by Sarah Bird
“Una copita?” he asked me, tipping his thumb and pinkie up. He pulled green bottles of Dos Equis lager for us out of the refrigerator. “You like posole?”
“With red chile?”
“Claro. I’m going to make the best posole for you that you’ve ever tasted. Mi tío Ernesto taught me how.” He’d already soaked the dried hominy and put the fat kernels of corn on to boil in a cast-iron pot, adding garlic, Mexican oregano, onion, green chiles; then he browned a cut of beef I didn’t recognize.
“You don’t use pork shoulder?” I asked, showing off what I’d learned from Alejandro, who had told me that pork shoulder was essential for good posole.
“A lot of people do. I asked Tío Ernesto once why he didn’t. He didn’t have a reason, just that they always used beef in his village and it was always good. So why change?” Tomás asked, showing me how to pour boiling water to soften dried red chiles, then scrape pulp from the leathery skins to make red chile.
The history of New Mexico, of Spaniards in the New World, went into the stew of dried hominy, chiles, and meat. Certainly, Tomás’s history was there as he performed each step of the preparation with the devotion of an acolyte. Still, as he chopped an onion, I realized that this was the first human moment I’d had with him, the first moment with Tomás that wasn’t part of a fairy tale. That he was a real human and that we were in the same room, breathing the same air.
While the posole simmered, Tomás began my true flamenco education. In my years at the Flamenco Academy, I’d studied a complicated equation, but as Tomás played, he showed me that I had only solved half of the problem. The equation had to be balanced with a guitarist and a singer before it could be proved. I thought I knew how to work with a guitarist. I didn’t. I’d learned a basic vocabulary at the academy. That evening, Tomás began teaching me how to combine the simple words and phrases I knew into eloquent passages that would express what he wanted expressed about his playing. I had had my last yo soy moment during the audition. Tomás was not just the star, the featured performer; he was the entire reason for my being onstage. I was his interpreter. My job was to translate from the ear to the eye.
It was midnight before he put his guitar down and we fell upon the posole, devouring it with thick tortillas dripping with butter, washing it all down with Dos Equis lager. Tiny cups of the espresso Tomás brewed followed, so that we could stay up even later. It was near dawn before we went to bed and much later before we went to sleep.
That period before the first tour was a space out of time. Our hours in the house by the river were measured out in piñon fires. He played and I danced. I danced harder than I ever had before. As harsh as the great-aunt had been, the great-nephew was twice as tough. My life took shape around the spaces I occupied while dancing or making love with Tomás. Within both those areas, I found equal parts ecstasy and terror. These elements created a compound as unstable as nitroglycerin. I hardly dared breathe, fearing it would blow up, that he would choose someone else. I had been picked, but I never stopped auditioning.
Then a fax machine spit out a cloud of itineraries that floated onto the floor. Tomás picked up the sheets of paper from the promoter and began packing for the tour that would establish him in the United States. We left the house on the river where I had learned to translate into motion every note Tomás plucked. Walking toward the airport, dragging bags behind us like obedient dogs on leashes, Tomás and I fell out of step. Going on the road required him to put on psychic armor and as he strode ahead of me, it locked into place. We passed beneath the caped warrior reaching for the eagle and, for a moment, I wished Didi had been there to say good-bye.
Our first stop was Tulsa, Oklahoma. We played a medium-size hall at the university. That night, I understood what Tomás had trained me for. His was the name that caused people to open their wallets and pull out forty, fifty, a hundred dollars for a ticket. His was the face on the poster. The pressure was on him. My job was simply to provide a little movement, a change of pace. I was his foil. My paleness accentuated Tomás’s dark ethnicity. My understated dancing never stole the spotlight from his passionate playing. My white-bread American background never upstaged his pedigree as the Gypsy ward of a flamenco legend, gitano a cuatro costaos. The last year my family had lived in Houdek, Daddy brought home a novelty Christmas gift, a plastic flower in a pot, wired with fiber optics that would light up to music, flashing different colors for every tune that was played. I was that flower in a pot. That was the bargain I’d made, and I did everything in my power to live up to it.
For one month we did nothing but perform, party, make love, and travel to the next gig, where it all started again. In spite of being in a different city almost every day, a surprising sameness overtook our lives. In each new venue, we’d be picked up at the airport by someone I came to think of as the Guitar Nerd. The Guitar Nerd, holding up Tomás’s CD, met us as we stepped off the plane. He was frequently a college professor, often accompanied by his prize student.
All the Guitar Nerds were driven to prove themselves to Tomás. After a few warm-up compliments in which they’d proclaim Tomás to be the next Paco de Lucía or, if they were really reaching, far better than Paco, they’d work in references to their own flamenco backgrounds. The older ones would mention their time in “Moron” with “Diego.” The younger ones would ask nerdophile questions about nail filing: “Always in the same direction!” Or the merits of Hannanbach bass strings mixed with La Bella trebles over, say, just going with Luthier Concert Silvers on all six. To really prove themselves as initiates in the flamenco world, they would casually pass Tomás a joint.
After the performance, there would be a reception given by the head of the music department or the guitar society or whatever group had sponsored our visit. We’d sip Spanish red and eat olives and almonds; sometimes the faculty wife would attempt gazpacho or get her countries mixed up entirely and do taquitos.
Then the magic word, juerga, would pass through the group. If there were enough initiates, the real party would start right there. If not, the aficionados would slip away to adjourn at a bar or someone’s ratty apartment. There the focus would be on the true juerga’s nearly sacramental use of controlled substances. In short, everyone would get utterly baked. That was when I would have to be my most vigilant, for the flamenco minxes truly swarmed at juergas. Fortunately, I’d studied with the master and knew every trick in the groupie playbook.
We’d all take a brief break from the party for that evening’s performance, where Tomás would astonish the locals by playing with both passion and precision no matter how wasted he’d been only moments before stepping onstage. I’d provide a bit of color and motion. Then, the instant we took our last bows, we would be swept back into the bacchanal we’d just left. The party would typically go on all night and not end until whoever risked being mocked as anal-retentive for wearing a watch would yell out that our flight was leaving in an hour. Then there would be a mad scramble to the airport and, with many abrazos and besos, we’d be poured onto the plane where Tomás would promptly pass out.
In each city there would be an interview. It might be on the local NPR station, or the arts editor from the local paper would meet us in a coffee shop. The interviewer would have already read all the clips about Tomás, the stories that always mentioned the phrase gitano per cuatro costaos to explain that his birth mother and father back in Spain were both pure Gypsy. He would already know that Doña Carlota, a famous flamenco dancer and herself gitana par cuatro costaos, had been asked by the doomed addict mother, her great-niece back in Spain, to adopt the child because the family knew he would be brought up in the old Gypsy way.
The interviewers asked Tomás for refinements on the theme of authenticity. Did he feel he would be able to play flamenco puro the way he did if he hadn’t been brought up in the tradition? If he didn’t have Gypsy blood in his veins? They asked how his great-aunt was doing. Was she still living in Santa Fe? Did he see her often? After each successive interview, To
más grew quieter and more distant. I knew why. I knew his secret, but I had already used it, used it to become an ally in his deception. Bit by bit, though, rather than being an ally, I became the emblem of his deception, a pretender slipping into camp under the protection of a powerful insider who was herself a fraud. His detachment grew until I came to live for the moments when I was onstage with him, dancing, being the flower in the pot that only his guitar could bring to life. Only then was he really with me.
The tour had been arranged in a circle. The top of the circle, the halfway point, was Madison, Wisconsin, where black ice covered the streets and Tomás had to loosen the strings on his guitars so the cold that tightened them wouldn’t harm the fretboards. When we reached the bottom of the loop, the southernmost and last stop of the tour, we stepped off a plane in Austin, Texas, into heat so tropically humid that Tomás filled his cases with sachets of drying agents. The first thing we were shown in Austin was the site of America’s first mass murder, a tower on the university campus where Charles Whitman had killed seventeen people including himself. The second thing was Barton Springs. Coming from the desert, the sight of a lagoon, a minor inland sea, cutting cold and clean through the center of a city, was the most improbable extravagance I could imagine. I had to possess this luxury, to have such opulence in my life.
That night, we played to a full house at the Hogg Auditorium on the university campus. After the show, a local aficionado dragged us to a tapas bar owned by a Madrileño who went crazy for Tomás’s playing and offered to let him play for as many nights as he wanted in exchange for a percentage of the bar. There was no room in the small club for a dancer. I could stay or go home to Albuquerque. I chose to stay and have a vacation from flamenco. I never went with Tomás to the club, never met anyone from the local flamenco scene.
We rented an apartment in Travis Heights, a leafy neighborhood dotted with birdhouses on tall poles that purple martins swooped around, eating mosquitoes. I bought a jade green tank suit and an old robin’s egg blue Schwinn and every day, as Tomás slept off the night before or practiced for the night to come, I rode to Barton Springs. My route cut through the campus of the Texas School for the Deaf.
I would sweat on the ride over, salty drops trailing down to my elbows, then plunge into the hypothermic waters of the chilly springs and stay until the sky was dark and the pool darker. Until the only thing that could warm me up was Tomás’s body. At first, he loved my coming home to him, still chilly from the polar waters, curlicues of wet hair dripping water onto my shoulders. But as the summer wore on, the heat bludgeoned us. He took to leaving the apartment earlier and earlier and staying out later and later. Of course, he was having an affair. Maybe several. It was not my place to ask. I was in his country on forged papers and could be asked to leave at any time. My only toehold, what helped me hang on, was knowing Tomás’s secret, knowing that his documents were falsified as well.
The last time I rode to Barton Springs, I was so sunk in gloom that I was halfway around the playing field before I sensed an entirely soundless game of soccer being played beside me. The spectacle of teams of young men screaming silently at one another in sign language mesmerized me to such a degree that I failed to notice a gaping pothole in the road ahead. I hit it, sailed over the handlebars, and skidded to a landing that flayed the inside of my arms.
The soccer team surrounded me, speaking in voices filled with complex harmonics, bird shrieks, and mechanical sounds. The coach and the rest of the team packed me and the battered Schwinn into a pickup and drove me home.
The windows of the little house were open and as I approached with my silent crew I could hear Tomás talking on the phone. All the heat that had cooled between us was there with whomever he was speaking to. His Spanish was too rushed, too animated for me to understand, but his excitement was easy to translate. I waved good-bye to my rescuers and, cradling my arm, opened the door. The instant he saw me, Tomás switched to English, pretending to be bored as he said, “Okay, well, I gotta go.”
Then he noticed my arm and rushed me into the bathroom. He washed the wound, patted on ointment, and bandaged it up. But the cut needed to be scrubbed to remove all the bits of gravel embedded in my flesh. Tomás couldn’t bear to hurt me and I couldn’t summon up the courage to clean the scrape myself. So, eventually, the scrape healed over the tiny specks of gravel that hadn’t been cleaned away and they left gray smudges that grew into the new skin like shadows beneath the surface. It didn’t matter; the only time anyone saw the underside of my arms was when I danced, and in flamenco, it was good to have shadows to reveal.
Chapter Thirty-three
We went home to the house on the river. Tomás stopped playing anything but cante jondo. His toque was drenched with loneliness, regret, abandonment, and betrayal. I assumed that the last, the betrayal, was his confession to me and I fell into a state of panicked rage. We talked about this in the only way we had ever talked about anything, through flamenco. Since we exchanged so few words, his every gesture took on heightened meaning. The entire time I’d known him, Tomás had always held his guitar the way the old-timers had, with the guitar resting on his right leg, pointing upward on a diagonal that allowed the left hand easy access to the fretboard. Around this time he adopted an even more torturous position that made the fretboard almost invisible, with his right leg crossed over the left, guitar hugged into the hip and tilted away from his body. He looked like Picasso’s Old Guitarist draped around the guitar, his left hand crooked painfully into a position that strained the muscles and made the nerves go dead. He complained about the pain, the numbness. Then he would go back to practicing with his instrument tilted even farther away.
One morning, I stepped out onto the porch and was surprised to discover that somehow the season had changed from late summer to winter with no fall intervening. The Sandias had turned a steely blue and a light dusting of snow crowned them. Tomás’s booker had organized another tour: San Diego, Phoenix, Chicago, Montreal. He had a big following in Montreal. All solo engagements. There was no mention of my going with him.
If there was a gap long enough between gigs, he flew home. What survived of our relationship existed in those sputtering installments. On the nights before he left again, I tried to inoculate him against other women. That winter, it always started with my pulling him close in the darkness, yanking his sweater off over his head so that in the dry air, static electricity crackled and flared and an aurora borealis flashed across his back, his arms. His hair would rise above his head, an unearthly frame for his ruinous beauty, the beauty that was both animating and obliterating my life. We made love in panicky, desperate sessions. I put up NO TRESPASSING signs on him with necklaces of hickeys and let him flay my neck, my cheeks, my breasts with his beard. We ground ourselves into each other, brutal at some moments, then tender. In the only arena I had left, I was competitive in bed. I intended that each swivel of my hips, each touch, each syncopation be better than that of any of the other women I knew he would sleep with. I gauged each erection, calculating whether another woman could inspire one harder, more enduring. His orgasms were how I kept score. Were the convulsions of passion strong enough to ward off interlopers? I clung to the promises made by the wet slap of our bodies.
I inhaled his odor, the smell of our animal selves, the fragrance we made together. Before he’d even left, the scent made me nostalgic for us. I kissed the furrows of his ribs, his flat stomach, my tongue running over the small hairs, letting my own hair tickle him, and moving downward toward the place where the smell was strongest.
Near dawn, I would creep out of bed and write long letters, inventories of desire cataloging everything we’d done, everything I still hoped to do. I packed these missives into his suitcase. I spent a fortune express-mailing them to hotels, concert halls, whatever address I had, wherever they would reach him before another woman did.
At dawn, I would drive him to the Sunport. We passed the bandage factory as the sky just started to turn pink wit
h early morning light and we gazed upon the woman painted on the side of the building, raising her arms in a flamenco pose that came to look more and more like pleading.
Denial and fantasy. Longing and deprivation. Like a cactus that could survive on little more than the moisture in the air, I was made for the arid emptiness of the long-distance relationship. After years of sustaining a one-sided relationship, I was ideally adapted to subsist on Arrivals and Departures. I could live on airport moments alone. At the Departures gate, after he pressed fervid last-minute erections against me, I would will myself into hibernation until the next arrival. Then, as Tomás sauntered in carrying the Santos Hernandez guitar he would never dream of abandoning to the faulty attention of baggage handlers, my life would stutter and start up again. I didn’t question this contract since I’d written it myself. My consolation was that I was the one he came home to. Of the five hundred, the sultan had chosen me to wait in his chamber. He would leave, would visit others, but I had been installed in his personal quarters. I waited for him in a house by the river that wasn’t mine and wasn’t his, dancing to his CDs, waiting for him to return.
Each time he came back, his dark mood would have turned darker. He played nothing but soleares, the Gypsies’ songs of desolation and exile. Because I knew the code so well, I could translate the rhythms he played. I knew the songs of suppression, of a spirit yearning to be free. I knew that he believed his duende, his crazed flamenco passion, was suffocating. I assumed that he believed the blanket of domesticity I had enshrouded him in was the villain. I finally found the courage to ask if he wanted me to leave.
All he said was, “I have to show you something.” We drove to the Rosario Cemetery in Santa Fe and he led me to the Anaya family plot. Though I couldn’t have said where it had gone, a year had disappeared since the audition. The weather was as cold and gray as it had been on the day when Tomás had entered and Didi had exited my life. A black wrought-iron fence and thick hedges of lilac bushes encircled the plot, securing the rest of seven generations of Anayas. I spotted headstones with dates on them that reached back three centuries. Though the branches of the tall lilac bushes were bare and snow mounded over their roots, I could imagine that stepping inside the lilac maze when they were green and blooming would have been like entering a seraglio, a prison where scent alone could hold you captive.
