"The Flamenco Academy" (56 page)

“The orange syrup did relieve Clementina of
her pain. Unfortunately, it also relieved her of her timing and the
iron discipline that had kept her alive when so many others had
perished. The orange syrup unlocked doors that had been closed
thirty years before and Clementina wept for all she had lost. When
her tears dried, she took stock. It was 1966. She was almost fifty,
though she could pass for ten, fifteen, twenty years younger. Her
body was firm, slender. Her feet would last another year doing
three shows a day. Longer if she only had to teach. She had no
savings since she’d spent every peso she’d earned pampering the
horror of her life into submission. Clementina had to find a
husband. A rich one. Preferably one very close to dying.

“She joined the first troupe heading north.
They danced up the continent to Mexico City. From there, they
followed the Camino Real, the same route Clementina’s distant
ancestors had taken in their conquest of the New World. It led her
to the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, a once-majestic vaudeville
palace, now, like her, on its last legs. Still, with the right
lighting, she and the old place could be magnificent. The lighting
was right the night that Ernesto Anaya sat in the audience. A
lawyer who had grown wealthy accepting land as payment for his
services, a widower whose wife had died before they could have
children, he was the answer to her prayer. Ernesto. Ernesto
Anaya.”

Doña Carlota repeated her dead husband’s
name as if it were the chant that broke a spell. Her voice grew
weaker and weaker until it was the barest of whispers. Then she
fell silent.

“Doña Carlota?” The sun long set, the last
of the piñon logs burned down to smoldering embers, a gloomy chill
had entered the room. “Doña Carlota?”

The old woman shivered and tugged the shawl
more tightly around her shoulders. She nodded toward the fireplace
and I placed another log on the hearth. Next she nodded toward the
bottle of pain pills. I shook a couple out and handed them to her
with a glass of water. She winced when she swallowed as if even
that effort hurt. The new log caught fire with a crackling that was
overly loud in the silent room.

“Should I leave?”

She held up one finger and I sat back down.
As she waited for the pills to take effect, I studied the filigreed
crucifixes, portraits of suffering saints, and beatific madonnas
hanging on the wall. It took me a moment to realize that the dry
scratching I heard was not leaves scraping against a window in a
far corner of the big house; it was the old lady whispering.

“Please,” she said again, waving a skeletal
finger toward the massive armoire. It took a few more languid waves
before I understood that she wanted me to retrieve something from
the ornate antique cabinet. She shook her head no until I retrieved
a box carved of rosewood and inlaid with lapis lazuli. She beckoned
for me to bring the box to her. With some effort, she removed a
thin gold chain from around her neck and handed it to me. A small
key was threaded onto the chain. She gestured and I used the key to
open the box. All it held was a Certificado de Nacimiento, a birth
certificate, from El Hospital Virgen de las Nieves in Granada dated
twenty-nine years ago.

“Is this Tomás’s?”

She nodded.

The
Nombre del Padre
, father’s name,
was left blank. In the space for
Nombre del Madre
a long
name was carefully printed. Amid the
y
s and
de
s was
the name ROSA.

Doña Carlota’s eyes had drifted shut. I
raised my voice to ask her, “Was your friend Rosa Tomás’s
grandmother? Great-grandmother?” When she didn’t answer, I raised
my voice higher and asked the only important question, “Is Tomás
gitano
?”

She screwed her eyes shut more tightly like
a dreamer clinging to a dream, resisting being awakened. Though her
eyes didn’t open, they relaxed. Doña Carlota sighed, nodded
yes
, then fell into a sleep heavy as death.

I never had any choice about what to do with
the truth Doña Carlota gave me. Tomás was an addiction. I craved
him at a cellular level. I was a junkie who’d been clean for months
only because I didn’t have money. The instant I had the means to
procure my drug, I set about trying to make a connection. Doña
Carlota’s truth was my means. I now had what Tomás desired most:
proof of his authenticity.

But I wanted more. I wanted Tomás’s entire
story. Names, dates, places. I called the old lady repeatedly. Each
time Teófilo answered and said he would ask La Doña if she felt up
to speaking on the phone. Sometimes he would return to inform me
that she was under the weather and would return my call when she
felt better. Other times, he would not come back at all. I drove up
to Santa Fe twice and knocked on the door guarded by Santiago but
no one answered. I wanted more, but I had enough, enough of the
story to accomplish what needed accomplishing.

Up until the moment when Doña Carlota told
me her secret, I had been dreading the high point of the New Mexico
flamenco calendar, the Flamenco Festival Internacional. Instead of
a celebration the festival that year would present only limitless
humiliation. Everyone would know that I was the pathetic third leg
of a triangle, the one who’d been abandoned by her lover, betrayed
by her best friend. Armed with Doña Carlota’s secret, I had reason
to endure the festival. She had given me another chance with Tomás.
But only if I learned enough to be able to make full use of what
information I did have, and the festival was nothing if not a place
to learn. I was bolstered further when Alma informed me that I had
been selected as one of the few locals to teach at that year’s
festival. That honor would deflect some of the pity certain to rain
down on me.

In the weeks leading up to the festival, I
prepared myself as best I could. Once again I told Leslie that I
would be too busy to keep our regular therapy appointment. She
answered that with the festival coming up I needed to see her more,
not less, or all the work we had done would be lost. I told her I
would think about it. Instead, I stopped taking the pills she’d
prescribed, stopped returning her calls, and threw myself into
preparing for the classes I would be teaching.

A week before the festival started, the
fires that had been raging out of control in southern Colorado
started creeping farther south. The smell of scorched newspaper
hung in the air. Four firefighters had already been killed and
still the fires moved down. On the morning of the opening, the
Archbishop of Santa Fe announced that he would say a novena to lead
all the citizens of New Mexico in prayers for the rain needed to
save our state. I prayed for the strength to face the flamenco
community. Then, that night, armed with the power of my secret, the
history that only I knew, I marched across campus toward Rodey
Theater, where the Carmen Amaya documentary was to be shown. As I
neared the theater, I slowed my pace. I dawdled in the shadows
until everyone had entered and the lights dimmed. After the film
started, I slipped in unnoticed and found a seat near the back.

Carmen Amaya in motion was the revelation
and exultation I had expected. Then came the revelation I had not
expected, the bomb that blew me out of the theater and into the
grip of memory: Didi was coming home. I fled the theater and spent
the rest of the night driving Route 66. I hurtled west to east.
From the future to the past. From the moment that would define my
future—when I learned Didi was returning—all the way back to the
moment that had defined my past—that day in the oncologist’s office
when I’d first met her.

The new day was leaching the brilliance from
the neon lights along Albuquerque’s stretch of Route 66 when I
realized I had figured nothing out. It was only a few hours until I
taught my first class and I was already exhausted.

Before I even reached the Flamenco Academy a
river of sound cascaded out, surging against my body. Classes were
in full swing. A banner above the academy announced: 16TH FLAMENCO
FESTIVAL INTERNACIONAL BIENVENIDO!
TONIGHT!
OFELIA
AT THE KIMO!
My eyes stung from lack
of sleep and forest fire smoke. Fortunately, I didn’t run into
anyone I knew.

The entire gym had been taken over for the
festival. Every room held a class already in session. Each one
presented not just a different turn of the flamenco kaleidoscope
but twists on my own personal history with
el arte
as well.
The first open doorway framed a famous Gypsy guitarist playing a
bulerías
for an advanced class. He filled the hall with
crystalline
falsetas
, melodies, that floated above a raw,
driving rhythm. He finished and a student asked, “Did you start
with a D minor chord?”

The guitarist shrugged and answered in
Spanish, “If you say so.”

The class laughed. Reading music,
rehearsing, even knowing the names of the chords was antithetical
to the renegade Gypsy spirit. I wanted to warn the laughing
students that beneath that spontaneous, untutored surface lurked a
Titanic
-crushing iceberg of hard work.

A rain of silver notes poured from the next
classroom, where a teacher demonstrated the maligned art of
castanets. Clacking two pieces of wood together, she rained
intricate rhythms down on her students that dissolved the snags of
their stuttering mistakes.

The main studio, once a gym where past
generations of Lobos shot basketballs and did jumping jacks, had
been taken over by
los pequeñitos
, kids, being taught by
sweet Blanca. A couple dozen little girls in puffy pastel dresses
stamped their black patent leather Mary Janes on the academy’s
wooden floor. The loudest stompers, though, were the three little
boys in the class.

Blanca caught sight of me and came over to
the door, circling her hands and yelling behind her as she walked,
“
Bueno, niños!
Let’s practice our hands. Come on, let me see
those snakes twining around.”

“Rae, how are you doing?”

“Fine.” Leslie had told me some old hippie
saying about how nine times out of ten when someone says they’re
fine, it stands for Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and I can’t
remember what the
e
was supposed to mean. I was not the one
in ten who actually was fine.

“Really?” She rubbed the side of my arm in a
warm, comforting way that made tears come to my eyes. “I can’t
believe Alma did that. You know, invited... her.”

She didn’t say Didi’s name. She didn’t have
to. It was all there in her face, all that I dreaded: sympathy,
concern, pity. Of everything Didi had done, this might be the
worst, making me an object of pity.

I stepped away and, struggling to inject a
note of peppiness into my voice, said, “Hey, your class is starting
to revolt.”

The boys had turned their twining snakes
into rattlers bent on striking the shrieking girls.

“
Ay! Muchachos!”
Bianca rushed to
stop the boys’ rattler attacks. She pressed the boys’ fingers
together so that they wouldn’t fan out in a way that flamenco
purists considered lethally feminine. She pushed their little
chests out and instructed,
“Muy macho.”

The little boys hardened their tender
mouths, thrust out puny chests. I imagined Doña Carlota instructing
Tomás, pushing his spindly chest out, resetting his heart so that
it beat only to flamenco’s pulse and, for just a second, flamenco
did seem like something carried in the blood, a disease that no one
can be responsible for. I wondered if it was irresponsible for me
to step into a classroom and pass the infection on to another group
of innocents.

I left and headed for the new addition, the
Flamenco Academy itself. I shoved the doors open and there was Doña
Carlota, staring down at me from the portrait that would be hanging
at the entrance to the academy she had started long after I was
gone and forgotten. So what if I knew her secrets? Some version of
the truth? Queens always shared secrets with handmaidens because no
one ever remembered the handmaidens, I lowered my eyes and I
hurried on.

I was late. I entered the studio with the
high ceilings and honey-dipped floors where my engagement with
flamenco had started. I felt nearly as fraudulent as I had that
very first day. The class was big: several dozen students. I heard
accents from all over the country as well as one that sounded
Germanic, maybe Swedish. All my students were female, teens to late
fifties, a comfortable mix of young and old, slender and plump, hip
and dowdy. I was grateful that Alma had given me a beginner class.
I wasn’t up to proving myself to a bunch of flamenco hotshots. In
fact, I no longer felt up to flamenco at all.

I went around the room. The students
introduced themselves and told why they were there taking their
first flamenco class. They had the usual assortment of reasons:
exercise, love the flamenco beat, want to try something different.
I would never have admitted in my first class why I was there, that
I was sick with love and thought flamenco held the cure.

I stamped my feet, warmed up with a few
quick combinations. In the mirror I watched mouths fall open and
friends turn to each other, to exchange expressions of amazement. I
remembered then how astounding the rhythms that had become as
automatic as breathing to me had been the first time I’d seen them
demonstrated by Doña Carlota.

“I’m sure we’ll be doing that by the end of
the festival,” a girl with multiple piercings said sarcastically,
her tongue stud flashing as she opened her mouth to laugh.

“That and so much more,” I joked back. I
stopped and drew myself up into the tall, proud flamenco
postura
. “Let’s warm up those feet.” I demonstrated a basic
heel-toe stamp. The class imitated it with a few tentative
taps.