The Flamenco Academy

by Sarah Bird

  The front door was massive, made of dark wood and held together with black studs. I knocked and had ample time to study the figure of Saint James, patron saint of Spain, lance in hand atop a rearing stallion, guarding the house from his place tucked inside a nicho in the thick adobe wall. I was leaning in close to read what was painted on the tile behind the saint: SANTIAGO SEA CON NOSOTROS, Saint James be with us, when the door opened.

  I recognized the elderly family retainer who had driven Doña Carlota. He found me examining the saint. He smiled, displaying a full set of very white teeth. In spite of the threadbare work khakis held up by suspenders and an old olive sweater frayed at the cuffs, the old man seemed as distinguished as he had when I’d caught a glimpse of him dressed in a suit and tie. He gave the saint a fond caress, then stuck his hand out to me and introduced himself. “Teófilo.” His hand was warm, the palm rough with calluses. “Pásele, pásele.” He waved me into the house.

  I followed him down a dark hallway into a dark living room and took a seat on a mahogany chair big as throne. “I’ll tell La Doña you’re here.” He disappeared into the back of the house. Masses of velvet red roses in various stages of decay were bunched in vases throughout the room. Their cloying aroma combined with the scent of piñon from decades of fires to create a fragrance that defined flamenco in New Mexico. Retablos, máscaras, bultos, santos, and every other conceivable piece of art that could have been lifted from a church in northern New Mexico gave the room the feel of a museum. Then I noticed the contents of the shelves lining the large room on three sides and saw that the true focus of enshrinement was Tomás.

  Every moment of his young life in flamenco was documented. Handsome professional photos of him lined the shelves. The photos were all framed, all in black and white, and in every single one of them, he held a guitar. There was not one photo of a grin with front teeth missing, not one in a Cub Scout uniform. No pictures of friends, classmates, teachers. No First Communion. No mortarboard. There weren’t even any photos of Doña Carlota or her husband, Ernesto, with Tomás. The only other thing with him in any of the photos was a guitar. From a solemn boy with a guitar, he grew, photo by photo, into a solemn young man with a guitar. The last one in the chronology was a photo that depicted Tomás in his mid-twenties, the age when I met him, the age when he had walked out of Doña Carlota’s life.

  “She’s not feeling up to coming out.” I turned around. Teófilo was gesturing toward the back of the house. “You mind going back?” His voice was pleasant. I followed him down the dark hallway to a door at the end. He opened it and stepped aside as I entered. Doña Carlota’s bedroom was something out of a Gustav Klimt painting, with dozens of photos in glittering gilt frames, acres of ornate fabric covering every inch, and her, pale, emaciated yet made up like Sarah Bernhardt about to take the stage. Resting on a chaise longue, her feet propped up with a dozen pillows arranged just so, Doña Carlota wore a quilted pink robe, streaked with dribbles of orange and purple medicine. She seemed old and frail, a sugar sculpture of a human that would dissolve in a light shower. The real shock, however, were her feet, if the gnarled stumps at the ends of her legs could even be called feet. They were as misshapen as I imagine the bound feet of Chinese women might have been. The toes were welded into one striated claw gone violet from lack of circulation.

  “La Metrónoma.” She held her hand up, and I didn’t know whether to shake it or kiss it. She decided for me by grabbing the hand I extended and drawing me to her so that I could kiss her powdered cheek. Up close, I saw that her scalp was permanently tattooed blue from decades of dying her hair jet black and that she was painted not like Sarah Bernhardt, but like herself. Like the silent-movie-vamp self she had been half a century ago when the portrait that greeted everyone who entered the Flamenco Academy had been created.

  “Did you meet my brother-in-law?” she asked.

  Teófilo grinned.

  “Yes, we met at the door.” Brother-in-law? The brother of Ernesto, the man Tomás considered his father? I thought of Teófilo in the faculty parking lot behind the Flamenco Academy, opening the door of the old Buick. Her sitting in back, him in front like a chauffeur.

  “Teófilo, could you bring me...” She pointed to a bottle of pills next to the bed and he fetched it.

  “Is the pain bad?” he asked her in Spanish, shaking several capsules onto his callused palm.

  She answered in Spanish. Her Castilian, all the vowels clacking as crisply as a good break in pool, was another language compared to Teófilo’s softly lyrical New Mexican version. I recognized the pills. Daddy had taken them toward the end when the pain had become unbearable. One had always been enough to knock him out. She swallowed three.

  “I’m gonna take off now,” Teófilo said. “You need anything before I leave?”

  She shook her head no.

  “Bueno, I’ll take the ear then. Work on it at home.”

  He shook my hand with a courtly warmth that made me want to cling to him. The room seemed much chillier after he left. With an effort, Doña Carlota swallowed the pills, then gathered herself and said, “Alma tells me you were sick.” So there it was. Cards on the table. She was acknowledging that she was plugged into the flamenco grapevine. That she knew everything. It was more humiliating than I’d expected it to be. “Are you well now?”

  “Yes, how have you been?”

  “Look at me. My feet are destroyed. I hope you wear good shoes. The feet, the feet take the punishment.”

  I nodded. “Yes, Menkes.”

  “A good shoe, but there are better.”

  “Oh? Which ones do you like?”

  Just as I was feeling grateful to Doña Carlota for saving me with this gift of small talk, she cut it off and asked, “Have you heard from Tomás?”

  His name was a punch in the gut. I searched her eyes. Were they glassy? Had the drugs taken effect? “No, I haven’t heard from him for a while now.”

  “They chatter. Everyone in flamenco chatters. It reaches me even here. What we both care about is Tomás. He cut me out of his life. He won’t speak to me. Tell me, why is he so unhappy with me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you have ideas.”

  “I have ideas.”

  “Metrónoma, if you don’t know why he is unhappy, you will never make him happy.”

  “We’re not together anymore.”

  “I know. He’s with your gemela.”

  “Didi? She’s not my twin.”

  “You’re closer than that. You’re one coin. Two sides.”

  “That’s not true either.”

  “At first I was surprised that he picked you. But as I thought about you and him together, it made sense. Didi? No, that will never work. You, he will come back to you.”

  “He will?”

  “He needs to be worshipped, doesn’t he? Didi, the same but worse. Two gods together?” She shook her finger in front of her face. “This only works in mythology. I know. Why did you come?”

  “I came because—” All the lines I’d rehearsed in the car on the drive north vanished. I couldn’t imagine why I had come. I certainly couldn’t imagine asking the questions I’d planned to ask. “I came to visit. To see how you are.”

  “Metrónoma!” My spine stiffened at the snap of command in her voice. I expected to feel the grind of her knuckles in my back next, just as if we were back in class again. “You’re not a timid little girl anymore. You were always so good with time. Now is the time for the truth. Tell me what you want. Dame la verdad.”

  “I want to know why he is unhappy so that I can be the one to make him happy.”

  “Happiness comes from within.”

  Her statement was so out of character, such a blatant lie, that I laughed. “Now who’s not telling the truth?”

  She smiled. “I like you, Metrónoma. You are exactly what Tomás needs. Not this Didi-Ofelia person. Not La Tempesta. That will not end well. I would like to see you two together before I die.”

&nb
sp; “You can.” The words rushed out of me. I knew what I needed from the old lady. I had used Tomás’s secret, the one Guitos had told me once before to make him choose me. Now I had to use it again to win him back. To take him from Didi. But first I had to make Doña Carlota dame la verdad. I had to make her give me the truth. “There was only one Delicata who lived on Sacromonte and was married to El Chino the blacksmith. Only one who was una bailaora. But this Delicata had dark skin. Dark as a Moor. And all her children were dark, as dark as the darkest Gypsy.”

  For a moment, the air crackled with the electricity Doña Carlota had always been able to generate, and once again she was the fierce, intimidating lioness who had ruled the classroom. A second later that energy sagged and she slumped back onto her pillows. “Could you please massage my legs a bit? The blood has to be encouraged to move into my feet.”

  I felt another shift in energy. Perhaps it was the pain pills taking effect. Perhaps we really did slip into the foggy zone where fairy tale met flamenco and those bewitched by love must meet impossible challenges in their quest for love. As I knelt beside her, my sleeve brushed the dragon’s claw of her foot. She winced in pain at even that touch. Gently, I rubbed the still-taut muscles and tendons of her calves until her feet pinked up from violet to lilac.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. I sat down. I had passed one test.

  Bit by bit, she uncoiled as the pills held pain at bay. Still, it was a long time before she spoke again. When she did, her voice had a dreamy quality, as if she were asking herself the questions she had spent her life answering. “Is flamenco in the blood? The feet? The throat? The fingers? Or is it in the soul?”

  She nodded toward her own ruined extremities, a small part of the price she had paid for admission. She didn’t expect me to answer. She waited for the drugs to take full effect. When all the muscles in her face had gone slack and her breathing had settled into an even rhythm, she spoke. “Metrónoma, I have told you the story of one girl, a dancer, daughter of a Gypsy mother and a Gypsy father, themselves born of the blood of the pharaoh. Now I will tell you the story of another girl. It will be for you to decide what to do with the story. Perhaps it will lead you to love. Perhaps to knowledge. But what is flamenco except knowledge? Being in the know? Enterao?”

  Her eyelids drifted shut and she suddenly seemed not just old and frail but, quite possibly, feeble as well. I waited several long moments before deciding to leave. The instant I started to stand, however, her eyes sprang open and she launched in as if there had been no interruption.

  “Her name was Clementina, and if there is such a thing as blue blood, what ran through the little girl’s veins was as dark as ink. Clementina was the daughter of a duke and a duchess born of two of the most venerable houses in the entire Spanish aristocracy. Her ancestors fought beside Isabel and Fernando at Granada to beat the Muslims back into Africa and complete the Reconquest of Spain in 1492. They rode with the conquistadors to conquer the Incan and Aztec empires. At one time, you could travel from Granada to Cadiz without ever leaving the family estates. King Alfonso the Thirteenth and Queen Victoria Eugenia held the infant Clementina over the baptismal font.

  “Clementina grew up on an estate in the very shadows of Granada’s Alhambra. The floors were laid with sixteenth-century tiles in strict accordance with the rules of heraldry as befits a member of the Andalusian aristocracy. The family patio was paved with Roman mosaics brought from the ruins of Italica four centuries before her birth. Galleries of Mudejar columns and arches. Rugs from the Alpujarras, Roman busts, plateresque railings, family portraits painted by Zuloaga, fans inscribed with personal dedications by Julio Romero de Torres himself.

  “Clementina had everything a little princess needed except a queen, because her mother had died in childbirth. Her father adored his only child, a little girl who resembled her sainted mother more and more each day, and for this he guarded her. Perhaps, a bit too jealously. School, of course, was out of the question. Tía Rogelia, a maiden aunt with whiskers white as bean sprouts on her chin, taught Clementina to sew and embroider with stitches the width of a hair. She also taught her to read and write, which the duke considered superfluous. But mostly she taught the little girl to accept her sino, her fate, which was to guard her purity with her life until such time as she would be called upon to surrender it to the son of a suitably noble family whom the duke would select to be her husband.

  “Clementina wondered exactly whom she was expected to guard her purity from, since the only time she was allowed to leave the family estate was on Sunday when she and her father and Tía Rogelia were driven in the duke’s first automobile, a recently acquired Hispano-Suiza, to the cathedral to attend Mass with all the other leading families of Granada. Other than that, the girl was little more than a prisoner in her home. She grew up without a single friend.

  “And then, one day, the lonely little girl’s father employed a herrero, a blacksmith, a metalworker, to repair the extensive grillwork, the elaborate screens in front of the fireplaces, as well as rationing all the copper pans that had been handed down through the generations. The blacksmith, called El Chino for the tilt of his eyes, brought his daughter with him.

  “But this was no ordinary metalworker, and his daughter was no ordinary little girl. They were gitanos from Sacromonte, gitanos puros who lived in the caves of the sacred mountain. The little girl, Rosa, had learned her compás by dancing to the beat of her father’s hammer as he sang his great Gypsy martinetes.

  “Oh, this girl, this Rosa. Dark, dark as a Moor. Her clothes were rags; her hair was a mat of knots alive with lice; her hands and feet were black from the cinders from her father’s forge, from the dirt floor of the cave. The duke forbade Clementina from even speaking to Rosa, for everyone knew that Gypsies were thieves and cutthroats, that they stole babies and were in league with the devil. And the worst, the worst of all was their music, flamenco, the music of drunkards and prostitutes.

  “Little Clementina was so lonely, she disobeyed her father and tried to speak with Rosa. Rosa, however, was as wild as a mountain goat and ran from her. So Clementina set a trap for the little girl in the patio and baited it with mantecaditos. Rosa, always starving, could actually sniff out the little cookies of almonds and olive oil and would gorge herself on the delicacies. Her hunger forced her to trust the young mistress of the house.

  “Thus they became friends. Clementina, barely older than Rosa herself, took this creature under her wing. She bathed the wild Gypsy child, scrubbed her until the brown skin showed beneath the black. Washed her hair until the water ran clear and Rosa’s black Gypsy hair glinted blue in the sun. She fed the Gypsy girl all manner of delights: candied chestnuts in syrup with brandy, perfectly grilled sardines, tender marinated octopus. Clementina went to her own closet and took out her pink silk party frock embroidered with rosebuds, a delicate gown of English lawn trimmed with Belgian lace, her black velvet slippers, a mantilla blessed by the pope, and gave them all to Rosa.

  “Rosita, overwhelmed by such kindness, had only one thing to give her generous benefactor in return. In secret, the wild Gypsy girl began to share her art with the highborn aristocrat. From the first, Clementina loved flamenco, for the rhythms that Rosa clapped out were not strange to her. She had heard these rhythms echoing through the lonely house late at night behind the locked doors of her father’s rooms. With these bewitching rhythms came other sounds she was forbidden to investigate, men’s hoarse voices, the furious stamping of heels on the heraldic tiles, women’s laughter. Clementina didn’t know what happened behind the locked doors, but she knew it spoke to her lonely soul. When she danced with Rosa, her spirit was set free.

  “ ‘Un fenómeno’ is what Rosa called Clementina, for she had never seen anyone learn her people’s dance so quickly. For the first time in her life, Clementina was happy. Rosa was even happier. She had a friend, a friend who was desperate to hear everything about her life. So, as they danced, Rosa told her stories from Sacromonte. She told her a
bout her mother, Delicata, how she would have reigned like a queen over Sevilla if her father had not stolen her away and imprisoned her in a cave. About the cuadro, La Sordita, Little Burro, Dried Wood, La Burriquita. About dancing for los suecos that El Bala brought to them. Rosa even told her friend she suspected that the fearsome El Bala was in love with Delicata because the pair spent a dangerous amount of time whispering to each other. Rosa’s stories came alive more vividly in Clementina’s mind than anything that had actually happened in her dull and confined life.

  “For months the girls danced in secret until the inevitable day when the duke discovered them. He threw the nasty little Gypsy girl and her father out of the house and forbade Clementina to ever speak with her again or to ever dance another step of flamenco. The exalted gentleman told his daughter that he would kill her with his own hand before he would see her associate with such a tribe of degenerates.

  “Clementina was desolate. She missed her friend and all the friends she had made in her imagination. Flamenco had opened the world to her and now she was in prison once again. Day and night, she roamed the grounds of the estate. When she was as far from her father’s prying eyes and from his spy, Tía Rogelia, as she could get, she would take off her shoes and dance. Over pebbles, over acorns, over thorns, burrs, she danced until her feet bled. It didn’t matter: once the spirit had captured her, she felt nothing.

  “One day, Clementina returned to the house expecting her aunt to scold her for allowing the sun to burn her face. But she heard nothing from the old lady. Not when she returned. Not through the endless, silent evening. Not a word. Clementina was not surprised when she knocked at her aunt’s door and heard no answer. She was even less surprised to find her aunt lying atop the matelasse cover, her hands folded in prayer on her chest, her mouth gaping open.

  “All of Granada came to the funeral. Clementina looked around at the funeral Mass and there were all the fine young men from the best families. One of them would be her husband. Would it be Esteban, with a bow tie and pimples on his chin? Would it be Arturo, pear-shaped heir to an almond fortune? Would it be Juan Pablo, with his hair parted in the middle and flattened with too much hair oil? It could be any of them. It would all end the same, locked away in the rooms of his family’s house until she was as old and shriveled and dead as Tía Rogelia. At that moment, Clementina envied her aunt because she had escaped. Only then did she weep. She wept so copiously for the utter pointlessness of her life that her sniffles turned to sobs. The assembled took Clementina’s grief as testament to the young girl’s devotion to her aunt. However, when the sobs turned to great heaving moans that caused el arzobispo to turn from the altar and shoot disapproving glances toward the source of the racket, Clementina’s father took his daughter outside. When she was unable to collect herself, he summoned a taxi, telling his daughter that important business would keep him in Granada that night and, most likely, for several nights to come. Then he ordered the driver to take her to the family estate.