The Flamenco Academy

by Sarah Bird

  The Aztec princess shouted out, “Give me the truth!”

  “Bueno! Give me the truth! Give it to me, ladies! Stamp! Come on! Make some noise! You’re not in Kansas anymore! This isn’t Barbie World! Don’t hide those unpleasant feelings! Use them! What makes you mad? Who in here is mad?”

  I studied the students behind me in the mirror. Nobody responded.

  “Nobody? Nobody is mad? How is this possible?” This both astonished and annoyed me to a degree far out of proportion to the instructional question I had posed. It suddenly seemed desperately urgent to wring the truth from this collection of novices. In the mirror, I caught the eye of a sun-spotted lady visiting from Tucson and demanded, “Anybody in here work for a big man who takes all the credit while you do all the work?” The lady lifted her head and started stamping her feet.

  I scanned the rest of the group. “Any of you in here work three times as hard as your jerk of a boss and make one-third his salary?” Smiles of recognition played across several faces and the tempo picked up. “When you get that shitty little basket of flowers on Secretaries Day, do you want to shove it up his fat ass?” The smiles turned to grins. “Okay! You are mad. Dance that!”

  I studied the rest of the students. Figuring out how to get them to admit their anger seemed like the most important thing I’d ever done in my life. I zoomed in on the girl with the tongue stud and asked, “When you turn on the television and realize your country is an oil oligarchy, does that make you mad?” Her many piercings caught the overhead light as she lifted her head and hammered the hardwood.

  I caught a couple of helmet-haired students who’d said they were from Dallas exchanging eye rolls and asked them, “Are you sick and tired of liberals with their hackneyed, knee-jerk idiocies always blaming America for everything that’s wrong in the world? Then pound the ground!”

  I zeroed in on a clump of Latinos. “Does it annoy you that you paid good money for this class and now you’ve got some skinny gringa standing up here yelling at you? Are you totally sick of Anglos appropriating every scrap of your culture? Okay, show me you’re pissed off!” They smiled good-naturedly even as their feet picked up volume.

  I spotted a shy girl trying to avoid eye contact and asked, “Does anyone in here ever get sick of people always telling you to smile? To speak up? Speak out? Whatever? Do you think there is entirely too much speaking up and out? Do you wish people would just shut up and leave you alone?”

  The girl kept her eyes on the ground, but I could hear her feet and feel the breeze from her whirling skirt as she joined in.

  “Who in here is mad?” I asked, because there was still one person in the studio who was not giving the truth. The answer sprang from my feet, from my gut. It leapt from every muscle fiber in my body. My body was telling me the truth, delivering it in a thundering sermon that even I could not ignore.

  “Who in here is mad?”

  I smashed the floor with my answer: Me. I was mad. I had to dance it and see it in the mirror in front of me before I could accept its immensity. Rage leached out of my bones and poured into my feet. I thought of all the years I had wasted being a handmaiden and my foot came down like an anvil. My fury was not for Didi, Doña Carlota, Tomás, my mother. My fury was for me. For telling everyone else’s story but my own.

  I stamped harder. I stamped so hard a shimmer of light of the sort that announces a migraine haloed my sight. A radiant nimbus oscillated around my reflection in the mirror, making it hard for me to recognize the savage dancer there, striking sparks of fire with her blazing footwork, the intensity of her passion. I felt disembodied, possessed. Behind me, the class teetered to a halt, then froze watching me, jaws hanging open.

  “It burns the blood like powdered glass... it exhausts, rejects all the sweet geometry we understand... it shatters styles.” I felt the whisper of Didi’s breath against my ear just as I had when she’d quoted Lorca’s definition of duende to me in the hidden park.

  I was possessed and I was exhausted. I had forsaken sweet geometry. I stopped, planted myself on the earth, hurled my arms to the right, then the left. I shook off both demons and angels. I regained control of myself, and with my next word I erased all that had gone before and opened a blank page upon which to begin once more: “Y!” And.

  I stopped. The class gathered behind me, ready to follow wherever I led, and I began again.

  “Fuerte! Brazos! Cuerpo! Arriba! Cabeza! Arriba!” We stormed across the floor, each student staking an emphatic claim to every inch we advanced. For just a minute, two at the most, all the heels hit the beat exactly in time with mine and we became one tribe, a tribe of wild, clacking, frenzied girls making a sound louder and more beautiful than any sound they had ever dreamed of making on their own.

  At the end of class, I rushed from the Flamenco Academy, still dripping with sweat. The one, true gospel of flamenco that I had just preached more to myself than to my students still thundered in my blood: Fuerte! Cuerpo! Arriba! Cabeza! Arriba! Strong! Body! Up! Head! Up! I paused in front of the looming portrait of Doña Carlota. Then I hoisted my head as high as it would go and settled it decisively upon my ramrod of a spine. I raised my middle digit and I shot Doña Carlota a big, fat bird.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  I strode out of the Flamenco Academy, believing that my moment of duende had transformed me, that I was through with being a handmaiden. I would serve no one else but myself. I would obey no one else’s desires but my own. When I confronted the banner outside the gym announcing Didi’s performance at the KiMo that night, however, I was stunned to discover that I could no longer identify what I really wanted. My first thought was that, of course, I didn’t want to see Didi. I never wanted to see or speak to her again. But, in the past, I had always made a point of seeing every performance during the festival. If I stayed away, wouldn’t Didi still be controlling my life? In the end, I went. I went to prove to myself that I could. That I could sit in an audience and watch Didi. Just so long as I didn’t have to speak to her. That was the bargain I struck with myself.

  The scorched air was still hot that evening as I walked down Central Avenue toward the KiMo Theatre. It was as if the forest fire smoke had sealed the day’s heat into the city, not allowing it to cool off as Albuquerque usually did once the sun went down. Lightning sliced through the sky above the West Mesa, a summer electrical storm of the sort that promised but almost never yielded rain.

  The exterior of the theater with its thunderbirds and zias elaborately painted in shades of gold and blue glittered beneath the lights of a marquee that spelled out OFELIA. The KiMo was a twenties fantasy collision of art deco and pueblo style where residents once watched vaudeville, then the new talkies. The only tickets left for Didi’s show were in the balcony, which is exactly where I wanted to be. I bought one and, for the second night in a row, was grateful to be late and entering a theater where the houselights had already been dimmed. The stairs leading up to the balcony were lined with panoramic murals. Each panel depicted one of the mythical Seven Cities of Cíbola, the Cities of Gold that had lured the conquistadors ever farther north, all the way up to the Spaniards’ last frontier outposts on the Camino Real: the city they named after El Duque de Alburquerque; Santa Fe, the city of Holy Faith; Truchas; Peñasco; Taos.

  In the balcony, air vents were disguised as Navajo rugs and chandeliers as war drums and death canoes. Ceiling beams, textured to look like logs, were painted with dance and hunt scenes. Rows of garlanded longhorn steer skulls with amber eyes glowing eerily stared down at me. In their dim light, I found my row and felt my way to a seat, stumbling over a backpack.

  “Sorry,” a young woman, her hair a pre-Raphaelite cloud in the darkness, whispered to me, shoving the book-anchored pack out of my way as I took the empty seat next to her. I recognized her from one of the classes I had substitute taught. In the reflection of the stage lights her face seemed as if it had been printed that very morning. A book almost finished but never opened. She’d never had a cla
ss with Didi. Might not have ever seen the disdain in which Didi was held by those of the flamenco puro school who considered the academy’s biggest star a complete fraud. To her, Didi was Ofelia and Ofelia was famous.

  Onstage, hundreds of votive candles flickered in amber and red holders on and around an altar. Arrayed around the altar were dozens of vases filled with roses from the pastel/sunset color group. Both the roses and the candles were backdrops to the stool where Ofelia/Didi would sit. It was draped with a black shawl, a genuine mantón from Madrid with a fringe that shimmied in air currents no one else was sensitive enough to feel.

  The house was packed with Didi’s obsessive fans, most of whom couldn’t have cared less about flamenco and how pure or impure Didi was. Virtually all were female, their faces frozen into expectant expressions of adoration that Nancy Reagan could have learned from. Then, before I even registered why, my heart lurched. It was him—Tomás—sitting half a dozen rows ahead. I could tell, just from the tilt of his shoulders, the dark curl of his hair. Of course he would be here. Then he turned. It was a student. Someone who looked the way he had all those years ago when I’d fallen in love with him at first sight. I pressed back into my seat, my heart still pounding, scrambling to reclaim the righteous anger that had steeled me earlier in the day. But when a team of five guitarists filed onstage, my breath clutched again. They were led by old-time gitano flamenco legend Diego Herredia. Will was among them. Tomás was not. I exhaled. The crowd of hardcore aficionados pounded their palms together for Diego. Nearly eighty, he padded slowly to the straight-backed chair where his instrument waited. His double-knit pants, pulled up a little too high, cradled the low-slung lobes of his old-man’s buttocks. He took his seat, pants hiking up still farther, exposing garters holding up black socks.

  The four other guitarists followed his lead. Softly, though with great power, they began playing an alegrías. The low undercurrent of sophisticated chatter stopped cold as every member of the audience was connected into the rhythm machine that is flamenco. With five great guitarists playing, it was impossible to resist. Didi knew what she was doing. After this warm-up, she could have came out and recited “Little Jack Horner” and enthralled. Plus, Diego’s old-time playing would sanctify the bleedings of her suburban girl heart with enough flamenco authenticity to placate the purists.

  The guitars chimed and pealed with a silvery clarity, rhythms piling on top of one another, frilled and accented by the loveliest falsetas imaginable. And then Didi entered. In an instant, I saw that she had become who she’d been transforming herself into from long before the day we’d met. All the tiny homages and lifts from all the one-name goddesses were there, Madonna’s overamped physicality, Cher’s no-shit subversiveness, Marilyn’s vulnerability: they had all come together in the persona she presented. Even her dancing had gelled. It was flamenco, but mixed with enough hip-hop, African, and belly dancing to be something else entirely. Something that couldn’t be graded on flamenco’s merciless scale where she was destined to fall short. She had shattered flamenco time, she was operating outside of el compás even as she made every flamenco fantasy work for her. She was Hispanic, Jewish, Gypsy. Mostly, though, she was what all the legends aspired to: she was life on the edge. She was the worst bad girl going. She would shoot heroin, drown in aguardiente; she would kill herself. And she would do it all to present her lucky audience with one moment of eternity. Out of time, off the beat, it didn’t matter, she had the quality she’d had from the first moment I saw her in the oncologist’s office: you couldn’t take your eyes off of her. Even if she had ruined your life, stolen the one person you’d ever loved, chewed you up and spit you out, even then, you could not take your eyes off of her.

  A long, susurrous “O!” sighed through the theater like a mammoth exhalation. Ofelia was in the house. She was magnificent in a long dress of red lace worthy of Bob Mackie that had the right heft for dancing, yet turned diaphanous when lighted from the back. Onto her short hair, she’d woven a hairdo of braids and spit curls with a black lace mantilla floating down from the high stake of a carved tortoise-shell comb driven into the crown of braids. She was the flamenco poet.

  Diego watched Didi’s every move. Clearly from the old school, he was there to serve Ofelia. Leading the others, he softened his playing until his thumbnail stroked a deep, rich major chord that became a buzz caressing the audience’s collective frontal lobe, preparing them to hear the flamenco poet speak.

  “Hello, New Mexico, mi Tierra del Encanto, land of my birth, land of my heart, land of my enchantment.” She punctuated her greeting with a fiery zapateado. The footwork elicited a wave of applause and óles. She clapped a rhythm that the initiates in the crowd were delighted to pick up and turn into an alegrías that became a roar of applause. A deep cannonade of thunder from outside the theater interrupted the clapping. Didi raised her arms to silence the audience and we all heard the staccato patter of a heavy rain. Didi turned her palms up and grinned as if she had ordered the downpour to accompany her.

  Then, snapping out a valley of pitos syncopated with the sound of the deluge, she wondered in a way that almost seemed idle, “What is the right poem for you tonight?” A great settling swept through the hall as audience members snuggled, satisfied, into their seats, the rain we had prayed for was falling, and Ofelia was searching for exactly the right piece for exactly this night for exactly us. Even I, who knew, forgot that her shows were as canned as Wayne Newton’s, that she’d been making set lists for years, just like one of the bands she’d spent her teens groupieing.

  In spite of my resolution not to allow Didi to dictate one more second of my life, I scooted forward to the edge of my seat, ready to leave if she performed any of the pieces that had come from our shared history. Nothing about fathers dying, young girls yearning. I wasn’t ready for that, though I wasn’t ready for what she eventually did read either.

  “In flamenco the holiest of the many song forms is one called the saeta, the arrow. Saetas are sung during Holy Week in Sevilla to celebrate the passion of Christ.”

  I hated the way she pronounced Sevilla, Sah-BEE-ya. Hated hearing a girl who had once devoted her life to the Strokes, whose father was Mort Steinberg, Jewish hipster, speak so rapturously about the passion of Christ. I glanced down the aisle. It was clotted with the rapt figures of acolytes hunched forward, waiting like baby birds to be fed from the mouth of experience.

  Reading the cues like the master accompanist he was, Diego matched Didi’s tricked-up theatrics with a showy arpeggio, a gaudy gush of notes. He squinted up into the spotlights, his eyes watery, vulnerable.

  “I call this poem ‘Secret Park.”

  I had to leave, but Didi had already shot the arrow. It found its mark and staked me to my seat. As Didi read, my perception of her fractured into black spit curls, red lips, tent of black mantilla all melted away into the smell of summer and the hunger of waiting.

  My kiss is summer

  Your kiss is cut watermelon

  Sprinklers click

  A shower every seventeen seconds.

  Seventeen years.

  Waiting for night.

  Waiting for the moon.

  Waiting for the breeze.

  Waiting for owl screech.

  Waiting for earth warmth.

  Below.

  I am waiting for heaven cool.

  Above.

  Waiting for your whisper.

  Waiting for your touch.

  Waiting for a breeze.

  Waiting for a moon.

  Waiting for night.

  Waiting for her

  Her? Did I really hear Didi whisper “Cyndi Rae” into the microphone, a lapping of syllables so gentle they were lost in the wild applause? Was she really searching the crowd trying to find me?

  Onstage, Didi raised her arms like a charismatic Christian. A gleam caught the spotlight and I noticed the silver bracelet made of two panthers twining together that had been hidden beneath the sleeve of her dress. The sight of t
he blood-sister bracelet caught me off guard for just one moment. But one moment was all Didi ever needed.

  “I dedicate that poem to my pale twin, the light I shadowed, the ray I darkened. I’ve come home to you, Rae-rae. Are you here? Is she here? You all know who I mean. Cyndi Rae Hrncir, is my blood sister here tonight?”

  Why did it take me one frozen moment before I could believe that Didi would do the unbelievable? When had she ever done anything else? I lurched from my seat. The backpacks were boulders blocking my path. Not everyone in the theater knew our story. But everyone wasn’t required, just the handful of students, of devotees, of fans who spotted me and started up a jungle telegram of pitos, fingers snapping as loud as the crack of a bullwhip. Loud enough to call Didi’s attention to the balcony.

  “She’s here? You’re here, my pale twin?” She visored her eyes with her hand, squinted up into the balcony, and implored. “Please, just for one moment, could we have the houselights?”

  The lights came up. Didi followed the wave of heads turning in my direction and caught me as I stumbled into the aisle. She was already heading to the edge of the stage as I hurtled down the stairs, four centuries of New Mexican history whizzing past as I raced for escape. The unexpected downpour had turned the water-sheeted glass doors at the front of the theater into an aquarium. In the second I paused before shoving the doors open, a frantic rap of claves hammered my way.

  The rain, smelling of ash, of doused fires, drenched me. I ran for the truck, plucking keys from my pocket even as I trampled past gutters rushing with muddy water. In my haste and agitation, I fumbled the rain-slicked keys and dropped them into a puddle half a block from the truck. I bent to fish them out and when I straightened up, Didi stood in front of me. Rain beaded up and rolled off her pancake makeup in streams. Mascara coursed down her face as if she’d been crying. Up close, without the stage lights, she was haggard and hollow-eyed. Her irises were a sapphire thread around the black fish egg of her dilated pupil.