Outside, Didi ran past. “Gotta blast,” she yelled back at me. “Jeff’s helping me put a new piece together.” She stopped. “You wanna come? You’ve hardly heard any of my new stuff.”
I shook my head no. All I wanted to do was stand in the sun and enjoy the spell Doña Carlota’s story had cast over me.
“What? You’re just going to hang here and pretend that you’re the emerald-eyed dancer and the heart you steal belongs to Tomás Montenegro?”
“No.” She was, of course, exactly right. That was precisely the fantasy I was looking forward to.
“Oh great,” she said sarcastically. “Then that means you’re actually planning to do something real about the Tomás obsession.”
I pulled a foot out of the sandals I’d changed into and displayed my calluses, bunions, and blisters like they were merit badges. “And these aren’t real enough?”
“Hey, girls who cut themselves get real scars.”
“That is so ridiculous! That is a completely different thing al—” But before I could finish saying altogether, Didi left, waving her fingers at me over her shoulder as she went.
More to prove to myself than Didi that she was wrong, I moved without thinking. Thinking was a problem for me since it always led to nothing, to me daydreaming in the sunshine. So I didn’t stop long enough to think, I simply made myself run to the faculty parking lot just in time to see Doña Carlota’s driver pull up to the back of the academy, jump out of the Buick, and race around to open the back door for the old lady.
Because it was the last thing on earth I wanted to do, I called out, “Doña Carlota!”
It is possible that I hadn’t called out loudly enough for her to hear me. That I’d only called out loudly enough to say that I’d done it. That I had tried. But the handsome, silver-haired driver with the unplaceably ancient face did hear me. He stopped and looked my way. The thrill of recognition that I had always expected when looking into Doña Carlota’s face hit me in the instant my eyes met this old man’s. The eyes. It was like looking into Tomás’s eyes. The ridiculous suspicion that he might be related to this old man was what alerted me to how dangerously overwrought I was. If the driver had not already been turning Doña Carlota’s attention my way, I would have fled. But she was beckoning me to come to her and the driver was walking away to give us privacy, so I stepped forward.
“Metrónoma, yes, what is it?” Her tone, her expression, her bearing, all the eloquence a great dancer can bring to bear expressed how highly irregular and irritating my appearance was.
What would my lie be? A question about Lorca? About the bulerías desplante? Stopping her after class when she’d made it quite clear she didn’t want to be stopped after class or any other time was bad enough. Now I had to compound the offense by asking an idiotic question. Nothing I could say would be any worse than the truth. So, because, it was the one word always at the center of my thoughts, I blurted out the name that was all questions rolled into one, “Tomás—”
“Tomás?” She cut me off, leaping at his name with the same ardor I spent my days hiding. “What have you heard? Do you know something? Has he been in contact with you? Someone you know? He’s sent a message through you? He’s done that before. Sent messages through unlikely sources. Where is he? Do you know where he is?”
“No, no, nothing like that. I don’t really know him. I—”
“Ah, I see.” The moment of excitement, hope, was gone, replaced by an Old World knowing that added my name to what was surely a very long list of breathless girls. “But you would like to know him, is that it?”
I shook my head no. This was my nightmare. I had tipped my hand. This was what I had decided from the very beginning never to do: I was a groupie. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bother you. Have a good weekend.” I was babbling. I was an idiot. I backed away, twiddling my fingers in a silly wave, ducking my head to keep her from seeing how my cheeks now scorched with embarrassment.
“Wait. Come back. You just did the one thing you have to do in flamenco: you told me something. When you said my nephew’s name, you showed me more about yourself than you’ve revealed this entire semester. That, that is what flamenco is all about. And that is what you never do and what your friend does all the time. Show yourself. Tell me something. Tell me something true. Digame la verdad.”
“Didi’s not telling the truth. She hasn’t even told you her real name.”
“You think that matters? You think it matters that her truth is lies? I will tell you something.” She waved me closer. “You could be a great dancer.”
My heart clutched. These were astonishing words from a woman whose most fulsome praise was usually “No es feo.” It’s not ugly.
“But...”
Of course there was a but.
“... you never will be. Technically, you are estupendosa. But great?”
She shook her head and muttered, “Nunca, nunca.” Never, never. “Why? Why will you never be great? Because of her.”
There was no point in even pretending that I didn’t know who “her” was.
“Flamenco is yo soy.” The gravel of the parking lot crunched beneath the old lady’s foot as she stamped the earth, taking, demanding her place on it with the essential Spanish declaration: I am. “Flamenco is yo soy. You are waiting for her permission to be. Why? Why do you stay in her shadow? She is too big a tree. You are barely a sapling. You will never have enough light because you will never have enough courage to grow past her and reach the sun.”
She leaned in even closer, close enough that I smelled Maja soap, lavender, sweat, and, underneath, another odor I couldn’t identify. It contained elements of the sweetish fragrance Daddy had about him toward the end, plus the spike of what I’d come to identify as an almost hormonal surge when Didi’s ambition went into overdrive, all combined with the dusty scent of ancient books and rooms that have been closed for a long time. “I too once had a friend like Ofelia. From her I learned a secret, a secret that you must learn.”
Suddenly, what she had to tell me seemed more important than anything, more important in that moment than even Tomás.
“She needs you more than you need her. Because of that, she will never release you. You will have to either live forever in her shadow or—” She made a swift, brutal hacking motion, an ax hacking down a tree.
How, I wanted to ask her, does a small tree kill a big tree?
But, as if she had literally slashed through some vital energy source, the gesture seemed to have exhausted Doña Carlota. Without the bristling nimbus of energy that always whirled around her, she shrank into herself, suddenly old and a bit confused. Mumbling, she turned away. Abruptly, her voice rose and she declaimed, “What had to be done, had to be done. Rosa, what other choice was there?”
“Excuse me? Doña Carlota, did you say something?”
But when she looked up again, her eyes were glazed. She hadn’t been speaking to or even seeing me.
Her driver, sensing her disorientation, rushed forward. Murmuring soft words in Spanish, he led her toward the car. Before he closed the door, she turned to me and held a quivering hand out as if she were offering something unspeakably precious.
Or asking for it back.