I woke to find Didi hard at work with her protractor and ruler. “I scoured the Internet,” she said when she saw that my eyes were open. “But there is no other trace of Tomás Montenegro, flamenco guitarist, so we turn to the stars, right?”
Pausing only to consult various texts and mumble names of planets, houses, cusps, trines, triplicity, anaretic degrees and aspects, Didi drew circles surrounding smaller circles. These she filled with numbers followed by signs for degree, latitude, longitude, and all the houses of the zodiac. In the inner circle, she carefully drew lines in pink, brown, and green from one precisely marked point to another, all the while muttering things like “Sun position, eighteen degrees forty minutes of Scorpio.” And “Mercury, twenty-nine degrees, forty-five minutes of Libra.” At the top of the paper she’d written his name, Tomás Montenegro. I knew then how seriously she was taking my quest: she was throwing his chart.
As she finished mapping out Tomás’s destiny, her jaw dropped. She turned to me. “This is the most fucking amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life!”
I didn’t usually listen to Didi’s bulletins about the most fucking amazing things she’d ever seen in her entire life since she averaged roughly eighteen such sightings a day. But since this was Tomás, I jerked to attention. “What?”
“All the positions of his planets are exactly the same as Julie’s.” She meant Julian Casablancas of the Strokes. She shook her head in wonder as she studied Tomás’s chart. “Wow, they’re virtually identical.”
“Tell me! Tell me!” I insisted, wide awake.
“Okay, okay. Let’s see.” She studied the arcs and transits. “Venus in Aries. Wow, that means he is an ardent and passionate lover.” Didi wiggled her eyebrows at me. “I’m starting to see the attraction.”
I shrugged, happy as always to participate in the fiction that I was a hot number. “What else? What else?” I wanted every clue Didi could extract from the stars or tea leaves or reading head bumps. I didn’t care. All that mattered was the answer to the question, “How do I get him?”
“How do you get him?” Didi repeated as she drew her finger along the lines she had charted, the lines of his destiny that, I prayed, I would entangle with my own.
“Okay, here it is.” Didi pointed to the mandala tangle in the inner circle. “His moon is in the tenth house, which means the guy has this constant struggle between security and doing the high-wire act that his talent demands.” She looked up. “That’s it. That is how you get him.”
“What! What!? Quit being so vague! Tell me, tell me how I get him!”
“Chill, okay? Okay, you have to be both this total, total hot vamp and the big, plushy mama cooking up pots of posole or whatever. You know someone who will be sexy and totally take care of him.”
I absorbed this information, soaking it right into my DNA, willing, anxious, no, ecstatic to change everything about myself to make it fit whatever template would be most likely to ensnare him
“Oh God, look at his south node.”
“What the fuck is a fucking south node?”
Didi’s eyebrows jerked up at my language, at my forgetting our roles: she was the bad girl, I was the goody-goody sidekick. But already, in that very moment, I had begun turning myself inside out, reversing all my polarities, waiting to become whatever, whoever, would make him mine. I tried again. “The south node?”
“Essentially that’s whatever tendencies he developed in past lives. The north node is what he’s gotta work on in this life. Since they’re one hundred and eighty degrees apart, they totally control his relationships. His work houses and his love houses are inseparable. Can’t have one without the other. His work is who he is and who he’s gonna fall in love with.”
“What does that mean? Should I learn to play guitar?”
“God, no. Guitar guys do not like guitar chicks. And don’t say Courtney Love cuz she plays for shit.”
“What then?”
Before Didi could answer, the phone rang. My first thought was It’s him. How did he find me? But it was only Alejandro wondering when we were coming in to work.
Outside, I was surprised both by how bright the world was, sizzling in the sunshine of an early summer morning, and by how new it was. Every cottonwood tree we passed flaunted the green hearts that told the world my secret. His presence was so strong that it felt as if he were in the car with us. As we cruised down Central Avenue, I could barely glance at the Aztec, the De Anza, and just the barest peek at the Ace High as we pulled into the parking lot of the Puppy made me feel as if I were going to throw up. I felt his eyes on me as I got out of the car and walked across the lot.
Ever since my mother left, Alejandro had let us eat before we started work. Since I’d moved in with Didi, I was always starving because there was never any food at her house. He had my favorite, blue corn enchiladas with green chile, all ready and waiting for me. But I couldn’t look at them. The jangly excitement that had seized hold of me the instant I set eyes on Tomás clamped around my throat so tightly that I couldn’t even think about food.
“Not hungry?” Didi asked, teasing as she picked sesame seeds off the bun of her Mexi-burger and popped them one by one into her mouth. “You are so going to waste away.” Didi, mistress of the weirdo diet, was jealous that I wouldn’t have to resort to any of her old standbys—laxatives, a finger down the throat. “You are so lucky. Puking rips hell out of the old tooth enamel.” She tapped her front teeth, which she’d had to bleach after they’d turned slightly gray from years of frolics with reverse peristalsis.
“It’s gonna be all right, mija,” Alejandro said softly when he caught me pushing the enchiladas away. He had been even nicer than usual to me since my mother left. But that day, hearing him talking to me as if I were his daughter made me miss Daddy so much that tears I pushed back stung my eyes. I knew I wouldn’t have told Daddy about Tomás if he were still alive, but it would have been nice to think that I could have.
Didi, who usually got mad at me when I was sad, surprised me that day by putting her arm around my shoulders and whispering in my ear, “He knows.”
I didn’t have time to ask her who she meant, Daddy or Tomás, because the dinger started chiming madly and my breath caught. Against all logic, I was certain it was him. Of course, it was one of Didi’s disgruntled fan/customers running back and forth over the hose that made the clinger ring.
“Take it away, ladies,” Alejandro said as he shoved open the back door to leave.
Didi was actually eating her burger, so I slid back the order window, told the driver, a middle-aged guy in a Dodge Ram truck, that Didi was busy, and tried to take the order he barked at me: “Three Mexi-meals, cut the onions, hold the cheese on one, two diet D.P.s, a chocolate shake, two orders of tater tots, extra pico.” But his order slid through my mind as if he hadn’t spoken. All the synapses I’d formerly used to tend to details were now devoted to Tomás. I was making the truck guy repeat his order when a maid at the Ace High across the street opened one of the motel’s glass doors to shake a rag out on the balcony and a gold curtain flashed in the sunlight. My heart stopped and all I could do was stare, certain that he was about to step onto the balcony.
Didi gently pried the pad out of my frozen hand and took over for me. Which is exactly what she was doing when a perfectly restored old Jaguar XKE pulled in. Logically, I knew it couldn’t be Tomás, but that didn’t stop me from peeking over Didi’s shoulder just to make sure. I saw everything that Didi did: the driver was in his mid-twenties, okay but far from great-looking, and obviously rich. He had CDs of Marilyn Manson, Lou Reed, the New York Dolls, and the Strokes spread across the passenger seat. We also noticed a travel mug with a Brown University logo and some suspicious scars on the inside of his left arm that brought a distant memory to mind of one of Sheriff Zigal’s drug lectures back in Houdek and the word tracks. I’m sure that Didi, who was always several steps ahead of me, had already put all the symptoms together and diagnosed a bohemian preppy with motive and means enough to finance a walk on the wild side.
Didi leaned out the window until she was nearly close enough to lick his ear and asked, “You like the Strokes?”
The driver picked up the CD, shrugged, and tossed it aside. “They’re okay.” He was one of those guys who acts like he’s handsome even though he isn’t. Everything about him was too long: his face, his nose, his teeth, his long neck with its long Adam’s apple. He looked as if he’d been held over a flame and melted. That didn’t stop him from staring at Didi and licking his lips in a cheesy way like some jerk watching a stripper circling a pole. None of that seemed to bother Didi. “Depends who you’re talking about. Julie can be kind of a prick. Al’s not bad. Fabrizio. Well, what can I say about Fabs?”
“You know Julie and Fabs?”
He shrugged. “I went to boarding school with them in Switzerland.” He kept staring at Didi like he was about to ask for a lap dance, running his tongue around his lips. He held a cell phone up. He asked Didi, “You want to talk to him?”
“No! You can get Julie Casablancas on the phone?”
“Come with me and find out.”
As Didi looked at me, considering, he yelled out, “And bring a couple orders of taquitos to go!”
“I thought you were through with—”
Didi cut me off. “This isn’t a mission. He’s not famous.” She smiled. “He just knows famous people.” She handed me the order pad. “You’ve got Mystery Man now. Maybe it’s time for me to see what’s out there.”
By the time Didi was out the door, the guy had cleared away the CDs so she could occupy the passenger seat.
“Didi!” I yelled and she stopped for a moment as she was getting in the Jag. Then I didn’t know what to say. Be careful? Of what? Didi had negotiated much worse situations. She jumped into the car and was gone before I knew what I wanted to tell her.
She came home that night very late, giddy as a game-show contestant who’s just picked the right curtain. She threw her arms around me. “I love you. God, I love you. I know you love Mystery Man best now, but I still love you best.”
She was high. Extremely high. “What did that guy give you?”
“ ‘That guy’? His name is Paco.”
That sounded affected to me since he was such a WASP.
“Oh, Rae-rae, you will love Paco and he will love you.” Didi dragged out her big duffel with wheels, opened drawers, and stuffed whatever she scooped out into the bag.
“What are you doing? Are you going somewhere?”
“God, I sure the hell hope so.” She laughed the way really stoned people laugh when they think they’re in on a joke that the straight world will never get. She yanked open a drawer and shoveled bras and panties into the bag.
“Didi,” I said sternly, “where are you going right now?”
“To camp!” she declared brightly as if that were the punch line to her special stoned-people joke. “A special camp in New York where I’ll get merit badges in schmoozing, seeing, and being seen, and”—Didi had to pause for a full laugh attack—“using people on my way up!”
“Didi, really, where are you going?”
“New York. Can you believe it? Paco went to that same ritzy school in Switzerland as Julian Casablancas did! They smoked hash together! Or, well, actually, Paco’s cousin did.” Didi always had a fine disregard for degrees of separation. “But the important thing is Paco is way connected in the whole New York glam-revival scene and—best part!—he loveloveloves my music.”
“Your music?”
“The stuff I’ve been working on. I haven’t written much down. It’s mostly in my head. I told Paco my influences and he totally gets it. What? Did you think I was going to be a groupie my whole life?”
A horn honked outside. “Oops, Pock said if I wasn’t back in five minutes, I would have to travel naked.” Didi dragged the bag toward the door like a giant black dog on a leash.
I jumped up and grabbed her. “Didi, you’re not going anywhere. You’re stoned.”
She let the leash drop. The bag fell to the floor and with it any hint that she might be high. She suddenly seemed more sober than I’d ever seen her. “I’m not leaving because I’m high. Rae, I got high so I could leave. I couldn’t do this straight and I have to. I have to leave. School is out, baby. What could possibly, in a million years, happen to me that would be worse than spending the next three months sweating like a piece of old cheese in that grease trap?”
“But Didi, you don’t know anything about this guy.”
“Quit calling him ‘this guy.’ I didn’t call Tomás ‘this guy.’ And I know everything I need to know about him. I know he’s rich, I know he’s connected, and I know”—she held up her pinkie and leaned in close to me—“I can wrap him around this. And that is a hell of a lot more than you know about Mystery Man, and tell me you wouldn’t leave me for him in a heartbeat.”
“Didi, I’m not leaving you. I’d never leave you.”
She laughed as if the whole conversation had been a joke and I was stupid to have fallen for it. “Jeez, Rae, don’t lez out on me. Here.” She tossed me the keys to the Mustang. “Keep the battery charged.”
“Didi, no. You haven’t even told your mom. Didi, you can’t just leave like this!”
But she was already out the door.
A few hours later, while I was debating whether to tell Mrs. Steinberg or just call highway patrol myself, Didi called on Paco’s cell phone. She was singing, “ ‘Would you get hip to this kindly tip?’ ”
I knew right off that I was supposed to sing back, “ ‘Get your kicks on Route 66!’ Deeds, you’re taking Route 66!”
“As far as we can!”
“Are you okay?”
“Okay? This is how I want to live the rest of my life.”
“I miss you.”
“Can you hear me, because I can’t hear you!”
“I said I miss you. I really miss you!” But the call had already ended in a crackle of static.
The next call came around two that morning. I was on Didi’s computer, reading everything I could find on flamenco. She was singing, “ ‘Cadillac, Cadillac. Long and dark, shiny and black,’ ” when I answered.
I sang back, “ ‘Don’t let ’em take me to the Cadillac Ranch!’ ”
“Ooo, girl knows her Boss.”
“You’re at the Cadillac Ranch?”
“At this very moment, Paco is spray-painting a giant white circle on top of all the graffiti so we can put the title of my first CD up there: DIDI’S CD. Isn’t that perfect? A really good friend of Paco’s does the cover art for the Strokes. Paco already called him and the guy is pumped to do my cover. Oh, he finished. I want to put the title up there while it’s still wet so it’ll run. Bye!”
I knew they’d detoured when she called a few days later and sang a question, “I’m going to—?”
“ ‘Graceland! Graceland! Memphis, Tennessee!’ ” I sang back. “You got off of Route 66.”
“Had to come and pay our respects to the King, right? But, God, Graceland is so small, you wouldn’t believe it. And tacky? What’s the point of being an icon if this is all you’re going to do with it? Oh, Paco is waving for me. He’s doing a series of me in front of Japanese tourists.”
Didi forgot to turn the phone off and I heard Paco pretending that Didi was famous and they were on an important photo shoot. By the time the battery went dead the Japanese tourists were asking Didi for her autograph.
The next day, I visited every record store listed in the Yellow Pages: Borders, Music Mart, Hastings, Wherehouse. None of them carried Tomás’s CD, Santuario. There was only one shop left on my list, Onomatopoeia Records, an indie on Central. I didn’t usually have the nerve to enter Onomatopoeia alone since the guys who worked there had a withering sense of superiority they used to shrivel anyone caught buying uncool music. With Didi, I was fine since she was cool enough for two people, but on my own it took an act of courage.
Inside the front door was a bulletin board blanketed with flyers for concerts and ads for henna tattooing, piercing, and a band seeking “Bass player into neo-funk.” I pretended to be interested in an ad for “body modification” and wished Didi were with me as I sneaked peeks at the store, searching for a bin labeled FLAMENCO. I couldn’t see one and tried to slip in unnoticed, but the clerk, a chunky guy with tattooed calves peeking out from beneath long homeboy shorts that held a wallet on a long chain, immediately lumbered over. “Need some help?” he asked, his attention on reordering the old vinyl records in the bin next to me.
I could not imagine saying Santuario out loud, much less uttering Tomás’s name, so I shrugged and answered, “Just looking.”
I guess the clerk didn’t get many just browsers because he snorted and said, “Whatever,” leaving me to search through all the bins that I thought might apply: Guitar. Instrumental. Latin.
I was about to give up when the clerk appeared beside me again. “Sarah McLachlan, Liz Phair, Indigo Girls, Lisa Loeb.” He pointed down the aisle. “I’ve got them all quarantined over there in a special Lilith Fair section I just created.”
“I’m not looking for them.”
The clerk made a face at me to express both disbelief and disgust.
“I’m not,” I protested. “I’m looking for Santuario, by—”
“Tomás Montenegro. Put out by the now-defunct Kokopelli label. They went belly-up before the release. No promotion. Underground hit among the dozen or so aficionados who managed to snag a copy before the IRS seized everything. Not my cup of tea but a very tasty product. I’ve got one copy over in...” He went to a bin labeled WORLD MUSIC and pulled out Tomás’s CD.
Once I had it, I was glad that Didi wasn’t around. She would have yanked it out of my hand and thrown it into the player in her car just as if it were any old CD. I rushed back to the Lair and didn’t even take the wrapping off until I was ready. I wondered if he might have touched that very CD. Maybe he’d delivered it to the store personally. The moment was so private that I couldn’t even bring myself to play it over the speakers. I clapped Mr. Steinberg’s old headphones on and carefully placed the shimmering disc on the player. Every click and whir was magnified. My heart was racing by the time the sound of his fingers on guitar strings reached my ears. The instant it did, I was back at the Ace High, my head against his guitar as he fed rhythm and passion, mastery and excess directly into my brain.
Since listening to Santuario and daydreaming about Tomás took all my energy, I had none left over to find a better summer job than working at Puppy Taco. So when Alejandro, who’d opened a new location across town, offered me the manager spot, I took it. Unfortunately, the only interest I had in the Puppy Taco anymore was that it was across the street from the Ace High. All I did for entire days, long, hot days when the sun turned the stand into an oven, was stare at the motel and recall every second of The Night. I took out each moment I’d spent with Tomás as if it were a jewel on a black velvet tray and examined it from every angle. I replayed each word we’d exchanged, wringing a semiotician’s range of meaning from every utterance. I felt his presence constantly. He was the invisible audience for which I played my life. I searched all the cars that pulled in, stupidly expecting to see his face. I lost my ability to juggle five orders at a time and calculate tax in my head. Alejandro assumed it was because Didi had left, and he didn’t fire me. I was grateful for his patience and for my paycheck since it had been months since my mother had sent me anything from HeartLand HomeTown other than prayers and predictions of how badly I would suffer in the next life unless I accepted Jesus.
With Didi gone, I got homesick and even started to miss my mom a little. But it was Daddy I really missed. I wanted to talk to him, to tell him about Tomás even though I knew that, if he were still alive, I never would have breathed a word to him. Didi always said that you got through the tough times with distraction. Fortunately, for the first time in my life, I had a distraction powerful enough to wash everything, even missing Daddy and Didi, out of my mind. I bought some guitar strings and rubbed them until my fingers smelled like his; that scent alone was enough to block out any other thought for at least an hour.
But the best distraction ever invented was flamenco. I played Tomás’s CD night and day. During the day, I listened to it on my player while I fried burgers or hauled tater tots out of hot grease. At night, I cranked it on Mr. Steinberg’s old stereo while I surfed the Internet reading everything that popped up when I entered flamenco. I haunted the library, checked out the few books they had that mentioned flamenco, and ordered all the rest.
It took almost a week for Mrs. Steinberg to notice that her daughter was gone. She accosted me as I left for work, “Where Didi?” Her once-beautiful Natalie Wood face was puffy and perfectly outlined by a seam of gray at the base of her overpermed, dyed-black hair.
“She’s gone to this sort of music camp?” I didn’t know how much she understood or how much I could improvise, so I embellished with some feeble hand gestures somehow meant to convey music and camp. “To learn how to write songs and sing songs and do all the things that a rock star does.” I tried to translate as much as I could into Spanish, but I doubted that campo meant “camp.”
“With boy in Jaguar?” It took me a minute to realize what she’d said since she pronounced Jaguar the Spanish way, hag-wahr.
“Paco? Right. He’s going to the camp too. He gave Didi a ride.”
Mrs. Steinberg bunched her eyebrows together, increasing her resemblance to a Pekinese dog. Then she said something in Spanish that even I could understand: “No se llama Didi. Se llama Rachel.” Mrs. Steinberg pronounced it the Jewish way, Rah-hel.
I repeated it in English, mostly so I could hear it myself and understand. “Didi’s name is not Didi, it’s Rachel?”
Mrs. Steinberg nodded vigorously, so pleased by our exchange that she ventured a bit more English. “Yes, father say Rachel but Rachel not good name of star. Not famous people’s name. Didi good name of star. Since little little girl she only want to be star. You good friend. You be good friend, okay?”
I nodded. “Yes, okay.”
Mrs. Steinberg’s computer dinged loudly. She nodded and left.
The heat that summer broke records that had stood for a hundred years. The ravens, disoriented by thirst, came down from the mountains to seek out sprinklers. But the city started water rationing and soon no sprinklers were allowed. Lawns turned crispy and brown. Raven bodies appeared in the gutter. I felt insulated inside a bubble where heat waves, sound waves, and my obsession made the world around me wobbly and out of focus. Only the memories of the night I had met him and dreams of when I would meet him again remained Arctic sharp.
I passed the hours at work in a fog that lifted the second I stepped back into the Lair and worked feverishly on my strategy. Didi would have directed a frontal attack. We’d have tracked Tomás down and laid siege as if he were an ordinary groupie target. That was unthinkable. From the very beginning I wanted only one of two things: Either I wanted to worship him from afar and never speak to him again, leaving the memory of our night together the one, shining moment in my life. Or I wanted to own him. I wanted us to spend every second of the rest of our lives together, then be buried in the same coffin.
That meant that I would never see Tomás again, never allow him to see me, until I had transformed myself into the woman he could love.
I decided on a three-pronged attack. First was body modification. I had to completely change the way I looked. Fortunately, between the jangly excitement that kept my stomach sealed and the lack of edibles at Didi’s house, weight loss took care of itself. The jittery excitement fueled marathon exercise sessions. I bought every workout video on the market and did them all, marveling at how my bread pudding of a body firmed up into a solid new consistency.
His work houses and his love houses are inseparable. Can’t have one without the other: His work is who he is and who he’s gonna fall in love with. I knew Didi was more right about that astrological projection than she could have ever dreamed. The path to his heart was through his work. In order to transform myself into the woman he would love forever, I had to learn everything I could about what he loved most, flamenco. Obviously that involved learning Spanish.
Third, I had to learn everything I could about Tomás.
Only after I had accomplished all three things would I even attempt to find him. Maybe most people, certainly Didi, would have moved the last element up. But like most people, Didi would have missed the point. I did not want to see Tomás, did not want him to see me again, until I was ready, until I had transformed myself into the person he would fall in love with. There would simply be no point in ever seeing him again if I wasn’t that person.
I bought a set of Spanish-language tapes and managed to tear myself away from Santuario long enough to play them. The teacher would say, “El libro,” and I would imagine handing Tomás a book so dazzling it would change his life and make him swoon at my feet. I said, “La pluma,” and imagined saving Tomás’s life with the click of a Bic.
I sought out Didi’s mom for help with pronunciation. She was delighted that I was learning Spanish. As a teacher, speaking in her native language, Mrs. Steinberg was a different person, a surprisingly chatty person. She laughed in a good-natured way at my pronunciation, then chattered away at me in Spanish. I couldn’t understand most of what she was saying. But since she was usually blasted, it didn’t really matter. We were both blotto, really, she on frozen margaritas, me on Tomás. It was enough to build a friendship on. That and we both missed Didi.
Flamenco wasn’t like anything I had ever studied before. Through Interlibrary Loan, I borrowed all of Carlos Saura’s flamenco movies on videotape. Flamenco dance was a revelation. All the wild, inexplicable, irrational, undeniable emotions roiling inside me were there, splashed across the screen as vivid as a painting of my interior landscape. Carmen was my favorite. Platoons of dancers surged through it, stampeding ferociously across wooden floors, driven by flamenco’s beat. It was like seeing my heart choreographed. I watched Carmen so many times that streaks began to appear where the tape became demagnetized.
Over and over, I listened to Antonio Gades, the ravishing dancer who played the director of the dance company staging a flamenco version of Bizet’s opera, as he coached his student, the succulent Laura del Sol. “Your arm should rise smoothly and meaningfully. The hips must be detached from the waist. The breasts are like a bull’s horns, warm yet soft. Heads up... a princely posture.” I put Tomás in Antonio’s place, molding my arms, my hips, my breasts into the perfect receptacle for his art. For him.
Everything I learned showed me how much I didn’t know. All of flamenco was written in code, secret rhythms that could be read only by Gypsies and Spaniards. What I didn’t learn in all my research was how a blond, blue-eyed Texan Czech living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, could ever break into this secret world. I perused the Yellow Pages under DANCE STUDIOS and found one that offered flamenco lessons. But when I called, the instructor had a Southern accent and two names just like me: she could never guide me into any world Tomás inhabited. I knew I would never get any farther in my quest in New Mexico. I was calculating how many years I’d need to put in at Puppy Taco to save enough to study in Spain when the Mustang died and I had to have it towed to a service station. While I waited for a new battery to be installed, I picked up a week-old copy of the Albuquerque Journal. Of course, Catwoman didn’t have a subscription to the local paper. If she had, I might have already known that the answer to my prayer was in my own backyard. I found that answer in an article that read:
In a sun-drenched studio in a gymnasium on the UNM campus an instructor’s dark ringlets bounce tempestuously as she stamps her feet in front of two dozen students. No, she’s not throwing a temper tantrum. Alma Hernandez-Luna is demonstrating flamenco footwork, or zapateado.
“Bodies up, eyes forward,” the energetic Albuquerque native commands, clapping her hands rhythmically. “Heel! Heel!” she commands. “Heel! Heel!” again, like some mantra. Finally, the magic words: “Muy bien! Muy bien! Olé! Olé!”
Though Hernandez-Luna, 38, is the energetic director of the only university-level flamenco program in the world, she is quick to divert all credit to Carlota Anaya, who founded the program eighteen years ago. Though Anaya, contacted at her Santa Fe home, was unavailable for comment due to poor health, Hernandez-Luna maintains that “Doña Carlota is our goddess. She is the real thing. Born in Andalusia—some say seventy, some say eighty years ago, who knows? With someone of her vitality age is irrelevant. What is relevant is that both her parents were full-blooded Gypsies immersed in el arte, in the art and lifestyle of flamenco. Sadly, a lifetime of dancing has taken its toll and she was forced to retire and stop teaching ten years ago. But her true Gypsy spirit lives on here. In the program she established.” The lithe and vibrant Hernandez-Luna stretches her arms out to encompass the studio filled with dancers stamping furiously.
Although the program is widely known in the world of flamenco, enrolling students from all over the country and around the world, it has been a well-kept secret in its hometown. That is all about to change.
“Doña Carlota’s modesty has always prevented her from granting interviews and allowing us to do any sort of publicity. She has recently had a change of heart and has agreed to our christening the dance hall the Doña Carlota Anaya Flamenco Academy and doing more promotion outside of the flamenco community. So from now on, the rest of the world will know what we’ve always known, that the University of New Mexico has a world-class flamenco program and we owe it all to the amazing Doña Carlota Anaya.”
When Didi came home a week later, she had crabs, borderline malnutrition, and a demo of her songs. I had a plan. “I’m going to study flamenco at the university.”
“Oh yeah, right,” she mumbled, struggling against exhaustion to remember. “Flamingo. Mystery Man. Cool.” She dragged her eyelids up one last time and took me in. “You got buff. You look hot.” Then her eyes dropped shut and she slept for three days straight.