Doña Carlota clapped out a rhythm and ordered, “Name it?”
As usual, no one answered and too many gazes swiveled my way since I was the one who could always identify whatever palo, style, Doña Carlota clapped out. I stared down at my feet to avoid eye contact.
“Why do we go through this cruel charade?” Didi asked Amalia, a girl from the South Valley with the profile of an Aztec princess who threw a lot of hip-hop attitude into her dancing and was Didi’s current favorite among her growing entourage. Amalia grinned because Didi gave “charade” a jokey French pronunciation.
“Metrónoma! Tell them!”
“Por soleares?” I answered hesitantly, pretending I didn’t know. I did. Not just because I had a natural facility for hearing the rhythms, but because I spent every moment I could spare in the Lair listening to CDs with titles like “Todos los Compases!” and “Learn Flamenco Rhythms.”
“In the style of?” she asked, pointing at me.
“In the style of soleares, songs of solitude, songs of loneliness.”
Will winked at me. We were sort of regarded as a couple. He regarded us as a couple. Since Didi was either hanging out with Jeff or building her entourage, Will had filled the vacuum she left. In defiance of university rules, he was smoking a Ducado inside the studio. He plucked it from his lips and squeezed it into the gap between the strings and the wood on the neck of his guitar before he picked up Doña Carlota’s rhythm and began playing. Without a word, she began the footwork. By that time most of the class was able to follow. The class was no longer a bunch of rank beginners and it showed in our outfits. Swanky pairs of shoes in purple and red now appeared among us and we’d all taken to wrapping our skirts in special ways just like the older girls. We wore jeans, gym shorts under the long skirts, then whirled the yardage around ourselves, tucking the ends into our waists in order to show off and air out our legs. Even Will with his Ducados was transforming himself. I tried not to think about how ridiculous he looked, a choirboy sucking on a cigarette trying to be a badass. Still, he was no more ridiculous than a Czech milkmaid attempting to become a flamenco temptress.
Doña Carlota noticed a couple of students in the last row, staring at their feet and trying to follow. She dragged them from their hiding places, brought them to the front, and made them stand behind me.
“Watch her feet,” she told them, pointing to me. Then she pointed at Didi and added, “And watch her face.” Clapping out the rhythm, she started again. My heart sank. Today would be another day when she wouldn’t tell any more of the story.
“You girls, you have no idea how lucky you are. I had to learn to dance to the beat of an anvil. Yes, it’s true. Brazeo! She ordered us to bring our arms to life and they twined upward until we looked like a bed of kelp waving in the current. I wished fervently for the class to follow well enough that Doña Carlota would tell the story. For once, they did.
“Cante jondo.” Doña Carlota fondled the words, expelling them on a theatrical sigh. “Deep song, none was deeper than my father’s. It came not just from his heart, but from the hearts of his ancestors for a thousand years. He beat the songs out on an anvil just as he beat out his specialty, fancy grillwork. My father’s anvil was only a block of iron, but he could fashion anything on it. The fanciest designs, decorative grillwork that no one anywhere can do anymore. With him iron and hammer were like paper and scissors. Peacocks fanning their tails. Palm trees. A toreador swinging his cape.”
While we concentrated on the story, letting our minds follow Doña Carlota’s words, our bodies followed her feet, her hands.
“His customers, the rich señoras, said that El Chino had the blood of the Moors in his veins because it was those long-ago invaders from the desert who taught us how to turn metal and fire into palm trees and peacocks and, yes, cannonballs. It is said that Gypsy metalworkers forged the cannonballs that King Fernando fired upon the Moors to free Granada and reclaim her in the name of Saint James. For five centuries, the people of Granada had their horses shod, their pots mended, and the nails to build their homes forged on the fraguas of Sacromonte.
“And then one morning a shriek sounded through the sierra so loud that it made the chickens gabble and run into each other in a clucking fury of feathers and dust and all the blacksmiths put down their hammers to listen. What they heard was the sound of their children chewing their last mouthful of bread. Cima Metales had opened a factory in Granada. All day and all night, cyclones of fire whirled about this factory. Trains loaded with coal pulled up at one end and at the other out came an endless stream of pots, pans, metal plates, spoons, ladles, hinges, nails, and decorative grillwork in the shape of peacocks, palm trees, and toreadors.
“Suddenly all the housewives who used to walk up the mountain with their great-grandmother’s miserable iron pots and pans to have our men patch the holes could now buy pots and pans from this factory so cheaply that it was not worth having new tin put on the bottoms of the old ones. Who cared that the factory pans were so thin the tortillas de patatas scorched and the flan turned to leather; suddenly these shiny pans were what all the housewives desired. It was such a joy to buy something new that they didn’t care they would have to buy it again and again and again. At first, the Gypsy blacksmiths just laughed at this factory, my father the loudest.
“ ‘Cheap things,’ he said. ‘Only for the poor people. The stupid. My customers, los ricos, know quality. They pay for the best and from El Chino they get the best.’
“And, for a while, for my father, this was true.
“But the smoke from this great factory, wrapping around the city like a beggar’s blanket, bewitched everyone. Now they wanted only metal that had poured like lava from the great iron cauldrons, metal that did not show the marks of a herrero’s hammer. They wanted their hand to be the first to touch the shiny, new metal. Soon even my father’s customers became infatuated with the idea of choosing something that was already made.
“One by one, las fraguas went out, the Gypsy earth stopped burning, and the face of Sacromonte went dark. For the first time, we were hearing a possibility mentioned that no self-respecting Gypsy man would have ever considered before: going to work for los payos. My father wouldn’t allow such a possibility even mentioned in his home. He walked down into the city carrying samples on his back. Heavy grilles that would have broken a mule’s back. These he carried down each morning and these he brought back each night.
“Like all Gypsies, my father had turned into gold every pesata he saved. As his children grew hungry, he exchanged the gold for bread for his family. At first my mother’s necklace was sold. Then her bracelets. Finally only her earrings were left, and still my brothers and sisters and I kept eating like locusts. Delicata’s potaje, the stew we ate every night, usually had tomatoes and garlic and whatever else my mother could scavenge, eggs, onions, beans, fish, chorizo, maybe a chunk of blood pudding. Each night it grew thinner and after El Chino and my brothers ate, there was less of it left for Delicata and my sisters and I, who, good Gypsy women that we were, always ate after our men. When the tomatoes, then the garlic disappeared, we knew we were lost. We children fanned out through the sierra, grubbing for prickly pear and acorns. Whatever we found was never enough to stop the rumbling of our stomachs at night, so we stole. We dug beets from gardens at night like raccoons and snatched grapes and oranges from the stalls in the market during the day.
“As a last resort, my father, who could make señoritas dance sevillanas across iron screens, was reduced to forging nails. It was beneath his dignity to take these miserable things into the city. He told my mother that she must join the other women who hiked down the mountain once a week to sell in the plaza the baskets they braided and the horseshoe nails their men forged.
“The walls of our cave were covered in whitewash. This coating of white over the rocks of the hill was what made it a house and not a hole. Even the millipedes that invaded when the rock showed through knew this. But the cave sweated off the whitewash like a whore sweats off powder. When my father gave my mother the order that she must sell his nails in the plaza, the walls were so nervous that they sweated away the last bit of white because my mother answered no.
“My father was momentarily too stunned to do anything, and she told him: ‘I am the daughter of La Leona, who danced for King Alfonso himself. Every café cantante in Sevilla begged her to work on their stages. The name La Leona is known all up and down the Alameda de Hércules. And I would have been even more famous. Even now, after seven children, I am still the best bailaora on the Sacred Mountain. Every day the tourists squander thousands of pesetas to watch those cows in La Cagachina’s zambra dance and you ask me to sell horseshoe nails in the Plaza de los Reyes Católicos?
“ ‘No,’ she told him, ‘I will dance. In one night I can earn more than I could make selling horseshoe nails for ten years!’
“ ‘And who will sing for you?’ he demanded, sputtering in his rage.
“Cante is where El Chino always trapped her. The dance came from the singing and my father was the best on Sacromonte. Also the most feared for his violent temper and brute strength. He knew that no other cantaor would dare to sing for his wife.
“Because she was trapped, my mother had no choice but to spit in my father’s eye. My father, in turn, had no choice then but to beat her. He beat her that day and the next and for many days after. At the end of a week, my mother groaned every time she breathed and we walked down the hill together and tried to sell nails in front of the statue of King Fernando and Queen Isabel in the Plaza of the Catholic Kings.
“My mother was right. We didn’t make enough to stay alive and continued to live on acorns and cactus pads. Then one day, late in the fall, when we had all begun to wonder which one of us would die when winter came, my mother and I rose early and were on the trail into town while a sliver of moon still hung in the sky, then disappeared as the sky turned pink. Our breath froze in the early morning air. Frost sprinkled the tangled forests of cactus next to the path.
“At each cave, other women, wives and daughters of blacksmiths whose fraguas had grown cold, joined us. There was La Sordita—Little Deaf One—the wife of my father’s uncle, a tiny sprite of a woman whose deaf ears stuck out like an elf’s. My father’s cousin, Palo Seco, who’d gotten her nickname, Dried Wood, because she was tall and thin and all the juice had dried out of her. I remember walking behind her, watching how her shoulder blades poked out the back of her blouse like the wings of a vulture. Last was my father’s oldest sister, Little Burro—Burrita—a powerful, high-breasted woman who, alone among all the women, never had any bruises on her face because she had broken her husband’s arm the last time they fought and promised him she would cut off his janrelles while he slept if he ever touched her again. By Little Burro’s side was her daughter, Little Little Burro, Burriquita. I can’t remember the names of all the daughters and cousins and nieces and the babies and small children who came with us, but, all together, we were more than a dozen strong.
“As we walked in the soft morning light, my empty belly growled thinking of the hot churros y chocolate that vendors sold in the marketplace. I forgot my hunger staring at my mother. She had on her pomegranate red skirt that had faded to a beautiful pink, a blouse trimmed in Badajoz lace, her shawl crossed in front of her breasts and pinned at her waist with a brooch carved from wood to replace the fancy one she’d had to sell. My mother bore herself like a queen. Next to her, the other women looked like mud hens beside a swan.
“With each step, we all jangled as loudly as the coins in a beggar’s bowl. From our ears dangled linked hoops of tin. On our wrists were innumerable bracelets of the cheapest silver filigree since the gold had been sold. We wore skirts with tier upon tier of ruffles dotted in big polka dots of black on turquoise or yellow on red, whatever colors were the brightest we could find. The women and girls of marriageable age wore hairstyles fixed onto their heads with tallow. Maybe because her deaf ears stuck out so much, I remember La Sordita’s hair the best. It was piled onto the top of her head like coils of dog droppings and greased with pork fat until it glistened.
“At the edge of the town, I watched my mother and her friends complete their transformation into the wild Gypsy band the townspeople expected us to be. My mother slung the newest baby, my brother Mateo, onto her hip, where he slumped like a bag of potatoes. Little Burro fluffed out the curls of black hair dangling onto her face from beneath the kerchief on her head and shifted the basket of nails she’d been carrying on her head onto a hip that she stuck out. Dried Wood and Little Deaf One did the same, sticking out what little they each had in the way of hips.
“ ‘You know what los castellanos like to say,’ Little Burro announced to the group in her foghorn voice. ‘Everyone knows how to dance. Only we gitanas know how to walk.’
“Even the little girls imitated their mothers’ special Gypsy way of walking, hips swaying like a baby rocking in a cradle. I cocked out my own little-girl hips, put the stack of baskets I was carrying onto one, and followed the women. I tried to make the hem of my dress twitch back and forth, the way theirs did, swishing figure eights around their knees. But I only succeeded in getting a stitch in my side.
“In Granada, we were a cloud of gaudy butterflies descending upon a hill of black ants. The town women all wore black. I saw how they shrank from us as we approached, stepping aside, pulling their children to them, staring. I saw how our women pretended not to notice. How their voices grew louder, the sway of their hips looser. How they spread out to take over even more of the narrow street. Little Burro’s harsh laughter bounced off the tall buildings and echoed back down to slap the women in black who walked carefully, side by side, whispering to one another about us behind their black shawls.
“Then we entered my favorite street, Calle de los Geranios, Geranium Street. On every balcony, the owners set out pots of red, pink, and white geraniums. I lingered, staying behind while the women’s party moved away and their blaring voices and rasping laughter came back to me in echoes that grew fainter and fainter, until the quiet of the street returned. Water dripped from the terra-cotta pots above my head, turning the cobbles under my feet into river rocks. Two canaries in a cage nailed to the wall outside a second-story window began to sing. The sun shone on their yellow feathers, but their eyes, like tiny, shriveled currants, reflected nothing. These people believed that canaries sang better if they couldn’t see the world beyond their tiny cages, so they put the birds’ eyes out. They must have been right, because nowhere on earth do canaries sing as beautifully as they do in Granada.
“Their song and the smell of that street were like a taste I hungered for but could never satisfy. All around me, the fragrance of geraniums scrubbed the air of the narrow street with a scent so pure I felt purified, as if all the dirt, the lice, the scabs had been washed away. I breathed in the clean, geranium air and the canaries’ songs poured down on me from the balconies overhead like miniature waterfalls. I listened until all the other sounds in my head stopped and it was filled only with birdsong and geranium purity.
“In the next moment, I realized I could no longer hear even the echoes of the women. Panic overtook me as if the beating of my own heart had stopped. I ran after the others, unable to imagine that life could continue without my family, mi tribu.
“I caught up with them as they rounded the corner, then slowed down because they were approaching a certain tienda de tabaco run by a woman who hated us more than all the women of the town put together. She was there that day waiting, a big woman, gray hair yanked back in a bun, white apron tied over gray cardigan sweater, sweeping the street in front of her tobacco shop. As we drew closer, she held her arms out and blocked the area she had just cleaned.
“ ‘Don’t walk here! Don’t bring your Gypsy dirt, the shit from the animals you sleep with, here!’
“We all sneered at her but moved away. All except Little Deaf One, who walked right up to the stout woman.
“ ‘What do you think you are doing!’ the woman screamed at her.
“Of course, Little Deaf One couldn’t hear and kept trying to pass.
“The shop owner waved her hands furiously. You didn’t need ears to understand what she meant. We all stopped and watched. Everyone on the street watched. People awakened in the apartments upstairs, opened their shutters, and screamed down, ‘Go around, you stinking Gypsy bitch!’
“These are the words we had been waiting for. We lunged at the shopkeeper, screaming in our language, ‘Achanta la mui! Achanta la mui!’
“ ‘You shut your mouths, you Gypsy whores!’ someone who understood Caló shouted back at us.
“My mother pushed everyone aside and stood with her face so close to the shop owner’s that her spittle sprayed the woman as she hissed at her, ‘Whores? You call us whores? You, woman who stands in the doorway to make love!’
“The shop owner gasped and tried to slap my mother, but her hand caught only the wind. Ducking back, my mother hurled the worst Gypsy insult of all: ‘Anda ya! Que te gusta beber mente para que se te ponga gorda la pepitilla!’
“This time the gasp came from everyone on the street for, in perfect Spanish, my mother had accused the woman of drinking mint tea to fatten her clitoris. The woman swung her broom at my mother’s head. Burriquita stepped forward, grabbed the broom handle, and twisted it out of the woman’s hand with a flick of her thick wrist. Then Dried Wood, La Sordita, and my mother swarmed over the shopkeeper like a flock of blue jays pecking and screeching at the poor woman. In the uproar, only I noticed my mother slip into the store, take a sack of Silver Horse tobacco, and slide it beneath her skirt.
“Seeing that the townswomen were getting the worst of things, a cry went up: ‘Call la guardia!’
“At this, we withdrew. The guardia civil were the worst torturers of Gypsies. Only last week Little Burro’s husband had been arrested for hunting snails on the estate of a rich absentee landowner who lived in Madrid and both his thumbs had been broken. We backed down the street shouting curses and fixing mal de ojo on the shopkeeper until we turned the corner.
“Several blocks later my mother called a stop and pulled out the bag of Silver Horse. The women, who weren’t allowed to smoke in front of their men, eagerly rolled up the tobacco in whatever scraps of newspaper they could find. By the time we were finished smoking our cigarettes, the story had changed: we weren’t chased away, we’d left in triumph after we’d beaten los payos again with our quick wits and even quicker fingers. The proof was the cigarettes we smoked.
“This is the way Gypsies see the world. Always, always, always, we must be the ones who outsmart the payo. To celebrate, my mother started las palmas. Just a little sordas, a muffled handclap with the palm cupped, not the loud secas, dry, clacking on the flat palm.
“My mother clapped...” Doña Carlota waved at the class and they clapped with her.
“I clapped contratiempo.” She slapped out a counterrhythm and pointed at me to pick it up.
“Then we started los pitos. Dried Wood was as good as her name, her fingers sounding like old sticks cracking as they clicked together.”
Doña Carlota’s twisted fingers snapping together rang out. She pointed at Didi, who was good at imitating the rifle crack of La Doña’s pitos.
“Little Burro started the jaleo. Vamos ya!”
La Doña didn’t have to repeat the exclamation a third time—the class immediately echoed Little Burro’s jaleo.
“Little Deaf One, who could feel rhythm, was the first to raise the ruffles of her skirt and tap out an answering rhythm with her heels as she danced down the street.
“All the rest of us shouted encouragement at La Sordita. ‘Vamos ya!’
“La Burriquita was next to take her turn dancing. Then Palo Seco. Me. Then my mother. She went last because everyone knew she was the best. We were all en compás with her. The rhythm held us together so tightly that we became one person. One person with five pairs of dancing legs and five pairs of clapping, snapping hands.”
In the mirror of Doña Carlota’s studio I saw that my classmates and I, so mesmerized by the story that we were following Doña Carlota without thinking, had all become sassy Gypsy women. We swung our hips, happy to be ostracized by the straitlaced townswomen who were threatened by our wild ways. We were rebels. We were bad. Didi caught my eye, grinned, and shook her raised skirt at me playfully.
The class made a wild jaleo, yelling back every new cheer Doña Carlota taught us: “Arza! Así se baila!” When we were really moving, Doña Carlota pretended to fan her face as she called out, “Agua! Agua!”
We didn’t need a translation to know that our teacher was calling for water because we were so hot. Doña Carlota calmed the pandemonium with little more than one circle of her arm. We clapped quiet palmas sordas as our feet automatically stayed en compás while we waited, expectant as good children in pajamas, teeth brushed, for the story to continue. La Doña did not disappoint.
“The sun and the peasants from the sierra were thronging in as we reached the center of the city. The air echoed with the clang of cattle bells, the braying of mules and donkeys loaded with casks of wine and oil, baskets of fruit and vegetables from the country. A customs official in his belted uniform stopped everyone who passed, poking their bundles, searching for contraband. We strode like queens through the Bibarrambla, where the last Moorish king had watched bullfights and jousts.
“From Bibarrambla, we wound our way to the cathedral, where the herb sellers hawked their wares: flor de azafrán for headaches and sadness; manzanilla for stomachaches and childbirth pains; genciana for men’s disease; azahar de naranjo for bad temper; alenjo for lunacy; siete azahares for boils and earache.
“We passed the grand cathedral that the Catholic kings had built to try to outshine the Moorish rulers’ Alhambra. I shivered from more than the cold as I ran past the gray, forbidding church. It looked too much like the tomb it was with Fernando and Isabel lying side by side inside, the queen’s icy smile frozen for all eternity.
“All the women crossed themselves and touched their hair in honor of the sad story of Isabel’s daughter, Juana la Loca. We gitanas loved Isabel’s daughter, Juana the Crazy. Juana had been married to Philip the Fair, the most handsome man in the kingdom. Poor Juana had fallen madly in love with her prince. And how did he repay her passionate love? By betraying her with every woman who crossed his path. Worse, he mocked her in front of the whole court. He beat her. He made her cut off her beautiful hair. Yet in spite of his cruelty, when he died Juana went mad with grief. She rode through Spain in a gloomy carriage pulled by eight horses carrying his coffin, refusing in her insanity to bury him, hoping until her dying day that her faithless husband would come back to life. Come back to her.
“Is it any wonder that Gypsy women love Juana la Loca?” Doña Carlota stared right at me as if she knew that I was as crazed by love and beauty as poor, mad Juana had ever been.
“At the market we sat in the dust beside our baskets and our piles of nails for so long that we looked like beautiful flowers wilted in the sun that nobody wanted. We pretended we didn’t notice the maids and the housewives passing us by, kicking more dust into our faces. When Mateo cried, my mother hiked up her blouse to nurse my new brother. As she stroked his clean, chubby cheek, the hairs on my cheek quivered, my body remembering when I was clean and sweet-smelling and she was gentle and affectionate to me too.
“After another hour of the Granadina housewives passing us by with their noses in the air, my mother swatted at me as if this was all my fault.
“ ‘Do you piss horchata?’ she asked me. ‘Do you shit bolichones?’ I knew what that meant. I had to begin begging. I put my head down and wished I was back in la Calle de los Geranios. ‘Then where is your food coming from today? Go, you lazy Gypsy bitch! Earn your keep!’
“She shoved me toward a woman in a tight brown skirt carrying a string basket filled with onions and peppers. I stuck my hand out, but the woman never even looked at me. Neither did the next shopper, a buxom maid with a metal scapular bouncing on her breasts. A grandmother with a black scarf tied tightly around her head also ignored my outstretched hand and the piteous look on my face. In fact, all the Granadans were so convincing in their pretense that they didn’t see me that I had to touch myself to believe that I was really there.
“My mother waved for me to come to her. Her green eyes had turned pale as olives, a sure sign that she was furious. I had never seen her so angry, and in my fear, my ears stopped working. All the noise of the market stopped. Gone were the voices of our men trading horses and mules. Gone were the cries of the cheese vendor yelling about the creaminess of his manchego. Gone were the tinkling bells of the churro cart. I went to my mother. As soon as I was near enough, she grabbed the soft flesh on the inside of my arm and twisted until tears sprang into my eyes. I wiped them away. I had learned long ago that crying only made her pinch harder.
“She yanked me to her so that my ear was next to her beautiful mouth and hissed into it, ‘If you can’t earn your keep, we’ll have to sell you to the payos, like Mariluna.’
“All us children lived in terror of the fate of Mariluna. She was the last of nine children born to a family on Sacromonte even poorer than my own. Her parents had sold her to the owner of the brick factory. We saw Mariluna at the market, trailing behind the family cook, her thin shoulders slumped under the weight of the baskets she carried in either hand, her head bent, her Gypsy defiance beaten out of her. We had heard that she slept on the floor of the kitchen and was fed scraps from the family’s table. It was probably a better life than the one she had had with her family. But, in her family, everyone slept on the floor and shared scraps. With los payos, only Mariluna and the dogs slept on the floor and ate scraps.
“With the threat of Mariluna’s fate ringing in my ears, my mother shoved me away. In panic, I ran up to the first person who crossed my path and jabbed my palm at a señora wearing a fancy navy blue drop-waist dress with stockings of finely spun white lisle cotton. A cloche hat shaded her ivory skin. Her maid, a stout, red-faced woman with stumpy bow legs, pushed me away.
“ ‘Para la niña,’ I whimpered, gesturing pathetically toward my baby brother. My mother had slumped into an equally pathetic lump in the dust. Even chubby-cheeked little Mateo managed to appear near death.
“ ‘Don’t bother la señora tan linda, tan bonita,’ my mother yelled in Spanish, smiling wanly at the grand lady. In our own language, she hissed to me, ‘Either you get money from this bitch or I will when I sell you to her.’
“I ran after the woman, harrying her like a dog nipping at the heels of a bull. My eyes were a baby fawn’s, so sweet, so sad as I begged, ‘My little brother, the baby, he’s sick. My mother has no milk for him. We have not eaten in three days. Un duro para la niña, señora. It will bring you good luck. You and your children.’ I sharpened my voice and hardened my eyes as I said ‘your children.’ These words reached behind the wall the woman put between herself and the dirty beggar.
“The grand lady’s eyes flickered to my mother and I knew she was thinking of her own children and the curse I might place upon them. Her pace slowed. I put back on my pitiful beggar-girl smile, so that she would forget I had frightened her and would remember only that she was a kind and generous woman whom everyone admired for her saintly ways. I knew I had her, but then the maid pushed her lady forward and swatted hard at me.
“The maid was doing her job to swat at me, but she hit me harder than she needed to. Hard enough to freeze my eyes into beams of pure Gypsy menace as I snarled, ‘Good luck to give. Very bad luck not to give. Who knows what might happen?’
“La señora dipped into her purse then and put three centimos on my palm. These coins were so light they could blow away like dried leaves and were worth barely more. This time I was not the fawn, sweet and sad; this time in my eyes la señora saw the color of her children’s flesh, dead and cold. I spit on her money. The bitch crossed herself and hurried away.
“I gave my mother the coins and she cursed me for letting the lady go with such a pittance. I believe that my mother might have found a buyer for me that day if a great clanking had not caught her attention. Everyone turned toward it. We had seen motorcars before, but only from a distance and certainly never in the market. The traders’ horses, already on edge from having Mentholatum smeared on their rectums and fed coffee beans to give them a bolt of temporary spirit, reared and snorted and fought the traders, trying to run in terror from the clattering machine. A coop of clucking chickens burst free and the birds escaped, wings flapping wildly as windmills, straight into the path of what had scared them. Turnips, beets, heads of cabbage rolled out of the baskets shoppers dropped in their panic.
“In all the chaos, only one person remained calm: my mother. Anyone looking at her as she wedged her thumb into her baby’s mouth to break his suction on her nipple would have thought she didn’t have a care in the world. Only I noticed the centimos she’d taken from me roll down her faded pink skirt as she stood. This told me how scared my mother really was, for money meant more to her than air. Seeing how well she could hide her true feelings gave me the stupid hope that Delicata was hiding her true feelings of love for me. That when she slapped and cursed me, she was doing it out of love, to toughen me up for a world that hated my kind.
“I, on the other hand, could not hide my fear of this automóvil. Only the week before a little boy had been crushed with the touch of a tire. I’d seen the spot on Calle Ángel smeared with bits of his heart and guts. So, like the brainless chickens, in my fright I ran straight into the middle of the road.
“The machine stopped. It did not have a top. The driver stood up and pushed the goggles he wore back over his head. Two white circles stood out from the dirt on his face. His hair was the color of cinnamon. Underneath the dirt were freckles of the same color. He was un sueco, a Swede. This is what we called any of the tourists from the north who grew so heated that they turned the color of boiled tomatoes in weather we found chilly.
“Perdóneme, señorita.’ The sueco held out a hand covered by a glove of yellow leather and indicated the road. ‘Con su permiso.’
“Even for a sueco it was strange to speak so politely to a Gypsy. I looked around and saw the faces of the maids and their mistresses who had, only seconds before, pretended I did not exist. I saw the face of the elegant lady who had dismissed me with her dead leaf money. I knew they all expected me to ask him for money, so I stuck my hand out and asked:
“ ‘Dame perras gordas.’
“At this, the voices in the market started again. ‘Como una gitana.’ Just like a Gypsy. They were surprised when el sueco got out of his automóvil. The man was a giant. He walked over to me.
“His guide, a small Spaniard with wax on his mustache, scrambled out of the car then and tried to pull his employer away. ‘Señor,’ he hissed at him, ‘a los gitanos les pasa coma a los perros; si no pegan pulgas, pegan pelo.’ This was a very common saying that everyone knew so well no one had to repeat it except to a foreigner. ‘Gypsies are like dogs: if they don’t leave their fleas on you, they leave their hair.’
“The tall stranger stared at me and I saw myself with his eyes: a skinny girl with hair matted and dulled by dust, black dirt under her fingernails and in the creases of her hands, ground into her elbows, knees, bare feet, wearing a gray rag of a dress. Most shameful of all, just as the guide had warned, my legs were covered with fleabites, some of them infected, all of them scratched until they had bled and scabbed over.
“ ‘What will you do to earn this?’ he asked in a Spanish that sounded as if a machine were grinding out the harsh words. In his hand gleamed the coin I had asked for, perra gorda, named for the lion imprinted on it that looked like a fat dog.
“ ‘I can dance,’ I answered as I stared at the ground.
“The payo women clucked and hissed the condemnation, ‘Sinvergüenza.’ ‘Shameless.’
“Yes, I thought, I am sinvergüenza and, grabbing the hem of my skirt, I began stamping the dust with my feet just as Delicata had taught me, just as I’d done at every baptism, wedding, and funeral I’d ever celebrated with my people, just as I’d done earlier that day leaving the street of geraniums. The difference was that, for the first time in my life, I was doing it for strangers and, even odder, no one was singing. I had never danced without singing. None of our people danced without singing. Cante was what made us dance. But my father had pounded his songs so thoroughly into my head that, in truth, I never lacked for a cantaor: So, with the memory of his hammering playing through my head, my heels pounded into the earth, reaching down to that place where black thoughts and blacker deeds form, even as my arms became willow branches in the breeze while my hands became geese flying to a cool and green land. I ignored everything—the women of the town pursing their lips into tight lines, the stones on the ground that hurt my bare feet. All I thought about was that, for as long as I danced, I held the line that separated dirty little Gypsy girls with lice in their hair from dogs.
“ ‘Anda! Anda!’ I was barely aware of Little Burro’s shouts, of her claps picking up a counterrhythm. They only made me concentrate more on obeying the rhythm ticking in my head, my heart. Urged on by Little Burro’s palmas, I finished a matacaballos, a speed to kill a horse. Only when I was holding my final pose, back arched, hand flung into the air, did I notice that the stones I thought I had been dancing across were pesetas.
“ ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ The giant blond stranger threw more coins. Then, although his guide tried to hold him back, he put ten more pesetas in my hand. The others in our band swarmed forward to snatch the centimos from the dirt. The payo women pretended to be disgusted even as their own palms itched for the feel of the sueco’s coins. Through the crowd, I saw my mother stand and walk away with my baby brother.
“I pushed through the Granadinas. A couple of the old women, the ones most toughened by hard work and bad weather, spit in my face. They pretended to do this to take off mal de ojo, but it would have worked just as well if they had spit on my feet. They really did it to show their contempt. I ran after my mother. As I passed the spot where we’d been sitting, I saw that she had left behind my father’s basket of nails. I tried to pick it up, but it was too heavy for me to carry. My mother was almost out of sight.
“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.’ ”