"The Flamenco Academy" (23 page)

She closed her eyes and clapped softly for
one minute, two, hands held next to her ear as if she were
listening for the ocean roaring inside a seashell. She swayed, her
feet rooted not just to the floor but to the ground deep beneath
it, and sucked energy from that dark place. Then an unearthly
sound, deep and low, ripped from her throat. Just one word,
“Ay,”
that seemed not so much sung as exhumed from a world
that was not Western, not modern, not the one I was standing in.
Then she began:

We are the wretched calés

poorer than larks in the sky:

citizens and guards, alas,

deny us even our own shade.

Her song was more a cry, a scream set to
complex harmonies I had never heard before. It reminded me of High
Mass and Jewish chanting and a muezzin calling the faithful to
prayer, but it was none of those things. It was Arabic, African,
ancient, nothing so trivial as a song, a melody, and it cut
straight into my soul. Dark emotions rose up from the dark place
where this song originated and I felt them without thinking about
Tomás, about Didi, about my mother, about my father. The sound
became the leathery rustling of bat wings beating deep within me.
They whirred, whisking the dust from all that was too painful to
consider. For one excruciating second, I wanted her to stop more
than I’d ever wanted anything on this earth. I would walk out of
class and never think about flamenco or Tomás Montenegro again. I
would pack away the grief and longing forever. I would take only
accounting and math classes and have a safe life. That second was
followed by all the rest in which, more than anything on this
earth, I wanted the singing never to stop.

I glanced around, expecting the rest of the
class, the ballet swans, the jazz princesses, to be as obliterated
as I was. Mostly what I saw on the other faces was embarrassment at
having emotion so raw and dark spilled forth in front of them. A
few of the Latinas seemed to hear what I was hearing. But it was
Didi whose face mirrored mine. The tears pooling in her eyes kept
me from fearing that I was in the middle of a psychotic break.

Doña Carlota’s
cante
, her song,
resonated through the classroom long after she fell silent and Will
stopped playing. She stared into each of our faces. The embarrassed
dance princesses’ eyes skittered away from hers. Didi though, Didi
was another story. I watched her in the minor. She studied Doña
Carlota in the same omnivorous way she watched Madonna and Cher,
the same way she read Sylvia Plath and studied Frida Kahlo’s
painting, the same way she absorbed anyone’s work when the creator,
the woman, had become bigger than the work. Didi knew a diva when
she saw one and Doña Carlota was her first chance to study one up
close.

When the old woman’s dark gaze found mine, I
stared back, asking for more information, more clues about what had
happened.

“You,” she said, pointing at me, “come to
the front,” then at Didi, “and bring your friend.” She pushed a
couple of the swans toward the back and installed us directly in
front of her. “These are your spots. Those who can understand what
flamenco has to say must be close enough to hear.” She addressed
the whole class. “That was
cante
. That was the last time I
will sing to you in English. That was the song my father sang. Why
aren’t you stretching?” She stood on one foot and worked the
other.

We all copied her, standing on one foot,
then the other.

“STRETCH those metatarsals!”

She clapped another rhythm, which the
guitarist tried to pick up, then turned to me and asked, “What
palo
, what style am I calling for?”

The weird number decoder chip in my brain
translated the soft claps, the accented louder claps into the
almost-Western four-beat count and put them together with what I
recalled of the names she’d called out last class. “Tango?”

She dipped her head, acknowledging my
answer. “
Increíble!
An American girl who can actually hear
el compás
.”

I bit my lip to keep from beaming with
pleasure at the old lady’s praise.

“Reach with the top of the head! Lengthen
the body! Lengthen! My father didn’t have a guitar for his
cante
. Like all the good Gypsy men on Sacromonte, he was a
blacksmith and beat his rhythm out with his iron hammer, his
martinete
. Some believe that little children, infants, don’t
remember anything. I remember, I remember everything.” She signaled
and Will softened his playing.

“At night, in the old days before the
factory came, I looked out onto our city of caves and I knew what
hell was. Flames licked out of the earth as if the world were on
fire. As if we Gypsies were the devils
los payos
believed we
were and we could make dirt burn.

“They weren’t the flames of hell, they were
the
fraguas
, the forges where the blacksmiths beat metal all
day and all night. They say that those born within the sound of the
Gypsy hammers hear them all their lives. That is true. I tried to
escape the constant pounding and failed. I was six when I tried the
first time. I went all the way up the hill to the Alhambra, where
for eight hundred years the Moors ruled Spain. I sat where jasmine
blooms over the tombs of
los moros
. Where the stone walls
have been carved into lace. Where
las sultanas
listened to
the lutes of the eunuchs. Even there, I still heard the pounding. I
hear it still. Everyone who wants to dance or sing or play flamenco
guitar must hear it as well.”

She clapped.

“One, two,
three
! Four, five,
six
! Seven,
eight
! Nine,
ten
! Eleven,
twelve
!
El compás
. I will clap it for you, loud,
con palmas secas
. One, two,
three
! Four, five,
six
! Seven,
eight
! Nine,
ten
! Eleven,
twelve
!
El compás
, the Gypsy clock. This was the time
my mother set my heart to beat to before I was ever born. I never
had a choice but to dance flamenco.

“Clap with me. Come on, clap. You will be
terrible. Just do it. Don’t think about it. Don’t listen to your
hands. Listen to the story.”

I listened, of course, I listened. But what
I heard wasn’t her story, it was his. The story of the world he
came from. The world I had to enter to win him. Watching Didi’s
face in the mirror, I saw that she was just as avid as I to enter
this secret realm.

When we were all clapping, Doña Carlota
started again. Sighing, she whispered,
“Granada, ah, mi
Granada
, a city both sadder and more glorious than any other.
The greatest poet of this century, Federico García Lorca, said that
the hours are longer and sweeter in Granada than in any other
Spanish town. And though I was the last person who loved Lorca to
see the poet alive, I must disagree. The hours are longer and
sweeter in Granada than in any other town anywhere on this
earth.

“I knew the Granada of poets, but I did not
live in it. At this time, the time I speak of, Sacromonte was not a
show for tourists. It was a garbage dump on the edge of the city
where we
gitanos
were tossed out with the rest of the trash.
Eventually tourists,
aficionados
, from all over the world
would come like pilgrims to see the real, the true Gypsy flamenco
dancing. But they never saw the only true flamenco who ever lived
in Sacromonte, the only one who didn’t care about making a show for
the tourists, my father, called El Chino because his eyes slanted
like a Chinaman’s.”

Still beating out the rhythm with her feet,
Doña Carlota stopped clapping and raised her arms, winding them
upward in time to the beat. Without a word, the class followed her.
At the top of the arc, she snaked her hands in languid circles
above her head and we all copied her.

“My father was the smallest blacksmith on
the mountain. But strong. Stronger than any two men. Just as with
everything else, my father kept his muscles hidden. His hair was
like a black ram’s, a thousand tight curls. His skin was the color
of old coffee, a color with sheens of purple and blue in it. He had
a strong Gypsy nose, like me. Good for filtering the sand out of
desert air. And his eyes. He had the eyes of a poet. When I pumped
the double bellows hard enough, the flames leaped up and made the
gold in his dark irises flicker to life.

“His
cante
was a tree, an ancient
olive tree that has stood since the Romans ruled Spain. Since the
Moors invaded. Since ships laden with gold from the New World
sailed up the river Ebro. This old tree had roots that went farther
into the earth than any other tree. Roots that went all the way to
Hell and drew up the boiling water of the demons who torment us
all. When my father sang, no one could pretend they had angel
hearts because his songs made the demon blood boil in their
veins.”

She pointed at me and spanked her palms
together. “You, clap louder. You are the only one here who is
en
compás
. You are a natural. Get these
burros
back in
time.”

Blushing, I blocked out everyone else’s
faltering attempts—especially Didi’s, since Didi, standing next to
me, was way off—and clapped the beat Doña Carlota dictated. The
blood rushed so loudly in my ears that it was hard to hear myself.
I was a
natural
! I imagined Doña Carlota telling her nephew
those very words, that a new student of hers was a natural. It
didn’t matter that Tomás had disappeared and wasn’t speaking to his
aunt. Somehow, he would know.

She started singing and writing on the
board, translating the words as she went.

In my life I have known

The sorrows of this world

Others often have a look

But not the knowing

“The words of my father’s
coplas
, his
lyrics were not the silly words of folk songs about pretty girls
with high combs and mantillas throwing a rose from her balcony. No,
his
cante
came from him like a rusty nail pulled from an old
board. His voice was what we called
la voz afillá
. Like
sandpaper. A good
gitano
voice,
muy rajo
, very rough.
But, more than rough, it was powerful and it was true. Do you know
the worst thing you can say about someone in flamenco?
No me
dice nada
. He didn’t say anything to me. He didn’t speak to me.
No one ever said that about my father.”

Didi studied herself in the mirror, watching
the effect of each hand twirl.

It thrilled me to see Doña Carlota note
Didi’s self-absorption with a quirk of her eyebrow. Didi would not
outshine me. Doña Carlota was on to her already.

“When my father sang, Gypsy men tore their
clothes and Gypsy women scratched their faces because my father’s
voice reminded them that for more than a thousand years our people
have had no home. His voice made them remember again that we were
thrown out of India and forced to wander strange lands. Beaten,
tortured, jailed, enslaved, and driven away. That even in
Andalusia, where poets write poems about us and composers compose
operas, even there,
la guardia civil
will throw a Gypsy man
into jail for stealing a handful of grapes and let his wife and
children starve. No place wants us. No place on this earth wants
the Gypsy. When my father sang, the people heard their
great-grandfathers in prison crying for their wives and children.
They heard the whip that tore the flesh from his back. They heard
the woman, all alone with no man to defend her, cry when the
soldiers came to do what they will with her and her daughters.”

She turned to the board and wrote CANTE
JONDO.

“
Cante jondo
. Deep song. This is a
song that must come from not only your broken heart, but the hearts
of ancestors broken for a thousand years. The hungrier my father
became, the louder the cries of his babies, the deeper his
cante
became.”

Doña Carlota sang a lament so heartrending,
the translation she wrote on the board was superfluous.

One judge cried: “Let them die.”

Another answered “Why?”

Poor, pitiful Gypsies

What is the harm they’ve done?

All the world cries out to God for health
and liberty;

I cry out to God for death

But he will not harken to my plea.

As Doña Carlota sang, she began some
footwork. I could not copy it and clap at the same time. Didi was
the only one who followed her. Doña Carlota moved over in front of
her and Didi mirrored her moves. They were sloppy, imprecise
copies, but like everything Didi did, she executed them with
confidence bordering on arrogance and her own reckless style.

“
Óle
!” Doña Carlota called out,
accenting the
o
.

Didi blossomed under the praise and her
arm-twining and foot-stomping became more frenetic. She even
started a deep, guttural humming moan to accompany Doña Carlota’s
singing. La Doña stamped to a finish and Didi followed.

She barked a question in a rapid burst of
Spanish. Didi shot back a reply. As if she already knew what the
answer would be, Doña started nodding before Didi had finished.

“
Bueno, mujer, bueno
. You have
something to say. You don’t say it in the proper form, but that
will come. You have the fire. You are La Tempesta. And you”—she
stuck her chin out at me—“you are
coma un metrónomo
. You
will be La Metrónoma.” She waved a finger at us. “The two elements
of flamenco. Fire” she pointed at Didi—“and ice.” Of course, that
was me. “The head and the heart. Together you are the perfect
dancer. Apart?” She gave an Old World shrug that dismissed both our
chances.