"The Flamenco Academy" (47 page)

The tour had been arranged in a circle. The
top of the circle, the halfway point, was Madison, Wisconsin, where
black ice covered the streets and Tomás had to loosen the strings
on his guitars so the cold that tightened them wouldn’t harm the
fretboards. When we reached the bottom of the loop, the
southernmost and last stop of the tour, we stepped off a plane in
Austin, Texas, into heat so tropically humid that Tomás filled his
cases with sachets of drying agents. The first thing we were shown
in Austin was the site of America’s first mass murder, a tower on
the university campus where Charles Whitman had killed seventeen
people including himself. The second thing was Barton Springs.
Coming from the desert, the sight of a lagoon, a minor inland sea,
cutting cold and clean through the center of a city, was the most
improbable extravagance I could imagine. I had to possess this
luxury, to have such opulence in my life.

That night, we played to a full house at the
Hogg Auditorium on the university campus. After the show, a local
aficionado
dragged us to a tapas bar owned by a Madrileño
who went crazy for Tomás’s playing and offered to let him play for
as many nights as he wanted in exchange for a percentage of the
bar. There was no room in the small club for a dancer. I could stay
or go home to Albuquerque. I chose to stay and have a vacation from
flamenco. I never went with Tomás to the club, never met anyone
from the local flamenco scene.

We rented an apartment in Travis Heights, a
leafy neighborhood dotted with birdhouses on tall poles that purple
martins swooped around, eating mosquitoes. I bought a jade green
tank suit and an old robin’s egg blue Schwinn and every day, as
Tomás slept off the night before or practiced for the night to
come, I rode to Barton Springs. My route cut through the campus of
the Texas School for the Deaf.

I would sweat on the ride over, salty drops
trailing down to my elbows, then plunge into the hypothermic waters
of the chilly springs and stay until the sky was dark and the pool
darker. Until the only thing that could warm me up was Tomás’s
body. At first, he loved my coming home to him, still chilly from
the polar waters, curlicues of wet hair dripping water onto my
shoulders. But as the summer wore on, the heat bludgeoned us. He
took to leaving the apartment earlier and earlier and staying out
later and later. Of course, he was having an affair. Maybe several.
It was not my place to ask. I was in his country on forged papers
and could be asked to leave at any time. My only toehold, what
helped me hang on, was knowing Tomás’s secret, knowing that his
documents were falsified as well.

The last time I rode to Barton Springs, I
was so sunk in gloom that I was halfway around the playing field
before I sensed an entirely soundless game of soccer being played
beside me. The spectacle of teams of young men screaming silently
at one another in sign language mesmerized me to such a degree that
I failed to notice a gaping pothole in the road ahead. I hit it,
sailed over the handlebars, and skidded to a landing that flayed
the inside of my arms.

The soccer team surrounded me, speaking in
voices filled with complex harmonics, bird shrieks, and mechanical
sounds. The coach and the rest of the team packed me and the
battered Schwinn into a pickup and drove me home.

The windows of the little house were open
and as I approached with my silent crew I could hear Tomás talking
on the phone. All the heat that had cooled between us was there
with whomever he was speaking to. His Spanish was too rushed, too
animated for me to understand, but his excitement was easy to
translate. I waved good-bye to my rescuers and, cradling my arm,
opened the door. The instant he saw me, Tomás switched to English,
pretending to be bored as he said, “Okay, well, I gotta go.”

Then he noticed my arm and rushed me into
the bathroom. He washed the wound, patted on ointment, and bandaged
it up. But the cut needed to be scrubbed to remove all the bits of
gravel embedded in my flesh. Tomás couldn’t bear to hurt me and I
couldn’t summon up the courage to clean the scrape myself. So,
eventually, the scrape healed over the tiny specks of gravel that
hadn’t been cleaned away and they left gray smudges that grew into
the new skin like shadows beneath the surface. It didn’t matter;
the only time anyone saw the underside of my arms was when I
danced, and in flamenco, it was good to have shadows to reveal.

We went home to the house on the river.
Tomás stopped playing anything but
cante jondo
. His
toque
was drenched with loneliness, regret, abandonment, and
betrayal. I assumed that the last, the betrayal, was his confession
to me and I fell into a state of panicked rage. We talked about
this in the only way we had ever talked about anything, through
flamenco. Since we exchanged so few words, his every gesture took
on heightened meaning. The entire time I’d known him, Tomás had
always held his guitar the way the old-timers had, with the guitar
resting on his right leg, pointing upward on a diagonal that
allowed the left hand easy access to the fretboard. Around this
time he adopted an even more torturous position that made the
fretboard almost invisible, with his right leg crossed over the
left, guitar hugged into the hip and tilted away from his body. He
looked like Picasso’s Old Guitarist draped around the guitar, his
left hand crooked painfully into a position that strained the
muscles and made the nerves go dead. He complained about the pain,
the numbness. Then he would go back to practicing with his
instrument tilted even farther away.

One morning, I stepped out onto the porch
and was surprised to discover that somehow the season had changed
from late summer to winter with no fall intervening. The Sandias
had turned a steely blue and a light dusting of snow crowned them.
Tomás’s booker had organized another tour: San Diego, Phoenix,
Chicago, Montreal. He had a big following in Montreal. All solo
engagements. There was no mention of my going with him.

If there was a gap long enough between gigs,
he flew home. What survived of our relationship existed in those
sputtering installments. On the nights before he left again, I
tried to inoculate him against other women. That winter, it always
started with my pulling him close in the darkness, yanking his
sweater off over his head so that in the dry air, static
electricity crackled and flared and an aurora borealis flashed
across his back, his arms. His hair would rise above his head, an
unearthly frame for his ruinous beauty, the beauty that was both
animating and obliterating my life. We made love in panicky,
desperate sessions. I put up NO TRESPASSING signs on him with
necklaces of hickeys and let him flay my neck, my cheeks, my
breasts with his beard. We ground ourselves into each other, brutal
at some moments, then tender. In the only arena I had left, I was
competitive in bed. I intended that each swivel of my hips, each
touch, each syncopation be better than that of any of the other
women I knew he would sleep with. I gauged each erection,
calculating whether another woman could inspire one harder, more
enduring. His orgasms were how I kept score. Were the convulsions
of passion strong enough to ward off interlopers? I clung to the
promises made by the wet slap of our bodies.

I inhaled his odor, the smell of our animal
selves, the fragrance we made together. Before he’d even left, the
scent made me nostalgic for us. I kissed the furrows of his ribs,
his flat stomach, my tongue running over the small hairs, letting
my own hair tickle him, and moving downward toward the place where
the smell was strongest.

Near dawn, I would creep out of bed and
write long letters, inventories of desire cataloging everything
we’d done, everything I still hoped to do. I packed these missives
into his suitcase. I spent a fortune express-mailing them to
hotels, concert halls, whatever address I had, wherever they would
reach him before another woman did.

At dawn, I would drive him to the Sunport.
We passed the bandage factory as the sky just started to turn pink
with early morning light and we gazed upon the woman painted on the
side of the building, raising her arms in a flamenco pose that came
to look more and more like pleading.

Denial and fantasy. Longing and deprivation.
Like a cactus that could survive on little more than the moisture
in the air, I was made for the arid emptiness of the long-distance
relationship. After years of sustaining a one-sided relationship, I
was ideally adapted to subsist on Arrivals and Departures. I could
live on airport moments alone. At the Departures gate, after he
pressed fervid last-minute erections against me, I would will
myself into hibernation until the next arrival. Then, as Tomás
sauntered in carrying the Santos Hernandez guitar he would never
dream of abandoning to the faulty attention of baggage handlers, my
life would stutter and start up again. I didn’t question this
contract since I’d written it myself. My consolation was that I was
the one he came home to. Of the five hundred, the sultan had chosen
me to wait in his chamber. He would leave, would visit others, but
I had been installed in his personal quarters. I waited for him in
a house by the river that wasn’t mine and wasn’t his, dancing to
his CDs, waiting for him to return.

Each time he came back, his dark mood would
have turned darker. He played nothing but
soleares
, the
Gypsies’ songs of desolation and exile. Because I knew the code so
well, I could translate the rhythms he played. I knew the songs of
suppression, of a spirit yearning to be free. I knew that he
believed his
duende
, his crazed flamenco passion, was
suffocating. I assumed that he believed the blanket of domesticity
I had enshrouded him in was the villain. I finally found the
courage to ask if he wanted me to leave.

All he said was, “I have to show you
something.” We drove to the Rosario Cemetery in Santa Fe and he led
me to the Anaya family plot. Though I couldn’t have said where it
had gone, a year had disappeared since the audition. The weather
was as cold and gray as it had been on the day when Tomás had
entered and Didi had exited my life. A black wrought-iron fence and
thick hedges of lilac bushes encircled the plot, securing the rest
of seven generations of Anayas. I spotted headstones with dates on
them that reached back three centuries. Though the branches of the
tall lilac bushes were bare and snow mounded over their roots, I
could imagine that stepping inside the lilac maze when they were
green and blooming would have been like entering a seraglio, a
prison where scent alone could hold you captive.

“The twins,” Tomás said, pointing to two
small graves, side by side, guarded over by a granite lamb. “Efren
and Jacobo. They were my
tío
Ernesto’s cousins. They died
when he was six, back in the twenties. They were all out playing
when a storm rolled in over the mountains. Efren and Jacobo took
shelter under a cottonwood. There was no thunder. Barely even any
clouds. The two little boys were waving at him to come, get under
the tree with them, when the lightning struck. He said everyone
laughs at him, but when the lightning struck, he saw every bone in
the boys’ bodies. He hated El Día de los Muertos. All those
grinning skeletons, they reminded him of his cousins.

“
Mi tío
Ernesto.” We stood next to
his great-uncle’s grave. “He introduced me to everyone in this
plot. He told me that it didn’t matter that my parents weren’t
Anayas; everyone buried here was my family. All the Anayas had come
from ancestors who’d come from Spain. That made me an Anaya. And he
made me Anaya. It didn’t matter what blood I had running in my
veins. We’re all just bones in the end and my bones would end up
here, next to his.

“He had that carved before he died.” Tomás
pointed to the headstone. In the middle of the stone was chiseled
ERNESTO TIBURCITO ANAYA. On one side was Doña Carlota’s name with
the inscription BELOVED WIFE. On the other was Tomás’s name with
the inscription BELOVED SON.

His long hair fell forward, covering his
face. I would never have known he was crying if a cold wind had not
lofted the dark strands away. I put my arm around him. After all
the ways we had touched, at that moment when he needed the animal
comfort of another human the most, he turned from me and walked
back to his car. We drove in silence to the inelegant south side of
town, past an empty lot humped with mounds made by prairie dogs,
now hibernating in their burrows. We turned onto a street where no
grass grew. All the small, square houses had lawns of round rocks.
A semi cab was parked on the street. Tomás stopped in front of a
house that looked like all the others and handed me his keys.

“Take the truck. Do whatever you want with
it. I’ve got to go north. Spend some time at the cabin.” He didn’t
reveal to me the name of the village that Guitos had said was his
true home, where his heart was.

“I’ll drive you up there,” I said, but
meant,
Let me in. Give me a chance. Let me see the world I
should have reshaped myself to fit.

“No, thanks. My cousin Chucho lives here.
He’ll drive me.”

“When will you be back?”

“I don’t know, Rae. I need to think. Then
I’ve got a tour coming up. They want me in Spain again. The
biennale.”

“Will you come back before you leave?”

“Rae, I—I don’t know. Maybe. Don’t expect
me. Don’t count on me. Okay? That would be best. Just don’t count
on me.”

“That’s all? That’s all you’re going to
say?”

“Rae, we... I... I’m sorry. Stay at the
river house for as long as you want. I’ll send money. The bills are
taken care of. I’m... I’ll call, okay?” He grabbed his jacket and
his guitar and backed quickly away from the truck, his boots
crunching over the gravel on the front yard. I didn’t see who
opened the front door and let him in.