by Sarah Bird
“In the end our Inquisition came down to one question. ‘Who are you?’
“ ‘Soy gitano a contra costaos,’ he answered. Gypsy on four sides.
“In spite of what our eyes were seeing, we had to have more proof. El Pulgar took a guitar off the whitewashed wall. A piece of crap, put there for decoration at the end of a hard life as a cantina guitarra. He tuned it and stuck it in Tomás’s hands. Tomás didn’t protest, didn’t hurl the joke of an instrument back at El Pulgar. He strummed quietly for a few minutes. But soon, ¡A Jalar! had fallen silent. Everyone in the place was straining to hear the falling notes of his magical soleá falseta.
“ ‘Él tiene aire,’ Chi Chi whispered to me. But everyone in that room already knew that he had the air, the thing that cannot be taught.
“ ‘Tiene fuerza en el compás,’ El Pulgar exclaimed.
“But I no longer cared whether he had the right air or was strong in the compás. I ripped away the hat hiding my face and made the only response I could at having found my soul mate. En voz medio, at half voice, I sang.
“Ay
Rompe in oscuridad de in noche
Pero en realidad es nuestra pena
Rompiéndose dentro de nosotros
“They say each morning the dawn breaks
But really it is our own grief
Breaking within us...
“He played and I sang and the crowd went crazy as only a Gypsy crowd can. Men ripped the shirts from their chests, women dug their nails into their faces until they drew blood. The unuttered prayer was answered. El Pulgar called the owner over and bought una caña for every calé in the place. They would have kept us there all night if every string on that old guitar had not broken.
“In the end, the owner had to drag us away to a private room in the back and lock a heavy door on the chaos. There, in that back room, we three sat in stunned silence as Tomás spoke. I will tell you his story as he told it to us.”
Guitos paused to get into character. Drawing himself up, he sang the briefest of temples, a short Ay, to warm la voz. When he next spoke, it was in Tomás’s voice. Not an impersonation, but a channeling of his inflections, his tone so perfect that goose bumps rippled across my arms.
“ ‘I was raised by my great-aunt Doña Carlota Montenegro and her husband Don Ernesto Anaya. They were ancient when they adopted me and of a world where awkward details are never revealed. The details of my birth were awkward. My great-aunt was a dancer born in a cave on Sacromonte. Her mother had been una sensación en las cafés cantantes in the golden days in Sevilla. Her father was one of los cantaores who beat out the very form itself on their forges in Sacromonte. Then came the cursed days of the Civil War. My great-aunt spoke out courageously against the fascists and was marked for death. By the grace of God and a few well-placed admirers, she escaped. Her family was not so lucky. All her immediate relatives, everyone she’d known growing up, were massacred by Franco’s guardia civil.
“ ‘The tragedy killed something in my great-aunt and she forbade anyone to ever speak of it in her presence. All I know is that my mother was a distant relative, daughter of one of the few survivors of my great-aunt’s family. All that is known about my father is that he was Gypsy as well. I was taken from my mother because, as with so many of my people, there were drugs. I was sent to America to avoid this scourge. Later, my great-aunt searched for my mother only to learn that she had died of an overdose shortly after I was taken from her. No trace of my father could be found.’ ”
Guitos shook himself, and, in his own voice, plaintive and insistent, asked, “Can you imagine the impact this history had? You can’t. Not in America where pretending that birth makes no difference and anyone can be anything they choose is your national religion. But to us who know that blood is everything, Tomás’s story was a meteor, an asteroid, smashing into our planet of flamenco. The purists rejoiced. A Gypsy boy raised on the other side of an ocean and he plays like the incarnation of Sabicas? Here, at last, proof of what we had always said: you cannot play flamenco puro, the real, the true flamenco, without Gypsy blood.”
I nodded, astounded again at what an insular and rarefied community Tomás had grown up in. How explosions of a colossal magnitude within it never registered the slightest tick on any Richter scale in the outside world.
“He was the great Gypsy hope, no?” Guitos asked. “He would take the crown back from the payo who had worn it for so long. Tomás would reclaim flamenco guitar from Paco de Lucía. There was no question. Yes, he had técnica as good as any payo but better, far better; he was one of us, he had gitano soul. He played at the biennale. Not a main stage, a small venue, too early for the crowds to have come out. But he was una sensación. If Paco had been there, they would have torn the crown from his head and put it on Tomás’s.
“And then followed the happiest time in my life. Tomás became my accompanist. My cante was never better. Each night I sang of my hopeless love and audiences, never suspecting it was for my tocaor, wept. Sevilla, Madrid, Barcelona. And then north. Ah, the farther north we went, the more they adored us. London, Edinburgh, Copenhagen, Oslo. The more represivo the society, the more they worshipped us. Santa María de Dios! Los japoneses! Demente! Totalmente demente! They could teach us gitanos how to lose control. In Sapporo, security had to disarm a young woman who was stabbing herself in the chest with a knife!
“It was heaven. But I was the one who destroyed it. An excess of love was the culprit. I made love to him with my voice every night on a different stage and every night he left me and made love with his body to one of the women who threw themselves at him.” Guitos beat his chest like a penitent sinner.
“Love finds its own way. Every city, we were interviewed. Again and again, I heard Tomás tell his story. Each time he was asked what he knew about his mother, his father, the silence deepened. In the world outside of Spain, Tomás had only to answer ‘drugs’ and no further questions would be asked. In Spain, however, the only answer Tomás had to give was ‘la Guerra Civil.’ In our country, a veil of secrecy so profound has been drawn around the Civil War that where that fratricidal conflict is concerned, there are few good questions and no good answers. So, we learn from birth simply not to ask.
“But I asked. I asked because gitanos, who won’t say anything to a payo except a lie and rarely even tell one another the truth, will tell me the truth. I asked because the old-timers think I am the great Antonio Mairena come back to earth and will talk to me of matters they wouldn’t discuss with their confessors. I asked because I wanted to give Tomás my heart and he would never take it. All he might ever accept from me was knowledge. I will tell you how this tragedy befell me.
“We were in Frankfurt, where I have a tremendous following. The tour was coming to an end and I was frantic to find a way to keep Tomás in my life. I had almost succeeded in talking him into coming home with me to Málaga to record a new album when Tomás received word from New Mexico that Ernesto Anaya, the man who had raised him as a son, was gravely ill. Tomás talked all the time about Ernesto. Love flowed with every word when he told me about the small village in the north of the state where Ernesto had been born, where Tomás had spent the only happy days of his childhood. On the other hand, Tomás never spoke about his great-aunt. Never. So complete was his silence that it spoke volumes about a pain he would not approach. He broke that silence when his great-aunt, worried most about disturbing the tour, waited until the last possible moment to tell him how sick his great-uncle was. Tomás cursed his great-aunt then for that and for all the secrets she had kept from him.
“He packed to leave immediately and I, desperate for any way to bind him to me, made a promise. I promised to discover the names of his mother and father. I knew the heads of every Gypsy dynasty who had lived or had relatives who had lived on Sacromonte during the time his great-aunt had grown up there. One of them would know. I promised Tomás that, while he was back in New Mexico, I would go to Granada and would find an answer. Tomás was ecstatic. We
were never closer. At Frankfurt Airport, in spite of the shadow that Ernesto’s poor health cast over Tomás, joy at the prospect of learning who his parents were haloed him as we said our good-byes.
“I rushed to Granada, but not the Granada of Lorca, not the Granada Fernando and Isabel took back from the Moors. No, I did not visit the Granada of hidden patios where fountains splash and bougainvillea twines. I went to my friends on Sacromonte and was sent to a retirement home in an immigrant neighborhood on the far edge of Granada. The neighborhood was filled with Tunisians and Algerians in cheap polyester sweaters, Basques who’d come in the sixties and never left, Latin Americans who spent all their money calling home. The retirement home sitting between two highways, around the corner from a brake-manufacturing plant, could have been anywhere. A concrete building with no more charm than a warehouse, it smelled of piss and boiled potatoes. The relatives who’d sent me to that place where they’d packed away their viejos had called ahead. But, even if they hadn’t been warned, the old-timers would have been ready for me. They had read the articles about this newcomer, this fenómeno de Nuevo Mexico who claimed Gypsy blood. They’d seen the photograph of the phenomenon’s great-aunt. It was the one Tomás carried with him only because it was one of the few he had of Don Ernesto, who stood beside his great-aunt, grinning beneath a huge mustache like Zapata. In the photo that the old-timers shoved into my face and stabbed at with tobacco-stained fingers, Doña Carlota is pale as steam. In the articles Tomás explained that his great-aunt’s mother, Delicata, was just as light-skinned. Los viejos talked. Oh, they talked. And I wished I’d never asked.
“I went home, had a tall drink and a long bath, but couldn’t wash away their smells, their sadness, or my deep regret that I had ever met them. When Tomás called that night, I put on a bright voice and said, ‘Lástima. Too bad. They wouldn’t talk. I learned nothing. Gypsies, you know how they are.’
“I will never forget what he answered. ‘Guitos, for a lifetime you have told the truth in song. You have no training telling lies and you do it extraordinarily badly. All that we have, you and I, all that we will ever have, is honesty. Dame la verdad.’
“Give me the truth. That is what we always told each other before we went onstage. That was our pledge that we would never sing or play a note that was false. One note of falseness and the only link I had to mi corazón would be destroyed.
“ ‘Dame la verdad,’ he repeated and I told him what the toothless old men had told me: ‘Your great-aunt never lived in Sacromonte. Yes, there was una bailaora named Delicata married to El Chino, un herrero, but she was dark, dark as a Moor. Muy morena. Dark, dark, dark. She had several daughters. The oldest was a girl named Rosa. All of Rosa’s children were also dark, dark as the darkest Gypsy.’
“Tomás didn’t speak for a long time. I listened to the galaxies of space between us crackle and hum. Then, ‘Guitos, I’m going to disappear for a while. Figure this out. I’ll call you when I can.’ He thanked me and hung up before I could say another word.”
I tried to grasp the heresy Guitos had just spoken. “Doña Carlota never lived on Sacromonte?” Even me, the payo, even I was having trouble turning loose of the one tiny claim to legitimacy in the flamenco world that Doña Carlota had given me: I had been taught by una gitana por cuatro costaos. I couldn’t imagine the implications for Tomás. If what Guitos was saying was true, Tomás would have almost as little right to belong to flamenco’s inner circle as I. But it couldn’t be true. “How could Doña Carlota have fooled everyone for so long?”
Guitos clucked his tongue sympathetically. “Oh, pobrecita, if every flamenco who claimed gitano blood they didn’t have were banished from el arte, you wouldn’t hear a castanet clack or a clave tap from one Semana Santa to the next. They all claim to have a Gypsy grandmother tucked away somewhere. No, Doña Carlota knew she would never be discovered for many reasons.” Guitos ticked them off: “She was on the other side of an ocean. Still, even now, we gitanos are not a people interested in keeping the record straight. We don’t report things to ‘the authorities.’ We keep to ourselves. Besides, most of the ones who would have said anything are dead, no? Nearly a million people died in the Spanish Civil War. Who, aside from the handful of old-timers I spoke to, could say that the ancestors she claimed had not been among those who were killed? Doña Carlota could have claimed she was queen of the Gypsies and no one in Spain would have cared. Who was she? Some broken-down dance teacher on the wrong side of the water. No one cared about her, a nobody. But”—Guitos poked up one, cautionary finger—“but Tomás, Tomás was another story entirely. We Gypsies are only too happy to share failure, but success? Success like that Tomás was on the verge of? That, that, we will fight over.”
Guitos spread his palms and gave a desolate shrug. “When I told him that his great-aunt had never lived on Sacromonte, he wasn’t surprised. He’d suspected for a long time that she was a fraud. But if you are a fish, how do you question water? Not only was her story all he’d ever known of his own, but it was the basis for his own place on the earth. Still, he had suspected. That night there was a lunar eclipse. So after I told him, after I destroyed his world, I watched the moon disappear and hoped it had vanished wherever mi angelito was so we might be together in that one, last thing.”
“And that was the night...”
“He met you.”
“That’s why he’d said it was the worst night of his life.”
Guitos sagged. “Me, I brought that sadness to him. After that, he was changed. He returned a few times but refused to play in front of any audience that might be enterao. No more insiders. He would play with me on tours to Japan, Finland, Australia. Anywhere but Spain or North America. If he began to receive too much attention, too much acclaim, he would disappear. Again and again he returned to the place he considered home, to the little village in northern New Mexico where he’d spent the only happy times of his childhood with his beloved Tío Ernesto.”
“What village is that?”
“He never told me.”
My cell phone rang. I knew it was Alma and quickly turned it off. But the spell had been broken.
Guitos turned from me. “I’ve said too much.” A second later, his phone rang. He glanced at the name, swore, “Caray!” and answered. I could hear Alma cursing Guitos even before he lifted the phone to his ear. My name was mentioned several times as well. We were walking out the door and heading for Popejoy Hall before she’d finished excoriating both of us.
Guitos’s performance that night was a master class on the meaning of the elusive term duende. The spirit moved through him, but every one of us in the hall shivered. Black sounds—that’s how Lorca, quoting the great singer Manuel Torre, defined duende. “Whatever has black sounds has duende.” From the moment he stepped onstage, Guitos filled the hall with black sounds.
His voice was a tortured rumble that contained the essence of Andalusia and embodied flamenco’s heritage from the Moors’ mosques, the Jews’ synagogues, through every country the Gypsies wandered across, right back to the motherland in India. Guitos drew in a deep breath, diving far into himself, then exploded to the surface with his eyes and fists clenched, singing in a full-throated wail. He sang to the stars that had betrayed his dreams and turned his love to dust. Sweat ran down his dark face, pouring into the muffler tied around his neck as he reached even further into himself for notes so laden with despair that not a single person in the hall needed a translator.
As Guitos sat in the blazing light and wept for the love the earth eating the moon had stolen from him, I envied him. I envied that he was a part of Tomás’s world, a true flamenco. I envied every second they’d spent together. Then he opened his fists, his eyes, he found me gazing up at him from the first row, and sang every second of my one night with Tomás. He sang the heavens opening as we swung together into the stars. Then, he sang with such clairvoyant precision the moment when the stars went dark and Tomás left me, a bubble of sorrow rose in my chest. If I were tr
uly una flamenca, if I truly belonged in Tomás’s world, I would have wept openly.
As I knew he would be, Guitos was swept away after the performance, and I didn’t see him again until the end of the festival when I drove him to the airport. This time, the van was filled with other performers. Though I ached for him to give me a few more crumbs of information, Guitos spent the entire ride cajoling every visiting Spaniard into carrying some of his loot back for him so that he wouldn’t have to pay duty on the saddles he intended to sell to Gypsy horse-trader friends.
I hoped to snatch a moment alone with Guitos, but the chattering crowd of muscled dancers and rumpled guitarists fluttered about him like egrets circling a bull. By the time they had all been herded into the airport and were heading toward the International Departures terminal, I had given up. We were within sight of the statue of the caped Indian warrior when Guitos broke from the group and hurried back to me. His muffler was wrapped tightly around his neck and he was whispering again. His Spanish was hushed and rapid. I leaned close and he asked, “You will always keep his secret, no?”
“Sí. Siempre.”
“Guitos!” A thin male dancer waved frantically for the singer to hurry.
“Bueno, I have to leave. One last question: If I send him back to you, will you be ready?”
I nodded without knowing what I was agreeing to. It didn’t matter. Guitos knew I would have agreed to anything.
“Then God have mercy on us both.” He wrapped me in un abrazo fuerte, then left, rushing past the warrior forever reaching out to catch an eagle.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Didi barely came home for most of the summer before our senior year. Mrs. Steinberg had abruptly stopped drinking and, through her Internet connections and extended family back in Manila, had found a new life. She never talked to me about it directly, so I had to gather clues from peeking at her computer screen and eavesdropping on phone conversations. From what I could piece together, she had become an onsite screener of potential husbands for the daughters of friends and relatives back in the Philippines. This involved lots of high-pitched, hectic conversations in which vital information was exchanged; then Catwoman would leave for days at a time. When she returned, more conversations followed that centered on descriptions of cars, houses, quality of lawn care, overall impressions of neighborhoods. If that was all satisfactory, face-to-face interviews with the prospective suitor would be arranged. It seemed that Mrs. Steinberg was the perfect person to investigate exactly how an unknown American man might treat a mail-order bride.
