"The Flamenco Academy" (59 page)

“If I don’t come tonight
what
,
bitch?” I whispered to the black velvet painting outside my
windshield. I didn’t have to see the petroglyphs to know they were
there, all those mysterious squiggles Didi and I had squatted among
as she pledged to always have my back. “You’ll kill yourself?” It
was a comfort to spit out the words caroming inside my brain. To
inject as much mocking scorn as I could into them. Didi would never
kill herself. That would be one performance she absolutely wouldn’t
miss. That certainty was met with a crushing in my chest as a hard
reality squeezed into me: If Didi kills herself, she will own you
for the rest of your life. I could not allow that to happen. The
one thing I absolutely had to do was to root Didi out of my life
once and for all.

I headed back into town. Even the bars had
closed by the time I drove down Central going east, going back in
time, back to the university. Of course, Didi was staying at the
Sculpture Garden, where all the visiting luminaries were lodged. I
assumed that Didi, the star of that night, was even occupying the
same bungalow as Guitos had. I parked and made my way through the
grounds. The sculptures, charming during the day, were menacing at
night. In the dark, the giant grasshoppers became ravenous
predators from the Age of the Dinosaurs, the nail clippers weapons
of destruction. The stone angels guarding the guest cottage were
not the beneficent protectors they had been in daylight. They were
stern, winged creatures on missions of revenge and atonement.

I stood for a moment beneath their rigid
gaze and searched the bungalow on the other side of the gate. Not a
single light was on. She was asleep. I was about to turn and leave
when a small bubble of aggrieved righteousness burst inside of me.
Why the hell was I skulking around, worried about disturbing Didi’s
precious sleep? How many nights of sleep had she cost me? More than
she could, more than she would ever pay, but at least I could claim
a few hours of slumber from her. Buoyed up, I unlatched the gate,
stepped up to the door, and pounded heavily on it. When there was
no answer, I pounded louder. I didn’t care, I hoped I would rouse
Didi from whatever substance-abused slumber or compromising sexual
snarl she might have been entangled in. I pounded again, hard
enough to rattle the curtained window at the door. I suppose I knew
the door would be unlocked. That was so typically Didi, the
unlocked door, the compromise waiting to be made.

The smell of leather that greeted me when
Guitos occupied this bungalow had been replaced by the fragrance of
candles and old roses. But there was another odor, deeply female,
an estrous funk that forced an intimacy upon me I did not want. It
was Didi’s smell and I recoiled from it. I no longer wanted to wake
her, engage her. In her own megalomaniacal way, by manipulating me
into coming to her, Didi had won again. A laptop featuring Frida
Kahlo’s self-portrait as the screen saver provided what dim light
there was. The panther bracelet gleamed in its glow. The bracelet
was on my wrist before I had time to understand that the score
between us would never be even. It didn’t matter—an atavistic urge
to take something, anything from her drove me to steal it. If I
hadn’t taken the bracelet, though, I wouldn’t have moved into
position to see her, a sliver of her anyway, through the bedroom
door opened just a crack.

She was crumpled on the bed. In the dim glow
of a small bedside lamp her face was bluish at the lips, pale as
the sheets. Her body was floppy, boneless when I shook her. The
creak of the bedsprings thundered in my head when I sat beside her.
The sound subsided as I listened for breathing and heard only my
own fractured gasps. Did I hesitate one second, two, three? It
doesn’t matter, I hesitated. For that speck of time, I willed her
dead.

Then I pinched her nostrils, sealed her
mouth shut with my own, and breathed. Two breaths and fifteen pumps
a couple of inches below the nipples. I pressed the heels of my
hands on her chest. The bed sagged beneath the pressure. I listened
for breathing and wanted to hear it. I put my lips on hers and
pushed air into her lungs. Tilted my ear to her face and felt for
the dew of her respiration. Nothing came. Each breath I forced into
her was a pact I didn’t want to make. Every molecule of oxygen
expelled a different accusation, a different memory.

I pressed my lips against Didi’s and puffed
air into her mouth again. They warmed beneath my own. A weak,
hiccuping sigh formed either in her chest or in my imagination, my
heart was thudding too loudly to tell.

“Didi, it’s me, Rae,” I whispered. “Breathe,
okay?”

She didn’t respond. Her chest didn’t rise.
It didn’t move until, with my whole will, I breathed life into her
mouth. I wanted her to live. Only then did her chest stutter, the
muscles flinching and rippling. Her bluish lips brightened to a
sickly mauve. She coughed, vomited, coughed. Breathed. I grabbed
the phone, punched in 911, yelled between breaths. Didi inhaled.
Didi exhaled. Minutes later, bullets of light strafed the room. A
couple of EMT guys pushed me aside. While one of them worked on
her, the other tucked his head to one side and spoke into the
microphone on his shoulder. In answer to staticky questions about
“substances,” he picked empty bottles off the floor and read the
labels out loud.

Shortly thereafter, a policeman barged in
and asked me some questions. It took me a while to realize that he
was trying to decide whether or not to arrest me. Whether or not I
was a dealer or a murderer. He took my name and number and told me
to make myself available. One of the techs brought in a gurney.
They lifted Didi onto it, then slid her into the ambulance smooth
as a loaf of bread going into the oven.

It was light by the time I walked back to
the truck. Inside, I reached for the gear shift and the panther
bracelet slid down my wrist onto my hand. The bracelet was all
wrong on me. The panthers looked as if they were snaking around a
fat, white radish, instead of the slender, tea-colored wrist they
belonged on. I had believed I could hack Didi out of my life like
an overgrowth of kudzu. Yet I now felt the twist of the vines
twining about me more strongly than ever. They curled around my
lungs and squeezed out the oxygen like a python suffocating its
prey.

I touched the panthers on the bracelet,
woven together until they were one animal, claw flowing into
shoulder, tail into haunch, mouths breathing the same breath. I had
the thought then that, maybe, the only thing keeping me upright all
those years had been the vines.

I stood at the door of her room and
discovered Didi’s mother lying, asleep, in the bed. For a split
second, Didi looked exactly like Mrs. Steinberg after Mr. Steinberg
had died, pale, slack, a person haunting a body rather than
inhabiting it. Probably exactly how Didi would look when she was
old. If she lived to become old.

She was a mess. Her cheek and pillowcase
were streaked black from the charcoal slurry they’d pumped into her
stomach. Her right eye flamed red where a blood vessel had burst
when she was throwing up. Her nose was greasy, ringed in the K-Y
Jelly used to thread a tube into her stomach.

Behind me in the hall, a family passed by
talking loudly enough that they woke Didi. Her lids fluttered up,
then she worked to bring me into focus. “Rae.” She exhaled my name
on an exhalation so long she might have been holding it for all the
months since she’d seen me last.

I lifted one hand in a
How, paleface
greeting but didn’t step one foot closer.

“Rae.” Her voice was a whispery wreck, so
soft that I had no choice but to move forward. She shrugged and
gestured at herself, the tubes coming out of her nose, her veins.
The preemptive strike. It was what she always did, whenever she’d
let me down, whenever she didn’t do something she’d said she would.
She’d always start by neutralizing any complaint I might have by
detailing all her current dramas and misfortunes. This time she
mimed the strike simply by presenting her pitiful condition. “You
saved my life.”

Only after I willed you dead.
“Don’t
talk, okay? Save your voice.”

“I have to talk. Rae, I did a horrible
thing. I wasn’t as good a friend as I should have been, but I
wasn’t as bad as you think.” She shook her head, then chastised
herself. “Cut the bullshit. Cut the bullshit. Here’s the truth: I
didn’t take Tomás from you because you never really had him.
Neither of us ever had him. No one will ever have him because Tomás
does not have himself.” Didi echoed the exact words Guitos had
spoken to me.

“Rae, he’s waiting for you. Up north. He
wants you, he needs you to come and see his village. That’s the
only way you’ll understand.” Her eyelids drooped, then popped back
open. She lifted a hand with an IV taped to the back of it. “Look,
I’m zoning out here. I don’t know what they’re putting in my soup,
but I gotta make this short. Go. Just go to him. Anyone in town can
tell you where his cabin is.” Her eyes rolled up and she laughed.
“I told you. Told you I’d get him for you and I did.” She was
drifting off again. “I got him for you. Go get him. The name of the
village is...”

Her eyes closed and I considered leaving,
simply walking out while I still had a choice because I knew, once
she told me the name, the choice would be gone. I hoped she was
asleep. Her eyes and mouth twitched as if she were struggling to
open them. She didn’t open her eyes, but the name sighed as if of
its own accord: “La Viuda.”

The first map I picked up didn’t even have
La Viuda marked on it. I found the tiny village on a hiker’s map,
wobbly with topographical markings. Desire, identify my own heart’s
true desire and let it guide me, that was what my moment of
duende
had taught me. Desire? Tomás? Yes, I wanted him. I
shouldn’t, but I did. It was late afternoon by the time I finished
teaching my beginners class and set out. I roared north on I-25,
bypassed Santa Fe, then just outside of Pojoaque, I turned off onto
the back road to Chimayo.

In the space of one curve, long enough for
the big trucks on the highway to disappear from view, I was sucked
back four centuries into a time when not only the heart but the
body of New Mexico belonged to Spain. Last night’s storm had torn
through the fertile valley, leaving limbs from elephant-barked
cottonwoods and droopy Navajo willows lining the winding road. A
usually placid stream raged alongside the road churning with
battered cattails, uprooted tamarisks, and, washed in by the
downpour far to the north, the blackened stumps of trees burned in
the forest fires. The smell of those fires, doused by the heavy
rains, hung over the valley like incense.

The road bent north away from the stream and
evidence of the fires. An adobe estate with a coyote fence of
lashed-together cedar saplings presided over acres of apple and
plum trees. Yellow, oblong mailboxes with NEW MEXICAN printed on
them stood guard beside each gate. The names on the mailboxes, on
campaign posters lashed to trees, became biblical, portentous,
medievally Spanish: Balthazar Reyes, Cristo Oveido, Fidelina
Chavez, Nazario Mascarena, Euphonia C de Baca.

In Rio Chiquito, a spindly old Hispano
woman, her hair tucked into a shower cap, sprayed a trickle of
water from a garden hose onto a leggy geranium planted in a lard
can. Behind the frail woman, an airbrushed head of Christ floating
amid a galactic swirl of stars and planets decorated one entire
outer wall of her small house. A broken-down wringer washing
machine leaked a trail of rust against the bottom of the epic
mural.

The road climbed out of the lush orchards
and adobe estates of the Espanola Valley and onto a piñon-freckled
stretch of mesa, pink and gold in the late afternoon sunlight. A
solitary windmill sliced the ceaseless currents that had eroded
rock columns into lines of dancing cobras. Far overhead, the path
of a circling hawk slashed the white contrail of a jet in a sky
newly cleaned of smoke.

Truchas, Las Trampas, Peñasco, the villages
hugging the hairpin turns I slewed around, splashing through
puddles left by last night’s rain, I could have been transplanted
from the Spanish Sierra Nevadas. If I stuck my arm out the window,
I could touch the adobe houses I flew past. Beside each one stood a
silver tank of butane, several cords of wood seasoning in ragged
piles, and a beehive-shaped horno oven with a round opening at its
front like a mouth frozen in a wail.

I screeched around a corner and slammed on
the brakes, my tires slipping on the road still slick from the
rain. An old man in a crumpled felt fedora and a white shirt
buttoned up over the cords in his neck wandered down the center of
the road ahead, oblivious of my presence. Houses crowded the road
so tightly that I couldn’t pass him and had to slow down to match
his crabbed pace as he ambled down the street. I was close enough
to see his shoulder blades raise bony wings on either side of the X
where his suspenders crossed his back. He heard the engine and
looked back, turning his entire upper torso, so that I saw the
winged shoulder blades in profile. His eyes widened in surprise and
he hopped like an injured bird across the frost-buckled road.

The motor labored on the steep uphill grade
outside of town. Perched atop a ridge, the road was as thin as the
backbone of a starved dog, ribs of erosion digging into its side. A
few houses were tucked away in the green crotch of a deeply
shadowed valley far below. Their tin roofs winked in the fading
rays of the sun, sending silvered greetings from a world left
behind hundreds of years ago.

Next to the road, strips of red ribbon
bleached pink fluttered from a weather-grayed cross. CIPRIANO
ARCHULETA. KILLED IN A CRASH, JAN. 6, 1969. In the distance an
abandoned adobe chapel melted back into the earth it had sprung
from. A scrap of dirty rag, once a curtain, blew out of the empty
socket of a window where a congregation had once prayed amid the
cold beauty their grandchildren would abandon.