The Flamenco Academy

by Sarah Bird

  “ ‘And this?’ The bulldog woman stabbed a stubby finger at a figure.

  “ ‘For charity. Is for the sick, the aid, the widow, the cripple, the—’

  “ ‘Yes, yes, yes. Back home in Derbyshire we’re all quite active in the Parish Relief Society. But that’s not the point. The point here is, we agreed upon one hundred and fifty pesetas. Not seven hundred and fifty.’

  “ ‘One hundred and fifty pesetas! In England you can have such an evening for one hundred and fifty pesetas?’ El Bala turned back into the Bullet and stopped speaking. He refused to answer any more questions and he refused to move from the doorway. He gave the ladies enough time to remember that they had told no one at their hotel where they were going. They had wanted an adventure. They had wanted to be spontaneous. They had wanted to surrender.

  “They looked over at us expecting to find women who would be sympathetic to their plight. They saw for the first time exactly what we were: gitana wolves who fed on pale payo flesh.

  “The one with the longest, saddest horse face finally snapped, ‘Oh, just pay it. Let’s get out of here. I can’t stand this smell another second. It’s all simply too, too authentic.’

  “The instant El Bala had their money, he was all smiles and courtly manners again. He swept the curtain away from the door and stepped aside as if the women were marquesas and he their liveried footman.

  “The next night, El Bala brought two Germans, heavy-boned men with gray shadows beneath their eyes, dull hair the color of toast cut too short on the sides.

  “We were astounded to hear El Bala speak to them in their language as well, pulling aside the curtain and saying, ‘Bitte, bitte.’ He pointed to me, La Burriquita, La Sordita, my mother, and said, ‘Schonne, nein? Los damen son muy schonne?’

  “The Germans studied us like men used to driving hard bargains at brothels. Their faces were stolid, set against us. We didn’t have to understand any German words to know that they did not find any of us pretty. This rejection made my mother mad enough that she danced with a fierceness that was like a train coming through the cave. My brother even had trouble keeping up with her on the guitar. She was so good that he yelled out óle, and Mono was just like our father; he never applauded anything that was not flamenco puro. On any stage in the world my mother’s dance would have brought down the house. But those Germans just sat there like two rotten piles of wurst. Nothing, not a sound. You couldn’t even hear them breathing.

  “It was even worse for the others. The Germans didn’t clap, didn’t call out. All they did was drink. As I filled and refilled the copper cups, they gave me looks that made me aware again of the fleabites on my legs, of the way my shoulder blades stuck out like chicken wings against the back of my dress, of the black crescents of dirt beneath my fingernails.

  “At last La Burriquita ended the performance with her grand finale, battling with the python of her bata de cola. Even though my mother screamed her olés, the Germans didn’t twitch a muscle. Instead they called El Bala over, pressed money into his hand, and pointed to my mother.

  “The Bullet threw the money back in their faces, drew his knife, and shouted in furious Caló, ‘She is no whore some goatfucking German can point at.’

  “That is how the Germans learned that flamenco was not an advertisement for Gypsy prostitutes. One of the men raised his hand to El Bala. Who knew why. Maybe he was going to shake hands. Maybe he was going to reach into his jacket for a gun to kill us all. Whichever, the Bullet’s knife came down and when he pulled it away, the German’s finger drooped like an elephant’s trunk. It would never point again. El Bala had sliced the tendon in one golpe.

  “That was the only night we didn’t make any money. Night after night, El Bala brought the tourists. If we were tired, we danced. If we were sick, we danced. If we were sad, we danced. We learned how to get money from them all. We learned that the English would pay for smiles. The Spanish tourists from the north would pay for scowls. The Americans would shower us with pesetas for footwork at double, triple time, anything that was loud and made the sweat jump from our faces. Anything that looked like a lot of hard work. The Germans hardly paid for anything, but if I could make them laugh by waggling my bottom and pretending to be a pain, there might be a few perras gordas in it for me.

  “For the other girls, our shows quickly became boring. They were always unpinning their skirts before the last note was played. I didn’t understand it. For me all the rest of life on Sacromonte was boring. It was the hours we spent dancing that were exciting. When I danced, I dreamed I was my grandmother, that I was La Leona, queen of the cafés cantantes. I pretended that the tiled floor of the cave was the wooden stage of the Café del Burrero in Sevilla, where the happiest people in the happiest city on the face of the earth were happy all the time. Where there was always enough and more than enough for those with talent. Where a good dancer could rule over the city like a queen if she was talented. And I was. I was talented.”

  With that unequivocal declaration, Doña Carlota stamped to a finale and signaled the rest of us to stop. “Have you all been reading your Lorca?” she asked as we chugged water and wiped sweat from our faces, our necks.

  “Sí, Doña Carlota!” we chimed back.

  “Bueno. Today you will learn Lorca’s bulerías.”

  At the mention of Lorca’s name, Didi edged closer to La Doña. She had become even more enamored of the charismatic poet as she read everything she could get her hands on about his life and, even more important, his death. She loved that Lorca was idolized in his own time, that his flamboyant life and ambiguous sexuality enraged conservatives, that he was martyred by fascists.

  Doña Carlota clapped sharply; our break was over. She continued her story: “One minute, it seemed, our zambra was new and frightening. The next it was all any of us had ever known. I could no longer remember having a life that didn’t revolve around dancing for payos who huffed and puffed behind El Bala, climbing up the paths to Dried Wood’s cave.

  “But it wasn’t one minute. Three snows had fallen on the Sierra Nevada and three had melted since that first night. Three years. For the first time I knew the year because in Dried Wood’s cave there were two miraculous things: electricity and a radio. I never had a lover I loved as ardently as that radio. No sun ever lighted my life as brilliantly as the glow from the tubes of that radio. If I’d ever been alone with it, I would have wrapped my arms around it. The other girls called me La Catedral because the first thing I did when I stepped over the threshold was to rush in and kneel in front of Dried Wood’s radio shaped like a cathedral. It was there, on my knees, that I learned the year was 1934.

  “ ‘What useless information,’ La Burriquita said, when I told her.

  “ ‘Find some music. A nice cuplé,’ the others cried, begging to listen to the syrupy ballads that were so popular. But I shushed them and twisted the dial through spikes of static and a blurt of music that Little Burro immediately identified. ‘Leave it there! That’s La Bella Dorita!’ I pushed on past the famous cupletista chirping about rosebuds and butterflies and love until the dial landed on Radio Union where an announcer in a breathless, urgent voice told us:

  The army under Generalissimo Francisco Franco has suffered heavy casualties in trying to put down the miners’ strike in Asturias. Though severely underarmed, the miners’ skill with dynamite has inflicted a humiliating defeat on the army. In the mountain passes they have erected giant catapults to hurl the dynamite at the soldiers. In the cities, dynamiters creep forward smoking cigars with which they light the sticks grasped in their hands. Casualties have been high. Twelve hundred miners have been killed.

  “ ‘Who cares about some miners in Asturias?’ La Burriquita whined.

  “ ‘You should,’ I told her. ‘If the soldiers can shoot miners, payo miners, what is to stop them from shooting girls, Gypsy girls?”

  “ ‘Go back to La Bella Dorita!’

  “ ‘My father says the miners are comunistas and they want to tu
rn us all into atheists like in Russia where there’s no church.”

  “ ‘Pfft!’ Burriquita spit on the floor. ‘The priests! The nuns! Black crows! My father says we should kill them all. What have they ever done for us?’

  “ ‘No! It’s los ricos that we should kill and take their land.’

  “ ‘Why? Who wants land? Land is just dirt. We already have plenty of dirt.’

  “I put my ear against the rough cloth of the radio and tried to block out the sound of the women slapping and pecking at one another like chickens, but El Bala stuck his head in the door and yelled, ‘They’re coming! These are real aficionados. Señoritos!’ Señorito was a magic word. Some señoritos were nothing more than spoiled playboys who pretended to love flamenco as an excuse to hold juergas, orgies of drinking and whoring. But the real señoritos, true connoisseurs of flamenco, were as rich in knowledge and reverence for el arte as they were in duros. We had heard stories of the real ones paying exorbitant amounts to experience flamenco, real flamenco, flamenco puro.

  “El Bala pointed at my mother, then at me. ‘You two, he heard about you two. He wants the authentic stuff. None of this tourist crap, okay?’

  “ ‘Who is he, this señorito?’“ my mother asked.

  “ ‘Why do you care? How many señoritos do you know?’

  “ ‘I know that this one is coming to see me dance.’

  “Maybe my mother hadn’t noticed that El Bala had also pointed at me.

  “ ‘All right, if you must know... He lifted his ruined lip in a jagged smile, pleased to announce his big catch. ‘It is Federico García Lorca.’

  In Granada, the poet was as famous as his good friend, the bullfighter, Ignacio Mejías. We knew as much about him as we did La Bella Dorita.

  “ ‘That maricón!’ Dried Wood yelled.

  “ ‘So what if he does like boys?’ El Bala shot back. ‘You’re not pretty enough for him anyway. What are you worried about?’

  “ ‘I hear things. Don’t you know what they say about him in the market?’

  “ ‘I don’t pay attention to the gabbling of hens.’

  “ ‘You should. They say his plays are filthy. He writes nothing but filth, this maricón. Worse, though, he speaks against the government, the church. He had to run away to Madrid because he was going to be arrested. No one can believe he came back to Granada. The guardias follow him everywhere. Men with notebooks watch him and write down the names of everyone he speaks to. If you bring him here they will write down our names!’

  “ ‘Buen! Go on then.’ El Bala shooed her away. ‘The others will be happy to take his perras gordas.’

  “No one moved.

  “ ‘Good, then shut up!’

  “We all fell silent and into that silence came the sound of footsteps. We jumped up, certain it was them, los señoritos. Instead my father walked in, followed by his uncle, an ancient guitar player named Antonio. Fear seized my mother at the sight of the two men until El Bala said, “I invited him. Tonight we need a real cantaor: A true singer of cante jondo. Tonight we need El Chino.’

  “My father’s chest swelled, but my mother was furious.

  “ ‘I refuse to dance if he sings,’ she said.

  “Before she could say anything more, though, El Bala yelled, ‘They’re coming!’ and shoved us all into the other room.

  “I pushed La Burriquita away and held a corner of the curtain aside to peek out at the party as they arrived. I knew the instant he stepped in that the man in the white suit was a poet. It wasn’t just the way another man leapt across the threshold to sweep the curtain aside and allow him to enter first. Or the way the five others in the party stood back to give him his choice of seats. No, I knew he was a poet because of his eyes. Only a poet or the Madonna could have eyes so sad and kind and wise. His dark hair was brushed straight back from a high forehead. Eyebrows black as raven’s wings soared above black eyes. A mole nestled beneath his right nostril as if one of the polka dots had escaped from the bow tie around his neck. Everyone knew that polka dots brought good luck. The poet would bring us good luck.

  “Lorca sat down, crossed his legs, and looked around the cave with a half-smile on his lips as if each copper pot, each tile, each lump on the whitewashed cave wall pleased him immensely. He crossed one leg over the other, adjusted the crease of his trousers, twisted the cap off his pen, and wrote in a notebook he plucked from his pocket. While his head was bent, the others in his group caught one another’s eyes and exchanged smiles as if they were sharing a special event. As he was writing, he suddenly turned his head so quickly that he caught me staring at him from behind the curtain. He smiled. Since most adult attention led to a swat or reprimand, I looked around to see if there were someone behind me that the pleasant expression might be intended for. There was no one—he was smiling at me. I smiled back.

  “My father began his temple, the long, drawn-out Ay that rose and fell and rose again as he warmed up his throat. Tío Antonio strummed a rough falseta. He played the old way, entirely with his thumb, the nail thick as an old dog’s. As my father began singing, the poet closed his eyes and nodded his head. His lips moved as if he were saying prayers or having a vision.

  “El Bala ordered Dried Wood to go on. My mother crowded in beside me. As Dried Wood’s feet beat against the floor, Lorca’s eyes flew open. He studied Dried Wood, then turned to the woman beside him. She must have been his sister because she was his twin except with no bow tie and no mole. All Lorca did was arch one of his black eyebrows, and my mother and I both knew we were in trouble, these were not tourists. They knew what they were seeing. They knew what we knew: Dried Wood wasn’t very good.

  “ ‘Ozu,’ my mother cursed under her breath. She stepped out from behind the curtain and began palmas, clapping loudly, trying like a sheepdog to herd a wandering sheep back to the flock. Dried Wood responded with some footwork that was all pointless clacking and grimaces. My mother yelled out Óle! This was always the cue for the tourists to join in with some applause or, if they’d finished their sangrias, a few olés of their own. But Lorca only shook his head, capped his pen, put his notebook into his pocket, and, with a nod to the others, stood up.

  “Seeing Lorca’s disgust, my mother stepped up, her heels drumming furiously, calling out to the guitarist, to the singer with clapping hands and stamping feet for a bulerías. Tío Antonio responded immediately. My father fell silent.

  “Lorca paused while the women gathered their coats. He saw what I saw: that every molecule of my mother’s being was puro, flamenco puro. Without taking his eyes from her, he motioned for the others to sit back down. He watched my mother like a schoolteacher listening to a pupil reciting her lesson. When she set up a tricky contratiempo with her arms, he nodded to indicate that she’d gotten the answer right and murmured, ‘Sí, eso es.’ My mother glanced over at me. It was as if we, she and I, had spent the last two years surrounded by people who could barely hear, who only understood us if we screamed and waved our arms and acted out everything we wanted to say and, suddenly, we had met someone who could hear the faintest whisper.

  “In her exuberance at meeting such an aficionado, my mother forgot herself. She must have imagined she was a girl again, shining in the gaslights on the stage of Café Filarmónico, for she danced with a liveliness I’d rarely seen before. I knew she could never keep up the tempo she was demanding from Tío Antonio. She should have called for my father to sing. But years of dancing for payos, for clods blind to her art, combined with her hatred for my father, erupted in a fever that boiled through my mother’s blood so that she wouldn’t, she couldn’t, stop. Not to rest, not to allow my father to sing, nothing. Her hair, which had been oiled into fat rolls beside her ears, flew apart, swatting her red cheeks with greasy tendrils. Sweat streamed from her face. She sucked in air with wide-eyed gasps. Still she would not stop. Not until the coughing started. She ignored the first hacks, turning them inward into choked spasms. But eventually they exploded and my mother had to stop.


  “Before the poet’s sister could reach for her coat again, my mother, doubled over, had one hand plastered over her mouth, the other one she used to wave me on. She held up four fingers to signal to the guitarist to put his cejilla, his capo, on the fourth fret, and snapped her fingers in pitos loud as the crack of rifle shot to the compás of the style she wanted me to dance, a fandango. But I didn’t want to dance por fandangos, a folk dance for Malagans wearing silly hats with ribbons and clacking away on giant castanets. I wanted to dance what the poet wanted to see and he wanted to see the real thing, flamenco puro. I pushed back the curtain and entered, clapping a different time from the one my mother was snapping.

  “ ‘Keep it on the third,’ I told Tío Antonio.

  “He glanced over at my mother, La Capitana, to see if he should play the soleá por bulerías I was calling for or the fandango she had ordered. But she couldn’t hear anything over the cannonade of her own coughing.

  “I clapped out one compás, ordering soleá por bulerías. By the second compás, Tío had his cejillo back on the third fret and was following me. But I didn’t make my mother’s mistake. Lorca was a true aficionado and true aficionados know that cante comes before all else. I called for my father to sing. He was like me and did not allow his feelings to overtake him, as my mother had allowed hers to cloud her judgment. El Chino did not sing about faithless wives or the stab sharper than a knife of a woman’s bitterness. No, he took the puny packet of his grief and added it to the burden our people had carried for a thousand years. Then it had weight, then it meant something. Then Lorca was enraptured. The poet uncapped his pen and wrote down the verses my father improvised on the spot. Letras with biting words about how los payos might try to enslave gitanos but who, really, were the slaves?

  “Lorca loved the clever twist of his words that always turned gitanos into conquerors, rulers of a world where payo fools lived by the sweat of their brows and only gitanos were clever enough to live by their wits.