"The Flamenco Academy" (30 page)

“I ran to catch up with her and was out of
breath when I drew close enough to yell, ‘Mamá! Mamá! You left
behind Papi’s nails!’

“ ‘I leave only trash,’ my mother said as
she pried the coins out of my hand. ‘We are not nail sellers. We
are dancers. And we don’t need a singer.’ ”

We are dancers.

I walked around with those words whirling
through the fog in my head. I was barely passing any of my other
classes and still I took even more time from them to practice. The
blisters on my feet had turned to calluses and, beneath them, bone
was thickening into genuine dancer’s bunions. Will was my
accompanist, my accomplice. He would play for as many hours as I
wanted to dance. I stopped existing except in the mirror of a
studio. Only in those mirrors could I occasionally glimpse the
creature filled with passion and fury that I wanted to become. Had
to become.

Around the same time, Didi got tired of
Jeff, Ducado cigarettes, and Doña Carlota. She made an
announcement: “I’ve wasted enough time. Cher was barely eighteen
when Liberty Records signed her. She was on the charts by the time
she was twenty. I have screwed around long enough.” From that point
forward, Didi’s attendance at Doña Carlota’s class became spottier
and spottier. She was, she told me, “so over” flamenco. We barely
saw each other. More nights than not, she wouldn’t be home when I
fell asleep. Didi told me that her work was evolving. “Spoken
word,” she said, was the new form her art was taking. For the first
time in our friendship, I didn’t know every detail of Didi’s life.
The only times we saw each other at the Lair, one of us was rushing
off, so I wasn’t around enough to hear any of the new stuff. This
was fine with me. Since it meant I had flamenco all to myself, I
was free to gorge on it.

Didi decided to debut her “spoken-word
performance pieces” at Amateur Night at a coffee shop a few blocks
east of the university on Central that catered to students in
fleece vests and camou pants and professors in L.L. Bean khakis.
She asked Will to play for her. Nothing fancy, nothing that would
overwhelm her poetry, just a little background music.

The day before her first-ever public
performance the weather turned from crisp fall to dead winter. The
evening of the big event I drove while Didi sat beside me doing
breathing exercises and vocalizations. She didn’t say anything the
whole way except “Hooo-hoooo. Haaa-haaa.” The Skankmobile’s heater
had died and it was cold enough in the car that Didi’s long
exhalations froze. We found a parking spot right off Central just
down from Nob Hill. I carried a box filled with Deeds’s CDs. Will
was waiting for us when we arrived. Without saying anything to him,
Didi rushed to the ladies’ room.

“How’s she doing?” Will asked.

I shrugged. “I’ve never seen her so
nervous.”

I found a stool for Didi and put it onstage,
then stacked and restacked her CDs into pyramids and ziggurats on a
table next to the stage. Will dragged a chair onto the stage, bent
his head down until his temple touched the neck of his guitar, and
tuned up. People around us avoided eye contact, looking away as if
we were doing something embarrassing that no one wanted to
acknowledge. A chatting couple, seeing that we were setting up to
play music, moved to a table farther away.

Didi came out of the ladies’ room in an
outfit calibrated to look as if she hadn’t given it any thought.
But I’d seen the hours she’d spent in front of the mirror, choosing
the artfully battered hip-huggers and an embroidered bolero jacket
she’d scored at Le DAV. Seeing it made me realize how long it had
been since we’d gone thrift-shopping together.

Didi settled herself on the stool, turned to
Will, and nodded. He began playing something cocktail loungish with
lots of tremolos and jazzy inflections that seemed to beg for
reminders to tip your waitress.

“Hi,” Didi said.

The crowd glanced up and fell into an
uncomfortable silence in which the hiss of the steam machine
foaming cappuccinos sounded unnaturally loud. Everything about the
setup was wrong. She was too close to the audience. She needed a
microphone. Not to amplify her voice. Just for the psychic distance
amplification provided.

“Hello, Albuquerque!” she yelled, a parody
of every heavy metal concert, in every giant arena, she’d ever
wormed her way into. Except that this was not a giant arena, and it
was doubtful that any of the latte sippers had done much time at
Guns N’ Roses concerts. A few kindly souls smiled uncertainly.
Didi’s strategy was to take the place by storm. A punk poetry
smack-down. She nodded at Will. He began churning furious chords
while Didi yelled a couple of selections.

There was a lag of a second or two after she
finished when even I wasn’t sure if she was done. I didn’t start
clapping until Didi shot a murderous glance my way. The crowd
joined me in a halfhearted round of applause that dwindled into an
awkward silence. It was filled with the lethal sound of an audience
choosing to babble about tests and boyfriends and diets rather than
listen to the deepest outpourings of your soul.

Panic skittered across Didi’s face as she
realized she was dying. Almost as a nervous mannerism, she began
patting her feet to the rhythms Doña Carlota had been pounding into
us. I recognized the twelve-beat
compás
of an
alegrías
with accents on the three, six, eight, and ten, and
a softer one on the twelve. With the same automatic response Doña
Carlota had programmed into us, I picked up the beat. Will focused
on me until he had decoded the style pattern I was clapping and
started strumming in time, abandoning melody and simply hitting the
beats with the driving percussive style Doña Carlota insisted
upon.

Didi echoed what we were doing and her
footwork grew louder. She clacked her heels harder and harder until
she turned the wooden floor into a drum head resonating to her
beat. The effect was instantaneous. The babbling in the audience
grew softer as Didi’s
golpes
and
tacones
grew louder.
Soon the grinding and hissing stopped as the counter help paused to
listen and the only sounds were our hands and feet. Didi added
brazeo
, her arms twining up, fingers fanning, out and then
in, pulling attention into herself with each rotation. When she had
every eye in the place focused on her, she started reciting:

I died of cholera

My father threw the torch

That turned the house

Into a dervish of flame

Somehow she fit the lyrics to the beat. The
odd accents created a hypnotic rhythm that made unexpected words
leap out in ways which lent them an originality that hadn’t been
there before.

“
The contamination must be
contained”

He bellowed and hurled

My breasts

My lips

My pimples

My bangs hiding my eyes

The new hair between my legs

Into the bonfire

Right in front of my eyes, I witnessed Didi
change. Each gaze, each pair of eyes she managed to rivet, fed her
with an energy that I seemed not just immune but actually allergic
to. Didi was another story. The attention nourished a hunger she
had had her whole life. She grew larger before our eyes. I clapped
louder. I shouted out the
jaleo
we’d learned in class.

“
Vamos ya
,” I yelled. “
Así se
baila. Toma! Que toma!
” They were all versions of “You go,
girl.” And Didi did. She recited in time to the beat until her
voice took wing and she was singing in a style that was part rap,
part
cante
, and all Didi.

“
Save the innocents!”

He heaved in

L’eggs pantyhose

Tampax ultra-slims

Bonne Bell Boyz ‘n’ Berry gloss

Maybelline Great Lash

Summers Eve Morning Rain douche

And all the CDs of the Strokes

Into the bonfire

“
It had to be done.”

He gathered my bones

Disinfected of flesh

And dressed them in

A pink tutu

She finished with a flurry of footwork
ending in a dramatic pose, arms flung to the heavens, Will and I
wringing out one final, monumental chord/clap that left no doubt in
the audience’s mind that it was time for massive applause. A few of
the more highly caffeinated half-stood, half-crouched in a subdued,
coffee shop version of a tentative standing ovation.

After milking the applause for all it was
worth Didi spoke in the mock humble style of an acknowledged queen.
Celebrity-ese was a native tongue she had been waiting her whole
life to speak. It is a gentle language that can be spoken only from
on high, down to fans. Based as it is on adulation, all it required
was an elevation, and in that moment, arms thrown high, Didi became
big enough to have little people.

“I call that one ‘Quarantine,’ ” she said,
looking down as if the revelation had come at a great price. “I
wrote it after I visited my father in the hospital”—she paused,
then went on reluctantly, as if the information were being dragged
out of her—“for the last time.

“He was all, you know”—Didi’s arms tented
above her head—“covered in this oxygen thing. Tubes everywhere—”
She stopped. There was silence, the pure silence that is a
subtraction of all the normal sounds, even breathing.

“So, here’s my father dying of cancer and
all he wants to talk about, all he ever wanted to talk about since
I betrayed him, and became a sexual being”—knowing snorts of
laughter from a few women in the audience—“was that I was going to
hell if I didn’t watch out.”

While Didi launched into another one, I
thought about “Quarantined.” Did it matter that Didi’s father had
treasured and approved of everything his beloved daughter had ever
done? That it was my mother who predicted I was going to hell and
threw all my contaminated goods away? Probably not. Probably all
that mattered was that every woman listening mourned again for the
father she’d lost at puberty and every person of either sex
believed he or she had been privy to a dark personal
revelation.

“In Sevilla, during Semana Santa, Holy Week,
they have these songs? Called
saetas
?” Didi threw in a
little upspeak as if this information was just occurring to her on
the spot. “That means an arrow to the heart. They’re sort of
laments that the singer sings to Jesus or the Virgin Mary during
these gigantic processions. So you have thousands of guys in black
robes and hoods carrying these colossal floats that weigh tons and
they stop while someone on a balcony sings their heart out. Anyway,
I call this next one, ‘Arrow Poem.’ ”

Another one I hadn’t heard before.

“Because of the
saeta
thing. But also
when you see it written down, the lines form an arrow.” She
shrugged as if to say that even she herself could not explain the
random ways in which genius struck.

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 him.

I was back in Tomás’s secret park where the
cut grass had smelled like watermelon. Where Didi had found me the
day she came to say she was sorry she had taken my thing. Had she
done it again? I felt embarrassed, exposed. But no one was paying
any attention to me. I searched Didi’s face for some acknowledgment
that she had stolen the poem from my life. There was none. She was
already on to the next one.

With each piece, the crowd leaned farther
forward. Didi had started weak, but she finished invincible. All
she’d had to do was figure out how to set her natural charisma to a
flamenco beat and the coffee shop audience became hers just as
surely as every lonely Sunday driver who’d pulled up at the Puppy
Taco drive-through window had been hers.

“Thank you. Thank you,” she said, putting
her hands into prayer position and bowing her head until her lips
touched her fingertips. “I’ll be performing around town. Come on by
and say hello. I’m Ofelia!”

This time, the entire place stood and
clapped. I joined them. Didi
was
Ofelia. I clapped for her.
I clapped for Ofelia.

“
Y! Un! Doe! Tray!
” By the end of the
semester, Doña Carlota was using flamenco shorthand to start us
off. After an abbreviated countdown the class would run by itself.
“Delicata’s
paseo
!” She ordered and we all surged into the
sequence of steps first choreographed by Doña Carlota’s mother
almost a century ago. Everyone in the class fell into the dream
that she was putting her foot in history, following a path that led
all the way back to the original tribes in India. But no one else
dreamed as I did that the long trail of Doña Carlota’s story would
lead to a love nourished in secret. And no one else dreamed as Didi
did that it would lead to immortality.

Didi’s skirt whipped against my legs as we
pivoted and turned sharply. Far from abandoning flamenco, after her
coffee shop debut Didi saw that
el arte
was the key to
success and she threw herself back into it with an obsessiveness
that approached my own. She’d also restarted her affair with Jeff.
Snatching him away yet again from Liliana had created a highly
satisfying drama for the rivaling flamenco camps that had been
established once Didi was acknowledged as a diva worthy of
competing with Liliana for the title “head flamenco bitch.”