by Sarah Bird
“ ‘Dame perras gordas.’
“At this, the voices in the market started again. ‘Como una gitana.’ Just like a Gypsy. They were surprised when el sueco got out of his automóvil. The man was a giant. He walked over to me.
“His guide, a small Spaniard with wax on his mustache, scrambled out of the car then and tried to pull his employer away. ‘Señor,’ he hissed at him, ‘a los gitanos les pasa coma a los perros; si no pegan pulgas, pegan pelo.’ This was a very common saying that everyone knew so well no one had to repeat it except to a foreigner. ‘Gypsies are like dogs: if they don’t leave their fleas on you, they leave their hair.’
“The tall stranger stared at me and I saw myself with his eyes: a skinny girl with hair matted and dulled by dust, black dirt under her fingernails and in the creases of her hands, ground into her elbows, knees, bare feet, wearing a gray rag of a dress. Most shameful of all, just as the guide had warned, my legs were covered with fleabites, some of them infected, all of them scratched until they had bled and scabbed over.
“ ‘What will you do to earn this?’ he asked in a Spanish that sounded as if a machine were grinding out the harsh words. In his hand gleamed the coin I had asked for, perra gorda, named for the lion imprinted on it that looked like a fat dog.
“ ‘I can dance,’ I answered as I stared at the ground.
“The payo women clucked and hissed the condemnation, ‘Sinvergüenza.’ ‘Shameless.’
“Yes, I thought, I am sinvergüenza and, grabbing the hem of my skirt, I began stamping the dust with my feet just as Delicata had taught me, just as I’d done at every baptism, wedding, and funeral I’d ever celebrated with my people, just as I’d done earlier that day leaving the street of geraniums. The difference was that, for the first time in my life, I was doing it for strangers and, even odder, no one was singing. I had never danced without singing. None of our people danced without singing. Cante was what made us dance. But my father had pounded his songs so thoroughly into my head that, in truth, I never lacked for a cantaor: So, with the memory of his hammering playing through my head, my heels pounded into the earth, reaching down to that place where black thoughts and blacker deeds form, even as my arms became willow branches in the breeze while my hands became geese flying to a cool and green land. I ignored everything—the women of the town pursing their lips into tight lines, the stones on the ground that hurt my bare feet. All I thought about was that, for as long as I danced, I held the line that separated dirty little Gypsy girls with lice in their hair from dogs.
“ ‘Anda! Anda!’ I was barely aware of Little Burro’s shouts, of her claps picking up a counterrhythm. They only made me concentrate more on obeying the rhythm ticking in my head, my heart. Urged on by Little Burro’s palmas, I finished a matacaballos, a speed to kill a horse. Only when I was holding my final pose, back arched, hand flung into the air, did I notice that the stones I thought I had been dancing across were pesetas.
“ ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ The giant blond stranger threw more coins. Then, although his guide tried to hold him back, he put ten more pesetas in my hand. The others in our band swarmed forward to snatch the centimos from the dirt. The payo women pretended to be disgusted even as their own palms itched for the feel of the sueco’s coins. Through the crowd, I saw my mother stand and walk away with my baby brother.
“I pushed through the Granadinas. A couple of the old women, the ones most toughened by hard work and bad weather, spit in my face. They pretended to do this to take off mal de ojo, but it would have worked just as well if they had spit on my feet. They really did it to show their contempt. I ran after my mother. As I passed the spot where we’d been sitting, I saw that she had left behind my father’s basket of nails. I tried to pick it up, but it was too heavy for me to carry. My mother was almost out of sight.
“I ran to catch up with her and was out of breath when I drew close enough to yell, ‘Mamá! Mamá! You left behind Papi’s nails!’
“ ‘I leave only trash,’ my mother said as she pried the coins out of my hand. ‘We are not nail sellers. We are dancers. And we don’t need a singer.’ ”
Chapter Twenty-two
We are dancers.
I walked around with those words whirling through the fog in my head. I was barely passing any of my other classes and still I took even more time from them to practice. The blisters on my feet had turned to calluses and, beneath them, bone was thickening into genuine dancer’s bunions. Will was my accompanist, my accomplice. He would play for as many hours as I wanted to dance. I stopped existing except in the mirror of a studio. Only in those mirrors could I occasionally glimpse the creature filled with passion and fury that I wanted to become. Had to become.
Around the same time, Didi got tired of Jeff, Ducado cigarettes, and Doña Carlota. She made an announcement: “I’ve wasted enough time. Cher was barely eighteen when Liberty Records signed her. She was on the charts by the time she was twenty. I have screwed around long enough.” From that point forward, Didi’s attendance at Doña Carlota’s class became spottier and spottier. She was, she told me, “so over” flamenco. We barely saw each other. More nights than not, she wouldn’t be home when I fell asleep. Didi told me that her work was evolving. “Spoken word,” she said, was the new form her art was taking. For the first time in our friendship, I didn’t know every detail of Didi’s life. The only times we saw each other at the Lair, one of us was rushing off, so I wasn’t around enough to hear any of the new stuff. This was fine with me. Since it meant I had flamenco all to myself, I was free to gorge on it.
Didi decided to debut her “spoken-word performance pieces” at Amateur Night at a coffee shop a few blocks east of the university on Central that catered to students in fleece vests and camou pants and professors in L.L. Bean khakis. She asked Will to play for her. Nothing fancy, nothing that would overwhelm her poetry, just a little background music.
The day before her first-ever public performance the weather turned from crisp fall to dead winter. The evening of the big event I drove while Didi sat beside me doing breathing exercises and vocalizations. She didn’t say anything the whole way except “Hooo-hoooo. Haaa-haaa.” The Skankmobile’s heater had died and it was cold enough in the car that Didi’s long exhalations froze. We found a parking spot right off Central just down from Nob Hill. I carried a box filled with Deeds’s CDs. Will was waiting for us when we arrived. Without saying anything to him, Didi rushed to the ladies’ room.
“How’s she doing?” Will asked.
I shrugged. “I’ve never seen her so nervous.”
I found a stool for Didi and put it onstage, then stacked and restacked her CDs into pyramids and ziggurats on a table next to the stage. Will dragged a chair onto the stage, bent his head down until his temple touched the neck of his guitar, and tuned up. People around us avoided eye contact, looking away as if we were doing something embarrassing that no one wanted to acknowledge. A chatting couple, seeing that we were setting up to play music, moved to a table farther away.
Didi came out of the ladies’ room in an outfit calibrated to look as if she hadn’t given it any thought. But I’d seen the hours she’d spent in front of the mirror, choosing the artfully battered hip-huggers and an embroidered bolero jacket she’d scored at Le DAV. Seeing it made me realize how long it had been since we’d gone thrift-shopping together.
Didi settled herself on the stool, turned to Will, and nodded. He began playing something cocktail loungish with lots of tremolos and jazzy inflections that seemed to beg for reminders to tip your waitress.
“Hi,” Didi said.
The crowd glanced up and fell into an uncomfortable silence in which the hiss of the steam machine foaming cappuccinos sounded unnaturally loud. Everything about the setup was wrong. She was too close to the audience. She needed a microphone. Not to amplify her voice. Just for the psychic distance amplification provided.
“Hello, Albuquerque!” she yelled, a parody of every heavy metal concert, in every giant arena, she
’d ever wormed her way into. Except that this was not a giant arena, and it was doubtful that any of the latte sippers had done much time at Guns N’ Roses concerts. A few kindly souls smiled uncertainly. Didi’s strategy was to take the place by storm. A punk poetry smack-down. She nodded at Will. He began churning furious chords while Didi yelled a couple of selections.
There was a lag of a second or two after she finished when even I wasn’t sure if she was done. I didn’t start clapping until Didi shot a murderous glance my way. The crowd joined me in a halfhearted round of applause that dwindled into an awkward silence. It was filled with the lethal sound of an audience choosing to babble about tests and boyfriends and diets rather than listen to the deepest outpourings of your soul.
Panic skittered across Didi’s face as she realized she was dying. Almost as a nervous mannerism, she began patting her feet to the rhythms Doña Carlota had been pounding into us. I recognized the twelve-beat compás of an alegrías with accents on the three, six, eight, and ten, and a softer one on the twelve. With the same automatic response Doña Carlota had programmed into us, I picked up the beat. Will focused on me until he had decoded the style pattern I was clapping and started strumming in time, abandoning melody and simply hitting the beats with the driving percussive style Doña Carlota insisted upon.
Didi echoed what we were doing and her footwork grew louder. She clacked her heels harder and harder until she turned the wooden floor into a drum head resonating to her beat. The effect was instantaneous. The babbling in the audience grew softer as Didi’s golpes and tacones grew louder. Soon the grinding and hissing stopped as the counter help paused to listen and the only sounds were our hands and feet. Didi added brazeo, her arms twining up, fingers fanning, out and then in, pulling attention into herself with each rotation. When she had every eye in the place focused on her, she started reciting:
I died of cholera
My father threw the torch
That turned the house
Into a dervish of flame
Somehow she fit the lyrics to the beat. The odd accents created a hypnotic rhythm that made unexpected words leap out in ways which lent them an originality that hadn’t been there before.
“The contamination must be contained”
He bellowed and hurled
My breasts
My lips
My pimples
My bangs hiding my eyes
The new hair between my legs
Into the bonfire
Right in front of my eyes, I witnessed Didi change. Each gaze, each pair of eyes she managed to rivet, fed her with an energy that I seemed not just immune but actually allergic to. Didi was another story. The attention nourished a hunger she had had her whole life. She grew larger before our eyes. I clapped louder. I shouted out the jaleo we’d learned in class.
“Vamos ya,” I yelled. “Así se baila. Toma! Que toma!” They were all versions of “You go, girl.” And Didi did. She recited in time to the beat until her voice took wing and she was singing in a style that was part rap, part cante, and all Didi.
“Save the innocents!”
He heaved in
L’eggs pantyhose
Tampax ultra-slims
Bonne Bell Boyz ‘n’ Berry gloss
Maybelline Great Lash
Summers Eve Morning Rain douche
And all the CDs of the Strokes
Into the bonfire
“It had to be done.”
He gathered my bones
Disinfected of flesh
And dressed them in
A pink tutu
She finished with a flurry of footwork ending in a dramatic pose, arms flung to the heavens, Will and I wringing out one final, monumental chord/clap that left no doubt in the audience’s mind that it was time for massive applause. A few of the more highly caffeinated half-stood, half-crouched in a subdued, coffee shop version of a tentative standing ovation.
After milking the applause for all it was worth Didi spoke in the mock humble style of an acknowledged queen. Celebrity-ese was a native tongue she had been waiting her whole life to speak. It is a gentle language that can be spoken only from on high, down to fans. Based as it is on adulation, all it required was an elevation, and in that moment, arms thrown high, Didi became big enough to have little people.
“I call that one ‘Quarantine,’ ” she said, looking down as if the revelation had come at a great price. “I wrote it after I visited my father in the hospital”—she paused, then went on reluctantly, as if the information were being dragged out of her—“for the last time.
“He was all, you know”—Didi’s arms tented above her head—“covered in this oxygen thing. Tubes everywhere—” She stopped. There was silence, the pure silence that is a subtraction of all the normal sounds, even breathing.
“So, here’s my father dying of cancer and all he wants to talk about, all he ever wanted to talk about since I betrayed him, and became a sexual being”—knowing snorts of laughter from a few women in the audience—“was that I was going to hell if I didn’t watch out.”
While Didi launched into another one, I thought about “Quarantined.” Did it matter that Didi’s father had treasured and approved of everything his beloved daughter had ever done? That it was my mother who predicted I was going to hell and threw all my contaminated goods away? Probably not. Probably all that mattered was that every woman listening mourned again for the father she’d lost at puberty and every person of either sex believed he or she had been privy to a dark personal revelation.
“In Sevilla, during Semana Santa, Holy Week, they have these songs? Called saetas?” Didi threw in a little upspeak as if this information was just occurring to her on the spot. “That means an arrow to the heart. They’re sort of laments that the singer sings to Jesus or the Virgin Mary during these gigantic processions. So you have thousands of guys in black robes and hoods carrying these colossal floats that weigh tons and they stop while someone on a balcony sings their heart out. Anyway, I call this next one, ‘Arrow Poem.’ ”
Another one I hadn’t heard before.
“Because of the saeta thing. But also when you see it written down, the lines form an arrow.” She shrugged as if to say that even she herself could not explain the random ways in which genius struck.
My kiss is summer
Your kiss is cut watermelon
Sprinklers click.
A shower every seventeen seconds.
Seventeen years.
Waiting for night.
Waiting for the moon.
Waiting for the breeze.
Waiting for owl screech.
Waiting for earth warmth.
Below
I am waiting for heaven cool.
Above.
Waiting for your whisper.
Waiting for your touch.
Waiting for a breeze.
Waiting for a moon.
Waiting for night.
Waiting for him.
I was back in Tomás’s secret park where the cut grass had smelled like watermelon. Where Didi had found me the day she came to say she was sorry she had taken my thing. Had she done it again? I felt embarrassed, exposed. But no one was paying any attention to me. I searched Didi’s face for some acknowledgment that she had stolen the poem from my life. There was none. She was already on to the next one.
With each piece, the crowd leaned farther forward. Didi had started weak, but she finished invincible. All she’d had to do was figure out how to set her natural charisma to a flamenco beat and the coffee shop audience became hers just as surely as every lonely Sunday driver who’d pulled up at the Puppy Taco drive-through window had been hers.
“Thank you. Thank you,” she said, putting her hands into prayer position and bowing her head until her lips touched her fingertips. “I’ll be performing around town. Come on by and say hello. I’m Ofelia!”
This time, the entire place stood and clapped. I joined them. Didi was Ofelia. I clapped for her. I clapped for
Ofelia.
Chapter Twenty-three
“Y! Un! Doe! Tray!” By the end of the semester, Doña Carlota was using flamenco shorthand to start us off. After an abbreviated countdown the class would run by itself. “Delicata’s paseo!” She ordered and we all surged into the sequence of steps first choreographed by Doña Carlota’s mother almost a century ago. Everyone in the class fell into the dream that she was putting her foot in history, following a path that led all the way back to the original tribes in India. But no one else dreamed as I did that the long trail of Doña Carlota’s story would lead to a love nourished in secret. And no one else dreamed as Didi did that it would lead to immortality.
Didi’s skirt whipped against my legs as we pivoted and turned sharply. Far from abandoning flamenco, after her coffee shop debut Didi saw that el arte was the key to success and she threw herself back into it with an obsessiveness that approached my own. She’d also restarted her affair with Jeff. Snatching him away yet again from Liliana had created a highly satisfying drama for the rivaling flamenco camps that had been established once Didi was acknowledged as a diva worthy of competing with Liliana for the title “head flamenco bitch.”
Doña Carlota switched to an unfamiliar sequence and we all followed her through the new choreography like ducklings waddling after their mother. We knew that she would repeat the steps again and again through the class, that our feet would follow hers as mindlessly as the duck babies followed their mother, if only we surrendered our brains to her story. And though weeks had gone by without a new chapter, that day, with no preamble, she took up the tale once again.
“Since the day el sueco rained duros down upon me, my mother did nothing but work to create her own cuadro, what they called a zambra in Sacromonte. She was la capitana of our group. She was the one who broke the astonishing news to the others: there would be no cantaor ‘We don’t need a singer,’ she insisted. All that los suecos care about is el baile.
