“Y! Un! Doe! Tray!” By the end of the semester, Doña Carlota was using flamenco shorthand to start us off. After an abbreviated countdown the class would run by itself. “Delicata’s paseo!” She ordered and we all surged into the sequence of steps first choreographed by Doña Carlota’s mother almost a century ago. Everyone in the class fell into the dream that she was putting her foot in history, following a path that led all the way back to the original tribes in India. But no one else dreamed as I did that the long trail of Doña Carlota’s story would lead to a love nourished in secret. And no one else dreamed as Didi did that it would lead to immortality.
Didi’s skirt whipped against my legs as we pivoted and turned sharply. Far from abandoning flamenco, after her coffee shop debut Didi saw that el arte was the key to success and she threw herself back into it with an obsessiveness that approached my own. She’d also restarted her affair with Jeff. Snatching him away yet again from Liliana had created a highly satisfying drama for the rivaling flamenco camps that had been established once Didi was acknowledged as a diva worthy of competing with Liliana for the title “head flamenco bitch.”
Doña Carlota switched to an unfamiliar sequence and we all followed her through the new choreography like ducklings waddling after their mother. We knew that she would repeat the steps again and again through the class, that our feet would follow hers as mindlessly as the duck babies followed their mother, if only we surrendered our brains to her story. And though weeks had gone by without a new chapter, that day, with no preamble, she took up the tale once again.
“Since the day el sueco rained duros down upon me, my mother did nothing but work to create her own cuadro, what they called a zambra in Sacromonte. She was la capitana of our group. She was the one who broke the astonishing news to the others: there would be no cantaor ‘We don’t need a singer,’ she insisted. All that los suecos care about is el baile.
“ ‘But how,’ the other women asked, ‘will we dance without a song?’
“ ‘Sing to yourself,’ my mother ordered. ‘We will all keep time. If you have to have a song, sing it yourself.’
“Late at night, after the women had worked all day carrying water from the distant well and cooking over smudgy fires of dried cactus, and after the men, who’d spent the day sleeping, left to drink at the colmao, we would meet. My mother and I taught Dried Wood, La Burra, La Burriquita, and La Sordita all her dances. My brother Mono played the guitar. The one problem was, of course, my father. He had forbidden my mother to ever dance again for strangers. But each time Dried Wood whispered to my mother in her scratchy voice, ‘What about El Chino? He is going to find out. No one can keep a secret on Sacromonte,’ all she would say was, ‘Leave him to me.’ Then she would go back to pounding the floor of the cave with the cane she used to beat out the rhythms she was harnessing us all to. Like this. Y, uno, doe, tray...”
The entire class, caught up in the story, believing that they were with Delicata on Sacromonte, moved to her beat.
“Next to my mother, Little Burro was the most committed to this new scheme. She had watched all of her daughters except the youngest, La Burriquita, grow up and marry men no better than her husband. La Burriquita was her last chance for one of her children to have a better life than she had had and her mother and her mother’s mother all the way back to India. Little Burro was so desperate for something better that she took down the green and red polka-dotted material that hung in the door opening and with it made a real flamenco dress for La Burriquita.
“ ‘Let me show you,’ she said at our next practice. She lifted up the dress she was working on and we all sucked in our breath at its beauty, amazed that Little Burro’s hands, strong enough to move her husband’s fragua without any help, could stitch together a thing of such grace and femininity.
“ ‘But this is the best part,’ she said, smiling with pleasure at our amazement. She shook the dress out and a length of fabric unrolled across the packed dirt floor.
“I gaped at the dress’s long train. ‘Una bata de cola!’
“ ‘Una bata de cola,’ my mother said, draping the long tail of fabric over her arm. ‘With this and a fenómeno’—she meant my brother Mono. Though still a boy without a whisker on his face, he could play better than any of our men. ‘We have two of the three things every cuadra needs. All we are lacking now is un alcahuete.’ Un alcahuete, a procurer, was vital since he would bring the tourists to us. None of the women could ask their husbands because they would immediately tell my father, who had forbidden my mother ever to dance for another man.
“ ‘We have no choice,’ my mother said. ‘We must talk to El Bala.’
“At the very mention of this name, Little Burro spit on the floor and crossed herself.
“ ‘No,’ Dried Wood said, her voice even more parched and raspy than usual because fear had dried the saliva in her mouth.
“El Bala, the Bullet. I don’t know if he had always resembled a bullet or only looked like one after he went bald. But with no hair, his eyes sunk into his fat, greasy head, no neck, a body thick and stocky from the shoulders to the ankles, El Bala looked like a bullet. He worked as a collector for Juan ‘Coronel’ Fernandez, the moneylender. A scar from the knife of a resistant borrower sliced El Bala’s face, making one nostril and his top lip flap open so that his two top teeth and the inside of his nose were exposed. At the top of the long scar was one dead, white eye.
“ ‘Who else then?’ my mother demanded. No one spoke. The Bullet was the only man who spoke the language of los suecos and who would not immediately tell my father what my mother was planning. El Bala kept to himself. Even our men were so frightened of him that they kept their distance.
“ ‘It is better not to catch the eye of the tiger,’ the men said as they faded away at El Bala’s approach.
“We found the Bullet loitering outside the colmao wearing a shiny black suit with tan shoes and a checked cap pulled down as low as it would go to hide his white eye. He agreed to be our alcahuete in exchange for half of everything we brought in. With no other choice my mother agreed, warning him that he’d better fetch enough paying customers to be worth all the money he would take from them.
“ ‘You just be ready to waggle your jojois because I’ll bring the tourists,’ El Bala told my mother, using our word for rabbit, which means the same thing as your American word for pussy. It was a word I had heard often, but never spoken by an unmarried man in the presence of a woman. Gypsy men had gotten a knife in the liver for lesser offenses; still, my mother didn’t object. It was the first deal she made with El Bala, but it wouldn’t be the last.
“On the day of our first performance, my mother made me stand in the galvanized tin tub she used to mix sausage while she poured buckets of water over me.
“ ‘Scrub harder,’ she ordered as I rubbed the dirt that seemed tattooed into my skin with a slimy chunk of agave cactus. When we finished I was cleaner than I had been since I came from the womb. Over my head I slipped the dress my mother had made and was buried in the wonderful smell of sizing put in the brand-new fabric to make it stiff.
“Then, while my father slept, snoring loudly from a late night filled with too much aguardiente, my mother prepared herself. I did everything I could to keep the chaboros quiet. When she was ready, her hair shining with oil, her skin pink, she was a vision as beautiful as Christ’s mother. Fear made her even more beautiful.
“ ‘Let’s go,’ I said, pushing my mother out the door. We’d been lucky. My father hadn’t woken.
“ ‘No,’ my mother said. ‘He will find out where we are. If he is going to kill me, I want him to do it here. Not in front of the others.’
“I begged her to come with me, but she had made up her mind and woke my father. As she told him what we were going to do, my mother took off her new dress and handed it to me. She was naked when the first blow fell. It was usually deafening when my father beat my mother because her screams, then ours, would fill the cave. This time, she didn’t say a word. That scared me and my brothers and sisters more than anything that could have happened. We watched speechless as the blacksmith’s fists struck. He was as angry that she planned to dance without him, without a singer, as he was that she was going to dance at all. Her silence, her refusal to scream, to beg, drove my father to such frenzy that he bellowed out both his rage and hers.
“There was no thought that a neighbor would come to our rescue. Since Cima Metales had opened, the screams of wives being beaten had become as routine as the clang of hammers on anvils had once been. All gitano tribe business was taken care of on Sacromonte. All gitano family business was taken care of in the cave.
“We, her children, watched with the eyes of little beasts, each of us calculating how our lives would change with our mother dead. Tears ran down the cheeks of only the littlest ones. The rest of us were dry-eyed since we’d been on our own for so long already. My father would have beaten my mother to death if the most fearsome man on the mountain had not appeared at the door of our cave.
“ ‘What are you doing, you idiot?’ El Bala asked, as if my father were making a silly mistake that would bring bad luck, like saying the word lizard or not touching iron to ward off the evil eye or owning a black dog. Startled, my father stopped and in that frozen moment, what we all noticed was my mother’s body, not that there was blood trickling down it, but that it was naked and a man who was not our father was looking at it.
“El Bala stared at my mother as if she were made of gold, as if he could not believe that such a treasure could be found in a dirty cave filled with dirty children. My father turned on El Bala, eager to drive his fists into harder flesh. El Bala was quicker; his knife seemed to appear out of nowhere, plucked from the air. Its blue blade glinted in the flickering light cast by the candiles. Toledo steel. None of this hand-forged Gypsy shit for a professional like El Bala. Fear of that blade did not stop my father. Rather it was El Bala’s ruined face—the sneer cut forever into his mouth, the blind eye, white and eternally weeping—that stilled my father’s hand.
“I ran forward to give my mother her dress. Standing up as straight as only a true flamenca can, she pulled the dress over her head, careful to keep her blood off of it. Then we followed El Bala out of the cave.
“In the moonlight, I could see that both my mother’s eyes had swollen and turned purple. She touched her teeth and smiled when she discovered none had been knocked out.
“At the doorway of Dried Wood’s cave, El Bala inspected my mother. He took out his handkerchief, spit on it like a mother, and gently wiped a smear of blood from beneath her right nostril. ‘Go in and wait.’
“Dried Wood had the nicest cave of any of us and one of the first on the whole mountain to have electricity. A bulb burned from the ceiling. The floors were covered with a checkerboard of white and green tiles. Around the edges of the kitchen was a border of vines and leaves. A dozen gleaming copper pans hung from pegs. A curtain of red and black polka dots with a ruffle at the top separated the main room from the bedrooms in the back. They had arranged two rows of three chairs each, leaving just enough room in front of the chairs for the dancers. They all stared at my mother. She looked much worse in the harsh overhead light.
“Dried Wood finally broke the silence. Pointing to my mother’s swollen eyes, she joked, ‘Chop up those plums. The sangria needs more fruit.’ Everyone laughed then and crowded around my mother, repinning her hair, snagging loops of hair from either side of her face to cover her bruised eyes, giving her glasses of aguardiente to kill the pain.
“When they’d finished, we all sat on the straight-backed chairs borrowed for the evening, except for La Burriquita, who stood so as not to wrinkle the dress Little Burro had made for her with a bata de cola trailing behind. We lined ourselves up next to a rickety table where six borrowed copper cups and a pitcher of sangria waited for our first customers. We’d gone into town early that morning to beg and steal the fruit. The wine and coñac we had borrowed from the owner of the colmao with promises to repay him double after that night. The alcohol had kept the fruit we chopped up hours ago from spoiling immediately in the heat, but tiny bubbles of fermentation were now fizzing around the cubes of red-stained peach.
As the bubbles released their evidence of rot, the group began to argue. With each hour that passed without any sign of El Bala, their words grew sharper.
“ ‘I was crazy to believe in this ridiculous plan!’ Dried Wood said.
“ ‘Who comes to see flamenco in a cueva so far from Calle de Sacromonte?’ Little Burro demanded. ‘No one! El Bala is laughing at us.’ Then she called El Bala a name that meant both cockmaster and master of the cock and, at just the moment when Little Burro had pulled out her knife and was threatening to go into Granada and cut off the cockmaster’s janrelles, El Bala threw back the curtain at the door and gestured for the party he had in tow to enter.
“Over Dried Wood’s threshold stepped three Englishwomen of the type who liked horses and dogs better than people, certainly much better than they liked men. They wore long khaki skirts and, under them, brown leather boots with thick soles that laced up to the knees as if they were going on safari. They each had a different cameo brooch pinned at the necks of the blouses they covered with cardigan sweaters. They squinted their eyes and turned their heads away as the smell of the cave hit them. One of them took out a handkerchief and held it over her nose. And Dried Wood’s cueva was fragrant compared to ours.
“ ‘Here are the suckers,’ El Bala said to us in Caló, at the same time smiling like a gigolo and waving his arm elegantly toward the women, who smiled in return, lifting thin lips off of large, horse teeth. Little Burro’s daughter Burriquita and I had to cover our mouths and lower our heads into our laps to hide our laughter. My mother eyed me sharply and I remembered my assigned role. I jumped up and showed the women to their chairs, then brought them each a glass of sangria.
“The fragrance of cinnamon and cloves hid the smell from the overripe fruit as I handed the glasses to the women. They responded with words that sounded as if they’d been spoken by horses. My mother started palmas, clapping softly, and everyone fell silent. My mother nodded at las inglesas. The women smiled back, holding up their copper cups in salute. My mother caught my eye and I jumped to refill the women’s glasses. They waved their hands over the rims insisting they didn’t want any more, then glanced at one another, laughed, and pulled their hands away, surrendering. Though that was the first time I saw this charade, it would not be the last, for surrender was what foreigners came to us for, what they sought in the caves of Sacromonte. They all came to us wanting to surrender. Surrender their white to our dark. Surrender their clean to our dirt. Surrender their tame to our wild.
“As I sat back down after refilling the glasses, Dried Wood added pitos, snapping her fingers. La Sordita clacked on the floor with her heels. I joined my mother in palmas. Because there was no singer, no cante, I came in on the wrong beat, and my mother shot me a dark glance. An instant later, though, the Englishwomen nestled their copper cups between their thighs and clapped their hands and my mother saw that she needn’t have worried. The women clapped like El Maleta, the Suitcase, a half-wit with one arm longer than the other. They clapped like they were wearing mittens and listening to another beat. All of us glanced at one another because we had never heard such a thing; even a Gypsy baby could keep better time than these grinning inglesas. But my mother just kept smiling at the women and even held out her hands to them as if to compliment their talent and shouted ‘Olé!’
“Hearing my mother put the accent on the last syllable as if we were at a bullfight made us smile and look away because her payo pronunciation was a grave insult since it said the person was an outsider, and for us there was nothing worse.
“But las inglesas, their cheeks already turning red from the wine, didn’t hear the insult. They saw only our smiles and shouted back, ‘Olé’
“My mother, numbed by the aguardiente, took her pass first, shaking her skirt and stamping forward like a windup toy. She kept her head lowered to hide her bruised face. Her exuberant zapateado had nothing whatsoever to do with the mournful soleares Mono was playing. But we smiled even more when we saw that it didn’t matter to the strangers.
“ ‘Brava! Brava!’ the women shouted when my mother took her chair, huffing and puffing and fanning at her bosom as if she had truly exerted herself.
“Little Burro was up next. Her dance was tough and muscular, with lots of palmadas, slapping the side of her shoe, her thigh, and stomping the floor. She even sang a bit in her foghorn of a voice. It was a ridiculous charade of the real flamenco we did for ourselves, but, again, the Englishwomen loved it, clapping wildly. They no longer pretended to resist when I passed among them, refilling their glasses. Their cheeks were as red as a baby’s with fever. They lolled against one another, whispering comments in one another’s ears, laughing, and clapping in their mittened, half-witted way.
“My mother never stopped watching them, her gaze sharpening as theirs dulled. When she saw them leaning against one another, whispering secrets, she signaled to my brother and he strummed through a series of arpeggios and tremolos, He played the tricked-up, show-off fake flamenco that my father wouldn’t allow at home but that these English ladies seemed to love.
“Then La Burriquita trotted out in her new dress. Eventually, La Burriquita ended up looking like her mother, like the driver of a mule team. But that night, she was magnificent in her new dress. Unfortunately, she had no idea how to dance with una bata de cola. Instead of making it her partner, La Burriquita fought with it as if it were a serpent that had swallowed all but her head and arms.
“Still my mother stood and clapped and yelled to make the tourists believe that this was the grand finale. Luckily, English people are so polite that they will see whatever someone wants them to see. So, it was true, those women really did see a grand finale and they stood, too, and clapped with my mother when La Burriquita held her arms up like a toreador dedicating a bull to his sweetheart.
“Then, before the English ladies knew what was happening, all the dancers disappeared and my mother was taking the copper cups from their hands and lifting the chairs out from under their bottoms. They turned then to leave, but their friendly guide, the poor fellow with his one eye gone dead, so polite, so courteous in spite of his gruesome face that they had taken pains not to stare at it, was blocking their way. Even more alarming, the friendly guide was no longer grinning and his sliced-up face no longer aroused their pity. It scared them.
“ ‘Señor’ one of the ladies said in her horse Spanish when the Bullet didn’t move away from the door to let them out. ‘Por favor.’
“But El Bala still didn’t move. The women stepped a bit closer to one another, the red draining rapidly from their cheeks as El Bala lifted his ragged lip up in a wolfish smile and presented them with a bill.
“ ‘What is this?’ the shortest one asked. She looked more like a bulldog than a horse. ‘We already paid you. One hundred and fifty pesetas. Back at the plaza.’
“ ‘Yes, pesetas. But I said duros.’
“ ‘Duros? What is a duro?’
“El Bala bowed his head and scrunched his shoulders to make himself and the total seem smaller. ‘Perdóneme. We say duro, you say five pesetas.’
“The Englishwomen’s eyes all popped open. ‘This is mad. Seven hundred and fifty pesetas! You said it would be one hundred.’
“El Bala closed his eyes and shook his finger in front of his face. ‘No. Duros, no pesetas.”
“ ‘No, indeed not. We have paid what we agreed upon.’
“ ‘Sí, sí, but if you will look here...’ El Bala redirected their attention to the bill as if, because he had written them down, the numbers were truer on the paper. ‘Por la cuadra. Por la sangria. Por el tocaor. The boy, truly a fenómeno, no? Then, is customary to buy everyone a drink.’
“ ‘And this?’ The bulldog woman stabbed a stubby finger at a figure.
“ ‘For charity. Is for the sick, the aid, the widow, the cripple, the—’
“ ‘Yes, yes, yes. Back home in Derbyshire we’re all quite active in the Parish Relief Society. But that’s not the point. The point here is, we agreed upon one hundred and fifty pesetas. Not seven hundred and fifty.’
“ ‘One hundred and fifty pesetas! In England you can have such an evening for one hundred and fifty pesetas?’ El Bala turned back into the Bullet and stopped speaking. He refused to answer any more questions and he refused to move from the doorway. He gave the ladies enough time to remember that they had told no one at their hotel where they were going. They had wanted an adventure. They had wanted to be spontaneous. They had wanted to surrender.
“They looked over at us expecting to find women who would be sympathetic to their plight. They saw for the first time exactly what we were: gitana wolves who fed on pale payo flesh.
“The one with the longest, saddest horse face finally snapped, ‘Oh, just pay it. Let’s get out of here. I can’t stand this smell another second. It’s all simply too, too authentic.’
“The instant El Bala had their money, he was all smiles and courtly manners again. He swept the curtain away from the door and stepped aside as if the women were marquesas and he their liveried footman.
“The next night, El Bala brought two Germans, heavy-boned men with gray shadows beneath their eyes, dull hair the color of toast cut too short on the sides.
“We were astounded to hear El Bala speak to them in their language as well, pulling aside the curtain and saying, ‘Bitte, bitte.’ He pointed to me, La Burriquita, La Sordita, my mother, and said, ‘Schonne, nein? Los damen son muy schonne?’
“The Germans studied us like men used to driving hard bargains at brothels. Their faces were stolid, set against us. We didn’t have to understand any German words to know that they did not find any of us pretty. This rejection made my mother mad enough that she danced with a fierceness that was like a train coming through the cave. My brother even had trouble keeping up with her on the guitar. She was so good that he yelled out óle, and Mono was just like our father; he never applauded anything that was not flamenco puro. On any stage in the world my mother’s dance would have brought down the house. But those Germans just sat there like two rotten piles of wurst. Nothing, not a sound. You couldn’t even hear them breathing.
“It was even worse for the others. The Germans didn’t clap, didn’t call out. All they did was drink. As I filled and refilled the copper cups, they gave me looks that made me aware again of the fleabites on my legs, of the way my shoulder blades stuck out like chicken wings against the back of my dress, of the black crescents of dirt beneath my fingernails.
“At last La Burriquita ended the performance with her grand finale, battling with the python of her bata de cola. Even though my mother screamed her olés, the Germans didn’t twitch a muscle. Instead they called El Bala over, pressed money into his hand, and pointed to my mother.
“The Bullet threw the money back in their faces, drew his knife, and shouted in furious Caló, ‘She is no whore some goatfucking German can point at.’
“That is how the Germans learned that flamenco was not an advertisement for Gypsy prostitutes. One of the men raised his hand to El Bala. Who knew why. Maybe he was going to shake hands. Maybe he was going to reach into his jacket for a gun to kill us all. Whichever, the Bullet’s knife came down and when he pulled it away, the German’s finger drooped like an elephant’s trunk. It would never point again. El Bala had sliced the tendon in one golpe.
“That was the only night we didn’t make any money. Night after night, El Bala brought the tourists. If we were tired, we danced. If we were sick, we danced. If we were sad, we danced. We learned how to get money from them all. We learned that the English would pay for smiles. The Spanish tourists from the north would pay for scowls. The Americans would shower us with pesetas for footwork at double, triple time, anything that was loud and made the sweat jump from our faces. Anything that looked like a lot of hard work. The Germans hardly paid for anything, but if I could make them laugh by waggling my bottom and pretending to be a pain, there might be a few perras gordas in it for me.
“For the other girls, our shows quickly became boring. They were always unpinning their skirts before the last note was played. I didn’t understand it. For me all the rest of life on Sacromonte was boring. It was the hours we spent dancing that were exciting. When I danced, I dreamed I was my grandmother, that I was La Leona, queen of the cafés cantantes. I pretended that the tiled floor of the cave was the wooden stage of the Café del Burrero in Sevilla, where the happiest people in the happiest city on the face of the earth were happy all the time. Where there was always enough and more than enough for those with talent. Where a good dancer could rule over the city like a queen if she was talented. And I was. I was talented.”
With that unequivocal declaration, Doña Carlota stamped to a finale and signaled the rest of us to stop. “Have you all been reading your Lorca?” she asked as we chugged water and wiped sweat from our faces, our necks.
“Sí, Doña Carlota!” we chimed back.
“Bueno. Today you will learn Lorca’s bulerías.”
At the mention of Lorca’s name, Didi edged closer to La Doña. She had become even more enamored of the charismatic poet as she read everything she could get her hands on about his life and, even more important, his death. She loved that Lorca was idolized in his own time, that his flamboyant life and ambiguous sexuality enraged conservatives, that he was martyred by fascists.
Doña Carlota clapped sharply; our break was over. She continued her story: “One minute, it seemed, our zambra was new and frightening. The next it was all any of us had ever known. I could no longer remember having a life that didn’t revolve around dancing for payos who huffed and puffed behind El Bala, climbing up the paths to Dried Wood’s cave.
“But it wasn’t one minute. Three snows had fallen on the Sierra Nevada and three had melted since that first night. Three years. For the first time I knew the year because in Dried Wood’s cave there were two miraculous things: electricity and a radio. I never had a lover I loved as ardently as that radio. No sun ever lighted my life as brilliantly as the glow from the tubes of that radio. If I’d ever been alone with it, I would have wrapped my arms around it. The other girls called me La Catedral because the first thing I did when I stepped over the threshold was to rush in and kneel in front of Dried Wood’s radio shaped like a cathedral. It was there, on my knees, that I learned the year was 1934.
“ ‘What useless information,’ La Burriquita said, when I told her.
“ ‘Find some music. A nice cuplé,’ the others cried, begging to listen to the syrupy ballads that were so popular. But I shushed them and twisted the dial through spikes of static and a blurt of music that Little Burro immediately identified. ‘Leave it there! That’s La Bella Dorita!’ I pushed on past the famous cupletista chirping about rosebuds and butterflies and love until the dial landed on Radio Union where an announcer in a breathless, urgent voice told us:
The army under Generalissimo Francisco Franco has suffered heavy casualties in trying to put down the miners’ strike in Asturias. Though severely underarmed, the miners’ skill with dynamite has inflicted a humiliating defeat on the army. In the mountain passes they have erected giant catapults to hurl the dynamite at the soldiers. In the cities, dynamiters creep forward smoking cigars with which they light the sticks grasped in their hands. Casualties have been high. Twelve hundred miners have been killed.
“ ‘Who cares about some miners in Asturias?’ La Burriquita whined.
“ ‘You should,’ I told her. ‘If the soldiers can shoot miners, payo miners, what is to stop them from shooting girls, Gypsy girls?”
“ ‘Go back to La Bella Dorita!’
“ ‘My father says the miners are comunistas and they want to turn us all into atheists like in Russia where there’s no church.”
“ ‘Pfft!’ Burriquita spit on the floor. ‘The priests! The nuns! Black crows! My father says we should kill them all. What have they ever done for us?’
“ ‘No! It’s los ricos that we should kill and take their land.’
“ ‘Why? Who wants land? Land is just dirt. We already have plenty of dirt.’
“I put my ear against the rough cloth of the radio and tried to block out the sound of the women slapping and pecking at one another like chickens, but El Bala stuck his head in the door and yelled, ‘They’re coming! These are real aficionados. Señoritos!’ Señorito was a magic word. Some señoritos were nothing more than spoiled playboys who pretended to love flamenco as an excuse to hold juergas, orgies of drinking and whoring. But the real señoritos, true connoisseurs of flamenco, were as rich in knowledge and reverence for el arte as they were in duros. We had heard stories of the real ones paying exorbitant amounts to experience flamenco, real flamenco, flamenco puro.
“El Bala pointed at my mother, then at me. ‘You two, he heard about you two. He wants the authentic stuff. None of this tourist crap, okay?’
“ ‘Who is he, this señorito?’“ my mother asked.
“ ‘Why do you care? How many señoritos do you know?’
“ ‘I know that this one is coming to see me dance.’
“Maybe my mother hadn’t noticed that El Bala had also pointed at me.
“ ‘All right, if you must know... He lifted his ruined lip in a jagged smile, pleased to announce his big catch. ‘It is Federico García Lorca.’
In Granada, the poet was as famous as his good friend, the bullfighter, Ignacio Mejías. We knew as much about him as we did La Bella Dorita.
“ ‘That maricón!’ Dried Wood yelled.
“ ‘So what if he does like boys?’ El Bala shot back. ‘You’re not pretty enough for him anyway. What are you worried about?’
“ ‘I hear things. Don’t you know what they say about him in the market?’
“ ‘I don’t pay attention to the gabbling of hens.’
“ ‘You should. They say his plays are filthy. He writes nothing but filth, this maricón. Worse, though, he speaks against the government, the church. He had to run away to Madrid because he was going to be arrested. No one can believe he came back to Granada. The guardias follow him everywhere. Men with notebooks watch him and write down the names of everyone he speaks to. If you bring him here they will write down our names!’
“ ‘Buen! Go on then.’ El Bala shooed her away. ‘The others will be happy to take his perras gordas.’
“No one moved.
“ ‘Good, then shut up!’
“We all fell silent and into that silence came the sound of footsteps. We jumped up, certain it was them, los señoritos. Instead my father walked in, followed by his uncle, an ancient guitar player named Antonio. Fear seized my mother at the sight of the two men until El Bala said, “I invited him. Tonight we need a real cantaor: A true singer of cante jondo. Tonight we need El Chino.’
“My father’s chest swelled, but my mother was furious.
“ ‘I refuse to dance if he sings,’ she said.
“Before she could say anything more, though, El Bala yelled, ‘They’re coming!’ and shoved us all into the other room.
“I pushed La Burriquita away and held a corner of the curtain aside to peek out at the party as they arrived. I knew the instant he stepped in that the man in the white suit was a poet. It wasn’t just the way another man leapt across the threshold to sweep the curtain aside and allow him to enter first. Or the way the five others in the party stood back to give him his choice of seats. No, I knew he was a poet because of his eyes. Only a poet or the Madonna could have eyes so sad and kind and wise. His dark hair was brushed straight back from a high forehead. Eyebrows black as raven’s wings soared above black eyes. A mole nestled beneath his right nostril as if one of the polka dots had escaped from the bow tie around his neck. Everyone knew that polka dots brought good luck. The poet would bring us good luck.
“Lorca sat down, crossed his legs, and looked around the cave with a half-smile on his lips as if each copper pot, each tile, each lump on the whitewashed cave wall pleased him immensely. He crossed one leg over the other, adjusted the crease of his trousers, twisted the cap off his pen, and wrote in a notebook he plucked from his pocket. While his head was bent, the others in his group caught one another’s eyes and exchanged smiles as if they were sharing a special event. As he was writing, he suddenly turned his head so quickly that he caught me staring at him from behind the curtain. He smiled. Since most adult attention led to a swat or reprimand, I looked around to see if there were someone behind me that the pleasant expression might be intended for. There was no one—he was smiling at me. I smiled back.
“My father began his temple, the long, drawn-out Ay that rose and fell and rose again as he warmed up his throat. Tío Antonio strummed a rough falseta. He played the old way, entirely with his thumb, the nail thick as an old dog’s. As my father began singing, the poet closed his eyes and nodded his head. His lips moved as if he were saying prayers or having a vision.
“El Bala ordered Dried Wood to go on. My mother crowded in beside me. As Dried Wood’s feet beat against the floor, Lorca’s eyes flew open. He studied Dried Wood, then turned to the woman beside him. She must have been his sister because she was his twin except with no bow tie and no mole. All Lorca did was arch one of his black eyebrows, and my mother and I both knew we were in trouble, these were not tourists. They knew what they were seeing. They knew what we knew: Dried Wood wasn’t very good.
“ ‘Ozu,’ my mother cursed under her breath. She stepped out from behind the curtain and began palmas, clapping loudly, trying like a sheepdog to herd a wandering sheep back to the flock. Dried Wood responded with some footwork that was all pointless clacking and grimaces. My mother yelled out Óle! This was always the cue for the tourists to join in with some applause or, if they’d finished their sangrias, a few olés of their own. But Lorca only shook his head, capped his pen, put his notebook into his pocket, and, with a nod to the others, stood up.
“Seeing Lorca’s disgust, my mother stepped up, her heels drumming furiously, calling out to the guitarist, to the singer with clapping hands and stamping feet for a bulerías. Tío Antonio responded immediately. My father fell silent.
“Lorca paused while the women gathered their coats. He saw what I saw: that every molecule of my mother’s being was puro, flamenco puro. Without taking his eyes from her, he motioned for the others to sit back down. He watched my mother like a schoolteacher listening to a pupil reciting her lesson. When she set up a tricky contratiempo with her arms, he nodded to indicate that she’d gotten the answer right and murmured, ‘Sí, eso es.’ My mother glanced over at me. It was as if we, she and I, had spent the last two years surrounded by people who could barely hear, who only understood us if we screamed and waved our arms and acted out everything we wanted to say and, suddenly, we had met someone who could hear the faintest whisper.
“In her exuberance at meeting such an aficionado, my mother forgot herself. She must have imagined she was a girl again, shining in the gaslights on the stage of Café Filarmónico, for she danced with a liveliness I’d rarely seen before. I knew she could never keep up the tempo she was demanding from Tío Antonio. She should have called for my father to sing. But years of dancing for payos, for clods blind to her art, combined with her hatred for my father, erupted in a fever that boiled through my mother’s blood so that she wouldn’t, she couldn’t, stop. Not to rest, not to allow my father to sing, nothing. Her hair, which had been oiled into fat rolls beside her ears, flew apart, swatting her red cheeks with greasy tendrils. Sweat streamed from her face. She sucked in air with wide-eyed gasps. Still she would not stop. Not until the coughing started. She ignored the first hacks, turning them inward into choked spasms. But eventually they exploded and my mother had to stop.
“Before the poet’s sister could reach for her coat again, my mother, doubled over, had one hand plastered over her mouth, the other one she used to wave me on. She held up four fingers to signal to the guitarist to put his cejilla, his capo, on the fourth fret, and snapped her fingers in pitos loud as the crack of rifle shot to the compás of the style she wanted me to dance, a fandango. But I didn’t want to dance por fandangos, a folk dance for Malagans wearing silly hats with ribbons and clacking away on giant castanets. I wanted to dance what the poet wanted to see and he wanted to see the real thing, flamenco puro. I pushed back the curtain and entered, clapping a different time from the one my mother was snapping.
“ ‘Keep it on the third,’ I told Tío Antonio.
“He glanced over at my mother, La Capitana, to see if he should play the soleá por bulerías I was calling for or the fandango she had ordered. But she couldn’t hear anything over the cannonade of her own coughing.
“I clapped out one compás, ordering soleá por bulerías. By the second compás, Tío had his cejillo back on the third fret and was following me. But I didn’t make my mother’s mistake. Lorca was a true aficionado and true aficionados know that cante comes before all else. I called for my father to sing. He was like me and did not allow his feelings to overtake him, as my mother had allowed hers to cloud her judgment. El Chino did not sing about faithless wives or the stab sharper than a knife of a woman’s bitterness. No, he took the puny packet of his grief and added it to the burden our people had carried for a thousand years. Then it had weight, then it meant something. Then Lorca was enraptured. The poet uncapped his pen and wrote down the verses my father improvised on the spot. Letras with biting words about how los payos might try to enslave gitanos but who, really, were the slaves?
“Lorca loved the clever twist of his words that always turned gitanos into conquerors, rulers of a world where payo fools lived by the sweat of their brows and only gitanos were clever enough to live by their wits.
“In response to my father’s verses, their message, their structure, my taconeo hammered out a celebration of our people. Lorca nodded his approval of my collaboration with El Chino. This was true flamenco and he knew true flamenco.
“Stepping backward and silencing my feet, I called my father back in. He was ready. He sang beautiful verses, tragic verses that told the tale of a simple blacksmith who journeyed to Sevilla to trade horses. Once there he was bewitched by a dancer from Triana whose baile was a tornado whirling about two precious stones, the emeralds that were her eyes. The tornado tore his heart from his chest. He sang about how he would die without his heart. How in claiming his heart, he’d had to steal the dancer too. It was sad to snatch la bailaora from Sevilla and lock her away in a cave, but how could a man live without his heart? Tell him, please, and he would do it. Tell him how he could set the dancer free and still go on. Tell him how a man could live without his heart?
“I didn’t hear the words in my brain. I heard the tragedy of my parents’ lives in my body and I danced it. Slow, a medio tempo. I lost track of everything and everyone around me, my mother, the poet, the fine ladies from Granada. Because I was only aware of my father’s song and telling the sad story of his love for my mother, I was momentarily thrown off by the unevenness of the tiles on the floor. Then I realized that I was dancing over coins and not flimsy centimos or even pesetas, but duros! Heavy silver coins, some with the banished king’s portrait on them, some celebrating the new government in Madrid, the Second Republic.
“In spite of the coins, though, I didn’t make my mother’s mistake. I didn’t keep hammering my feet faster and faster like a cheap tin windup toy gone mad. I took a bold step back to signal what I wanted to the guitarist. Then I enfolded the wild calliope of movement, scooping it out of the air with my arms and drawing it all back in. In a split second, I froze the motion, holding it ticking inside of me.
“The poet’s group pounded their hands together, but he silenced them, both his hands thrown out to stop every sound. Now he watched. Now he listened with his eyes, waiting to learn if I had anything to say. I had waited all my life for this. I opened my arms and released the motion, let it whirl me away until I was a tornado, until I had whirled every heart in that cave out of every chest and claimed them as my own.”
Doña Carlota clapped her hands with a sharp crack like a hypnotist waking his subject from a trance. “That’s all the time for today! Next class we talk about my friend, Federico García Lorca.”