“Time to step up the program,” Didi said, stuffing shoes and skirt into the bag she heaved onto her shoulder. Class had just ended and, as usual, we’d all waited until Doña Carlota had left. That day I wanted to stay in the studio for hours, savoring and committing to memory the new chapters of Tomás’s family history. But, almost as if she were deliberately breaking the spell, Didi yanked me out of the classroom and dragged me down the hall toward the faculty lounge with its emphatic sign, NO STUDENTS. ESTUDIANTES PROHIBIDAS. We waited until Señora Martinez, who taught castanets, punched the code into the keypad and entered. A second before the door closed on its automatic lock, Didi sprinted ahead and grabbed it.
“What the hell are you doing?” I hissed, refusing to enter the teachers’ inner sanctum.
“I thought the whole idea of this flamingo thing was to get to Mystery Man.”
“Shut up,” I whispered, prickling with the sensation of being watched, heard not just by the unseen audience of one I had played my life to ever since that night at the Ace High but by the woman I’d made his proxy, Doña Carlota, who was probably still in the faculty lounge.
“Come on. The very least we can do is find the old lady, maybe tail her back to Santa Fe. View the boyhood home.”
“No!” The thought, the remotest hint of intruding on Tomás’s world to that extent before I was absolutely ready, appalled me.
“What?” Didi challenged. “You changed the mission without telling me? You seriously want to be a dancer now or something? Nice of you to let me know. Should I find someone else to do my books?” Didi held the door open for me. Terrified that if I didn’t do something to end this discussion, she would say his name out loud, I stepped through.
“Girls.” Señora Martinez stopped us. “You know you’re not supposed to be in here.”
“Oh, sorry,” Didi said as she fished her wallet out of the shoulder bag. “Doña Carlota left this in the studio and we wanted to catch her.”
“Andale, pues! She just left. Out the back way. Ten prisa, chica!”
Didi rushed through the dressing room to the back door and pushed it open. I peered around the edge of the door and caught a glimpse of Doña Carlota being helped into the backseat of a meticulously maintained old Buick by an elderly man. As he dipped his head, his silver hair glinted in the sun like a sheet of tinfoil. There was a timeless formality to his every gesture as if he’d been transported, not just from another continent, but from another time entirely. His face was oddly unplaceable. Not quite Hispanic, not quite Native American, not quite Anglo. His profile could have come off an ancient Roman coin. He slid behind the wheel in the front seat and drove away. Didi ordered, “Memorize the digits!”
We stepped outside and watched the Buick disappear.
“Whoa! A driver,” Didi said. “Major diva action. Well, at least we know why the old lady ordered us to let her leave first.”
“What do you mean?”
“She doesn’t especially want anyone seeing that she’s either too feeble or too prissy to drive.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Hey, don’t get confused. It’s the great-nephew or ward or whatever you’re in love with. Not her. Shit, if we didn’t have to park halfway to Gallup, we could follow her home.” I was deeply grateful that there was no way Didi could engineer such detective work.
The usual Friday afternoon crowd was gathered on the front lawn outside the academy to listen to the guitarists practice their falsetas—the sweetly lyrical melodies sprinkled atop flamenco’s driving rhythms—and smoke harsh cigarettes imported from Spain. The flamenco program’s inner circle clustered around Liliana, the Christina Aguilera look-alike, whom Didi had correctly identified as the “head flamenco bitch.” I recognized a few other standouts from the program: Liliana’s chief henchbabe, Yolanda Gutierrez, a good but not great dancer; Adriana Ebersol, a ballet swan with a major eating disorder and a reputation for technical perfection served up with a side of soulless güera attitude; Paz Diaz, probably the best dancer but not most-likely-to-succeed because she had a rabbitty overbite and was stocky. Everyone paid a lot of lip service to how shape and size didn’t matter in flamenco, that some of el arte’s greatest performers were old and fat. Yeah, right. No, flamenco wasn’t as body-obsessed as ballet, but still, the stars all had the right look and that look was thin and dark.
~ ~ ~
“Could I bum one of those?” Didi asked a tall guy with broad shoulders and a ring of thorns tattooed around his biceps. His name was Jeff, a rock guy picking up a few flamenco chops. Good-looking in a rock ‘n’ roll way, tall, thin, long blond hair, the top part pulled back into a ponytail, he would have been perfect for Didi except that he was Liliana’s boyfriend.
Jeff handed her a Ducado and she did that forties movie thing of letting him light it for her leaning in close and looking up into his eyes. Didi and Jeff chatted in Spanish for a few minutes while she smoked. Liliana shot daggers at Didi when she made him laugh.
“Laters,” he said to Didi, before sauntering over to Liliana.
“He seemed interested.”
“Jeff?” She glanced over her shoulder and caught him staring after her. “Yeah, he’ll be useful. He’ll help us a lot more than the pinche compás ever will.” She smoked the rest of the Ducado as if she were furious at the cigarette and wanted only to incinerate it. What she was furious at was (a) not being the center of attention and (b) Jeff walking away from her.
Will Thomas, the accompanist for our class, had taken up a spot by himself beneath a middling-size spruce off to one side and was playing a beautiful falseta. Some of the girls in our beginner’s class were scattered around the edge of the lawn watching Liliana and her group practice. Blanca, who’d encouraged me in class, sat by herself, reading.
“Come on,” Didi said, heading toward Will. “Time to start our own cool group.”
Will barely glanced up as Didi positioned herself in front of him and began working through some of the combinations Doña Carlota had been teaching us. Like most everyone else on the lawn, Will was smoking a Ducado, the official sign that he was applying for membership in the hardcore flamenco club.
I sat down and watched Will play, watched his hands on the strings. Of course, they made me think of Tomás’s hands flowing like that across silver strands, coaxing beauty and passion from them. I thought of his hands on my face, my back, pulling me to him.
“You were really good in class today,” Will said, barely looking up at me.
“Oh.” I was surprised that he knew who I was. “Thanks.”
“Who else do we need?” Didi whispered to me. “The Great White Hope?” she asked, nodding toward Jeff. “I couldn’t agree more,” she said before I could answer. “Take over here.” Didi was already striding away before I stood and took her place, practicing the bulerías sequence the old lady had shown us last week.
“That’s an amazing story she’s been telling.”
“Really.” Will couldn’t talk and play and his compás faltered a bit. Enough to throw me off. I clapped to get him back on the beat.
He listened, nodding, then lowered his head and started playing again, betraying his roots in classical music with lots of tremolos and arpeggios that seemed the absolute antithesis of flamenco. He finished a tricky run and glanced up at me. Only because he wore a look I’d seen on my own face once when I was thinking about Tomás and caught a glimpse of myself in a window did I realize: Will likes me. Then I heard all the tremolos and arpeggios for what they were: offerings. I checked to make sure Didi was occupied. She was executing a tricky maneuver, luring Jeff away from Liliana to play for her. I glanced around to make certain that no one else was within range of hearing before I asked as casually as I could manage, “Doesn’t the old lady have an adopted child? Some kind of guitar prodigy?”
“Tomás?” Will pronounced the name with an ease so studied that it told everything about Will and Tomás and their places in the guitar hierarchy. Will was a roadie and Tomás was the star whose name had enough weight to be worth dropping.
It was nearly unbearable hearing his name spoken. I glanced around feeling nervous, exposed. As much as I wanted to hear more, I also wanted to run and hide. But Will seemed safe. It was impossible to imagine that he had any direct connection to Tomás. All I could manage to say was “Yeah.”
Will shrugged, lowering his head as he moved down several frets. “Last I heard he had a gig playing at this flamenco club in Miami. This other dude, though, said he was teaching at Berklee. You know, the music college up in Boston.”
“Does he come back much? Ever?”
“I doubt it. He’s got this whole complicated thing with flamenco. I heard him interviewed somewhere.”
“Where?”
Will shrugged. “Was it the radio? That guitar show that comes on Saturday afternoons? Or maybe it was something my professor was telling me. I don’t remember exactly. It really wasn’t anything he said. The interviewer asked Tomás when he was coming back to New Mexico and he answered, ‘Next.’ That was it, just cut him off. Then the guy asks when he’s going to do another flamenco concert and he does the same thing. ‘Next.’ That’s all. Hey, do that step again you were doing. I’ve got to figure out this accompanying thing. It’s kicking my ass.”
I went through all the combinations Doña Carlota had taught us, imagining Tomás as my ever-present, invisible audience. When we finished, Will asked me if I wanted to go across the street to the Frontier Restaurant to get something to drink. I looked around, saw Didi walking away with Jeff, and answered, “Why not?”
In the friendly, cavernous restaurant, we split one of Frontier’s catcher mitt–size sweet rolls and watched the activity outside the window along that stretch of Central Avenue. Students bending like sherpas under backpacks, waiting to cross the street, blinking into the sun. Oddly speckled dogs tied with rope to the lamppost, waiting for their masters. A guy wearing cutoffs sliced down to the size of a thong, tanned to the color and consistency of shoe leather, frantically panhandling. A couple of senior citizens on recumbent bikes pedaling beneath high-flying orange safety flags. At the table next to us, a study group reviewed French subjunctive verbs.
Over the next few weeks, without anything being said, Will and I entered into a companionable relationship. He and Jeff became the guitarists for Didi’s “cool new group.” Blanca, the nice girl from our class, was our first recruit. Soon most of the other first-year girls were gathering under our spruce tree after class. We spent a lot of time outside that autumn, smoking Ducados and practicing beneath skies as bright as new pennies. Starting with Jeff, Didi entranced the male portion of the flamenco crowd so thoroughly that we were absorbed into Liliana’s group without her permission. Liliana simply surrendered to Didi’s inevitable encroachment with salvos of high-pitched compliments—“I lovelovelove that top!” “You’ve lost weight. God, you’re a toothpick!” and, always, “Where did you get those shoes?”
The flamenco culture was made for Didi. Smoking and drinking were expected and many of its greatest stars had died of drug overdoses. So, though Didi still considered the tyranny of el compás to be a tedious nuisance designed for lesser mortals, she adopted every other facet of el arte. Overnight, she shed her Strokes T-shirts, removed all her fake piercings, let her spiky hair grow out until she could pull it back into a braid, lived in her long, dark practice skirt, and transformed herself into the flamenca she christened Ofelia. All that was missing were the spit curls and a rose between her teeth.
So, for different reasons, the Flamenco Academy became the center of the universe for both Didi and me. The only other class we paid much attention to was Spanish. Didi, already fluent, took it for the easy A. I struggled through it because I had to. It was the language of flamenco. As much as I could, I made Didi speak to me in Spanish. All other classes that first semester, we simply endured. We became part of the scene transforming the old gym into backstage at a Broadway musical. Our wardrobes became the dancer’s grab bag of stretch and sweat everything, leggings with a short wrap skirt, yoga pants. We too were dancers doing their dancer things—changing into practice skirts, slugging down water, stretching, taping our feet. I aspired to have bulbous, inflamed bunions and an eating disorder that would turn my teeth gray.
I was worming my way into Tomás’s world, learning to dress and act like its inhabitants. I still had a long way to go, though, before I would be ready to reenter his universe. I still had to learn flamenco and I still had to learn his story. And for that, I needed Doña Carlota.