"The Flamenco Academy" (55 page)

“They watched with a hungry insatiability.
But they didn’t clap.

“She danced more furiously, her footwork
better that night than even Rosa’s had ever been. Yet not one man
clapped. Perhaps they couldn’t see how her heels hammered like
pistons? She raised her skirt the tiniest bit and a sprinkling of
applause broke out. Offstage, Gustavo prompted her to raise her
skirt higher. She did and the applause grew. Only Clementina could
hear the growling of her stomach, but it told her what she had to
do next. She had to do what Clementina could never have done. Only
Rosa could do what was necessary to survive. She raised her skirt
higher and the men clapped louder.

“Señor Vedrine, owner of several companies
touring the country in his Espectáculos, resplendent that night in
black evening cape, mustache waxed to fine points, dropped a few
centimos into ‘Rosa’s’ hand. What he gave her was exactly enough to
stay alive for one more day and to arrive back at Teatro Olimpia
the next night hungry enough to do again whatever was necessary. He
welcomed the newest addition to his company with these words, ‘More
clapping, more centimos. Tomorrow, look a little harder for that
flea.’

“ ‘Rosa’ didn’t begin her search for the
flea in earnest the next night. No, she had to get much, much
hungrier before she even removed her shawl. But when she did, oh
the applause. Better still, Señor Vedrine parceled out a few extra
centimos as a reward. Enough to buy a tomato to eat with her bread.
The next night, off came her shoes and she earned enough applause
to buy a small piece of cheese. So it went until ‘Rosa’ stood
beneath the blinding lights wearing nothing but her corset, pink
stockings, and a false Gypsy’s false smile plastered on her
face.

“For this Señor Vedrine gave her a little
more, but never enough. Never enough to fill her stomach. Perhaps,
if Clementina had grown up like Rosa with an empty stomach growling
her whole life, she would have been stronger. But she hadn’t and
she wasn’t. So, when a German officer gestured for the pretty
chica
, light-skinned and delicate unlike her swarthy
sisters, to join him at his table, a table piled with candied
chestnuts in syrup with brandy, perfectly grilled sardines, tender
marinated octopus,
mantecaditos
!—the little cookies of
almonds and olive oil she had used to lure Rosa into friendship—was
it any wonder she said yes?

“And that is how Clementina survived the war
in which a million died. A million in a country of twenty-two
million. She became the
puta
her father had cursed her for.
She entertained in all the ways in which a half-starved young woman
can entertain a man. She thought of all the men, German, Italian,
Spanish, as
señoritos
, as the wealthy patrons who had always
supported flamenco performers. She smiled at the German officers
who told her how lucky she was to be a little Gypsy girl in Spain.
Back in the Fatherland, they had been sterilizing people like her
and putting them in concentration camps since 1932. She smiled when
the Italians complimented her manners, saying she wasn’t a pig like
most Spaniards. She smiled when Spanish officers joked about making
the maricón poet Lorca dig his own grave—‘The only work that fairy
did in his life!’—before they shot him in the back of the head.

“German bombs fell on Spain and anyone with
enough influence or money left. Carmen Amaya, Sabicas, all gone to
Paris, New York, Buenos Aires. In 1939, the Civil War ended. The
Germans, the Italians, and the Moors left, but the memory of what
they had done remained. Spaniards on the left and the right
remembered the nineteen thousand Luftwaffe personnel who had
rotated through the Condor Legions learning all they needed to know
about bombing civilians in places like Guernica before they moved
on to Poland, to Czechoslovakia, to France, to the rest of Europe.
They remembered the tanks flying Italian flags that had bombarded
their homes. They remembered what Franco had incited the Moors to
do to their women. The foreigners left, but those who had danced
and sang for them remained. And people remembered.

“Life after the Civil War ended was grimmer
in many ways than it had been when guns were being fired. Franco
tried not just to freeze time, but to turn back the hands of
history. Spain became a prison camp secured by
la guardia
civil
against dissent, against progress, against the outside
world and the war sweeping the Continent, then the globe. While the
rest of the world fought the Second World War—the war that Germany
and Italy had rehearsed in Spain—the only blood Spain spilled was
her own. Franco exacted a terrible revenge upon all who had opposed
him. All who might oppose him still. Rumors that a person did not
attend Mass regularly were enough for him to end up in front of a
firing squad. Franco purged the country of ‘Reds,’ of anyone
suspected of supporting the Republicans. Thousands starved in the
years of poverty that followed.

“As the people grew hungrier, their memories
grew sharper. They remembered the girl who’d searched for a flea,
throwing her clothes off for Nazis, both on the stage and off. But
no one dared say anything to Clementina. No one would castigate a
girl who had entertained Franco’s generals and all the foreign
generals who had aided him. Not when Franco was still executing
prisoners by the thousands. In Sevilla alone eighty citizens a day
were killed. In the light of day, no one dared whisper a word to
Clementina. But in the safety of a dark theater, when the curtains
parted and ‘Rosa’ went onstage, the whistles that are a Spaniard’s
boo would shriek through the theater.

“Clementina knew that scores were being
settled. A knife between the ribs in a dark alley, a piece of wire
around the neck, a lead pipe to the back of the head, that was how
the defeated, how ordinary Spaniards, retaliated against their
conquerors. On moonless nights when even the wary slept, when even
la guardia
could not protect them, that was when revenge was
exacted. Clementina, who had survived the war eating delicacies fed
to her by Nazis, who had taken her clothes off for captains and
done so much more for majors, who had lived when so many others had
died, knew that her name was on the list of those scores waiting to
be settled.

“Which is why on a night seven years after
the war ended, when Clementina’s feet hurt so badly she could
barely drag herself home, she was not surprised that a heavily
built man stepped out of the shadows and blocked her path. She had
been expecting him or someone like him for a long time. It was
right that it should happen there, in an alley, with only the
faintest glimmer of moonlight shining on the cobblestones slick
from the damp night air, an alley just like the one where she and
Rosa last saw the poet Lorca. What did surprise her, though, was
that the man knew her name, her real name.

“ ‘Clementina.’

“Then she realized that, of course, it would
be someone sent by her father who would kill her.

“ ‘You don’t recognize me, do you?’ He
tilted his head up so that moonlight found the scar on his face and
turned it into a silver pucker running from his scalp, over his
whitened eye, down to his chin.

“ ‘El Bala.’

“ ‘Well, I barely recognize you either. You
look like you’ve aged twenty years. Wait until I tell Rosa.’

“ ‘Rosa? Rosa is alive?’

“ ‘Rosa is my wife. The mother of my three
children with another on the way. The woman whose name, whose very
blood, you have taken and dishonored.’

“ ‘Rosa is alive?’

“ ‘Only because I rescued her from the side
of that mountain you had led her to.’

“ ‘You stole her? Not Long Steps? You stole
Rosa just like her father stole her mother?’ The weight of memory,
of longing for her friend, pressed down upon Clementina so heavily
that she could not draw a breath. ‘Is she happy? Does she still
dance?’

“ ‘She is my wife.’ Those four words were
the walls that imprisoned Clementine’s friend. They described the
prison she had been sentenced to by her own parents. ‘I have come
to collect what you owe us for stealing her name.’

“ ‘You are looking at everything I own in
this world,’ Clementine answered.

“ ‘Then I will have to kill you for the
shame you have brought upon my family.’ El Bala was used to
speaking these words, then watching hard men turn into babies,
crying, begging for their lives, soiling their pants. Clementine
barely shrugged, and El Bala saw what the years of hunger and shame
had taken from the little aristocrat: her fear of death. So he
selected another weapon from his arsenal, blackmail. If regular
sums were not sent to him, he would expose Clementine for the fraud
she was.

“ ‘Send money to Rosa?’ The flicker that had
been Clementine’s interest in staying alive flamed back to life.
‘Where? How much?’

“El Bala had never had such an eager
extortion victim. He named an outrageous sum and Clementina agreed
so eagerly that he doubled it.

“ ‘It will take me a few months. Let’s say
six, no, three, at the most, to have the first payment. I assume
you’ll expose me if the first payment is not made. Then find me and
kill me if I miss the second.’

“ ‘Uh, yes.’

“ ‘Good, good. Fine. Oh, this is wonderful.
Rosa is alive.’

“El Bale stood alone in the dark alley for
several moments after his wife’s strange
payo
friend bounded
off looking twenty years younger. Yet again he cursed his heart,
his fate, for making him fall in love with Delicate. The daughter,
Rosa, grown thin and silent, was nothing like her explosive, fiery
mother and now, for the rest of his miserable life, he was trapped.
A
churro
vendor pushing his cart to the plaza to sell his
fritters to late-night revelers and early risers startled El Bala.
He sheathed his knife and slipped into the shadows. It was a long
trip back to Sacromonte.

“After that night, Clementina was reborn.
She had a reason to live. To make money. Lots and lots of money to
send Rosa. There was nothing but poverty, deprivation, and revenge
in Spain. One of the companies of Espectáculos Vedrines was setting
sail next week for a tour of Argentina and they needed a dancer.
Just someone for the back row who could shake a ruffled skirt and
do the tourist kind of flamenco that Franco had promoted since
banishing the real thing. Clementina seduced the manager of the
overseas companies and convinced him that since all the Nazis had
fled to Argentina anyway, the old Luftwaffe pilots and Panzer
commandants would be delighted to see the girl who had searched her
clothes for a flea while they were training in Spain. She got the
job. They gave her an advance on her salary. Clementina intended to
send it all to Rosa, but somehow, when she passed the shops that
sold candied chestnuts in syrup with brandy, perfectly grilled
sardines, tender marinated octopus,
mantecaditos
!, the money
flew out of her hand. She boarded the ship for Argentina without
having sent one centimo to Rosa.

“Though Clementina felt guilty about
abandoning her friend, Argentina was a new country where it was
almost possible to forget old memories, old obligations. The
streets were broad and clean, there was plenty to eat, and no one
had scores to settle with her. No whistles of derision greeted her
when she appeared onstage. She danced with the company at the
Teatro Maravillas and the Teatro Mayor right on the broad,
tree-lined Avenida Mayor in the middle of town. When their
engagement was finished, the company moved on, but Clementina
stayed. A woman as strong as she was
en compás
never had
problems finding work. She danced in the chorus with La Argentinita
and even the great Carmen Amaya herself. Though a sturdy and
reliable dancer, she was known as someone who kept to herself. It
was rumored that she was a lesbian, though she didn’t seem to have
any more interest in women than she did in men.

“What did interest Clementina was
forgetting. Unfortunately amnesia was expensive. Amnesia required
dresses of silk, shoes of kid leather, sheets from Portugal. It
required the finery of her girlhood. But mostly it required an
absence of scent. Only when her body and hair had been scrubbed
with the plainest of soaps to remove any possible fragrance, only
when her tiny apartment was cleaned of every particle of matter
that might rot, only when nothing remained to remind her of a
bombed perfume factory, of corpses bloating in a bullring, of the
things hunger could force a woman to do, only then could she forget
who she’d had to become. Forgetting was essential. Forgetting took
all her money so she had none left to send Rosa. Memories of her
old friend, of all Clementina owed her, proved impossible to
forget. Rosa came in her dreams, as sad and bedraggled as Delicata,
to remind Clementina that she owed her her life.

“The years slid past, then the decades. In
the beginning, when she was pretty and talented enough to have
moved up from the back of the chorus line, she hadn’t wanted to for
fear of calling attention to herself. When, at last, in a foreign
country far from her father, from El Bala, from the passions of the
Civil War, she felt it was safe to step into the spotlight, it was
too late. She had already ruined her feet. It was a point of honor
with Clementina that, though she might be in the last row, there
would always be puffs of dust rising from her spot and no one
else’s because she would be the one pounding dust a century old
from the boards of the stage. Three decades of such stomping had
taken their toll. When the pain became too great to ignore, she
went to the best podiatrist in all of Buenos Aires. He gasped at
her mangled toes and pronounced surgery the only answer.

“Clementina hobbled out on her battered
feet. She had seen the results of foot surgery, big toes that stuck
out at ninety-degree angles, feet that curled up like sultan’s
shoes. No, she would not allow anyone to cut her feet. Instead, she
did what most of the dancers did: she found ways to deal with the
pain. Some drank, some smoked herbs. Clementina did both, along
with taking any of the medications that floated through the
dressing rooms. Paregoric, opium tincture, beneficial for
everything from teething babies to chronic diarrhea, became a
favorite.