by Sarah Bird
“ ‘But how,’ the other women asked, ‘will we dance without a song?’
“ ‘Sing to yourself,’ my mother ordered. ‘We will all keep time. If you have to have a song, sing it yourself.’
“Late at night, after the women had worked all day carrying water from the distant well and cooking over smudgy fires of dried cactus, and after the men, who’d spent the day sleeping, left to drink at the colmao, we would meet. My mother and I taught Dried Wood, La Burra, La Burriquita, and La Sordita all her dances. My brother Mono played the guitar. The one problem was, of course, my father. He had forbidden my mother to ever dance again for strangers. But each time Dried Wood whispered to my mother in her scratchy voice, ‘What about El Chino? He is going to find out. No one can keep a secret on Sacromonte,’ all she would say was, ‘Leave him to me.’ Then she would go back to pounding the floor of the cave with the cane she used to beat out the rhythms she was harnessing us all to. Like this. Y, uno, doe, tray...”
The entire class, caught up in the story, believing that they were with Delicata on Sacromonte, moved to her beat.
“Next to my mother, Little Burro was the most committed to this new scheme. She had watched all of her daughters except the youngest, La Burriquita, grow up and marry men no better than her husband. La Burriquita was her last chance for one of her children to have a better life than she had had and her mother and her mother’s mother all the way back to India. Little Burro was so desperate for something better that she took down the green and red polka-dotted material that hung in the door opening and with it made a real flamenco dress for La Burriquita.
“ ‘Let me show you,’ she said at our next practice. She lifted up the dress she was working on and we all sucked in our breath at its beauty, amazed that Little Burro’s hands, strong enough to move her husband’s fragua without any help, could stitch together a thing of such grace and femininity.
“ ‘But this is the best part,’ she said, smiling with pleasure at our amazement. She shook the dress out and a length of fabric unrolled across the packed dirt floor.
“I gaped at the dress’s long train. ‘Una bata de cola!’
“ ‘Una bata de cola,’ my mother said, draping the long tail of fabric over her arm. ‘With this and a fenómeno’—she meant my brother Mono. Though still a boy without a whisker on his face, he could play better than any of our men. ‘We have two of the three things every cuadra needs. All we are lacking now is un alcahuete.’ Un alcahuete, a procurer, was vital since he would bring the tourists to us. None of the women could ask their husbands because they would immediately tell my father, who had forbidden my mother ever to dance for another man.
“ ‘We have no choice,’ my mother said. ‘We must talk to El Bala.’
“At the very mention of this name, Little Burro spit on the floor and crossed herself.
“ ‘No,’ Dried Wood said, her voice even more parched and raspy than usual because fear had dried the saliva in her mouth.
“El Bala, the Bullet. I don’t know if he had always resembled a bullet or only looked like one after he went bald. But with no hair, his eyes sunk into his fat, greasy head, no neck, a body thick and stocky from the shoulders to the ankles, El Bala looked like a bullet. He worked as a collector for Juan ‘Coronel’ Fernandez, the moneylender. A scar from the knife of a resistant borrower sliced El Bala’s face, making one nostril and his top lip flap open so that his two top teeth and the inside of his nose were exposed. At the top of the long scar was one dead, white eye.
“ ‘Who else then?’ my mother demanded. No one spoke. The Bullet was the only man who spoke the language of los suecos and who would not immediately tell my father what my mother was planning. El Bala kept to himself. Even our men were so frightened of him that they kept their distance.
“ ‘It is better not to catch the eye of the tiger,’ the men said as they faded away at El Bala’s approach.
“We found the Bullet loitering outside the colmao wearing a shiny black suit with tan shoes and a checked cap pulled down as low as it would go to hide his white eye. He agreed to be our alcahuete in exchange for half of everything we brought in. With no other choice my mother agreed, warning him that he’d better fetch enough paying customers to be worth all the money he would take from them.
“ ‘You just be ready to waggle your jojois because I’ll bring the tourists,’ El Bala told my mother, using our word for rabbit, which means the same thing as your American word for pussy. It was a word I had heard often, but never spoken by an unmarried man in the presence of a woman. Gypsy men had gotten a knife in the liver for lesser offenses; still, my mother didn’t object. It was the first deal she made with El Bala, but it wouldn’t be the last.
“On the day of our first performance, my mother made me stand in the galvanized tin tub she used to mix sausage while she poured buckets of water over me.
“ ‘Scrub harder,’ she ordered as I rubbed the dirt that seemed tattooed into my skin with a slimy chunk of agave cactus. When we finished I was cleaner than I had been since I came from the womb. Over my head I slipped the dress my mother had made and was buried in the wonderful smell of sizing put in the brand-new fabric to make it stiff.
“Then, while my father slept, snoring loudly from a late night filled with too much aguardiente, my mother prepared herself. I did everything I could to keep the chaboros quiet. When she was ready, her hair shining with oil, her skin pink, she was a vision as beautiful as Christ’s mother. Fear made her even more beautiful.
“ ‘Let’s go,’ I said, pushing my mother out the door. We’d been lucky. My father hadn’t woken.
“ ‘No,’ my mother said. ‘He will find out where we are. If he is going to kill me, I want him to do it here. Not in front of the others.’
“I begged her to come with me, but she had made up her mind and woke my father. As she told him what we were going to do, my mother took off her new dress and handed it to me. She was naked when the first blow fell. It was usually deafening when my father beat my mother because her screams, then ours, would fill the cave. This time, she didn’t say a word. That scared me and my brothers and sisters more than anything that could have happened. We watched speechless as the blacksmith’s fists struck. He was as angry that she planned to dance without him, without a singer, as he was that she was going to dance at all. Her silence, her refusal to scream, to beg, drove my father to such frenzy that he bellowed out both his rage and hers.
“There was no thought that a neighbor would come to our rescue. Since Cima Metales had opened, the screams of wives being beaten had become as routine as the clang of hammers on anvils had once been. All gitano tribe business was taken care of on Sacromonte. All gitano family business was taken care of in the cave.
“We, her children, watched with the eyes of little beasts, each of us calculating how our lives would change with our mother dead. Tears ran down the cheeks of only the littlest ones. The rest of us were dry-eyed since we’d been on our own for so long already. My father would have beaten my mother to death if the most fearsome man on the mountain had not appeared at the door of our cave.
“ ‘What are you doing, you idiot?’ El Bala asked, as if my father were making a silly mistake that would bring bad luck, like saying the word lizard or not touching iron to ward off the evil eye or owning a black dog. Startled, my father stopped and in that frozen moment, what we all noticed was my mother’s body, not that there was blood trickling down it, but that it was naked and a man who was not our father was looking at it.
“El Bala stared at my mother as if she were made of gold, as if he could not believe that such a treasure could be found in a dirty cave filled with dirty children. My father turned on El Bala, eager to drive his fists into harder flesh. El Bala was quicker; his knife seemed to appear out of nowhere, plucked from the air. Its blue blade glinted in the flickering light cast by the candiles. Toledo steel. None of this hand-forged Gypsy shit for a professional like El Bala. Fear of that blade did not stop
my father. Rather it was El Bala’s ruined face—the sneer cut forever into his mouth, the blind eye, white and eternally weeping—that stilled my father’s hand.
“I ran forward to give my mother her dress. Standing up as straight as only a true flamenca can, she pulled the dress over her head, careful to keep her blood off of it. Then we followed El Bala out of the cave.
“In the moonlight, I could see that both my mother’s eyes had swollen and turned purple. She touched her teeth and smiled when she discovered none had been knocked out.
“At the doorway of Dried Wood’s cave, El Bala inspected my mother. He took out his handkerchief, spit on it like a mother, and gently wiped a smear of blood from beneath her right nostril. ‘Go in and wait.’
“Dried Wood had the nicest cave of any of us and one of the first on the whole mountain to have electricity. A bulb burned from the ceiling. The floors were covered with a checkerboard of white and green tiles. Around the edges of the kitchen was a border of vines and leaves. A dozen gleaming copper pans hung from pegs. A curtain of red and black polka dots with a ruffle at the top separated the main room from the bedrooms in the back. They had arranged two rows of three chairs each, leaving just enough room in front of the chairs for the dancers. They all stared at my mother. She looked much worse in the harsh overhead light.
“Dried Wood finally broke the silence. Pointing to my mother’s swollen eyes, she joked, ‘Chop up those plums. The sangria needs more fruit.’ Everyone laughed then and crowded around my mother, repinning her hair, snagging loops of hair from either side of her face to cover her bruised eyes, giving her glasses of aguardiente to kill the pain.
“When they’d finished, we all sat on the straight-backed chairs borrowed for the evening, except for La Burriquita, who stood so as not to wrinkle the dress Little Burro had made for her with a bata de cola trailing behind. We lined ourselves up next to a rickety table where six borrowed copper cups and a pitcher of sangria waited for our first customers. We’d gone into town early that morning to beg and steal the fruit. The wine and coñac we had borrowed from the owner of the colmao with promises to repay him double after that night. The alcohol had kept the fruit we chopped up hours ago from spoiling immediately in the heat, but tiny bubbles of fermentation were now fizzing around the cubes of red-stained peach.
As the bubbles released their evidence of rot, the group began to argue. With each hour that passed without any sign of El Bala, their words grew sharper.
“ ‘I was crazy to believe in this ridiculous plan!’ Dried Wood said.
“ ‘Who comes to see flamenco in a cueva so far from Calle de Sacromonte?’ Little Burro demanded. ‘No one! El Bala is laughing at us.’ Then she called El Bala a name that meant both cockmaster and master of the cock and, at just the moment when Little Burro had pulled out her knife and was threatening to go into Granada and cut off the cockmaster’s janrelles, El Bala threw back the curtain at the door and gestured for the party he had in tow to enter.
“Over Dried Wood’s threshold stepped three Englishwomen of the type who liked horses and dogs better than people, certainly much better than they liked men. They wore long khaki skirts and, under them, brown leather boots with thick soles that laced up to the knees as if they were going on safari. They each had a different cameo brooch pinned at the necks of the blouses they covered with cardigan sweaters. They squinted their eyes and turned their heads away as the smell of the cave hit them. One of them took out a handkerchief and held it over her nose. And Dried Wood’s cueva was fragrant compared to ours.
“ ‘Here are the suckers,’ El Bala said to us in Caló, at the same time smiling like a gigolo and waving his arm elegantly toward the women, who smiled in return, lifting thin lips off of large, horse teeth. Little Burro’s daughter Burriquita and I had to cover our mouths and lower our heads into our laps to hide our laughter. My mother eyed me sharply and I remembered my assigned role. I jumped up and showed the women to their chairs, then brought them each a glass of sangria.
“The fragrance of cinnamon and cloves hid the smell from the overripe fruit as I handed the glasses to the women. They responded with words that sounded as if they’d been spoken by horses. My mother started palmas, clapping softly, and everyone fell silent. My mother nodded at las inglesas. The women smiled back, holding up their copper cups in salute. My mother caught my eye and I jumped to refill the women’s glasses. They waved their hands over the rims insisting they didn’t want any more, then glanced at one another, laughed, and pulled their hands away, surrendering. Though that was the first time I saw this charade, it would not be the last, for surrender was what foreigners came to us for, what they sought in the caves of Sacromonte. They all came to us wanting to surrender. Surrender their white to our dark. Surrender their clean to our dirt. Surrender their tame to our wild.
“As I sat back down after refilling the glasses, Dried Wood added pitos, snapping her fingers. La Sordita clacked on the floor with her heels. I joined my mother in palmas. Because there was no singer, no cante, I came in on the wrong beat, and my mother shot me a dark glance. An instant later, though, the Englishwomen nestled their copper cups between their thighs and clapped their hands and my mother saw that she needn’t have worried. The women clapped like El Maleta, the Suitcase, a half-wit with one arm longer than the other. They clapped like they were wearing mittens and listening to another beat. All of us glanced at one another because we had never heard such a thing; even a Gypsy baby could keep better time than these grinning inglesas. But my mother just kept smiling at the women and even held out her hands to them as if to compliment their talent and shouted ‘Olé!’
“Hearing my mother put the accent on the last syllable as if we were at a bullfight made us smile and look away because her payo pronunciation was a grave insult since it said the person was an outsider, and for us there was nothing worse.
“But las inglesas, their cheeks already turning red from the wine, didn’t hear the insult. They saw only our smiles and shouted back, ‘Olé’
“My mother, numbed by the aguardiente, took her pass first, shaking her skirt and stamping forward like a windup toy. She kept her head lowered to hide her bruised face. Her exuberant zapateado had nothing whatsoever to do with the mournful soleares Mono was playing. But we smiled even more when we saw that it didn’t matter to the strangers.
“ ‘Brava! Brava!’ the women shouted when my mother took her chair, huffing and puffing and fanning at her bosom as if she had truly exerted herself.
“Little Burro was up next. Her dance was tough and muscular, with lots of palmadas, slapping the side of her shoe, her thigh, and stomping the floor. She even sang a bit in her foghorn of a voice. It was a ridiculous charade of the real flamenco we did for ourselves, but, again, the Englishwomen loved it, clapping wildly. They no longer pretended to resist when I passed among them, refilling their glasses. Their cheeks were as red as a baby’s with fever. They lolled against one another, whispering comments in one another’s ears, laughing, and clapping in their mittened, half-witted way.
“My mother never stopped watching them, her gaze sharpening as theirs dulled. When she saw them leaning against one another, whispering secrets, she signaled to my brother and he strummed through a series of arpeggios and tremolos, He played the tricked-up, show-off fake flamenco that my father wouldn’t allow at home but that these English ladies seemed to love.
“Then La Burriquita trotted out in her new dress. Eventually, La Burriquita ended up looking like her mother, like the driver of a mule team. But that night, she was magnificent in her new dress. Unfortunately, she had no idea how to dance with una bata de cola. Instead of making it her partner, La Burriquita fought with it as if it were a serpent that had swallowed all but her head and arms.
“Still my mother stood and clapped and yelled to make the tourists believe that this was the grand finale. Luckily, English people are so polite that they will see whatever someone wants them to see. So, it was true, those women really d
id see a grand finale and they stood, too, and clapped with my mother when La Burriquita held her arms up like a toreador dedicating a bull to his sweetheart.
“Then, before the English ladies knew what was happening, all the dancers disappeared and my mother was taking the copper cups from their hands and lifting the chairs out from under their bottoms. They turned then to leave, but their friendly guide, the poor fellow with his one eye gone dead, so polite, so courteous in spite of his gruesome face that they had taken pains not to stare at it, was blocking their way. Even more alarming, the friendly guide was no longer grinning and his sliced-up face no longer aroused their pity. It scared them.
“ ‘Señor’ one of the ladies said in her horse Spanish when the Bullet didn’t move away from the door to let them out. ‘Por favor.’
“But El Bala still didn’t move. The women stepped a bit closer to one another, the red draining rapidly from their cheeks as El Bala lifted his ragged lip up in a wolfish smile and presented them with a bill.
“ ‘What is this?’ the shortest one asked. She looked more like a bulldog than a horse. ‘We already paid you. One hundred and fifty pesetas. Back at the plaza.’
“ ‘Yes, pesetas. But I said duros.’
“ ‘Duros? What is a duro?’
“El Bala bowed his head and scrunched his shoulders to make himself and the total seem smaller. ‘Perdóneme. We say duro, you say five pesetas.’
“The Englishwomen’s eyes all popped open. ‘This is mad. Seven hundred and fifty pesetas! You said it would be one hundred.’
“El Bala closed his eyes and shook his finger in front of his face. ‘No. Duros, no pesetas.”
“ ‘No, indeed not. We have paid what we agreed upon.’
“ ‘Sí, sí, but if you will look here...’ El Bala redirected their attention to the bill as if, because he had written them down, the numbers were truer on the paper. ‘Por la cuadra. Por la sangria. Por el tocaor. The boy, truly a fenómeno, no? Then, is customary to buy everyone a drink.’
