At Doña Carlota’s next class, we found a note taped to the studio door saying we were to meet in the academy’s main classroom. Once we’d settled in along with all of the other flamenco students, the director of the program, Alma Hernandez-Luna, swept in, brimming with an illegal amount of energy. “I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news for those of you in the beginning class is that Doña Carlota had a minor stroke yesterday and though the damage is not serious, she will not be able to finish what remains of the semester. I will be taking over her classes.”
“What?” I gasped. She hadn’t even gotten close to Tomás’s part of the story.
Didi shrugged. “End of story time.”
“The good news is that we have with us today the great flamencologista, Don Héctor Arribe y Puig. Don Héctor has come to this country to write the history of flamenco in the New World. Let’s all welcome our distinguished guest, Don Héctor Arribe y Puig.”
As Don Héctor took the podium, Didi turned to me and whispered, “Hercule Poirot.”
She was right. Don Héctor was the very embodiment of Agatha Christie’s hairnet-wearing detective. The professor was a diminutive man of a type that had either never existed in or had vanished long ago from the New World. A pince-nez would not have looked out of place clamped across the bridge of his thin nose with its quivering nostrils. More than that, though, Don Héctor Arribe y Puig was the embodiment of the compleat flamenco aficionado of the obsessive-compulsive type. There is no exact equivalent in our country to the true, the puro, flamenco aficionado. The comic book collector, the baseball trivia nut, the Civil War reenactor, the Star Trek fan, yes, the aficionado is all of those things but more. With flamenco’s emphasis on el puro, its love of bloodlines, the mystical handing down of el arte through families, preferably Gypsy families, the die-hard aficionado also has something of the racetrack handicapper, the genealogy authority, and the slave-owning plantation owner about him as well.
Don Héctor started off by drawing a great tree on the blackboard. With much emphatic underlining, he labeled the roots, INDIA. Brushing chalk dust from his hands, he turned to his audience with a pugnacious tilt to his little chin like a backstreet brawler ready to take on all comers. He seemed deflated when we copied the tree into our notebooks without a question.
“The long debate over where los gitanos originated is over. A study at Hospital Puerta de Hierro, Madrid, Spain, examined the HLA class I and class II antigen distribution in a sample of seventy-five Spanish Gypsies and seventy-four Spanish non-Gypsies. They found that Gypsies have a statistically significantly higher frequency of these antigens, which proves that Spanish Gypsies are closer to Indian Caucasoid populations than to the Spanish non-Gypsy population?”
He looked around, expecting a fierce reaction to what he obviously considered a bombshell revelation. All he saw were students either dutifully scratching down what he’d just said or muffling yawns. I, however, was electrified. He was talking about the exact issues of blood and authenticity that haunted Tomás. This was the problem I could solve for him, the one that would win his love. I scribbled frantically as the professor continued.
“Gypsies migrated from or were cast out of India around the eleventh century. Records exist of their arrival in Spain as early as 1425. They named themselves Children of the Pharaoh, Egyptians, los egipcianos, a label that eventually became los gitanos. Many of the Gypsy chiefs called themselves conde or duque de Egipto, count or duke of Egypt, and traveled with their bands under forged letters of safe conduct, claiming to be pilgrims. They carried out this fabrication for so long that even the gitanos themselves forgot that they were not really Egyptian pilgrims, sons and daughters of the pharaohs.
“After the Reconquest of Spain in 1492, when the Moors were driven from the peninsula, an official persecution began against all non-Christian groups. The same year that America was discovered, Jews and Gypsies became hunted people. They were either expelled or forced to hide their identities. The Jews became conversos, practicing their religion in secret, or they fled. Gypsies had nowhere to flee.
“For three centuries, Gypsies were subject to laws and prejudice designed to eliminate them from Spain. Settlements were broken up; Gypsies were required to marry non-Gypsies. They were denied their language and rituals as well as being excluded from public office and from craft membership. In 1560 Spanish legislation forbade gitanos from traveling in groups of more than two. Gypsy dress and clothing were banned. Around this same time there were nearly a million Gypsy slaves in Eastern Europe, and Holy Mother Church owned two hundred thousand of them.
“Not surprisingly, Gypsies were driven into a permanently submerged underclass from which they are still emerging today. Just as hardship, however, nurtured the blues music of your persecuted African Americans, in my country it led directly to the creation of flamenco song, dance, and guitar.
“During the twentieth century in Spain, General Franco continued the persecution of Gypsies, as did the Nazis, who enacted laws twice as strict against Gypsies as against Jews. By 1933 Hitler was already sterilizing Gypsies in Germany. Eventually, a third of all Gypsies living in Europe, nearly one million people, were annihilated. A proportion as great or greater than the number of Jews murdered, yet not one single Gypsy was called as a witness at the Nuremburg Trials. Not one single Gypsy was ever compensated.”
Don Héctor summarized the story of flamenco’s beginnings among the outcasts of Andalusia: Jews, Moors, and Gypsies. He followed the trunk of his great tree to limbs forking out to ever smaller branches to, finally, the farthest extension, the one that bore the golden fruit that we were all feasting upon, flamenco in Nuevo México.
“According to my sources, flamenco truly took root in New Mexico in a club outside of Tesuque, a town on the edge of Santa Fe. The name of this club was, appropriately enough, El Nido, The Nest. Here, for a handful of aficionados, the godfather of New Mexico flamenco, Vicente Romero, danced. He danced his famous twenty-minute escobilla, the machine-gun footwork that would eventually kill him when, overweight and trying to keep up with a young Pepe Greco, Romero died onstage at the Joyce Theater in New York.”
Didi turned to me, her eyes popping at this fabulously dramatic bit of New Mexican flamenco history.
“But Romero left behind several talented guitar-playing brothers and also inspired two dancers of seminal importance. The first, of Chippewa/Puerto Rican heritage, María Benítez, would go on to become one of the most acclaimed dancers in America. The second is your own Señora Alma Hernandez-Luna.”
At this the tiny professor bowed his head and extended his arm to Alma and the entire audience burst into spontaneous applause for our beloved homegirl.
“But the real reason I have journeyed to your state, to your Tierra del Encanto, the actual focus of the book I will be writing, is—” The professor turned back to the blackboard and drew one final branch. Beside this last branch he chalked in the name Doña Carlota Montenegro de Anaya, bailaora.
Didi’s eyes popped open and she hissed in my ear, “Yes!”
I waved my hand to silence her, terrified that I might miss a single word.
“Not only was Doña Carlota the first to bring flamenco puro to New Mexico, she gave el arte its first academic home in the New World. Doña Carlota has established a dynasty of New Mexican dancers who are, even now, forcing flamenco to evolve in directions both unexpected and, for many traditionalists, unwelcome. But we shall save that controversy for another time. For now, let us examine the reasons why flamenco took root here in your majestic state as it did nowhere else in America, or the world, for that matter. Why was el arte embraced by Hispano residents in a way that no other Latino population in the New World has? The reason is contained in their very preference for the designation ‘Hispano.’ Not Latino, not Chicano, Hispano. Though it is not a popular contention in this country, some would say that something in the blood of your Hispanos, those descended from Spanish settlers, responds to flamenco. They hear, in its ancient rhythms, songs of home.
“Let us leave, for now, the fascinating question of why New Mexico, and turn to the other great gift that Doña Carlota has given us.”
He picked up the chalk again and next to Doña Carlota’s branch, drew one leaf. Beside it, he wrote Tomás Montenegro de Anaya, tocaor.
The sight of his name written by another’s hand had as powerful an effect upon me as if the phantasm I constantly dreamed of had stepped into the classroom.
I didn’t realize until a loud buzzer startled me that I had stopped breathing. Most of the class vanished before the buzzer even finished sounding. Didi jumped up, then waited for me so we could join the stampede. Instead, bereft, I pointed frantically at the lone leaf trembling at the end of Doña Carlota’s branch. “He didn’t get to—”
Didi pulled me to my feet before I could finish. “Not a problem. We’ll just grab the old queen before he escapes and pepper him with questions.”
“No, no, don’t say anything, okay?” I hurried to wipe away such a possibility. After my humiliating experience with Doña Carlota I was actually relieved that the old lady wouldn’t be coming back to class. I couldn’t risk word getting back to her through the professor of my interest.
“Come on,” Didi coaxed. “It’ll be great reconnaissance. He knows a lot more than he’s telling. We can take him to Cervantes and get him to spill the beans.”
Cervantes was a gloomy cocktail lounge frequented by a midafternoon crowd of high-level defense contractors who hung around Sandia Labs and used the bar to cheat on their wives with their secretaries. Didi liked it for intelligence-gathering because of the air of betrayed trust that hung over the place. I grabbed her arm as she started toward the professor. “No. Seriously. I don’t want you to talk to him. Or anyone. It’s too early for direct contact.”
“ ‘Direct contact’? Rae, can you hear yourself? We’re going to talk to some castanet-sniffer who’s writing about his great-aunt. How much more indirect can you get? And ‘too early’? Dude, it’s been”—she held up fingers as she ticked off the months—“May—”
“Not all of May.”
She bent the finger in half. “Whatever. June. July. August. September. October. November.”
I swatted her hand down to stop the count. “I know how long it’s been.”
“You know I’m absolutely the last person in the world to object to obsession, but even for me, this is getting a little strange. I mean, you met the guy once.”
“Which is once more than you ever met most of the guys you groupied.”
“Am I doing that now? Am I groupieing now? That was always a means to an end. You know that. It was a way to get to the life I’m supposed to have. This thing, what you’re doing, it’s a way to completely avoid having a life.”
“I can’t believe this. I cannot believe that you, Poster Girl for Fantasy, have the nerve to tell me shit like that.”
I tried to walk away, but Didi planted herself in front of me and wouldn’t let me pass. “Rae, I’m doing it. I’m putting myself out there. I’m going for it. What are you going for?”
“Like I really have to tell you.”
“I know what you think you’re going for. You think you’re going for love, but you’ve got that right in front of you.”
“Yeah, right.” I gave a dry snort of fake laughter to dismiss her ridiculous claim.
“Okay, what about Will?”
“Will? What about Will?”
“He’s insanely in love with you.”
“What?”
“Please, please, please, don’t be the only person who doesn’t know.” She studied my face. “God, you don’t. Oh well, I guess you look in a mirror, you expect to see yourself.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Will, he’s you. Hopeless, one-sided love sublimated into flamenco. Sound familiar?”
“As a psychiatrist, Didi, you make a really good poet. Move. I’m going home.”
“Look, you’re right, I shouldn’t criticize anyone for living in a fantasy, but at some point you’ve got to intersect with reality a tiny bit. At least on our missions, the whole idea was to meet the band, right? If you’ve seriously got a thing for this guy, let’s go to Doña Carlota and find out where he is. Huh? That’s a start, right?”
“She doesn’t know where he is. I asked.”
“Okay, very good. I’m impressed. I’m not sure I believe you, but I’m impressed.”
“Didi, I have to be ready, that’s all. That’s all it comes down to. I’m not avoiding life or any of that other horseshit. I will see him again. I know I will. But what is the point of seeing him again while I’m still—”
I flapped my hands at myself to indicate my total inadequacy and Didi filled in the blank, “You?” Her voice was soft and concerned again. “Okay, Rae, what do they say in AA? I can’t enable you anymore.”
“You enable me? You’re kidding, right? You have got to be kidding. You, Miss Never Met a Controlled Substance I Didn’t Like? Enable me? Me? The person who got you through high school? What? Has the quality of my service gone down now that I’ve found a genuine interest in life?”
“Flamenco or Mystery Man, Rae? Because they’re two sides of the same obsession and flamenco isn’t any better than Mystery Man. Flamenco is obsessive-compulsive disorder set to a great beat. You can dance to it, but, Rae, you cannot have a life to it.”
“I am through with this conversation,” I said, and for the first time ever, I walked away from Didi.
That weekend, I allowed Will to relieve me of my virginity. A part of me realized Didi was right. I’d left the realm of the rational. I thought Will might be a first step back. A first step away from Tomás. He wasn’t. Fully clothed, with one kiss, Tomás had transported me to the stars. Naked in bed, with Will laboring between my legs, I had never felt more leaden and earthbound in my life.
There was a smear of blood on the sheet when it was over. Will held me tenderly as I cried. It was nice to be comforted even if it was for the wrong thing. Will thought I was weeping for my virginity. My tears were for the knowledge that had just been made certain that I would never be happy with anyone except Tomás Montenegro.