by Sarah Bird
He listened, nodding, then lowered his head and started playing again, betraying his roots in classical music with lots of tremolos and arpeggios that seemed the absolute antithesis of flamenco. He finished a tricky run and glanced up at me. Only because he wore a look I’d seen on my own face once when I was thinking about Tomás and caught a glimpse of myself in a window did I realize: Will likes me. Then I heard all the tremolos and arpeggios for what they were: offerings. I checked to make sure Didi was occupied. She was executing a tricky maneuver, luring Jeff away from Liliana to play for her. I glanced around to make certain that no one else was within range of hearing before I asked as casually as I could manage, “Doesn’t the old lady have an adopted child? Some kind of guitar prodigy?”
“Tomás?” Will pronounced the name with an ease so studied that it told everything about Will and Tomás and their places in the guitar hierarchy. Will was a roadie and Tomás was the star whose name had enough weight to be worth dropping.
It was nearly unbearable hearing his name spoken. I glanced around feeling nervous, exposed. As much as I wanted to hear more, I also wanted to run and hide. But Will seemed safe. It was impossible to imagine that he had any direct connection to Tomás. All I could manage to say was “Yeah.”
Will shrugged, lowering his head as he moved down several frets. “Last I heard he had a gig playing at this flamenco club in Miami. This other dude, though, said he was teaching at Berklee. You know, the music college up in Boston.”
“Does he come back much? Ever?”
“I doubt it. He’s got this whole complicated thing with flamenco. I heard him interviewed somewhere.”
“Where?”
Will shrugged. “Was it the radio? That guitar show that comes on Saturday afternoons? Or maybe it was something my professor was telling me. I don’t remember exactly. It really wasn’t anything he said. The interviewer asked Tomás when he was coming back to New Mexico and he answered, ‘Next.’ That was it, just cut him off. Then the guy asks when he’s going to do another flamenco concert and he does the same thing. ‘Next.’ That’s all. Hey, do that step again you were doing. I’ve got to figure out this accompanying thing. It’s kicking my ass.”
I went through all the combinations Doña Carlota had taught us, imagining Tomás as my ever-present, invisible audience. When we finished, Will asked me if I wanted to go across the street to the Frontier Restaurant to get something to drink. I looked around, saw Didi walking away with Jeff, and answered, “Why not?”
In the friendly, cavernous restaurant, we split one of Frontier’s catcher mitt–size sweet rolls and watched the activity outside the window along that stretch of Central Avenue. Students bending like sherpas under backpacks, waiting to cross the street, blinking into the sun. Oddly speckled dogs tied with rope to the lamppost, waiting for their masters. A guy wearing cutoffs sliced down to the size of a thong, tanned to the color and consistency of shoe leather, frantically panhandling. A couple of senior citizens on recumbent bikes pedaling beneath high-flying orange safety flags. At the table next to us, a study group reviewed French subjunctive verbs.
Over the next few weeks, without anything being said, Will and I entered into a companionable relationship. He and Jeff became the guitarists for Didi’s “cool new group.” Blanca, the nice girl from our class, was our first recruit. Soon most of the other first-year girls were gathering under our spruce tree after class. We spent a lot of time outside that autumn, smoking Ducados and practicing beneath skies as bright as new pennies. Starting with Jeff, Didi entranced the male portion of the flamenco crowd so thoroughly that we were absorbed into Liliana’s group without her permission. Liliana simply surrendered to Didi’s inevitable encroachment with salvos of high-pitched compliments—“I lovelovelove that top!” “You’ve lost weight. God, you’re a toothpick!” and, always, “Where did you get those shoes?”
The flamenco culture was made for Didi. Smoking and drinking were expected and many of its greatest stars had died of drug overdoses. So, though Didi still considered the tyranny of el compás to be a tedious nuisance designed for lesser mortals, she adopted every other facet of el arte. Overnight, she shed her Strokes T-shirts, removed all her fake piercings, let her spiky hair grow out until she could pull it back into a braid, lived in her long, dark practice skirt, and transformed herself into the flamenca she christened Ofelia. All that was missing were the spit curls and a rose between her teeth.
So, for different reasons, the Flamenco Academy became the center of the universe for both Didi and me. The only other class we paid much attention to was Spanish. Didi, already fluent, took it for the easy A. I struggled through it because I had to. It was the language of flamenco. As much as I could, I made Didi speak to me in Spanish. All other classes that first semester, we simply endured. We became part of the scene transforming the old gym into backstage at a Broadway musical. Our wardrobes became the dancer’s grab bag of stretch and sweat everything, leggings with a short wrap skirt, yoga pants. We too were dancers doing their dancer things—changing into practice skirts, slugging down water, stretching, taping our feet. I aspired to have bulbous, inflamed bunions and an eating disorder that would turn my teeth gray.
I was worming my way into Tomás’s world, learning to dress and act like its inhabitants. I still had a long way to go, though, before I would be ready to reenter his universe. I still had to learn flamenco and I still had to learn his story. And for that, I needed Doña Carlota.
Chapter Twenty-one
Doña Carlota clapped out a rhythm and ordered, “Name it?”
As usual, no one answered and too many gazes swiveled my way since I was the one who could always identify whatever palo, style, Doña Carlota clapped out. I stared down at my feet to avoid eye contact.
“Why do we go through this cruel charade?” Didi asked Amalia, a girl from the South Valley with the profile of an Aztec princess who threw a lot of hip-hop attitude into her dancing and was Didi’s current favorite among her growing entourage. Amalia grinned because Didi gave “charade” a jokey French pronunciation.
“Metrónoma! Tell them!”
“Por soleares?” I answered hesitantly, pretending I didn’t know. I did. Not just because I had a natural facility for hearing the rhythms, but because I spent every moment I could spare in the Lair listening to CDs with titles like “Todos los Compases!” and “Learn Flamenco Rhythms.”
“In the style of?” she asked, pointing at me.
“In the style of soleares, songs of solitude, songs of loneliness.”
Will winked at me. We were sort of regarded as a couple. He regarded us as a couple. Since Didi was either hanging out with Jeff or building her entourage, Will had filled the vacuum she left. In defiance of university rules, he was smoking a Ducado inside the studio. He plucked it from his lips and squeezed it into the gap between the strings and the wood on the neck of his guitar before he picked up Doña Carlota’s rhythm and began playing. Without a word, she began the footwork. By that time most of the class was able to follow. The class was no longer a bunch of rank beginners and it showed in our outfits. Swanky pairs of shoes in purple and red now appeared among us and we’d all taken to wrapping our skirts in special ways just like the older girls. We wore jeans, gym shorts under the long skirts, then whirled the yardage around ourselves, tucking the ends into our waists in order to show off and air out our legs. Even Will with his Ducados was transforming himself. I tried not to think about how ridiculous he looked, a choirboy sucking on a cigarette trying to be a badass. Still, he was no more ridiculous than a Czech milkmaid attempting to become a flamenco temptress.
Doña Carlota noticed a couple of students in the last row, staring at their feet and trying to follow. She dragged them from their hiding places, brought them to the front, and made them stand behind me.
“Watch her feet,” she told them, pointing to me. Then she pointed at Didi and added, “And watch her face.” Clapping out the rhythm, she started again. My heart sank. Toda
y would be another day when she wouldn’t tell any more of the story.
“You girls, you have no idea how lucky you are. I had to learn to dance to the beat of an anvil. Yes, it’s true. Brazeo! She ordered us to bring our arms to life and they twined upward until we looked like a bed of kelp waving in the current. I wished fervently for the class to follow well enough that Doña Carlota would tell the story. For once, they did.
“Cante jondo.” Doña Carlota fondled the words, expelling them on a theatrical sigh. “Deep song, none was deeper than my father’s. It came not just from his heart, but from the hearts of his ancestors for a thousand years. He beat the songs out on an anvil just as he beat out his specialty, fancy grillwork. My father’s anvil was only a block of iron, but he could fashion anything on it. The fanciest designs, decorative grillwork that no one anywhere can do anymore. With him iron and hammer were like paper and scissors. Peacocks fanning their tails. Palm trees. A toreador swinging his cape.”
While we concentrated on the story, letting our minds follow Doña Carlota’s words, our bodies followed her feet, her hands.
“His customers, the rich señoras, said that El Chino had the blood of the Moors in his veins because it was those long-ago invaders from the desert who taught us how to turn metal and fire into palm trees and peacocks and, yes, cannonballs. It is said that Gypsy metalworkers forged the cannonballs that King Fernando fired upon the Moors to free Granada and reclaim her in the name of Saint James. For five centuries, the people of Granada had their horses shod, their pots mended, and the nails to build their homes forged on the fraguas of Sacromonte.
“And then one morning a shriek sounded through the sierra so loud that it made the chickens gabble and run into each other in a clucking fury of feathers and dust and all the blacksmiths put down their hammers to listen. What they heard was the sound of their children chewing their last mouthful of bread. Cima Metales had opened a factory in Granada. All day and all night, cyclones of fire whirled about this factory. Trains loaded with coal pulled up at one end and at the other out came an endless stream of pots, pans, metal plates, spoons, ladles, hinges, nails, and decorative grillwork in the shape of peacocks, palm trees, and toreadors.
“Suddenly all the housewives who used to walk up the mountain with their great-grandmother’s miserable iron pots and pans to have our men patch the holes could now buy pots and pans from this factory so cheaply that it was not worth having new tin put on the bottoms of the old ones. Who cared that the factory pans were so thin the tortillas de patatas scorched and the flan turned to leather; suddenly these shiny pans were what all the housewives desired. It was such a joy to buy something new that they didn’t care they would have to buy it again and again and again. At first, the Gypsy blacksmiths just laughed at this factory, my father the loudest.
“ ‘Cheap things,’ he said. ‘Only for the poor people. The stupid. My customers, los ricos, know quality. They pay for the best and from El Chino they get the best.’
“And, for a while, for my father, this was true.
“But the smoke from this great factory, wrapping around the city like a beggar’s blanket, bewitched everyone. Now they wanted only metal that had poured like lava from the great iron cauldrons, metal that did not show the marks of a herrero’s hammer. They wanted their hand to be the first to touch the shiny, new metal. Soon even my father’s customers became infatuated with the idea of choosing something that was already made.
“One by one, las fraguas went out, the Gypsy earth stopped burning, and the face of Sacromonte went dark. For the first time, we were hearing a possibility mentioned that no self-respecting Gypsy man would have ever considered before: going to work for los payos. My father wouldn’t allow such a possibility even mentioned in his home. He walked down into the city carrying samples on his back. Heavy grilles that would have broken a mule’s back. These he carried down each morning and these he brought back each night.
“Like all Gypsies, my father had turned into gold every pesata he saved. As his children grew hungry, he exchanged the gold for bread for his family. At first my mother’s necklace was sold. Then her bracelets. Finally only her earrings were left, and still my brothers and sisters and I kept eating like locusts. Delicata’s potaje, the stew we ate every night, usually had tomatoes and garlic and whatever else my mother could scavenge, eggs, onions, beans, fish, chorizo, maybe a chunk of blood pudding. Each night it grew thinner and after El Chino and my brothers ate, there was less of it left for Delicata and my sisters and I, who, good Gypsy women that we were, always ate after our men. When the tomatoes, then the garlic disappeared, we knew we were lost. We children fanned out through the sierra, grubbing for prickly pear and acorns. Whatever we found was never enough to stop the rumbling of our stomachs at night, so we stole. We dug beets from gardens at night like raccoons and snatched grapes and oranges from the stalls in the market during the day.
“As a last resort, my father, who could make señoritas dance sevillanas across iron screens, was reduced to forging nails. It was beneath his dignity to take these miserable things into the city. He told my mother that she must join the other women who hiked down the mountain once a week to sell in the plaza the baskets they braided and the horseshoe nails their men forged.
“The walls of our cave were covered in whitewash. This coating of white over the rocks of the hill was what made it a house and not a hole. Even the millipedes that invaded when the rock showed through knew this. But the cave sweated off the whitewash like a whore sweats off powder. When my father gave my mother the order that she must sell his nails in the plaza, the walls were so nervous that they sweated away the last bit of white because my mother answered no.
“My father was momentarily too stunned to do anything, and she told him: ‘I am the daughter of La Leona, who danced for King Alfonso himself. Every café cantante in Sevilla begged her to work on their stages. The name La Leona is known all up and down the Alameda de Hércules. And I would have been even more famous. Even now, after seven children, I am still the best bailaora on the Sacred Mountain. Every day the tourists squander thousands of pesetas to watch those cows in La Cagachina’s zambra dance and you ask me to sell horseshoe nails in the Plaza de los Reyes Católicos?
“ ‘No,’ she told him, ‘I will dance. In one night I can earn more than I could make selling horseshoe nails for ten years!’
“ ‘And who will sing for you?’ he demanded, sputtering in his rage.
“Cante is where El Chino always trapped her. The dance came from the singing and my father was the best on Sacromonte. Also the most feared for his violent temper and brute strength. He knew that no other cantaor would dare to sing for his wife.
“Because she was trapped, my mother had no choice but to spit in my father’s eye. My father, in turn, had no choice then but to beat her. He beat her that day and the next and for many days after. At the end of a week, my mother groaned every time she breathed and we walked down the hill together and tried to sell nails in front of the statue of King Fernando and Queen Isabel in the Plaza of the Catholic Kings.
“My mother was right. We didn’t make enough to stay alive and continued to live on acorns and cactus pads. Then one day, late in the fall, when we had all begun to wonder which one of us would die when winter came, my mother and I rose early and were on the trail into town while a sliver of moon still hung in the sky, then disappeared as the sky turned pink. Our breath froze in the early morning air. Frost sprinkled the tangled forests of cactus next to the path.
“At each cave, other women, wives and daughters of blacksmiths whose fraguas had grown cold, joined us. There was La Sordita—Little Deaf One—the wife of my father’s uncle, a tiny sprite of a woman whose deaf ears stuck out like an elf’s. My father’s cousin, Palo Seco, who’d gotten her nickname, Dried Wood, because she was tall and thin and all the juice had dried out of her. I remember walking behind her, watching how her shoulder blades poked out the back of her blouse like the wings of a vulture. Last w
as my father’s oldest sister, Little Burro—Burrita—a powerful, high-breasted woman who, alone among all the women, never had any bruises on her face because she had broken her husband’s arm the last time they fought and promised him she would cut off his janrelles while he slept if he ever touched her again. By Little Burro’s side was her daughter, Little Little Burro, Burriquita. I can’t remember the names of all the daughters and cousins and nieces and the babies and small children who came with us, but, all together, we were more than a dozen strong.
“As we walked in the soft morning light, my empty belly growled thinking of the hot churros y chocolate that vendors sold in the marketplace. I forgot my hunger staring at my mother. She had on her pomegranate red skirt that had faded to a beautiful pink, a blouse trimmed in Badajoz lace, her shawl crossed in front of her breasts and pinned at her waist with a brooch carved from wood to replace the fancy one she’d had to sell. My mother bore herself like a queen. Next to her, the other women looked like mud hens beside a swan.
“With each step, we all jangled as loudly as the coins in a beggar’s bowl. From our ears dangled linked hoops of tin. On our wrists were innumerable bracelets of the cheapest silver filigree since the gold had been sold. We wore skirts with tier upon tier of ruffles dotted in big polka dots of black on turquoise or yellow on red, whatever colors were the brightest we could find. The women and girls of marriageable age wore hairstyles fixed onto their heads with tallow. Maybe because her deaf ears stuck out so much, I remember La Sordita’s hair the best. It was piled onto the top of her head like coils of dog droppings and greased with pork fat until it glistened.
“At the edge of the town, I watched my mother and her friends complete their transformation into the wild Gypsy band the townspeople expected us to be. My mother slung the newest baby, my brother Mateo, onto her hip, where he slumped like a bag of potatoes. Little Burro fluffed out the curls of black hair dangling onto her face from beneath the kerchief on her head and shifted the basket of nails she’d been carrying on her head onto a hip that she stuck out. Dried Wood and Little Deaf One did the same, sticking out what little they each had in the way of hips.
