By the time the festival rolled around that summer, Didi was on the road, touring with a national troupe of slam poets. Meanwhile, I had pulled all the right strings so that I got the assignment to pick up Guitos at the airport even though Meatballs had specifically requested that he be met by “a young man, handsome and charming.”
I arrived at the Sunport holding a sign that read: BIENVENIDO AL FAMOSO GUITOS!!! SUPER STAR Y REY SUPREMO DE LOS CANTAORES!!! Before she left, Didi had helped me make the sign welcoming the Famous Meatballs, Super Star and Supreme King of Singers. It manifested not just Didi’s all-around genius for sucking up to the right people, but was also designed to deflect Meatballs’s pique when he discovered he was not being met by the “joven, guapo y encantando” he had specifically requested. I was glad Didi wasn’t around. Meatballs was my first live connection to Tomás and I wanted to be alone with him. I clutched a huge bouquet of red roses, the basic unit of currency in the economy of flamenco adulation, as I waited for the singer to emerge.
Far down the airport great hall a statue of an Indian warrior, his cape unfurling behind him, reaching out to catch an eagle, took flight above the tangle of passengers. Remembering the many past missions at the Sunport when we’d waited beneath the outstretched warrior to ambush sleep-dazed rock stars, I grew nostalgic and wished Didi were with me.
Meatballs was easy to spot. He appeared wearing an overcoat and a muffler. Among the tourists in their pastel cottons and spongy white tennis shoes, he looked like a bear coming out of hibernation. He had a bear-shaped body that sloped down from narrow shoulders and expanded to the great tub of his gut below with an immense, bear-size head above. His hair, though, done in a traditional old-school Gypsy style, was all Wolf Man. Thick, coarse, and black, it swept straight back from a hairline that started barely more than an inch above his thick, coarse, black eyebrows and involved muttonchops that all but covered his ears.
Even though the air-conditioning in the terminal was barely keeping the heat below body temperature, Meatballs acted as if he had been caught in a polar blast, tightening the muffler around his famous throat and buttoning up his overcoat. He saw my sign and glanced around for the young male escort he’d requested. When it became obvious that I was the entire welcoming committee, the singer graciously threw his arms open, lumbered over, and wrapped me in a damp embrace that smelled of Spanish hair pomade and old overcoat. Carried within the folds of that voluminous overcoat, wrapped into the threads of the muffler wound around his neck, embedded in his coarse, black hair, his dark, blue-sheened skin, coursing through his blood were the compass points of the Gypsy world. Tomás’s world. The world of flamenco. He would be my guide. I embraced him back.
“Bienvenido a Nuevo Mexico!” I delivered the welcome I’d rehearsed. Today, I had no choice; I had to move from a reader and a writer of Spanish to a speaker.
The first words out of his mouth were, “Mi compinche Tomás dijo.” From there on it was a list of all the places that “my buddy Tomás said” the singer had to visit while he was in New Mexico. His buddy Tomás said that he had to eat at Sadie’s; ride the tram up the mountain; soak in the hot springs in the Jemez Mountains; eat some of Roque García’s carnitas on the plaza in Santa Fe; take the High Road to Taos. The recommendations cascaded forth, all delivered in a hoarse whisper that made me recall what Doña Carlota had told us about la voz afillá, the raspy, genuine Gypsy voice of her blacksmith father singing in a cave in Granada: “La voz afillá is the sound a man makes when the world tries to choke him to death at birth and he sings anyway. That is the true Gypsy voice.”
After we loaded Meatballs’s five large suitcases in the university van, he asked me, “Happy Hocker Pawn Shop? Tú le conoces?”
I told him I was familiar with the Happy Hocker. The pawn shop was a favorite with our Gypsy visitors who were always either buying or selling gold.
As I got behind the wheel of the van I rehearsed the questions that would subtly lead to Tomás. Just as I was about to speak, Guitos announced that he wasn’t going to talk anymore. Touching his throat, he explained he had to save “la voz.” At the shop, though, he didn’t bother saving his voice as he used an array of haggling techniques that combined equal parts charm, intimidation, flattery, lies, and threats to acquire a dozen saddles, then paid for them with a wad of cash that would have choked the horses that all the saddles were intended for.
Like all the visiting luminaries, Guitos was staying at the Sculpture Garden Bungalows. Built by the university on the edge of its golf course, the cottages were sprinkled amid a collection of sculptures constructed from old farm machinery spread across the grounds. I parked in front of the cabin that housed the office and a young man appeared with a luggage cart. Guitos peeled twenties off his wad and stuffed them into the fellow’s pocket as he loaded up as many of the saddles as he could, then led us off to Guitos’s bungalow. We passed fifteen-foot-high grasshoppers and some tree-size nail clippers before we reached our destination. A pair of eight-foot-high stone angels guarded the gate in front of the bungalow.
“Muchísimas gracias.” Guitos shook my hand and turned his attention toward piloting the cart into his bungalow.
The mission was ending before it had even begun. I had learned nothing. The wall of renown that usually encased the famous singer was sealing him off in front of my eyes. From that moment forward, Guitos would be caught up in the festival, surrounded by fans, handlers, peppered with demands. I would have no further access and I had not spoken one word to him about Tomás. What I had done was confirm every accusation Didi had ever implied or hurled at me. If I let him step away, she would be right: all I wanted was the safety of a fantasy.
“Señor, perdóneme.” I had to say it twice before he stopped and turned back to me with a surprised expression on his face, almost as if he were startled that I’d continued to exist once he’d withdrawn his attention.
I rushed forward and spoke. For the first time, my brain unloosed its hold on my tongue and Spanish, unrehearsed, ungrammatical Spanish as simple as the baby I was in that language, poured forth. “Tomás? Tomás Montenegro? Tú le conoces?” Forgetting about formal forms of address, I blundered ahead, asking if he knew Tomás.
That was all I needed to say. Singers, cantaores, the great ones, along with their idiosyncrasies and egomania, have a gift for divining emotion. They witch it like a dowser hunting water. Instead of a green bough, though, they hold their voice over listeners until it trembles and twitches at the deepest pools hidden in your most secret heart. Without ever hearing Meatballs sing a note, I knew he was a great singer because after listening to me say those few words, he waved the cart handler away, took my hand, and guided me into the bungalow. It was a study in good taste, New Mexico–style. A Seven Hills rug hung on the wall, a black San Ildefonso pot occupied the place of honor between two kachinas, a basket of fragrant piñon sat beside a horno-shaped fireplace in the corner. Guitos beckoned for me to sit beside him on the Carpintero-style bench with Zias carved into its back. When I was seated, he retook my hand and pronounced the verdict: “Tú le amas. Tú le amas a Tomás.”
“You love him. You love Tomás.” He wasn’t asking; he was stating the fact he saw before him. There was no point in denying it or even in adding that I knew I was stupid. That I’d only met Tomás once. That he didn’t even know my name. That I should be spending my money on therapy, not flamenco classes.
Meatballs pressed my hand to his cheek and whispered a few words of English. “Es hokay. I luf heem too.”
And then we were girlfriends. The relief of finally being able to talk about the person who had occupied the greater part of my thoughts for three years was so great that I laughed along with Guitos as if we were dorm mates in frilly nighties.
La voz was forgotten completely as Meatballs spoke in tones that ranged from wonderstruck awe to lascivious hebephrenia as he cataloged Tomás’s charms in a torrent of fevered Spanish. “Those eyes. Those lips. That—” He cupped his hands to indicate the Montenegro ass. “Por Dios.” He crossed himself and kissed the back of his thumb at the memory. “But that, all that is nothing,” he declared, dismissing Tomás’s beauty. A second later, he called it back with a deep, rumbling laugh. “All right, it is something. All right, it’s a hell of a lot. But you know when I really, truly fell in love with this guy? When he played for me. Ay Santa María de Dios. When he plays... when he plays. Qué monstruo. Un fenómeno. No other tocaor has played like this for me. After singing with him for only a few minutes, I could not believe what I was hearing. We were speaking. I would say something and his response would be wise or witty. Mocking even. So I tested him to see if he was really as good as he seemed. I sang strange offbeats I’d never tried with any other tocaor and, like a compass always pointing to true north, he held the rhythm even as he created a brilliant new síncopa.”
I stretched to remember the word for syncopation as Guitos pressed the tips of his fingers together, then shook the gathered fingers in front of his face as if pleading for words to express Tomás’s gift. “This, all this”—he indicated his own hair, his face, his body—“it was gone. All that is there is”—he pounded his meaty hand into his chest, his heart, his soul—“this. This is what he sees. This is what he plays for. This is what he makes me show. He read my mind. He read my heart. With his guitar, he made me show everything. With Tomás, I could hide nothing. Every night with him I went to confession and the black blood, la sangre negra, poured out. Like no other tocaor—and, mind you, I have sung with the best, the greatest guitarists on earth—but Tomás. Ah, mi Tomasito. There is no player on earth like Tomás. I called him Angelito. Because he was. He was my little angel. He is my little angel.”
“Yes,” I whispered. “I thought I was insane. That I had fallen in love with him because he was a phantom I could never have.”
“I know!” Guitos exploded, the perfect girlfriend. “I thought I had fallen in love with him just to torture myself because he is so hopelessly straight. But no. It is him. Mi angelito. He is air and rain and gold dust and all others are mud. Nada. Nada. Nada. He poisons you for any other man.”
“I know! My best friend always tells me that I am just using him to keep the world away.”
“No! Tomás is the world.”
“Sometimes I think I haven’t wanted to know anything. To keep him the perfect, unattainable dream.”
He shook his great head. “No. When you know him, he is even more out of reach. No one on this earth will have him, because he does not have himself.”
“Why do you say that?”
Guitos slapped both his hands over his mouth. “No. I’ve said too much. He opened his heart to me. To me! The beauty told his secrets to the beast. It is all I will ever have of him. This much I will keep.” He squeezed the enormous fists he made of his hands tightly in front of his heart to symbolize the eternal lock he would keep on Tomás’s secrets, secrets he thought I intended to pry out of him.
“Of course, of course. No, don’t worry. I know nothing about him. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? I’m obsessed with, I love”—it felt so good to say it out loud, that I said it again—“I love a man I met once, three years ago, a man who doesn’t even know my name.” I giggled, giddy with the relief of pulling all my secrets out of the closet. “I am not a mentally healthy person.”
Guitos didn’t laugh. “Mental health? Pffft.” He flicked his fingers, waving away the pathetic American cliché. He leaned in close so that I was engulfed again by the smell he carried from an older world and he whispered in his husky voice, “Embrujados. Bewitched. We have both been bewitched.”
Yes, we had stepped into the same fairy tale and been bewitched. That is why, when he said, “Tell me, tell me about meeting Tomás,” I told him the truth as it had really happened. “I met Tomás on a night when the earth ate the moon. His nails were phosphorescent fairies flitting through the darkness, plucking enchanted sounds from the strings of a guitar. A neon rainbow splashed across his face and I escaped the police by flying out of a window and into his arms.”
The more fantastical my telling, the closer it approached the absolute truth of that night. Guitos nodded as I spoke, leaning closer and closer until the long whiskers of his sideburns stroked my cheek. He was the tocaor now, drawing the truth from me, the cantaor.
“He led me down a street where conquistadors ruled coffee shops and whiskey grew in a garden of green bottles. A secret park appeared in the middle of a sleeping neighborhood. He played falsetas so beautiful that the leaves on the trees turned into hearts and rained down on me. And, on a giant’s swing, we sailed so high that the stars blurred into streaks of silver next to our heads.”
Guitos looked as if he’d been struck. He dropped his head into his hands. His great shoulders heaved and tears ran in rivulets down the tendons of his wrists.
“Guitos, please...” I put my arm around his shoulders. He flinched and shrugged away from my touch. I backed off.
He raised his head and brusquely squeegeed the wetness from his face. “I want to be alone.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have talked about this.”
“What you say or don’t say to me doesn’t matter. What is meant to be, will be.” His tone was cold, dismissive.
“I’ve offended you. I didn’t mean to—”
He shifted to turn away from me. We weren’t best girlfriends anymore, we weren’t friends or even acquaintances of any sort. “As I said, your intentions are irrelevant. May I be left alone? I have a performance to prepare for?”
I muttered more apologies. Guitos didn’t respond. Confused, embarrassed, I stumbled out of the room and found my way back to Popejoy Hall, where Alma Hernandez-Luna tried to control the chaos. I buried my humiliation by throwing myself into preparations for that evening’s concert, the first of five that would be staged over the course of the festival.
Alma was directing four different cuadros, troupes, each one needing its own set of lighting cues, props, acoustics, and costumes. I was dispatched to deliver a guitarist from Malaga to the nearest nail salon for a new set of acrylics. It was a relief to be away from the festival for a while. My encounter with Guitos had left me feeling as if I’d met, and then lost, Tomás all over again.
When I returned, I was grateful to be put to work ironing costumes. As I smoothed over wrinkles in acres of fabric, I watched Alma through a haze of steam as she smoothed over the inflamed egos of a dozen divas. She had to navigate through a minefield of the thousand and one slights that flamenco performers are apt to interpret as walkout-worthy signs of disrespect. Watching the temper tantrums and hissy fits calmed me the way flamenco always calmed me; volcanic emotions were made manifest and released.
The first crack in Alma’s legendary composure came an hour before the curtain was to go up, when she was called away to speak to her star performer, Guitos, on the phone. She returned to the backstage area screaming my name. The usually unflappable Alma was utterly flapped.
With a hiss of steam, I tipped the iron up as she rushed over, shaking her head and muttering “cantaores,” as if the inexplicable eccentricities of these mercurial creatures were a personal curse upon her. “Guitos wants you, and only you, to come to the bungalow.”
“Me? Are you sure?”
“Very sure. He was quite emphatic that he wanted you and no one else. Was he drinking when you left?”
“No. He hadn’t touched a drop.” One of the major duties of the flamenco celebrity wrangler was to keep our visitors sober until concert time. After that, all bets were off.
“Well, whatever is wrong with him, he believes you’re the only one who can help. He’s wailing about a pain that only you will understand. I couldn’t follow the whole drama. Just have him here on time and on stage.”
I made the short drive to the guest bungalows and found Guitos’s door ajar. The smell of leather from the saddles stacked beside the bed greeted me as I slipped inside. It blended with the fragrance of sandalwood incense.
“Hello?”
When there was no answer, I followed the sound of chanting into the bedroom. Guitos was kneeling in front of an altar he had assembled on the desk in the corner. Coils of smoke rose from the sandalwood incense burning in front of a photo of a dark-eyed Hindu man with a bindi dotted on his forehead. The mini-bar had been savaged and an Elvis-size assortment of prescription bottles lay scattered across the bed. None of this seemed to have slowed the big man down very much. He rang a silver bell and prayed incoherently to his guru. The only words I could pick out were “Mi Tomasito, mi ángel, mi alma.”
“Guitos?”
He swiveled around and directed his rambling lament to me. Sobs wracking his giant body, he heaved himself up, then crumpled onto the bed. Pill bottles and empty miniatures bounced as his bulk hit the mattress.
I closed the door. Guitos, still sobbing, his head buried in the pillows, patted a spot on the bed and I sat down. After several moments of wailing, he hoisted himself up into a sodden clump, wiped his hand across his wet face, and regained some control.
“This is not what I thought would happen when I came here. I dreamed that I would find the key to Tomás’s heart here. And I have. But I see now that I will never be the one to turn it.” He heaved a giant sigh and composed himself a bit further. “Mi angelito guided me to you. Tomás and I have shared great love in past lives. Of this I am certain—we shall be united again after death, in pitraloka.” He turned to his guru and bowed his head in the direction of the photo. “But for now, in this current incarnation, mi angelito is meant to be with...” He paused and then, with a shuddering sigh, as if the word were his last breath of life said, “... you.”
I couldn’t speak.
“The moment you said you met him on the night that the earth ate the moon, I knew that I was not destined to be with him. Not in this life. You met mi amor on the night when his life cracked in two, the night he soared into the heavens with a virgin paler than the hidden moon into the stars.”
“He told you. About me?”
“You were part of the story. One of the signs. Part of the answer he was searching for.”
“The answer to what?”
“To himself. His life. That night, the night he met you, he learned that he could no longer hide from what he’d suspected for a long time,” He stared at me. The candlelight and smell of leather, his raspy voz afillá, the bluish tinge of his dark skin, they all blended together to evoke the cave on Sacromonte where Doña Carlota had lived and given her life to the Gypsy art, flamenco.
“Gypsies cheat, steal from, and lie to payos. To tell a payo the truth is to betray your people. You are a payo. The palest of the pale of payos. How can I tell you the only secret I would guard with my life, because it is Tomás’s secret?”
“I don’t tell secrets.”
He snorted a bitter laugh. “Who ever admits that they will reveal your secret? Who ever says, ‘Tell me, tell me, please, tell me and I promise I will betray you to the world’? I don’t even know who you are. Why should it be you? Why should I tell you the secret that controls Tomás’s life?”
It was easy to answer in the way he would understand. It was more than easy. All I had to do, for one moment, was to stop reining in my obsession and it ran away with me. “Because I care more about him than I do myself. Because for three years I have devoted my life to becoming who he would fall in love with. Because he is more essential to my happiness than life. Because I am sick with love for Tomás Montenegro and I will die if you do not give me the cure.”
“When you fall in love with un flamenco, you fall in love with his art, with his people. In America you tell each other the lie, ‘Oh, the color of a person’s skin. It doesn’t matter.’ In flamenco, we don’t tell that lie. Blood matters. To be the best, you must have the best blood, the blood of the pharaohs. You must be Gypsy. And don’t say, ‘Oh, what about Paco de Lucía?’ ”
He waved away the name of the world’s most famous flamenco guitarist.
“Pffft. Paco is great. The greatest of the decade. But for payos only. In el flamenco puro, puro, puro, for those who are truly enterao, Paco no dice nada, he says nothing. Do you understand this? Do you understand how even such a one as Paco de Lucía will never be accepted, truly, truly accepted, because he is a payo?”
“Yes, I know. In my classes, I am invisible. I don’t have el arte in my blood. I will never have it. I can study flamenco for the rest of my life and I won’t have it. I don’t care. I study for Tomás. No other reason.”
Guitos nodded, considering. He dropped heavy lids over his eyes, turned from me, and bowed in the direction of his guru’s photo. Several moments passed as he prayed silently. He opened his eyes, said one word, “Sí,” and began to tell me the story I’d fallen into on the night I dropped into Tomás Montenegro’s arms.
“When Tomás appeared on the scene in Madrid seven years ago, speaking his beautiful Spanish with words from the seventeenth century, he was a very young man. He came with a minor reputation. Good enough to get work in the tourist clubs. Word spread quickly, though. First los aficionados went so that they could dismiss this latest pretender and acquire a new object for their finely attenuated mockery.
“But they did not come away laughing and soon Tomás was playing in the best flamenco clubs in the world, El Corral de la Morería, La Torre del Oro, Casa Patas. He was accompanying classes at the greatest flamenco studio of them all, Amor de Dios. He was heralded throughout the flamenco world. At last, a real, a true flamenco from the New World, come back to us like an echo from the conquistadors five centuries ago. An ocean, a continent was between him and the sources of el arte, yet in spite of his isolation, he played with corazón gitano. Alma gitano. Pasión gitano. How could this be? Those of us who’ve given our lives to flamenco puro knew it had to be a lie. That year I, along with Chi Chi, the queen of el baile gitano from Jerez de la Frontera and El Pulgar, the last, true calé, were on the selection committee to pick the best, the purest, the most flamenco of all flamenco artists to perform at the Sevilla Biennale. Everywhere we turned, someone was telling us about this tocaor we had to consider, this Tomás Montenegro.
“Eventually we surrendered. We had to learn who the upstart from the New World was. So, late on a Tuesday, the first day of the flamenco weekend, we arranged to meet this fenómeno. We had already decided that he was a fraud. We intended not only to disqualify him from consideration for the sacred biennale, but to ensure that he would never play again at any respectable club. The heart and soul of our art hung in the balance. For this reason, we set the meeting at Restaurante Sonrisa, a tourist spot where they slam a bowl of gazpacho in front of you and some abomination in a red dress clacks her castanets in the imitation flamenco that Franco foisted on us after the war. The choice of Restaurante Sonrisa was an insult to the pretender and the three of us were quite pleased with our little joke.
“The joke was on us when Tomás appeared and the first words from his mouth as he looked around at the Japanese businessmen and the dancer in a polka-dotted dress were, ‘I know a spot that’s not far from here and not for guiris.’ Chi Chi, El Pulgar, and I were impressed not just that he knew the Caló word for outsiders, but that he led us to ¡A Jalar!, a dive popular with the Triana crowd, calé from Sevilla—a rough, working-class place, exactly the sort of place where Carmen Amaya herself might have danced barefoot as a child.
“Because I did not want to be recognized in the company of a fraud, I had taken care that night to wear a fedora that covered the top half of my face and a muffler that covered most of the bottom. In this way, I slipped unnoticed into ¡A Jalar!
“ ‘Eh, churumbel!’ the proprietor greeted Tomás, yelling to be heard above the racket. Even if the owner had not called him ‘kid’ in Caló, we, Chi Chi, El Pulgar, and I, would have known the owner was Gypsy by the gold chains glinting against the masses of black Gypsy hair, poking from the top of his lime-green silk shirt. He stared at us suspiciously, mumbled something in Tomás’s ear. He brightened when Tomás whispered something back to him.
“ ‘Ah, you are calé,’ the owner said, grabbing my hairy Gypsy hand in his hairy Gypsy hand. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’ So it was Tomás who had to vouch for us! Us, we three who were there to be his Torquemada at a flamenco Inquisition! I began to regard this nuevo mexicano in a very different light. Of course, he was physically sublime. But since I have always had a weakness in that regard, I ignored his beauty. Then I suddenly saw what was behind the beauty. All at once, the three of us saw it. The dark skin that had been kissed farewell by India a thousand years ago. The hair so black it crackled with blue as if lighted by the moon. The lashes, the lips, the whole enchantment. He could be my cousin if any of my family had possessed such beauty. Here before us was the answer to a prayer we had never dared utter.
“In the end our Inquisition came down to one question. ‘Who are you?’
“ ‘Soy gitano a contra costaos,’ he answered. Gypsy on four sides.
“In spite of what our eyes were seeing, we had to have more proof. El Pulgar took a guitar off the whitewashed wall. A piece of crap, put there for decoration at the end of a hard life as a cantina guitarra. He tuned it and stuck it in Tomás’s hands. Tomás didn’t protest, didn’t hurl the joke of an instrument back at El Pulgar. He strummed quietly for a few minutes. But soon, ¡A Jalar! had fallen silent. Everyone in the place was straining to hear the falling notes of his magical soleá falseta.
“ ‘Él tiene aire,’ Chi Chi whispered to me. But everyone in that room already knew that he had the air, the thing that cannot be taught.
“ ‘Tiene fuerza en el compás,’ El Pulgar exclaimed.
“But I no longer cared whether he had the right air or was strong in the compás. I ripped away the hat hiding my face and made the only response I could at having found my soul mate. En voz medio, at half voice, I sang.
“Ay
Rompe in oscuridad de in noche
Pero en realidad es nuestra pena
Rompiéndose dentro de nosotros
“They say each morning the dawn breaks
But really it is our own grief
Breaking within us...
“He played and I sang and the crowd went crazy as only a Gypsy crowd can. Men ripped the shirts from their chests, women dug their nails into their faces until they drew blood. The unuttered prayer was answered. El Pulgar called the owner over and bought una caña for every calé in the place. They would have kept us there all night if every string on that old guitar had not broken.
“In the end, the owner had to drag us away to a private room in the back and lock a heavy door on the chaos. There, in that back room, we three sat in stunned silence as Tomás spoke. I will tell you his story as he told it to us.”
Guitos paused to get into character. Drawing himself up, he sang the briefest of temples, a short Ay, to warm la voz. When he next spoke, it was in Tomás’s voice. Not an impersonation, but a channeling of his inflections, his tone so perfect that goose bumps rippled across my arms.
“ ‘I was raised by my great-aunt Doña Carlota Montenegro and her husband Don Ernesto Anaya. They were ancient when they adopted me and of a world where awkward details are never revealed. The details of my birth were awkward. My great-aunt was a dancer born in a cave on Sacromonte. Her mother had been una sensación en las cafés cantantes in the golden days in Sevilla. Her father was one of los cantaores who beat out the very form itself on their forges in Sacromonte. Then came the cursed days of the Civil War. My great-aunt spoke out courageously against the fascists and was marked for death. By the grace of God and a few well-placed admirers, she escaped. Her family was not so lucky. All her immediate relatives, everyone she’d known growing up, were massacred by Franco’s guardia civil.
“ ‘The tragedy killed something in my great-aunt and she forbade anyone to ever speak of it in her presence. All I know is that my mother was a distant relative, daughter of one of the few survivors of my great-aunt’s family. All that is known about my father is that he was Gypsy as well. I was taken from my mother because, as with so many of my people, there were drugs. I was sent to America to avoid this scourge. Later, my great-aunt searched for my mother only to learn that she had died of an overdose shortly after I was taken from her. No trace of my father could be found.’ ”
Guitos shook himself, and, in his own voice, plaintive and insistent, asked, “Can you imagine the impact this history had? You can’t. Not in America where pretending that birth makes no difference and anyone can be anything they choose is your national religion. But to us who know that blood is everything, Tomás’s story was a meteor, an asteroid, smashing into our planet of flamenco. The purists rejoiced. A Gypsy boy raised on the other side of an ocean and he plays like the incarnation of Sabicas? Here, at last, proof of what we had always said: you cannot play flamenco puro, the real, the true flamenco, without Gypsy blood.”
I nodded, astounded again at what an insular and rarefied community Tomás had grown up in. How explosions of a colossal magnitude within it never registered the slightest tick on any Richter scale in the outside world.
“He was the great Gypsy hope, no?” Guitos asked. “He would take the crown back from the payo who had worn it for so long. Tomás would reclaim flamenco guitar from Paco de Lucía. There was no question. Yes, he had técnica as good as any payo but better, far better; he was one of us, he had gitano soul. He played at the biennale. Not a main stage, a small venue, too early for the crowds to have come out. But he was una sensación. If Paco had been there, they would have torn the crown from his head and put it on Tomás’s.
“And then followed the happiest time in my life. Tomás became my accompanist. My cante was never better. Each night I sang of my hopeless love and audiences, never suspecting it was for my tocaor, wept. Sevilla, Madrid, Barcelona. And then north. Ah, the farther north we went, the more they adored us. London, Edinburgh, Copenhagen, Oslo. The more represivo the society, the more they worshipped us. Santa María de Dios! Los japoneses! Demente! Totalmente demente! They could teach us gitanos how to lose control. In Sapporo, security had to disarm a young woman who was stabbing herself in the chest with a knife!
“It was heaven. But I was the one who destroyed it. An excess of love was the culprit. I made love to him with my voice every night on a different stage and every night he left me and made love with his body to one of the women who threw themselves at him.” Guitos beat his chest like a penitent sinner.
“Love finds its own way. Every city, we were interviewed. Again and again, I heard Tomás tell his story. Each time he was asked what he knew about his mother, his father, the silence deepened. In the world outside of Spain, Tomás had only to answer ‘drugs’ and no further questions would be asked. In Spain, however, the only answer Tomás had to give was ‘la Guerra Civil.’ In our country, a veil of secrecy so profound has been drawn around the Civil War that where that fratricidal conflict is concerned, there are few good questions and no good answers. So, we learn from birth simply not to ask.
“But I asked. I asked because gitanos, who won’t say anything to a payo except a lie and rarely even tell one another the truth, will tell me the truth. I asked because the old-timers think I am the great Antonio Mairena come back to earth and will talk to me of matters they wouldn’t discuss with their confessors. I asked because I wanted to give Tomás my heart and he would never take it. All he might ever accept from me was knowledge. I will tell you how this tragedy befell me.
“We were in Frankfurt, where I have a tremendous following. The tour was coming to an end and I was frantic to find a way to keep Tomás in my life. I had almost succeeded in talking him into coming home with me to Málaga to record a new album when Tomás received word from New Mexico that Ernesto Anaya, the man who had raised him as a son, was gravely ill. Tomás talked all the time about Ernesto. Love flowed with every word when he told me about the small village in the north of the state where Ernesto had been born, where Tomás had spent the only happy days of his childhood. On the other hand, Tomás never spoke about his great-aunt. Never. So complete was his silence that it spoke volumes about a pain he would not approach. He broke that silence when his great-aunt, worried most about disturbing the tour, waited until the last possible moment to tell him how sick his great-uncle was. Tomás cursed his great-aunt then for that and for all the secrets she had kept from him.
“He packed to leave immediately and I, desperate for any way to bind him to me, made a promise. I promised to discover the names of his mother and father. I knew the heads of every Gypsy dynasty who had lived or had relatives who had lived on Sacromonte during the time his great-aunt had grown up there. One of them would know. I promised Tomás that, while he was back in New Mexico, I would go to Granada and would find an answer. Tomás was ecstatic. We were never closer. At Frankfurt Airport, in spite of the shadow that Ernesto’s poor health cast over Tomás, joy at the prospect of learning who his parents were haloed him as we said our good-byes.
“I rushed to Granada, but not the Granada of Lorca, not the Granada Fernando and Isabel took back from the Moors. No, I did not visit the Granada of hidden patios where fountains splash and bougainvillea twines. I went to my friends on Sacromonte and was sent to a retirement home in an immigrant neighborhood on the far edge of Granada. The neighborhood was filled with Tunisians and Algerians in cheap polyester sweaters, Basques who’d come in the sixties and never left, Latin Americans who spent all their money calling home. The retirement home sitting between two highways, around the corner from a brake-manufacturing plant, could have been anywhere. A concrete building with no more charm than a warehouse, it smelled of piss and boiled potatoes. The relatives who’d sent me to that place where they’d packed away their viejos had called ahead. But, even if they hadn’t been warned, the old-timers would have been ready for me. They had read the articles about this newcomer, this fenómeno de Nuevo Mexico who claimed Gypsy blood. They’d seen the photograph of the phenomenon’s great-aunt. It was the one Tomás carried with him only because it was one of the few he had of Don Ernesto, who stood beside his great-aunt, grinning beneath a huge mustache like Zapata. In the photo that the old-timers shoved into my face and stabbed at with tobacco-stained fingers, Doña Carlota is pale as steam. In the articles Tomás explained that his great-aunt’s mother, Delicata, was just as light-skinned. Los viejos talked. Oh, they talked. And I wished I’d never asked.
“I went home, had a tall drink and a long bath, but couldn’t wash away their smells, their sadness, or my deep regret that I had ever met them. When Tomás called that night, I put on a bright voice and said, ‘Lástima. Too bad. They wouldn’t talk. I learned nothing. Gypsies, you know how they are.’
“I will never forget what he answered. ‘Guitos, for a lifetime you have told the truth in song. You have no training telling lies and you do it extraordinarily badly. All that we have, you and I, all that we will ever have, is honesty. Dame la verdad.’
“Give me the truth. That is what we always told each other before we went onstage. That was our pledge that we would never sing or play a note that was false. One note of falseness and the only link I had to mi corazón would be destroyed.
“ ‘Dame la verdad,’ he repeated and I told him what the toothless old men had told me: ‘Your great-aunt never lived in Sacromonte. Yes, there was una bailaora named Delicata married to El Chino, un herrero, but she was dark, dark as a Moor. Muy morena. Dark, dark, dark. She had several daughters. The oldest was a girl named Rosa. All of Rosa’s children were also dark, dark as the darkest Gypsy.’
“Tomás didn’t speak for a long time. I listened to the galaxies of space between us crackle and hum. Then, ‘Guitos, I’m going to disappear for a while. Figure this out. I’ll call you when I can.’ He thanked me and hung up before I could say another word.”
I tried to grasp the heresy Guitos had just spoken. “Doña Carlota never lived on Sacromonte?” Even me, the payo, even I was having trouble turning loose of the one tiny claim to legitimacy in the flamenco world that Doña Carlota had given me: I had been taught by una gitana por cuatro costaos. I couldn’t imagine the implications for Tomás. If what Guitos was saying was true, Tomás would have almost as little right to belong to flamenco’s inner circle as I. But it couldn’t be true. “How could Doña Carlota have fooled everyone for so long?”
Guitos clucked his tongue sympathetically. “Oh, pobrecita, if every flamenco who claimed gitano blood they didn’t have were banished from el arte, you wouldn’t hear a castanet clack or a clave tap from one Semana Santa to the next. They all claim to have a Gypsy grandmother tucked away somewhere. No, Doña Carlota knew she would never be discovered for many reasons.” Guitos ticked them off: “She was on the other side of an ocean. Still, even now, we gitanos are not a people interested in keeping the record straight. We don’t report things to ‘the authorities.’ We keep to ourselves. Besides, most of the ones who would have said anything are dead, no? Nearly a million people died in the Spanish Civil War. Who, aside from the handful of old-timers I spoke to, could say that the ancestors she claimed had not been among those who were killed? Doña Carlota could have claimed she was queen of the Gypsies and no one in Spain would have cared. Who was she? Some broken-down dance teacher on the wrong side of the water. No one cared about her, a nobody. But”—Guitos poked up one, cautionary finger—“but Tomás, Tomás was another story entirely. We Gypsies are only too happy to share failure, but success? Success like that Tomás was on the verge of? That, that, we will fight over.”
Guitos spread his palms and gave a desolate shrug. “When I told him that his great-aunt had never lived on Sacromonte, he wasn’t surprised. He’d suspected for a long time that she was a fraud. But if you are a fish, how do you question water? Not only was her story all he’d ever known of his own, but it was the basis for his own place on the earth. Still, he had suspected. That night there was a lunar eclipse. So after I told him, after I destroyed his world, I watched the moon disappear and hoped it had vanished wherever mi angelito was so we might be together in that one, last thing.”
“And that was the night...”
“He met you.”
“That’s why he’d said it was the worst night of his life.”
Guitos sagged. “Me, I brought that sadness to him. After that, he was changed. He returned a few times but refused to play in front of any audience that might be enterao. No more insiders. He would play with me on tours to Japan, Finland, Australia. Anywhere but Spain or North America. If he began to receive too much attention, too much acclaim, he would disappear. Again and again he returned to the place he considered home, to the little village in northern New Mexico where he’d spent the only happy times of his childhood with his beloved Tío Ernesto.”
“What village is that?”
“He never told me.”
My cell phone rang. I knew it was Alma and quickly turned it off. But the spell had been broken.
Guitos turned from me. “I’ve said too much.” A second later, his phone rang. He glanced at the name, swore, “Caray!” and answered. I could hear Alma cursing Guitos even before he lifted the phone to his ear. My name was mentioned several times as well. We were walking out the door and heading for Popejoy Hall before she’d finished excoriating both of us.
Guitos’s performance that night was a master class on the meaning of the elusive term duende. The spirit moved through him, but every one of us in the hall shivered. Black sounds—that’s how Lorca, quoting the great singer Manuel Torre, defined duende. “Whatever has black sounds has duende.” From the moment he stepped onstage, Guitos filled the hall with black sounds.
His voice was a tortured rumble that contained the essence of Andalusia and embodied flamenco’s heritage from the Moors’ mosques, the Jews’ synagogues, through every country the Gypsies wandered across, right back to the motherland in India. Guitos drew in a deep breath, diving far into himself, then exploded to the surface with his eyes and fists clenched, singing in a full-throated wail. He sang to the stars that had betrayed his dreams and turned his love to dust. Sweat ran down his dark face, pouring into the muffler tied around his neck as he reached even further into himself for notes so laden with despair that not a single person in the hall needed a translator.
As Guitos sat in the blazing light and wept for the love the earth eating the moon had stolen from him, I envied him. I envied that he was a part of Tomás’s world, a true flamenco. I envied every second they’d spent together. Then he opened his fists, his eyes, he found me gazing up at him from the first row, and sang every second of my one night with Tomás. He sang the heavens opening as we swung together into the stars. Then, he sang with such clairvoyant precision the moment when the stars went dark and Tomás left me, a bubble of sorrow rose in my chest. If I were truly una flamenca, if I truly belonged in Tomás’s world, I would have wept openly.
As I knew he would be, Guitos was swept away after the performance, and I didn’t see him again until the end of the festival when I drove him to the airport. This time, the van was filled with other performers. Though I ached for him to give me a few more crumbs of information, Guitos spent the entire ride cajoling every visiting Spaniard into carrying some of his loot back for him so that he wouldn’t have to pay duty on the saddles he intended to sell to Gypsy horse-trader friends.
I hoped to snatch a moment alone with Guitos, but the chattering crowd of muscled dancers and rumpled guitarists fluttered about him like egrets circling a bull. By the time they had all been herded into the airport and were heading toward the International Departures terminal, I had given up. We were within sight of the statue of the caped Indian warrior when Guitos broke from the group and hurried back to me. His muffler was wrapped tightly around his neck and he was whispering again. His Spanish was hushed and rapid. I leaned close and he asked, “You will always keep his secret, no?”
“Sí. Siempre.”
“Guitos!” A thin male dancer waved frantically for the singer to hurry.
“Bueno, I have to leave. One last question: If I send him back to you, will you be ready?”
I nodded without knowing what I was agreeing to. It didn’t matter. Guitos knew I would have agreed to anything.
“Then God have mercy on us both.” He wrapped me in un abrazo fuerte, then left, rushing past the warrior forever reaching out to catch an eagle.