Every time I set foot in Doña Carlota’s studio, it was as if Tomás were waiting there for me. I bathed and perfumed as if I were meeting a lover. Every second of class, I felt his eyes on me. I believed that Doña Carlota was Tomás’s envoy to me, sent to teach me about the art, the culture, the blood that had formed him. Every stamp of my foot nailed him to me. Every twine of my wrist wound him closer to me. She had been sent to tell me his story, to give me the information I needed to salve all the complications in his life. Once I learned enough, I knew I could make every equation in his life balance. I could do what no one else could for him and he would need me and love me. Didi would occasionally point out how long it had been since that night. I couldn’t explain to her that it seemed I saw him or he saw me every day in class, that we were together, that everything I did was bringing us closer. It didn’t make sense then. It wouldn’t make sense later. It is impossible to explain obsession, to explain the irrational rationally.
The weeks passed and flamenco was hammered into me until my knees ached, my spine throbbed constantly, and my wrists felt as if they would twist off my arms. Pillows of blisters formed along the outside of my big toe, across the back of my heel, and on the balls of both feet. The nail of the right big toe turned black because I pounded on it the hardest. But every one of my toes felt as if they’d been run over. The muscles of my calves and thighs burned as they grew harder with each class, with each of the endless hours outside of class that I practiced.
Still, no more of her, of his, story was forthcoming. Doña Carlota had warned us, You will only hear more of the story when you have earned it. As the weeks passed without a single word from her that was not instruction, I began to fear that she would never consider us worthy to hear another word of the fairy tale that was hers and Tomás’s life. Instead, she spent every second of every class hammering flamenco’s diabolical rhythms into us, making our heels and toes into percussion instruments, our hands and arms into cobras curling out of a snake charmer’s basket, and our hips into an ocean of waves that never stopped rolling.
Gradually, as I watched Doña Carlota and the more advanced dancers who practiced on the lawn outside the old gym, dancers like the mesmerizing Liliana, I came to realize that each stamp, clap, hand flick, hip bump, twirl, jump—no matter how apparently frenzied—hit one of the very precise beats of the compás clock.
Soon, I was hearing el compás everywhere—in a car’s clacking transmission, in the hum and bump of a fan, in the pelting debris tossed around by a windstorm. Bit by bit, I began to see that flamenco was like haiku. Instead of seventeen syllables, though, the dancer, the singer, the guitarist, each member of flamenco’s holy trinity, we all had a dozen beats, in however long or short a series we chose, within which to express what was in our hearts. Those beats were both the yoke that bound dancer, singer, and guitarist together and the instrument that transformed random movement into forward propulsion that could take them wherever they wanted to go. They were the one essential element in flamenco.
And Didi couldn’t get them.
“God! I hate the fucking compás!” Didi burst out on a day when we left class and stepped into the glory of a New Mexico autumn that I’d somehow missed completely until that moment. The world, bathed in crystalline light, was a place so crisp and sharp, it was like being nearsighted your whole life, then putting on glasses and seeing clearly for the first time.
Doña Carlota had humiliated Didi that day. She’d stopped the entire class as we were trying to follow her through a routine and shouted, “Tempesta, you are fuera de compás!”
Didi had, once again, committed the greatest sin in flamenco; she was off the beat, out of compás.
“Can you count?”
Didi refused to answer and Doña Carlota asked her again, “Tempesta, I’m asking you can you count? Did you learn numbers or is that too boring for La Reina Oh-Fay-Lee-YUH! Is it?”
“Yes, of course, I learned to count.”
“Good, she can count. So why don’t you? Why don’t you count? One, two, three! Four, five, six! Seven, eight! Nine, ten! Eleven, twelve! In Spain, we are doing this in our sleep.”
Didi tried again but, although her heels cracked loud as a rifle shot and her arms were supple as silk and her expression was fierce as a Kabuki mask, she could not stay on the beat to save her life. That was when I truly trusted that Didi would never really invade my flamenco world. Knowing that she would never get it, I started in earnest that day to teach her el compás.
We took to walking everywhere en compás. I would call out the beats of the different palos, styles, to her in whatever scat improvisation I liked at the moment. “Tah-kah-tah-kah-tah! Tah-kah-tah-kah-tah! Pah-tah-pah! Pah-tah-pah! Tah-pum! Tah-pum! Tah-pum!”
Didi could stay en compás as long as I was hitting the beats hard for her, but the second I turned it over to her, she was lost. “I don’t hear it,” she moaned. “All this tah-kah tah-kah shit, it’s an urban myth.”
“How can you say you don’t hear it? You can sing it. I’ve heard you.”
“Shit, I can mimic anybody. But this?” She did a spazzed-out imitation of my footwork. “This is utterly insane. Vámonos! There’s a chile cheeseburger at Frontier calling my name.” She ran ahead. I followed, but found that even when I tried not to, my footsteps fell into compás.
I had almost given up, resigned myself to never hearing another word of the story that was Tomás’s story, when, one Friday, Doña Carlota swept into class, clapping before she was even through the door. She walked in demonstrating the sequence she wanted us to learn. “Golpe! Golpe! Tacón! Palmas secas!”
My heart sank. There would be no more of her story that day.
“You, Metrónoma, you like the story the best, don’t you?” With no warning I occupied the spot I hated most in all the world: the center of attention. The place where Didi bloomed so extravagantly made me writhe and shrivel. “I will let you be the one to decide if we hear more of it today.” She clapped out a rhythm. “Dígame! Tell me something and I will continue.”
Her request stunned me. Tell her something? I glanced at Didi, hoping for a clue. Didi mimed dancing. I turned back to Doña Carlota. What? What did she want me to dance? I echoed back the alegrías Doña was clapping, but my hands patting together felt wooden. The rest of my body was even stiffer. I couldn’t move, much less dance. From the corner of my eye, I saw Didi urging me on by holding up her skirt and drawing my attention to the simple paseo she was executing. How ironic that it was a sequence I had drilled into her head. Holding on to the compás like a handicapped railing, I dragged myself from one beat to the next. Though I hit every pulse on the head, it was a stilted color-by-numbers affair until, gradually, I loosened up and began to flow.
“Vamos ya!” Blanca, the sweet-tempered girl, yelled out encouragement.
The praise both unnerved and inspired me. I ducked my head, but pretended that, instead of hiding my cheeks flaming with embarrassment, I was only looking down to gather my skirt. Recovering, I swirled the material in a brisk countertempo to the one I hammered into the wooden floor.
“Todas!” Doña Carlota ordered and the entire class picked up the taconeo I was executing. When we were all pulsing in time like one many-chambered heart to a beat that I set, Doña Carlota awarded me the equivalent of a blue ribbon: she nodded her head. I felt as if I might incinerate on the spot from an overheated combination of pleasure and embarrassment. The attention was a trophy that threatened to crush me.
I glanced over to see if Didi had noticed La Doña’s approval, but she was absorbed in her own improvisation. Though she was wildly off the beat, a magical force streamed through Didi, animating every stamp of her heel, twining of her wrist, and fanning of her fingers. It was impossible not to stare at her; she embodied all that was savage and free in flamenco. She was so mesmerizing that I literally stumbled over my own feet.
Doña Carlota grimaced as if I had caused her actual physical pain and clapped her hands to stop the ensuing chaos. My wings had melted; it was a lesson I wouldn’t forget soon.
She started us back on a simple beat with some simple marking steps, then, without any further preamble, began to tell the story. “My mother was fourteen when I was born. Fifteen when my sister was born. Gemelos de gitanos, Gypsy twins they call this in Spain. Is it any wonder that she, my mother, remained a child all her life? Charming and cruel, stupid and crafty, selfish and sacrificed? Y doble.”
She doubled the rhythm her feet were creating and we all kept up, stamping and listening twice as hard.
“Her name, Delicata, fit my mother perfectly. All little girls believe their mothers are pretty, but everyone said my mother was as beautiful as a saint. Even though she was gitana por los cuatro costaos, Gypsy on all four sides, still her skin was not typical calé skin, tough and brown as ox hide. She had the skin of an English lady, pale as milk. My mother stayed away from the sun like an owl. Next to her pale skin, her lips were pomegranates, with the same red in her cheeks. The long ruffled skirt she wore had once been that same pomegranate red, but it faded to an even prettier pink. Over this she wore a white apron that she had embroidered with red poppies. Her black shawl with the long fringe was crossed over her breasts, the ends tucked into her apron. She wore her hair, glossy and black as a leopard, in fat curls in front of her ears called caracoles, snails.
“Don’t think about what your feet are doing! Just let them follow the rhythm! Óle.” She spoke the word softly, more in resignation than approval, and I allowed not just my feet but my heart to follow her rhythm, her words. I became the Gypsy with milk skin and pomegranate lips, the woman Tomás would fall in love with.
“Because I saw her with six babies after me, I knew how I had betrayed my mother. How we all had. With each new chaboro, that was our Gypsy word for baby, I saw her joy born again as well. While they were tiny, she loved nothing more than washing the babies’ soft skin, oiling their tender bodies, sniffing the sweet-smelling spaces at the back of their necks. She even pointed out to me how their curdy shit did not stink. But, eventually, like me, all the new babies disappointed her. They refused to stay clean and sweet-smelling. Their downy hair matted and filled with lice. Fleas chewed scabs onto the chubby ankles. Their shit began to stink. Soon, the new babies weren’t new. Soon they became as grimy as everything else in la cueva and it was as if, one day, my mother was no longer able to distinguish her newest child from the hole in the dirt that was our home.”
Though what Doña Carlota told us seemed fantastic, it also rang truer than any words we’d heard spoken in any classroom we’d ever been in. The experience was embarrassing and mesmerizing. With each word, she drew us into a world we’d never imagined. With each golpe, she cracked away a bit more of the shell of Anglo reserve that kept us and our true stories hidden from one another.
“My mother was a prisoner in our cave. She had been the most beautiful, the best bailaora, the best dancer in a town of the most beautiful, the best bailaoras in the world, Sevilla. Seh-vee-yah.” Doña Carlota trilled and caressed the syllables.
“Then my father took her away and forbade her ever to dance again for strangers. She spent hours gazing out the opening of our cave, not speaking, not giving any sign that she knew her children were there. I would cook a pot of stew and bring her a bowl with a crust of bread to use as a cuchara de pan, but she would just let it sit in her lap.
“Sometimes, when my father was gone, I could creep up to her and, if I was quiet enough and her dreams deep enough, she would begin stroking my hair, easing the tangles out of it with her fingers, splitting the lice between her nails. As she smoothed my hair, braiding order into the wild strands, she would speak. Always about her home, about Sevilla.”
It would be hard to say exactly how she did it, but with just a few minute adjustments in her carriage, her voice, Doña Carlota transformed herself into Delicata, her beautiful, spoiled mother. When she spoke, she spoke as Delicata.
“ ‘Granada is a gray town filled with gray people,’ my mother would tell me. ‘Don’t you see how stocky and short and serious they are? The thumb of God has squashed them. In Sevilla, ah, Sevilla, people know how to laugh. They know how to dance. To sing. In my neighborhood, Triana, you can’t turn a corner without hearing cante. Sevillanos have chuso. Chuso y gracia. Granadinos don’t even know what humor and grace and charm are! Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Moors, Christians, they all loved Sevilla. They all tried to conquer her. But she always belonged to us, her people.’
“ ‘To walk along the Río Guadalquivir where the galleons sailed in bringing the treasures of the New World. To gaze upon the Moors’ shining Golden Tower. To stroll down the Alameda de Hércules and hear singing and laughter pouring out from every café and bar. This is to live. Everywhere there is laughter, gaiety, with enough to eat for everyone and more than enough for those with talent. Sevilla, my Sevilla. I would have been queen of Sevilla. They all said it, “Delicata, you will be queen of the cafés cantantes!” ’
“At the mention of the singing cafes, I would nestle in more deeply between my mother’s knees. This is what I wanted to hear about, the magic world of the cafés cantantes. But first she would always tell me about my grandmother.
“ ‘Your grandmother was the true queen. La Leona they called her, the Lioness, because she ruled the world of the cafés cantantes as surely as a lioness rules the jungle. Four performances a day, that is how often my mother and I danced with our cuadro. Cuadro, that is the proper term for a person’s dance group, not this zambra nonsense these Granadino animals in their caves use. These stumpy, dreary—’
“ ‘Four performances a day?’ I would prompt my mother, not wanting to lose her to the endless litany of grievances she had against Granadans, against Granada.
“ ‘Yes, and more,’ she would answer. ‘Los adinerados, the rich ones with their cigars and whiskeys and walking sticks, would always select a few of their favorites to continue in los cuartos, the private rooms, after the regular performances. And my mother and I were favorites. Oh yes, they called for us, los adinerados. Many a time, we crossed the bridge to our Gypsy neighborhood, to Triana, with the sun high overhead, but we were back again at eight that evening.
“ ‘Back at the Café del Burrero, Café de Novedades, Café Filarmónico. Such beauty. You can’t imagine such beauty, here in this miserable hole in the ground. The cafés were heaven. All of us dancers with our hair piled into gleaming caracoles, our waists tucked in by corsets, bustles rustling beneath the yards of fine silk and crinoline. The audience, always men, with their derbies and cigars. Some of the grand señoritos, the true patrons, with capes over their dark suits, white spats, and high-buttoned shoes.
“My mother fell into a dream so deep as she spoke that I could smell the cigars, the polish on the gentlemen’s shoes, the pomade on the dancers’ hair.
“ ‘We performed on stages, proper stages raised high above the crowds. At our feet were rows of light, flames of gas, so that every move, every turn of an arm, every twist of a wrist, shone as if we dancers were made of gold. And the floor of the stages? Wood. No Gypsy had ever danced on wood until the cafés opened. For the first time, we could hear the rhythm pulsing through our bodies. That I loved. The sound of my feet stomping, pounding so fast that los tocaores could barely keep up on their guitars. Luckily, I was a young girl, not yet of marriageable age, so they let me get away with my wild zapateado. If one of the older dancers, my mother, any woman, tried to shake the dust from those wooden floors with footwork like mine, oh! Then they would start. ‘Not feminine enough. Destroying el arte. Too masculine.’ And the women would go back to their delicate brazeo, standing rooted on one spot, twining their arms with all the fire of ivy growing. Cows, stupid cows. Los señoritos might say they were true aficionados, that they only liked the old-style dancing. But who did they hire? Who did they want for their private parties? Who was the princess of the cafés cantantes? Yes, that is what they called me, La Princesa, and I would have been the queen, La Leona. I would have ruled over that world if only, if only—’
“ ‘What about the decorations?’ I cut my mother off. Too many times all the wonderful stories had been derailed by ‘if only.’
“ ‘Ah, the decorations.’ She would sigh, close her eyes as if she were smelling the most delicious smell, and begin again, calm then as she remembered the cafés cantantes. ‘Always, the cafés were decorated in the most elegant style. Heavy curtains of ruby velvet hung at the sides of the stage. Giant mirrors in frames of gold made the big halls appear even larger. In front of the stage were rows of chairs. Each chair had a tray fastened to the back so that the customer would have a place for his caña of wine. Some of the cafés had little tables. Above all the spectators on the ground floor were boxes with armchairs, just like a theater. Up there, in the boxes, los adinerados didn’t drink the little caña of wine for thirty-five centimos like the riffraff on the floor. No, they bought wine by the bottle, four and five bottles at a time. On the walls were posters that celebrated all the beautiful places of Sevilla. La Giralda, the golden tower, Sevilla’s cathedral, almost as large as St. Peter’s in Rome. All the beautiful, beautiful places of Sevilla. All the beautiful places I will never see again because—’
“ ‘What dances did you perform?’ I hurried to ask before my mother’s dreamy mood sank beneath her sadness.
“ ‘On those wooden floors that were like dancing on a drum? All of them. All the dances that we gitanos de Triana had only danced for ourselves before, they all burst forth in the gaslight. Tangos, tientos, bulerías, alegrías. These were the easy ones, the light, happy ones for weddings and baptisms that the audiences liked right away. But we also brought out the slow, sad ones. Los jondos that we danced at funerals, siguiriyas, soleás, peteneras, these we danced too, but only the truest of the aficionados liked them. Four performances a day and, with each one, the public begins to like el baile a little more until one day the singers are no longer the stars. It is the dancers the public come for.
“ ‘Even worse, the tocaores, the monkeys plucking away at their guitars, are starting to be noticed. One day, some player in some café plucks out a particularly sweet falseta and what happens? The audience applauds. Applauds a guitar player? That had never happened before and now all the guitarists want their moment in the gaslight. Ramón Montoya, Luis Molina, Habichuela el Viejo, Manolo de Huelva, Javier Molina. They all became soloists, each one trying to outplay the other. But the worst rivalry of all was between Paco Lucena and Paco el Águila. The first Paco played and the audience went wild. To show his disdain for his rival, the second Paco pulled a glove out of his pocket, put that on his hand, and played even better than the first! Well, First Paco can’t let this stand, so he takes the sock off his foot, puts it on his left hand, and plays a solo!’
“My mother laughed at the memory, but the unusual sound of laughter echoing off the walls of the cave startled her. She remembered where she was and the cave became her prison again. My mother slapped my head and pushed me away, glaring as if I were her jailer, the one who had imprisoned her. I suppose I was, her first child, the one who had cost her her virginity. Because, really, what decent Gypsy man would have had my mother after my father kidnapped and raped her?”