoritos
, who pounded on the tables and yelled
for the replacement dancers to enter.

“ ‘
Pásele! Pásele!’
The old woman
ordered the girls into a room that consciously tried to duplicate
the caves Rosa’s people inhabited, right down to the odor of
tobacco and unwashed bodies. The only light was from
candiles
, pots of oil with wicks in them. Their illumination
flickered across the sweaty bodies of the exhausted dancers whom
they had come to replace and threw shadows against the walls. As
Clementina’s eyes adjusted to the room, which was darker than the
moonlit courtyard, she saw that other than the dancers and the
serving girls passing among tables, clearing away and replacing
empty bottles of
fino
, dumping ashtrays, the room was filled
with men. A head bobbing up just above a table caught Clementina’s
eye. Its owner was a dwarf with a hunchback, holding a large
serving platter containing small plates of ham, glasses of wine. As
he passed, the revelers reached out and touched his hump for good
luck.

An especially drunk carouser noticed the new
girls and yelled out to the dwarf, ‘Those two look hungry! Bring
those girls some fried eggs!’ A rumble of low chuckles greeted the
request. The dwarf ducked behind a screen, then reappeared in front
of Clementina and Rosa. He held the platter low and it was now
covered by a napkin. The little man stared up at the girls and
jiggled the platter anxiously.

“ ‘I don’t think he can talk,’ Rosa
said.

“The dwarf bobbed his head toward the napkin
until the girls understood that they were to remove it. Clementina
glanced at Rosa. Rosa nodded for her to do what he wanted. Afraid
of attracting even more attention, Clementina lifted the napkin and
everyone in the room, including Rosa, exploded in bellowing
laughter. Clementina dropped the napkin and turned away
immediately, but not before seeing the dwarf’s testicles, swollen
by disease to mammoth proportion, resting on the platter.

“Clementina bolted away, rushing to the
darkest corner of the room. Rosa, still laughing, found and chided
her, ‘Clementina, what’s wrong with you? Don’t you have any
gracia
? It was just a
chiste
.’

“Not having any sense of humor, not getting
a joke, was the worst thing you could accuse an Andalusian of. It
was so bad that Clementina tried to hide the shock that had made
her feel faint.

“ ‘
Ay! Mira!’
Rosa grabbed
Clementina’s arm and pointed at a sad-eyed, slender man in a white
suit like a
cubano
. ‘It’s him.’

“ ‘Who?’

“ ‘You know, Garcia Lorca, the poet who
loves my dancing. I told you about him. He came to see our
cuadro
.’

“As Clementina followed Rosa’s finger
pointing toward the poet, though, one familiar face after another
began to pop out of the darkness at her. First, she saw Esteban,
still wearing the bow tie he’d had on at Tía Rogelia’s funeral. His
frog eyes goggled as he watched the dancers. Then she spotted
Arturo, pear-shaped heir to the almond fortune, whose face suddenly
disappeared as he leaned over to vomit. At another table, Juan
Pablo and his father, they of the matching over-oiled haircuts
parted in the middle, clinked glasses and tossed back a bolt of
fino
that caused the boy to sputter and cough. The other
fathers laughed as Juan Pablo Senior pounded his son on the back,
refilled both their glasses, and held his high, yelling out a toast
to Clementina’s aunt above the clamor:
‘A la vieja!’

“Clementina was touched that, throughout the
shadowy room, men held up their glasses and toasted her dead aunt.
She’d always thought that the men of Granada either didn’t like or
simply didn’t notice her aunt. It pleased her to discover that the
old woman had actually been esteemed. Her pleasure ended abruptly
when other toasts followed. These were composed mostly of filthy
words she didn’t precisely understand. The brays of male laughter
they incited made their meanings clear.

“ ‘Did your aunt really die of a dry cunt?’
Rosa asked, confirming Clementina’s worst suspicions about what the
men were saying.

“Clementina turned away. This fiesta was
nothing like she’d dreamed it would be. The dancers moved among the
revelers and a few shadowy figures near the back grabbed the women
and dragged them toward a door that opened into another room that
couples disappeared into.

“ ‘Where are the dancers going?’ Clementina
asked.

“ ‘Dancers? They’re not dancers. They’re
just
palomas torcaces
.’

“ ‘Wild pigeons?’

“Rosa laughed at her friend’s ignorance.
‘Whores! Those women are whores and they’re going to do what whores
do with men who have money. Don’t you know anything?’

“Clementina was beginning to understand that
she didn’t know anything. She didn’t know anything at all.

“ ‘Miracielos!’ Delicata’s sharp voice cut
through the uproar and Rosa rushed to her side. Clementina lifted
the scarf up to hide even more of her face and joined Rosa at the
front of the room in time to hear her mother say, ‘Lorca is the one
who asked for our
cuadro
. He specifically asked for you. He
told all his friends about you. Tonight, I will go first and you
will go last’

“ ‘Oh, Mama, thank you.’ Rosa threw her arms
around Delicata. To be the final dancer in a crowd of
aficionados
such as this was a great honor.

“Delicata pushed her daughter away. ‘Don’t
thank me,’ she snapped, then added, her voice softer, sadder, ‘and
don’t blame me either. Not for doing what a Gypsy woman has to do
to keep her family alive.’

“Clementina and Rosa didn’t have time to
wonder about Delicata’s strange words, for Mono, Rosa’s brother
with the nose smashed in like a monkey, began to play. He bashed at
the strings of his battered guitar, beating brutal rhythms. The
poet was the most intent of the spectators. When someone behind him
called out drunkenly, ‘
Baila! Baila!
Dance! Dance!’ Lorca
shot the man the most withering of glances and the room fell
silent. Delicata took her place at the edge of the area that had
been cleared for the dancers.

“El Chino broke the intense silence with a
wail even more unearthly than the one he had unloosed while the
troupe had walked through Granada’s dark street. More scream than
song, the
cante
of Rosa’s father evoked bewildering surges
of despair and ecstasy in Clementina as he sang of his love for a
woman that none could compare to except one and that one was on the
wall of a church with the moon at her feet.

“Delicata raised her arm above her head and,
in that gesture, transformed herself from a troll into a queen and
left no doubt whom El Chino was singing about. Staring at the men
with a defiance that bordered on disgust, she stamped her foot
hard, sweeping her hand down with a decisive finality. She dropped
her head and everyone in the room held their breath until, two,
three
compáses
later, she slowly lifted it again, her arms
rising along with it. They twisted like flames above her head.