by Sarah Bird
“You love him. You love Tomás.” He wasn’t asking; he was stating the fact he saw before him. There was no point in denying it or even in adding that I knew I was stupid. That I’d only met Tomás once. That he didn’t even know my name. That I should be spending my money on therapy, not flamenco classes.
Meatballs pressed my hand to his cheek and whispered a few words of English. “Es hokay. I luf heem too.”
And then we were girlfriends. The relief of finally being able to talk about the person who had occupied the greater part of my thoughts for three years was so great that I laughed along with Guitos as if we were dorm mates in frilly nighties.
La voz was forgotten completely as Meatballs spoke in tones that ranged from wonderstruck awe to lascivious hebephrenia as he cataloged Tomás’s charms in a torrent of fevered Spanish. “Those eyes. Those lips. That—” He cupped his hands to indicate the Montenegro ass. “Por Dios.” He crossed himself and kissed the back of his thumb at the memory. “But that, all that is nothing,” he declared, dismissing Tomás’s beauty. A second later, he called it back with a deep, rumbling laugh. “All right, it is something. All right, it’s a hell of a lot. But you know when I really, truly fell in love with this guy? When he played for me. Ay Santa María de Dios. When he plays... when he plays. Qué monstruo. Un fenómeno. No other tocaor has played like this for me. After singing with him for only a few minutes, I could not believe what I was hearing. We were speaking. I would say something and his response would be wise or witty. Mocking even. So I tested him to see if he was really as good as he seemed. I sang strange offbeats I’d never tried with any other tocaor and, like a compass always pointing to true north, he held the rhythm even as he created a brilliant new síncopa.”
I stretched to remember the word for syncopation as Guitos pressed the tips of his fingers together, then shook the gathered fingers in front of his face as if pleading for words to express Tomás’s gift. “This, all this”—he indicated his own hair, his face, his body—“it was gone. All that is there is”—he pounded his meaty hand into his chest, his heart, his soul—“this. This is what he sees. This is what he plays for. This is what he makes me show. He read my mind. He read my heart. With his guitar, he made me show everything. With Tomás, I could hide nothing. Every night with him I went to confession and the black blood, la sangre negra, poured out. Like no other tocaor—and, mind you, I have sung with the best, the greatest guitarists on earth—but Tomás. Ah, mi Tomasito. There is no player on earth like Tomás. I called him Angelito. Because he was. He was my little angel. He is my little angel.”
“Yes,” I whispered. “I thought I was insane. That I had fallen in love with him because he was a phantom I could never have.”
“I know!” Guitos exploded, the perfect girlfriend. “I thought I had fallen in love with him just to torture myself because he is so hopelessly straight. But no. It is him. Mi angelito. He is air and rain and gold dust and all others are mud. Nada. Nada. Nada. He poisons you for any other man.”
“I know! My best friend always tells me that I am just using him to keep the world away.”
“No! Tomás is the world.”
“Sometimes I think I haven’t wanted to know anything. To keep him the perfect, unattainable dream.”
He shook his great head. “No. When you know him, he is even more out of reach. No one on this earth will have him, because he does not have himself.”
“Why do you say that?”
Guitos slapped both his hands over his mouth. “No. I’ve said too much. He opened his heart to me. To me! The beauty told his secrets to the beast. It is all I will ever have of him. This much I will keep.” He squeezed the enormous fists he made of his hands tightly in front of his heart to symbolize the eternal lock he would keep on Tomás’s secrets, secrets he thought I intended to pry out of him.
“Of course, of course. No, don’t worry. I know nothing about him. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? I’m obsessed with, I love”—it felt so good to say it out loud, that I said it again—“I love a man I met once, three years ago, a man who doesn’t even know my name.” I giggled, giddy with the relief of pulling all my secrets out of the closet. “I am not a mentally healthy person.”
Guitos didn’t laugh. “Mental health? Pffft.” He flicked his fingers, waving away the pathetic American cliché. He leaned in close so that I was engulfed again by the smell he carried from an older world and he whispered in his husky voice, “Embrujados. Bewitched. We have both been bewitched.”
Yes, we had stepped into the same fairy tale and been bewitched. That is why, when he said, “Tell me, tell me about meeting Tomás,” I told him the truth as it had really happened. “I met Tomás on a night when the earth ate the moon. His nails were phosphorescent fairies flitting through the darkness, plucking enchanted sounds from the strings of a guitar. A neon rainbow splashed across his face and I escaped the police by flying out of a window and into his arms.”
The more fantastical my telling, the closer it approached the absolute truth of that night. Guitos nodded as I spoke, leaning closer and closer until the long whiskers of his sideburns stroked my cheek. He was the tocaor now, drawing the truth from me, the cantaor.
“He led me down a street where conquistadors ruled coffee shops and whiskey grew in a garden of green bottles. A secret park appeared in the middle of a sleeping neighborhood. He played falsetas so beautiful that the leaves on the trees turned into hearts and rained down on me. And, on a giant’s swing, we sailed so high that the stars blurred into streaks of silver next to our heads.”
Guitos looked as if he’d been struck. He dropped his head into his hands. His great shoulders heaved and tears ran in rivulets down the tendons of his wrists.
“Guitos, please...” I put my arm around his shoulders. He flinched and shrugged away from my touch. I backed off.
He raised his head and brusquely squeegeed the wetness from his face. “I want to be alone.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have talked about this.”
“What you say or don’t say to me doesn’t matter. What is meant to be, will be.” His tone was cold, dismissive.
“I’ve offended you. I didn’t mean to—”
He shifted to turn away from me. We weren’t best girlfriends anymore, we weren’t friends or even acquaintances of any sort. “As I said, your intentions are irrelevant. May I be left alone? I have a performance to prepare for?”
I muttered more apologies. Guitos didn’t respond. Confused, embarrassed, I stumbled out of the room and found my way back to Popejoy Hall, where Alma Hernandez-Luna tried to control the chaos. I buried my humiliation by throwing myself into preparations for that evening’s concert, the first of five that would be staged over the course of the festival.
Alma was directing four different cuadros, troupes, each one needing its own set of lighting cues, props, acoustics, and costumes. I was dispatched to deliver a guitarist from Malaga to the nearest nail salon for a new set of acrylics. It was a relief to be away from the festival for a while. My encounter with Guitos had left me feeling as if I’d met, and then lost, Tomás all over again.
When I returned, I was grateful to be put to work ironing costumes. As I smoothed over wrinkles in acres of fabric, I watched Alma through a haze of steam as she smoothed over the inflamed egos of a dozen divas. She had to navigate through a minefield of the thousand and one slights that flamenco performers are apt to interpret as walkout-worthy signs of disrespect. Watching the temper tantrums and hissy fits calmed me the way flamenco always calmed me; volcanic emotions were made manifest and released.
The first crack in Alma’s legendary composure came an hour before the curtain was to go up, when she was called away to speak to her star performer, Guitos, on the phone. She returned to the backstage area screaming my name. The usually unflappable Alma was utterly flapped.
With a hiss of steam, I tipped the iron up as she rushed over, shaking her head and muttering “cantaores,” as if the inexplicable e
ccentricities of these mercurial creatures were a personal curse upon her. “Guitos wants you, and only you, to come to the bungalow.”
“Me? Are you sure?”
“Very sure. He was quite emphatic that he wanted you and no one else. Was he drinking when you left?”
“No. He hadn’t touched a drop.” One of the major duties of the flamenco celebrity wrangler was to keep our visitors sober until concert time. After that, all bets were off.
“Well, whatever is wrong with him, he believes you’re the only one who can help. He’s wailing about a pain that only you will understand. I couldn’t follow the whole drama. Just have him here on time and on stage.”
I made the short drive to the guest bungalows and found Guitos’s door ajar. The smell of leather from the saddles stacked beside the bed greeted me as I slipped inside. It blended with the fragrance of sandalwood incense.
“Hello?”
When there was no answer, I followed the sound of chanting into the bedroom. Guitos was kneeling in front of an altar he had assembled on the desk in the corner. Coils of smoke rose from the sandalwood incense burning in front of a photo of a dark-eyed Hindu man with a bindi dotted on his forehead. The mini-bar had been savaged and an Elvis-size assortment of prescription bottles lay scattered across the bed. None of this seemed to have slowed the big man down very much. He rang a silver bell and prayed incoherently to his guru. The only words I could pick out were “Mi Tomasito, mi ángel, mi alma.”
“Guitos?”
He swiveled around and directed his rambling lament to me. Sobs wracking his giant body, he heaved himself up, then crumpled onto the bed. Pill bottles and empty miniatures bounced as his bulk hit the mattress.
I closed the door. Guitos, still sobbing, his head buried in the pillows, patted a spot on the bed and I sat down. After several moments of wailing, he hoisted himself up into a sodden clump, wiped his hand across his wet face, and regained some control.
“This is not what I thought would happen when I came here. I dreamed that I would find the key to Tomás’s heart here. And I have. But I see now that I will never be the one to turn it.” He heaved a giant sigh and composed himself a bit further. “Mi angelito guided me to you. Tomás and I have shared great love in past lives. Of this I am certain—we shall be united again after death, in pitraloka.” He turned to his guru and bowed his head in the direction of the photo. “But for now, in this current incarnation, mi angelito is meant to be with...” He paused and then, with a shuddering sigh, as if the word were his last breath of life said, “... you.”
I couldn’t speak.
“The moment you said you met him on the night that the earth ate the moon, I knew that I was not destined to be with him. Not in this life. You met mi amor on the night when his life cracked in two, the night he soared into the heavens with a virgin paler than the hidden moon into the stars.”
“He told you. About me?”
“You were part of the story. One of the signs. Part of the answer he was searching for.”
“The answer to what?”
“To himself. His life. That night, the night he met you, he learned that he could no longer hide from what he’d suspected for a long time,” He stared at me. The candlelight and smell of leather, his raspy voz afillá, the bluish tinge of his dark skin, they all blended together to evoke the cave on Sacromonte where Doña Carlota had lived and given her life to the Gypsy art, flamenco.
“Gypsies cheat, steal from, and lie to payos. To tell a payo the truth is to betray your people. You are a payo. The palest of the pale of payos. How can I tell you the only secret I would guard with my life, because it is Tomás’s secret?”
“I don’t tell secrets.”
He snorted a bitter laugh. “Who ever admits that they will reveal your secret? Who ever says, ‘Tell me, tell me, please, tell me and I promise I will betray you to the world’? I don’t even know who you are. Why should it be you? Why should I tell you the secret that controls Tomás’s life?”
It was easy to answer in the way he would understand. It was more than easy. All I had to do, for one moment, was to stop reining in my obsession and it ran away with me. “Because I care more about him than I do myself. Because for three years I have devoted my life to becoming who he would fall in love with. Because he is more essential to my happiness than life. Because I am sick with love for Tomás Montenegro and I will die if you do not give me the cure.”
“When you fall in love with un flamenco, you fall in love with his art, with his people. In America you tell each other the lie, ‘Oh, the color of a person’s skin. It doesn’t matter.’ In flamenco, we don’t tell that lie. Blood matters. To be the best, you must have the best blood, the blood of the pharaohs. You must be Gypsy. And don’t say, ‘Oh, what about Paco de Lucía?’ ”
He waved away the name of the world’s most famous flamenco guitarist.
“Pffft. Paco is great. The greatest of the decade. But for payos only. In el flamenco puro, puro, puro, for those who are truly enterao, Paco no dice nada, he says nothing. Do you understand this? Do you understand how even such a one as Paco de Lucía will never be accepted, truly, truly accepted, because he is a payo?”
“Yes, I know. In my classes, I am invisible. I don’t have el arte in my blood. I will never have it. I can study flamenco for the rest of my life and I won’t have it. I don’t care. I study for Tomás. No other reason.”
Guitos nodded, considering. He dropped heavy lids over his eyes, turned from me, and bowed in the direction of his guru’s photo. Several moments passed as he prayed silently. He opened his eyes, said one word, “Sí,” and began to tell me the story I’d fallen into on the night I dropped into Tomás Montenegro’s arms.
“When Tomás appeared on the scene in Madrid seven years ago, speaking his beautiful Spanish with words from the seventeenth century, he was a very young man. He came with a minor reputation. Good enough to get work in the tourist clubs. Word spread quickly, though. First los aficionados went so that they could dismiss this latest pretender and acquire a new object for their finely attenuated mockery.
“But they did not come away laughing and soon Tomás was playing in the best flamenco clubs in the world, El Corral de la Morería, La Torre del Oro, Casa Patas. He was accompanying classes at the greatest flamenco studio of them all, Amor de Dios. He was heralded throughout the flamenco world. At last, a real, a true flamenco from the New World, come back to us like an echo from the conquistadors five centuries ago. An ocean, a continent was between him and the sources of el arte, yet in spite of his isolation, he played with corazón gitano. Alma gitano. Pasión gitano. How could this be? Those of us who’ve given our lives to flamenco puro knew it had to be a lie. That year I, along with Chi Chi, the queen of el baile gitano from Jerez de la Frontera and El Pulgar, the last, true calé, were on the selection committee to pick the best, the purest, the most flamenco of all flamenco artists to perform at the Sevilla Biennale. Everywhere we turned, someone was telling us about this tocaor we had to consider, this Tomás Montenegro.
“Eventually we surrendered. We had to learn who the upstart from the New World was. So, late on a Tuesday, the first day of the flamenco weekend, we arranged to meet this fenómeno. We had already decided that he was a fraud. We intended not only to disqualify him from consideration for the sacred biennale, but to ensure that he would never play again at any respectable club. The heart and soul of our art hung in the balance. For this reason, we set the meeting at Restaurante Sonrisa, a tourist spot where they slam a bowl of gazpacho in front of you and some abomination in a red dress clacks her castanets in the imitation flamenco that Franco foisted on us after the war. The choice of Restaurante Sonrisa was an insult to the pretender and the three of us were quite pleased with our little joke.
“The joke was on us when Tomás appeared and the first words from his mouth as he looked around at the Japanese businessmen and the dancer in a polka-dotted dress were, ‘I know a spot that’s not far from here and not
for guiris.’ Chi Chi, El Pulgar, and I were impressed not just that he knew the Caló word for outsiders, but that he led us to ¡A Jalar!, a dive popular with the Triana crowd, calé from Sevilla—a rough, working-class place, exactly the sort of place where Carmen Amaya herself might have danced barefoot as a child.
“Because I did not want to be recognized in the company of a fraud, I had taken care that night to wear a fedora that covered the top half of my face and a muffler that covered most of the bottom. In this way, I slipped unnoticed into ¡A Jalar!
“ ‘Eh, churumbel!’ the proprietor greeted Tomás, yelling to be heard above the racket. Even if the owner had not called him ‘kid’ in Caló, we, Chi Chi, El Pulgar, and I, would have known the owner was Gypsy by the gold chains glinting against the masses of black Gypsy hair, poking from the top of his lime-green silk shirt. He stared at us suspiciously, mumbled something in Tomás’s ear. He brightened when Tomás whispered something back to him.
“ ‘Ah, you are calé,’ the owner said, grabbing my hairy Gypsy hand in his hairy Gypsy hand. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’ So it was Tomás who had to vouch for us! Us, we three who were there to be his Torquemada at a flamenco Inquisition! I began to regard this nuevo mexicano in a very different light. Of course, he was physically sublime. But since I have always had a weakness in that regard, I ignored his beauty. Then I suddenly saw what was behind the beauty. All at once, the three of us saw it. The dark skin that had been kissed farewell by India a thousand years ago. The hair so black it crackled with blue as if lighted by the moon. The lashes, the lips, the whole enchantment. He could be my cousin if any of my family had possessed such beauty. Here before us was the answer to a prayer we had never dared utter.
