The Flamenco Academy

by Sarah Bird

  Didi’s growing fame made her a target of controversy in the Flamenco Academy. For the purists, Didi was a travesty, a fraud who couldn’t stay en compás if her life depended on it. Didi came to classes when she wanted. She worked when she wanted. She showed flashes of brilliance between long stretches of thudding incompetence. As Doña Carlota had told me the last time I’d seen her, the great goal of flamenco is to show yourself, and that was always something Didi excelled at. An exhibitionist by nature, she was a transparent conduit of emotion. Joy, rage, sorrow—they flashed through her bold as neon. She always kept up her end of the flamenco conversation. There were heated debates among insiders, though, about whether what she did could even be considered flamenco. There was no argument, however, about the fact that audiences, especially nonflamenco audiences, loved her. For them Didi was a star. For them Didi was their introduction to and embodiment of flamenco. They came to our student performances especially for her. It was a source of extreme irritation that the one standing ovation of the evening would always be for Didi.

  It drove the purists mad to see how thoroughly charisma trumped technique. Watching her beaming in the hot lights, her devotees throwing long-stemmed red roses at her feet, her dark hair dyed even darker, a mantón of slinky black lace tied around her shoulders, no one could deny that Didi was the perfect amalgamation of every Spanish, Gypsy, Jewish flamenco fantasy. She so looked the part. Was it any wonder she hooked the part? Was it any wonder that newspapers around the state, tired of writing the same story about the Flamenco Academy, fastened on this new hybrid, the flamenco poet Ofelia? Of course not. Stories about her appeared in successively larger publications: Daily Lobo, Santa Fe Reporter, Albuquerque Tribune, Albuquerque Journal, Santa Fe New Mexican. AP picked up the last one and it ran all over the country. In short order, Didi became the public face of the Flamenco Academy.

  What bothered the purists most, though, was that Didi really didn’t care about flamenco. She would never form her own little cuadro and steal dancing gigs from the regulars at El Mesón or El Farol in Santa Fe. She had not the tiniest desire to open a studio and teach housewives to dance sevillanas. She didn’t dream of being invited to the Olympics of flamenco, the Sevilla Biennale. No, flamenco was merely set dressing for a much larger show. Didi was simply passing through Flamencolandia on her way to true stardom, collecting souvenirs to lend authenticity to her flamenco poet persona.

  Though her appearances around the Flamenco Academy became increasingly rare as her career blossomed, the one event Didi always made time for was the International Flamenco Festival. The festival was an annual miracle that Alma Hernandez-Luna managed to bring forth each summer at UNM. Over the previous sixteen Junes, every major international, which is to say, Spanish, star had made an appearance.

  Years of catering to rock gods and their entourages made Didi a much sought-after volunteer during the festival. As always, I was her second-in-command. Together, we would pick up the Spanish superstars at the airport, fetch the endless cafés cortos they required, and keep up a steady supply of Ducados, Ace bandages, cold packs, heating pads, Advil, marijuana, speed, and Tampax. In the classes our visitors taught, we would translate, take attendance, and maintain studios at the sweat lodge temperatures the AC-phobic Old Worlders demanded, usually over the protests of their gasping American students.

  When they were not teaching or performing, we drove the Spaniards to the little villages in the northern part of the state so they could be astounded by how much the landscape resembled parts of Andalusia and astonished by hearing the blue-eyed, blond-haired descendants of the conquistadors who’d battled up the Camino Real and fizzled out in the Sangre de Cristos speak a Spanish that hadn’t been uttered back in the Motherland since the seventeenth century. Didi always made the most of her time with our visitors by picking up the latest styles in Spanish divahood and establishing connections to be used at her convenience.

  “Laying groundwork” was what she called it. That is what I had been doing as well in my own private way: laying groundwork. By our junior year I did not believe I was ready yet to actually see Tomás again, but I was ready to begin the search. I’d had a series of work-study jobs on campus to cover expenses. I didn’t need much since I had been awarded several scholarships based on need and was still living in the Lair. But that year, I sought out a job in Zimmerman Library cataloging recent acquisitions. I was ready to make contact with Tomás and needed to have unlimited access and time for my research. Because news about el arte barely made it into print and never onto the Web, I not only had to read actual printed material in a library but had to be in a position where I could order obscure items of possible interest. I immediately insisted that the university subscribe to every flamenco magazine printed as well as acquire any publication with the remotest of flamenco connections.

  Since all the magazines and newsletters were in Spanish, it was lucky I’d learned to read the language. Speaking was another story. I’d gone into my Spanish courses mute in the language and had emerged in much the same voiceless state. But I could understand virtually every word that was spoken to me and was downright excellent with the written word. Didi, on the other hand, who was completely fluent going in, stopped studying the language the first time she received a failing grade because she couldn’t read or write a grammatical word and saw no reason to learn.

  Consequently, I spent a good portion of my time on the job cataloging magazines and books from Spain. After I entered them into Zimmerman’s collection, I would be the first borrower. Anything that didn’t circulate, I would pore over before, after, or during work. After a few months, I knew as much about all the reigning deities of the flamenco world as Mith Myth had known about her gods and goddesses. What I didn’t know anything more about was Tomás Montenegro. To my surprise, his name didn’t appear in any of the flamenco publications. And then, on the day before winter break started, I found it. I found his name.

  It wasn’t in an official flamenco periodical, it was in España Hoy, Spain’s answer to People. It featured a long article about Juan Diego Amaya, a distant relative of the legendary Carmen, and the biggest singing star of the past decade. Like all good Gypsies, Juan Diego went by a nickname, Albóndigas, Meatballs, shortened into the affectionate Guitos, in honor of the meatballs the famous singer had loved as a chubby child and continued to consume right into a corpulent adulthood. That the nickname was also a naughty reference to the famously homosexual singer’s manhood was an added bonus. Guitos had been tapped to succeed the greatest flamenco star of the modern age, Camarón de la Isla, a Gypsy singer with an affection for heroin that some say, ultimately, proved fatal. His true fans dispute the claim, maintaining that their idol died of lung cancer. Tobacco or heroin, it all came down to the same thing: flamenco offered its stars a lot of ways to go. Meatballs seemed to be choosing the fork. He was the Pavarotti of the flamenco world in both girth and talent.

  I already knew Guitos’s work since it was a point of honor to idolize singers among those of us who considered ourselves hardcore flamencos. If you wanted to enter the sacred state of insider status, to be enterao, el cante was essential. We had learned from Doña Carlota that flamenco singing is not pretty, it’s not melodic, it’s not anything that Americans like to listen to, but it is the heart of flamenco puro. Dancing, guitar, percussion, it all starts with cante. In the real thing, dancers dance to inspire the singer, players play to accompany the singer.

  I skimmed the article about Guitos hurriedly. It was near quitting time and I was anxious to clock out. I had a rare date to meet Didi and her latest conquest, Belinda Díaz-Reyes, for dinner. Didi no longer cared in the slightest what a person’s sex was—her basis for selecting romantic partners was far more elemental: what they could do for “Ofelia.” Didi had taken to speaking of herself in the third person as if Ofelia were a worthy charity she and everyone in her world were selflessly devoting themselves to. It seemed to work. Belinda was Chile’s most famous poet, teaching for a sem
ester at UNM. Poor Belinda had seen Didi perform and fallen madly in love. She was currently devoting herself to getting Didi published by the best press in Latin America. “It’ll open up a whole new market for Ofelia,” Didi had explained to me.

  I was barely paying attention to the lengthy article, in which Guitos attributed his success to a Hindu swami he followed then swore he would never get hooked on the heroin that had destroyed the lives of so many of “his people,” when my heart stopped. Before the letters even had a chance to settle into TOMÁS MONTENEGRO, my pulse was accelerating wildly. I snatched up the magazine and read.

  When the singer was asked who his favorite guitarist is, Guitos answered in the voice roughened by life and lost love that his fans love so dearly. “I have been fortunate to be allowed to perform with the greatest talents the art has to offer. But at this moment, the guitarist I most admire is a young man from New Mexico, Tomás Montenegro. Though raised in New Mexico, Montenegro is Gypsy on all four sides. He has the blood of the pharaohs in his veins and you can hear it in every note he plays. I will never perform with another tocaor.”

  This was a gift from heaven. All I had to do was make use of it while my courage still held. I stuffed the magazine into my waistband, sneaked it out of the library, and rushed over to the Flamenco Academy. Alma was just coming out of class. Sweat plastered her dark ringlets into curlicues around her flushed face. I stuck the magazine, open to the article about Guitos, into her hands. “We should get this singer for the festival.” It was perfect. I had asked for Tomás without ever saying his name.

  Months of transatlantic phone calls followed as Alma worked her way through the rings of agents and assistants surrounding the star, most of whom were, in the grand Gypsy tradition, members of the great singer’s extended family. Also in the grand Gypsy tradition, messages were never delivered, calls never returned. Alma threatened several times to give up, that this prima donna was simply more work than he could possibly be worth. But I would always beg her to make just one more attempt.

  “Rae, I didn’t know you had such afición,” she said as I pled with her to keep trying.

  Afición was an all-purpose term that expressed whether someone had the flamenco fire burning within them or not. Doña Carlota’s typecasting had stuck: Didi was fire and I was ice. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” I answered. “I’m a ruka tan caliente.”

  Alma laughed at me calling myself a “hot babe.” But she dialed Guitos again.

  A month later, just as the first winds of spring were starting to blow dust in all the way from Tuba City, Alma gave me a final list of that year’s lineup for the Flamenco Festival. The biggest name on the bill was Guitos. I searched for his name. It wasn’t on the list.

  “What about Guitos’s accompanist?” I asked, tamping dawn my mounting panic.

  Alma was disappointed, annoyed. “What? Rae, I killed myself to get your guy. Now all you can ask about is his tocaor?”

  I tried again. “You got him! Alma, that is amazing!” As I thanked Alma, I had to admit that I was relieved Tomás wasn’t coming. I still needed more information and I finally had a decent source. There is no closer relationship than that between un cantaor and his favorite tocaor. If I was ever going to learn enough about Tomás to be a part of his world, Guitos would be the one to teach me.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  By the time the festival rolled around that summer, Didi was on the road, touring with a national troupe of slam poets. Meanwhile, I had pulled all the right strings so that I got the assignment to pick up Guitos at the airport even though Meatballs had specifically requested that he be met by “a young man, handsome and charming.”

  I arrived at the Sunport holding a sign that read: BIENVENIDO AL FAMOSO GUITOS!!! SUPER STAR Y REY SUPREMO DE LOS CANTAORES!!! Before she left, Didi had helped me make the sign welcoming the Famous Meatballs, Super Star and Supreme King of Singers. It manifested not just Didi’s all-around genius for sucking up to the right people, but was also designed to deflect Meatballs’s pique when he discovered he was not being met by the “joven, guapo y encantando” he had specifically requested. I was glad Didi wasn’t around. Meatballs was my first live connection to Tomás and I wanted to be alone with him. I clutched a huge bouquet of red roses, the basic unit of currency in the economy of flamenco adulation, as I waited for the singer to emerge.

  Far down the airport great hall a statue of an Indian warrior, his cape unfurling behind him, reaching out to catch an eagle, took flight above the tangle of passengers. Remembering the many past missions at the Sunport when we’d waited beneath the outstretched warrior to ambush sleep-dazed rock stars, I grew nostalgic and wished Didi were with me.

  Meatballs was easy to spot. He appeared wearing an overcoat and a muffler. Among the tourists in their pastel cottons and spongy white tennis shoes, he looked like a bear coming out of hibernation. He had a bear-shaped body that sloped down from narrow shoulders and expanded to the great tub of his gut below with an immense, bear-size head above. His hair, though, done in a traditional old-school Gypsy style, was all Wolf Man. Thick, coarse, and black, it swept straight back from a hairline that started barely more than an inch above his thick, coarse, black eyebrows and involved muttonchops that all but covered his ears.

  Even though the air-conditioning in the terminal was barely keeping the heat below body temperature, Meatballs acted as if he had been caught in a polar blast, tightening the muffler around his famous throat and buttoning up his overcoat. He saw my sign and glanced around for the young male escort he’d requested. When it became obvious that I was the entire welcoming committee, the singer graciously threw his arms open, lumbered over, and wrapped me in a damp embrace that smelled of Spanish hair pomade and old overcoat. Carried within the folds of that voluminous overcoat, wrapped into the threads of the muffler wound around his neck, embedded in his coarse, black hair, his dark, blue-sheened skin, coursing through his blood were the compass points of the Gypsy world. Tomás’s world. The world of flamenco. He would be my guide. I embraced him back.

  “Bienvenido a Nuevo Mexico!” I delivered the welcome I’d rehearsed. Today, I had no choice; I had to move from a reader and a writer of Spanish to a speaker.

  The first words out of his mouth were, “Mi compinche Tomás dijo.” From there on it was a list of all the places that “my buddy Tomás said” the singer had to visit while he was in New Mexico. His buddy Tomás said that he had to eat at Sadie’s; ride the tram up the mountain; soak in the hot springs in the Jemez Mountains; eat some of Roque García’s carnitas on the plaza in Santa Fe; take the High Road to Taos. The recommendations cascaded forth, all delivered in a hoarse whisper that made me recall what Doña Carlota had told us about la voz afillá, the raspy, genuine Gypsy voice of her blacksmith father singing in a cave in Granada: “La voz afillá is the sound a man makes when the world tries to choke him to death at birth and he sings anyway. That is the true Gypsy voice.”

  After we loaded Meatballs’s five large suitcases in the university van, he asked me, “Happy Hocker Pawn Shop? Tú le conoces?”

  I told him I was familiar with the Happy Hocker. The pawn shop was a favorite with our Gypsy visitors who were always either buying or selling gold.

  As I got behind the wheel of the van I rehearsed the questions that would subtly lead to Tomás. Just as I was about to speak, Guitos announced that he wasn’t going to talk anymore. Touching his throat, he explained he had to save “la voz.” At the shop, though, he didn’t bother saving his voice as he used an array of haggling techniques that combined equal parts charm, intimidation, flattery, lies, and threats to acquire a dozen saddles, then paid for them with a wad of cash that would have choked the horses that all the saddles were intended for.

  Like all the visiting luminaries, Guitos was staying at the Sculpture Garden Bungalows. Built by the university on the edge of its golf course, the cottages were sprinkled amid a collection of sculptures constructed from old farm machinery spread acro
ss the grounds. I parked in front of the cabin that housed the office and a young man appeared with a luggage cart. Guitos peeled twenties off his wad and stuffed them into the fellow’s pocket as he loaded up as many of the saddles as he could, then led us off to Guitos’s bungalow. We passed fifteen-foot-high grasshoppers and some tree-size nail clippers before we reached our destination. A pair of eight-foot-high stone angels guarded the gate in front of the bungalow.

  “Muchísimas gracias.” Guitos shook my hand and turned his attention toward piloting the cart into his bungalow.

  The mission was ending before it had even begun. I had learned nothing. The wall of renown that usually encased the famous singer was sealing him off in front of my eyes. From that moment forward, Guitos would be caught up in the festival, surrounded by fans, handlers, peppered with demands. I would have no further access and I had not spoken one word to him about Tomás. What I had done was confirm every accusation Didi had ever implied or hurled at me. If I let him step away, she would be right: all I wanted was the safety of a fantasy.

  “Señor, perdóneme.” I had to say it twice before he stopped and turned back to me with a surprised expression on his face, almost as if he were startled that I’d continued to exist once he’d withdrawn his attention.

  I rushed forward and spoke. For the first time, my brain unloosed its hold on my tongue and Spanish, unrehearsed, ungrammatical Spanish as simple as the baby I was in that language, poured forth. “Tomás? Tomás Montenegro? Tú le conoces?” Forgetting about formal forms of address, I blundered ahead, asking if he knew Tomás.

  That was all I needed to say. Singers, cantaores, the great ones, along with their idiosyncrasies and egomania, have a gift for divining emotion. They witch it like a dowser hunting water. Instead of a green bough, though, they hold their voice over listeners until it trembles and twitches at the deepest pools hidden in your most secret heart. Without ever hearing Meatballs sing a note, I knew he was a great singer because after listening to me say those few words, he waved the cart handler away, took my hand, and guided me into the bungalow. It was a study in good taste, New Mexico–style. A Seven Hills rug hung on the wall, a black San Ildefonso pot occupied the place of honor between two kachinas, a basket of fragrant piñon sat beside a horno-shaped fireplace in the corner. Guitos beckoned for me to sit beside him on the Carpintero-style bench with Zias carved into its back. When I was seated, he retook my hand and pronounced the verdict: “Tú le amas. Tú le amas a Tomás.”