"The Flamenco Academy" (22 page)

“God, you’ve wasted away,” Didi said,
watching the skirt settle onto my hipbones. “I’ve got to try the
Mystery Man diet.” It was true; Didi and I wore the same size
now.

I went back out and found the skirt in a
smaller size. When I returned, Didi was completely dressed with a
silvery, fringed shawl thrown over her shoulders. Transfixed, she
watched herself in the mirror as she twined her hands up, winding
them through sinuous arabesques just as Liliana had, all to one of
Doña Carlota’s beats, which she rapped out with her feet.

“Didi? Deeds? What are you doing? You’re not
into this, are you? This ‘flamingo’?”

She froze with her arms curved above her
head, the fringe of the shawl trembling between us. “Why not?”

“Deeds, this is like a mission. My mission.
You know? All the times I’ve helped you do the groundwork? Moral
support? I helped you get in the door, then I disappeared, right?
Because that was your thing. Deeds, this is my thing.”

“But, Rae, can’t you see how amazing this is
for me?”

“For you? Why for you? You think it’s a
joke.”

“Not really.” She clapped her hands, almost
duplicating a
compás
. “This is what has been missing in my
work. These rhythms. Did you hear that shit? It is irresistible. I
could read the damn phone book and it would be astonishing. I’ve
discovered the missing ingredient. And the look.” She held her arms
out. “This is a gift from God. This”—she waved her hands at the
skirt, the shawl—“this is a total persona. Flamenco is in my
blood.”

“Your blood? Didi, you’re Filipino and
Jewish.”

“My mom is mostly Spanish. Her name is
Ofelia, for God’s sake.” She pronounced it
Oh-fay-lee-yuh
,
indisputably Spanish. “And, for all I know, Mort might have been
Sephardic.”

Doubt crinkled my face as I recalled the
pale hipster Mr. Steinberg. Didi launched in. “Don’t you see how
perfectly it all fits? What a great persona this is?” She swooped
her arms up and swung them around her head, making the fringe loft
and soar, then hula wildly.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to. As
always, Didi read my mind. “Rae, flamenco is still your thing.
You’re going to actually do it, actually learn to dance. I’m just
going to skim the surface. Lift the look and the beats. Why aren’t
you happy for me? You should be happy. You’re one step closer to
Mystery Man and I’m one step closer to immortality.”

I shook my head. “God, you’re such a
bitch.”

She threw the silver shawl around both our
shoulders and dragged me close. “Yes, but I’m
your
bitch.”
Didi’s laugh enclosed us in a conspiracy against the world. It was
impossible not to laugh with her. She pirouetted, making us both
spin around until the silver fringe danced and the silver nails
tinkled like coins falling on the floor.

“
Y!
Warm up!” Doña Carlota clapped
out a tempo for the guitarist to pick up as she marched to the
center of the class and took command. Knowing that the old lady had
raised Tomás, that they were distantly related, I studied her,
searching to find him in her fierce profile, the determined set of
her shoulders, the brisk cadence of her speech.

“Roll down!” she ordered, pressing a
student’s back forward until her body folded in half.

“Let the head relax! Relax the jaw! Let the
weight of the head pull the spine down!”

Clapping all the while, she strode over to
the student guitarist assigned to play for our class. Plump, pale,
and uncertain, Will was the exact opposite of Tomás. Doña
pronounced his name “Weel.”

“
Por tangos
, Will!” Doña ordered the
style she wanted.
“Dios mío,
Will,
por tangos!”
She
clapped right next to his ear, louder and louder until the
discombobulated player picked up the exact tempo she was
dictating.

“
Plié
! Keep the quads released! And
roll up!
Ocho! Siete! Seis! Cinco! Cuatro! Tres! Dos! Uno!
Cross the arms and let the weight of your torso pull you down! For
flamenco, you have to be tight and loose. Cold and hot if you want
to be able to do this.”

I lifted my head from where it was hanging
down between my legs and saw Doña Carlota do something out of the
The Exorcist
, pivoting her head until her chin swiveled
behind her shoulder. I glanced over at Didi who bounced her
eyebrows up to show that she was impressed as well.

“You must be loose, loose, loose! Keep
stretching. Today you begin to learn what flamenco is. Loosen up
those shoulders! Spread the scapula!

“Do you think flamenco is a dance? Is it
polka dots and a rose between the teeth? Is it fans and mantillas?
And roll up!
Ocho! Siete! Seis! Cinco! Cuatro! Tres! Dos!
Uno!
No! That is not what flamenco is. It is a way of life.
Until you understand that life none of you will be able to dance
flamenco. Spread the scapula!”

Doña Carlota patrolled the rows of dancers
and stopped behind me. Her twisted fingers were hot on my back as
they pushed my shoulder blades apart, then tugged my shoulders
down, making my chest expand and rise. I breathed and my lungs
inflated with the deepest breath I’d ever taken.

She caught my eye and asked, “See?
Better?”

I nodded idiotically, boinging my head up
and down, a hula doll on a car dashboard. The corners of her lips
lifted the tiniest bit before she moved on, speaking as she went,
“And down!
Ocho! Siete! Seis! Cinco! Cuatro! Tres! Dos! Uno!
Will!”

The guitarist looked up at her,
terrified.

“
Más lente, hombre!”

He slowed down.

“
Y los brazos!”
She stiffened her
arms into a taut circle, ordering, “
Fuerte! Fuerte!
Strong!”
She patrolled the class, stiffening limbs as she went.

“No bellyache arms!” she barked at Blanca,
correcting the sweet-faced Latina’s tentative, retracted posture,
arms held in as if she had a stomachache. I put extra starch into
my posture and the old lady gave me an approving nod as she
passed.

Doña Carlota strode to the front of the
class. “You came here to learn flamenco. You are lucky. You will
learn from the only teacher in this country who is
gitana por
las cuatro costaos
, Gypsy on all four sides. Now stretch the
whole body!” She reached up, then paused and pointed to baby-faced
Blanca, whose leotard hugged the tender rolls of baby fat around
her middle. “You, Chubby, reach those stumpy arms up!”

As one, the entire class sucked in an
outraged breath, Blanca’s pink face flamed crimson and her lower
lip trembled.

Doña Carlota made a peeved face and waved
her hand, swatting away the tears gathering in the girl’s eyes.
“Don’t cry, Chubby, you just got your first, most important lesson
in flamenco: tell the truth. If you can’t hear the truth, you can’t
tell the truth. You Americans, you
gabachos
, you
payos
, you say this is cruel. You believe that the truth
goes away just because you are too polite to speak it. That it is
an insult to ever mention that someone is black or fat or
crippled.”

“So? What?” Didi spoke out, loud the way she
always talked to teachers, like they were anyone on the street.

Doña Carlota stopped dead, her arms frozen
in a stretch that made her look as if she were climbing an
invisible ladder.

“You just insult them to their faces? That’s
not
cruel?”

Doña Carlota shot Didi a glance that would
have withered a redwood. “American girls.” Everyone in the class
tensed at the dismissive, acid tone of Doña Carlota’s voice. “You
know what makes you so strong, so sure?”

Didi gave a little half-shrug.

“You don’t know how much you don’t know.
That is how you go through the world and never see what is in front
of your face. And now you come in here and dare to tell me that my
way, the Gypsy way, is wrong?”

“I wasn’t exactly saying that,” Didi said,
not the least bit intimidated, though the rest of us were holding
our breath, astonished to see such open conflict in a
classroom.

“I am sick of it! All you American girls
traipse through here and think that you can become
flamencas
by taking classes at a university! You think you can learn flamenco
like history or geometry. You can’t ‘learn’ flamenco. You must live
flamenco.”

“So why are you here if it can’t be taught?”
Didi asked. I felt as if the studio had become a plane flying
through a storm that had belly flopped through the worst turbulence
any of us had ever experienced.

Doña Carlota drew herself up until she was
nothing but a steely armature. “What is your name?”

Didi looked around, the calm attendant on
this very bumpy flight, and answered, “Ofelia.” She rolled out the
Spanish syllables of her mother’s name.

“All right then,
Oh-fay-lee-yuh
,
though you, especially you, don’t deserve it, I will tell you a
story. A story from the world you’ve never seen. The world where
flamenco was born. You, all of you, keep stretching! I will give
you the beginning of the story, but you will only hear more of the
story when you have earned it.”

We mimicked the ladder-climbing stretch,
lifting our arms as high as they would go, miming Doña Carlota’s
movements perfectly. We did everything we could not to interrupt
the strange spell that had fallen on the studio.

“When my oldest brother was a little boy, he
fell and landed on his nose and squashed it flat. So we called him
Mono, Monkey, because of his squashed-flat nose. Is this cruel, to
call a little boy whose face has been smashed Monkey? If your spine
is a little crooked, where I grew up you were called Joroba,
Hunchback. If your face was a little round, your cheeks a little
puffy, your lips a little small, you were El Guarrito, Piglet. If
your voice was high and squeaky, you were El Capón. If you liked
sex in the wrong place, you were called La Peste, the Stink. The
name my mother gave me was Juana María, but no one ever called me
by that name so she gave it to one of my five little sisters who
came after me. Everyone called me Miracielos, Looks at the Sky.
Most Miracielos are crazy or retarded.”

We stretched, reaching out our arms, our
torsos, to drag more of this story our way.

“Is that cruel? No. For a Gypsy, a
gitano
, a
calé
, the only insult is not giving someone
a nickname because then they don’t belong, and for a Gypsy, not to
belong to the tribe is to stop existing. When I was a girl growing
up on the Sacromonte, on the Sacred Mountain outside of Granada,
the
gitano
way was to let the goats raise the children. We
learned that knives were sharp by getting cut and fires hot by
being burned. Our mothers did this because Gypsy children suffer so
much in the
payo
world that we have to be stronger than
los payos
.

“My family lived in a cave. Yes, a cave in
Sacromonte. Since there were no toilets, we all found abandoned
caves to relieve ourselves in. Everyone joked that my brother Mono
found his the hard way. He was two, old enough that he had stopped
existing for my mother and would not start again until he was
strong enough to do chores for her. As soon as he was able to step
over the threshold at the door of the cave that was supposed to
keep out most of the scorpions and some of the millipedes, he was
off, exploring the dusty paths that ran through our anthill of a
neighborhood.

“One day he toddled across what he thought
was a pile of hay and fell down the chimney hole of an abandoned
cave. Every year children died this way, either from the fall
itself or from being trapped in an old cave where the earth has
closed over the door opening. But my brother survived and screamed
loud enough to bring help and that is why he liked his nickname,
Mono, because it reminded everyone that he was tough enough to fall
down and squash his face flat and still walk away. Besides, having
a squashed nose did something to his voice. Made it different,
special, so that eventually Mono became a singer. I liked being
Miracielos because it told everyone, it told me, that I had my eye
on something higher, something better. Chubby, you should like your
nickname because in flamenco the biggest compliment you can give a
dancer is to say she dances
con peso
, with weight.

“
Bien
, okay, you are wondering when
I’m going to start teaching this.” She ripped off a machine-gun
blast of heel stamping. “No!” She abruptly stopped. “A baboon can
learn this. I am here to teach you flamenco and you will learn more
about flamenco just listening to me tell the story of my life than
any
payo
teacher with a hundred heel-toe combinations will
ever teach you. Now, you will start the right way, the proper way.
You will start the way I started. The way all true flamenco starts:
with
el cante
. I’m going to sing the first song I ever
heard, the song my father sang. Will! Por
siguiriyas
!”

The guitarist nodded nervously to
acknowledge the style Doña Carlota had called for, then studied her
intently as she clapped out an intricate pattern to a beat slow as
a dirge. He began to play a lovely melody ornamented with
expressive frills and she shook her head violently. “No! No! No
pretty
falsetas
. None of that
mierda
.”

Will stopped, his pink cheeks turning
scarlet with embarrassment.

“Just this,” she ordered him, pounding her
feet. She led him through the pattern several times, listening as
he tried to repeat the pattern, shaking her head and muttering,
“Qué feo,”
how ugly. “Listen to the stresses!”

Will played it several times as she shook
her head and clucked. Finally, when he’d abandoned every bit of
ornamentation and was banging at his instrument with all the
strings dampened, she brightened.
“Sí, hombre! Eso es! Vamos
ya!”