Of course, I couldn’t sleep the night before the audition. I watched the snow that began falling around three, heavy, wet flakes that dampened sound and soil. That morning dawned gray as cement. The few luminarias left over from Christmas had been turned into sacks of wet sand by the damp snow. Didi insisted that we trudge over to the academy far too early. The janitor who had become my friend let us into studio 110, where the audition was to be held. Once inside, Didi forbade me from practicing so much as one tacón.
“Remind me again,” I said, “why we’re here this early? Is it so I can get even more nervous than I already am?”
“To get a sense of the room, pilgrim,” she snapped, studying every corner of a space where I’d practically lived the past three and a half years.
“Whew, cold.” Rubbing her upper arms, she strode over to the thermostat and adjusted it until the heat clicked on.
“Didi, I have a pretty good ‘sense’ of this room.”
“As a classroom, yeah. But has it ever been the place where you’re gonna get or lose the biggest dream in your life?”
I stood in the glare of the fluorescent lights, imagining Tomás sitting in the metal folding chair the accompanist usually occupied, and I went cold. The glib answer I was going to give froze somewhere beneath my sternum.
“See what I mean?” She glanced up at the fluorescent lights. “Oh, those have got to go. The mood we’re trying for is not State Bureaucrat with a Hangover. Be right back.” The instant she left, the studio seemed to grow large as an airplane hangar. I envisioned myself attempting to fill it with motion and, more impossibly, emotion, and grew cold even as heat blasted over me.
Didi came back, holding a roll of duct tape and a Sharpie. She flipped off the bank of glaring lights, taped the switches down, and wrote, DON’T TOUCH. UNM CUSTODIAL DEPT. across the silver tape. Gray morning light, overcast and moody, filtered in through the high windows. “Better?”
I nodded. “Infinitely.”
She gave the studio one last check, then announced, “Let’s get out of here.”
Outside, we holed up in the cross-shaped concrete bunker where we could spy on whoever entered the gym. We slouched in the shadows and smoked, trying to stay warm. I had enough time to read all the graffiti chalked on the wall behind Didi: STONER CHICKS UNITE. THE PEOPLE SMOKE POT. WWW.HEMPCOALITION.ORG. WE NEED WEED!
“Wow,” Didi said, crushing a butt beneath her heel. “This is a historic moment. Hard to believe, but this will be the first time I actually get to see Mystery Man in person?”
“What are you saying?” My tone warned Didi not to make any further comment. Not to open that particular can of worms at that particular moment.
“Nothing, it’s just that”—I stared hard at her. She shook her head—“Nothing at all. You are here to kick butt, and I’m here to take names. Speaking of which, wow, looks like your boyfriend is a heavy hitter,” I peeked around the edge of the bunker. Besides Alma and most of the dance and music faculty, every great dancer who had gone through the program appeared. Didi ticked the girls off as they hurried in, frozen breath trailing behind them. She handicapped each one “Yolanda. No chance. Worse moves than Vanilla Ice. Adriana. Oh, Driana, doll, you’ve packed on a few elle bees. Blanca, sorry, babe, you’re not going to chew your way into Tomás Montenegro’s heart with those big ole bucky beaver teeth.”
I laughed, loving Didi for trying to lighten my grim, fatalistic mood. And then she said the one name I least wanted to hear.
“Liliana Montoya.”
“Liliana Montoya is here!” I pushed Didi aside in time to see the former queen of the Flamenco Academy hurry into the gym. Then I sank back against the cold concrete. “Shit, that’s it.”
“Why? Just because she dances in María Benitez’s company?”
“Uh, yes, being chosen for, arguably, the most prestigious flamenco troupe in the country might do for starters.”
“Liliana is certifiable. The woman is a psychotic break waiting to happen.”
“I thought that was a prerequisite in flamenco. Didi, I can’t beat Liliana Montoya.”
“Cyndi Rae Hrncir,” she said, putting on a thick Texas accent. “You do everything she does except compete. Story of your life in a nutshell.”
Odd how when you’re poised, ready to jump off one cliff, jumping off another one doesn’t seem that bad. That is probably why I said, “Story of us, too.” There it was, our relationship in a nutshell, the noncompeting sidekick and the action heroine. The air inside the bunker, deadened by half a foot of concrete, seemed to grow even stiller as I waited for her response. But her eyes flicked away toward a figure rounding the soft corner of the old gym, and what she did say was, “It’s go time. He’s here.”
A violent stroke wrenched my heart. I peeked around the edge of the bunker. Illuminated by the flat light of a distant winter sun, the world of snow and shadows outside the bunker was the black and white of an old movie. Tomás sauntered into the frame with the casual assurance of an actor hitting his mark. He wore a rumpled, black-velvet jacket, collar turned up, a muffler wound around his neck. His hair was black, the smoke from his cigarette, white. The shadows etching his eyes, nose, mouth, all black. His guitar case, black. He stopped at the front door, drew deeply on his cigarette, flicked the butt, still smoking, into a clump of snow, and went in.
“Breathe,” Didi ordered me.
I tried, but all the shallow inhalations seemed to accomplish was to jerk my shoulders up to my ears. I felt heavy as stone, leaden with an odd sense of finality and dread. “We should go in,” I said, sounding as numb as I felt.
“Jeez, Rae, what is it? Lighten up.”
Everything bright and shiny had leaked out of me.
“Hey, it’s just an audition. Besides, the slut is going to love you. He’d be lucky to carry your bunion pads.”
I snorted a thin, humorless attempt at a laugh, made my feet carry me out of the bunker, and stepped into Tomás’s black-and-white movie.
Inside the gym, the halls were empty until Didi opened the carved wooden doors of Doña Carlota’s Flamenco Academy. The sight of the old lady’s imperious portrait almost undid me. More than ever she seemed to be scrutinizing and finding me severely lacking. Half a dozen girls sat on the floor outside the door to studio 110. Though I strained to hear the sound of Tomás’s guitar, the hallway was entirely silent. Blanca waved and gave me a cheery greeting. I started to sit down next to her, but Didi yanked me back. “You’re not planning on waiting out here, are you?”
She gestured for me to follow her into the nearest bathroom, shut the door, shoved a metal trash can in front of it, and dug a small bottle of Frangelico from her purse. “Here, drink.” When I didn’t take the bottle, she shoved it in my face. “Drink. You look all shocky and Goth. Worse, you look like you’re ready to surrender.”
I took a slug of the hazelnut liqueur, grateful for the spot of warmth it thawed in my solar plexus.
“Now, here’s the plan.”
I took another swallow, comforted as much by her tone, which was the tone she used to use when taking charge of a mission, as I was by the alcohol.
Didi unwrapped the muffler from around my neck, slid the duffel bag off my shoulder, plopped it down on the floor, unzipped it, and extracted my carefully selected outfit: the black top of stretchy lace that Didi had loaned me, my new gored skirt in the only other color acceptable to the true flamenco, wine-red, and a new pair of Menkes, also wine-red and done up with a vampy cutout on the sides and seven-centimeter heels. Didi had meticulously hammered three extra rows of tiny, silver claves into the toes to give me the secret advantage of louder golpes.
“We hang here until it’s time. We don’t loiter in the hall sucking up loser anxiety vibes. We go last, okay?”
“We?” I asked.
“We what?”
“You said ‘we’ go last. I’m going last. It’s a solo.”
“That’s what I meant. What else would I mean?”
I sucked up my courage. “Didi, I can take it from here. In fact, I would probably be less nervous if you’d leave now.”
She blinked several times and picked her woven bag up off the bathroom floor where she’d dropped it. “Sure. No, that’s fine.”
I had hurt her feelings. Guilt stabbed me. She had completely thrown herself into helping me for the past week. All she’d cared about was getting me to open up and be great. What was my problem?
She started to leave, but someone pounded on the blocked door. Didi yelled, “Janitor! Come back later!”
“Don’t leave. I need you. For shit like that.”
“The details.” She grinned. “We all need someone to take care of the details.”
I nodded. She helped me get dressed, taking my discarded clothes, packing them away, and handing over my outfit. When she passed me the new shoes, I balked. “Shoes too?” No one ever put their shoes on until they got into the studio.
“How many chances do you get to make a first impression?” It was one of her showbiz mantras.
“One.”
“And if you’re gonna hook the part, you gotta...”
“Look the part.”
With that, Didi plucked an eyeliner from her bag and held it up. “Thanks,” I said, waving it away. I’d been doing and redoing my hair and makeup since four in the morning. “I’m good.”
“ ‘Good,’ that’s exactly the problem. Come on, no one in flamenco ever went wrong with too much liner.” I let her pencil dark circles on my lids, then smudge them until my eyes popped like a silent-movie heroine’s.
“Fullness, fullness.” Didi waved her hands around my head, indicating that I should bend over so my hair would fluff up. With my head between my legs, Didi directed hot air from the hand dryer toward the spots where the damp air had flattened my hair. When I straightened back up, my hair was twice as thick, there was color in my cheeks, and my eyes looked like Lillian Gish selling violets on a street corner. Confidence ebbed back. I was in the hands of the master. Didi spritzed the air in front of me with a little Must de Cartier, then made me walk forward so that the perfume settled on me in an atomized cloud. She picked a few bits of coat fuzz off my top, then pronounced, “Let’s go nail an audition.”
By the time we reached the hall, the only one left waiting outside the door was Liliana. Like Didi, she understood the importance of going last. She glanced at me, then looked away as if I hadn’t registered, which, I’m certain, in her world, I hadn’t. Didi, however, registered in a big way. Like a lioness defending her territory, Liliana stood and began doing the sorts of impossible stretches that only professionals could manage.
Didi leaned over and whispered, “I’m intimidated, aren’t you?” Her cocky smile said she wasn’t, but I was. Liliana was a professional. María Benitez had picked her out of all the dancers in the world. This was pointless. The past four years of my life were pointless. I wondered what the hell I thought I was doing.
The door of the studio opened, Blanca scampered out, and the door shut again. Blanca, the only dance major I knew who wasn’t obsessed, anorexic, and cutthroat, made me wish for a moment that I could trade it all in and be exactly like her: goofy, cheerful, nice, normal. Instead, I was doubly obsessed. Blanca caught my eye and slapped her hands against her chubby cheeks, her mouth open wide like the Home Alone kid and whispered, “Oh. My. God. He is the hottest guy in this or any other galaxy. I mean, en fuego to the max.”
I blinked twice as if I had no idea whom she was referring to, afraid she was going to utter his name aloud.
She bounced her eyebrows lasciviously. “I think I’m gonna go back and audition a few more times just for some more of that eye candy.”
The door opened again, and Alma poked her head out. “Liliana, you next?”
Liliana stared at Didi, clearly revealing who she thought her competition was, then she bent over to massage her foot and answered, “No, I got a little cramp. It’ll be fine in a minute.” She waved toward Didi. “She can go first.”
“Me?” Didi laughed. “Did you think I was auditioning? No, my girl, Rae is the star today. You are just her warm-up act.”
Liliana was not amused by Didi’s trash talk.
“If you were smart you’d go on before her, because anyone who follows her is going to look like shit. But if you want her to go first, that’s fine too. Rae?” She gestured toward the door, directing me to enter.
I panicked. I believed in Didi’s directive never to be a warm-up, to always go last.
Before I had time to stress even further, Didi glanced down at my feet and pretended to stop me even though I hadn’t moved. “Shit, Rae, you wore the wrong shoes. I told you the heel is about to come off those.”
“They look brand-new to me,” Liliana said.
“Funny how deceptive looks can be. No, there’s no way she can dance in those. Don’t worry, though, Lil, we’re parked close. It’ll only take a few minutes to run out and get the ones I told you to wear. Give you enough time to work out your cramp and get your audition over with.”
Didi pulled me away before Liliana could protest. As we left, Didi twiddled her fingers in a fake-friendly wave and over her shoulder chirped, “Mierda!” the flamenco version of “Break a leg.”
We retreated to the bathroom to sip Frangelico and wait Liliana out. “Okay,” Didi said, checking her watch. “They’ll give Liliana what? Eight minutes, max. Then she’ll hang and flirt with Tomás for, what? Three, four minutes, until Alma kicks her out. Twelve minutes at the outside. Here.” She passed me the bottle. “And quit looking so grim. I’ve got your back.”
Didi had my back. I smiled and tipped the bottle up.
Twelve minutes later, we were back in the hallway when Alma opened the door for Liliana to leave. The star backed out, babbling, “Tomás, I can’t tell you what an honor it was to work with an artist of your caliber. Even this briefly. I actually didn’t really get a chance to warm up and, you know, like I said, I had that cramp in my foot. Anyway, you have my card. I’m available at any time for a callback. Any time at all.”
Didi and I exchanged glances. Groveling? The great Liliana Montoya was groveling? My dry mouth went drier.
Alma pushed the door open farther. “Thank you, Liliana. Someone will let you know.”
On Liliana’s face was a dazzled expression. Tomás had dazzled a flamenco queen. I was a flamenco commoner. Did I even have the right to be dazzled? I wondered. I stiffened my spine and answered, Hell, yes. I’d earned the right with every blister and callus on my feet.
Alma looked at us. “Ah, the Bobbsey Twins. Ofelia, we haven’t seen much of you lately. Who’s going first?”
“I’m just a member of Rae’s entourage.” Didi waved her hand in front of her face and stepped away from the door.
In that instant, I caught sight of him. His dark head was bent over the guitar, his ear nuzzled against the neck of his instrument as he tuned it. He glanced up at the sound of scuffling at the door and, for the first time in nearly four years, looked at me. In that second of delusion, I believed that Tomás had spent every day of the past few years yearning for me just as deeply as I had yearned for him. I smiled. He returned my smile with the polite, distant smile he’d give any stranger. Of course he didn’t remember me. How could I have ever thought otherwise? Leslie was right. I was an erotomaniac. I had stalked Tomás for four years. My mother was crazy, had been crazy my whole life, and so was I. That was what was in my blood.
“Pásele, Rae,” Alma said, waving impatiently for me to enter.
Inside, sitting behind Tomás, was most of the dance faculty along with the entire guitar wing of the music faculty, all gathered as if auditing a master class. All waiting. Waiting with Tomás. What did blisters and calluses mean? They were bumps on my skin, minor modifications to an exterior. Nothing had changed the interior since I’d been too frightened to walk into my first flamenco class. I was born Cyndi Rae Hrncir and would die Cyndi Rae Hrncir. I would have left then, but my legs had turned to lumber. Didi jabbed a knuckle into my spine, but I still couldn’t move until I grabbed her hand and pulled her in with me. Alma shrugged, waved us both inside, then closed the door.
The light filtering through the high windows inside the studio was blue and spectral. A trickle of sweat like melted ice ran down from my armpit.
Tomás stood. Holding the guitar in his left hand, he came forward with his right outstretched. Alma made the introductions.
“This is Ofelia.”
She took his hand. “Muy encantado conocer a un tocaor tan dotado.”
“You speak Spanish.”
“Not as well as my friend,” Didi said, smiling in my direction.
He looked at me and Alma supplied the name. “This is Rae Hrncir.”
Never had I hated the soulless grind of Slavic consonants that was my name more than I did at that moment. Then, for one instant, as Tomás took my hand, he looked from me to Didi and a dim recognition flickered across his eyes. He remembered. He shook my hand, staring at me like a man trying to identify a distant sound. His hand was warm against my cold one. In the next instant, he decided he was imagining things and dropped my hand. He waved a questioning finger from me to Didi. “Both of you are auditioning?”
“No,” Didi answered. “I’m just here for moral support.”
“Bueno. Friends. That’s cute. I like that.” He held his hand out, palm up, inviting us with a gesture formal and very European to step into the open area encircled by folding chairs. There was no chair for Didi. She stepped off to one side.
He sat down, settled his guitar, and looked at me. “What do you want me to play?”
He had spoken to me. Everything I’d studied for three and a half years was for this moment. To know the language, the flamenco code, well enough that I could utter the password that would allow me to enter his world. I opened my mouth. My vocal cords were dry and tense. I croaked out, “Soleá por bulerías.” I had spoken to him.
“Bien, soleá por bulerías.” He nodded at Alma, who was cantaora. Yes, she sang, and, yes, el cante is the wellspring of flamenco. But not that day. That day Alma’s singing was inconsequential. It was all about his playing and my dancing. Tomás plucked out notes that rippled through the studio, his guitar a paddle pulling water in concentric swirls that drew us all toward him. He played the warm-up chords a guitarist always plays for new dancers as a way to synchronize style and tempo. But even with those throwaway chords, it was clear why some of the best guitar teachers in the country had chosen to sit in on an audition.
Behind me, Didi began doing palmas, softly clapping muted sordas, picking up the beat. I tried to force the sway of the familiar twelve counts into my body, but my nerves were logjammed.
“Something like that?” he asked me.
“Sí. Perfecto,” I answered.
“Okay, then.” He gave me a practiced smile. “De principio. Y...”
Where the warm-up chords had been a paddle rippling notes, Tomás’s soleá was a deluge. His left hand made the timeless journey from the A chord to B-flat and back while the long nails of his right hand plucked a torrent of notes that flooded the large studio with waves of precisely one dozen beats each. His ring finger struck golpes on the guitar, a surge on the three, the six, the eight, the ten, pulling against the rhythm I knew and loved. I usually found the six-beats-up and six-beats-back sway of a bulerías as easy as rocking in a hammock. Not that day. He played the entrada once, twice, three times. Each time his eyes locked on me, the dancer, the one who was supposed to conduct that performance.
Didi marked time, clapping, then stamping the heels of her boots. She was keeping time just as I had for her so often in the past. When I didn’t enter the second time Tomás played the entrada, Didi’s stamping grew louder, urged me forward more insistently. Still I didn’t move. The waves of notes kept coming. Any other time, I would have exulted in having an ocean of music to dance in. But that day, the golpes seemed dangerous, a riptide that would pull me under. I couldn’t find a safe place to dive in. The waves broke and receded, leaving me standing on the shore, terrified of drowning.
I tried to remember Doña Carlota’s story, to lose myself in the tale of the Gypsy girl dancing in the caves, but all I could recall was Guitos telling me that there had never been a pale girl like that on Sacromonte.
When Tomás played the entrada for the fourth time and I still did not move, Didi began doing the solo I’d choreographed. At first, she was inconspicuous, standing on the sidelines, performing in a subdued way, just to encourage me. But the faculty, who knew her so well, interpreted her modest hesitancy, her reluctance to embrace the spotlight as a joke, a clever comment on her renowned divahood. So, with a few laughs, a smattering of applause, the spotlight turned decisively toward Didi. And she flowered. I’d never not known this about Didi: she was a slave to attention.
Clapping, she picked up the tempo. Her months on the road, years of experience in front of audiences, had turned her natural charisma into a force of nature. It was impossible not to stare at her. Tomás stared. He looked away from me to her. Then, thumping out the golpes like a shepherd herding a scattered flock, he corralled Didi back onto the beat. He played for her. She danced for him. Her brazeo, her taconeo even flashier than usual, she took center stage beside me. Tomás smiled, pleased by the routine he assumed we were acting out, the shy wallflower being coaxed out of her shell.
I forced myself to move forward, to show some signs of life and retake the dance that was supposed to be mine. I picked up the tempo, energy returning to my legs with each stamp of my foot, and moved forward until Didi and I were dancing side by side. I caught her eye and nodded to signal to her that I could take over. But Didi and Tomás had formed the closed circuit that is essential between guitarist and dancer. He was doing for her what good accompanists do for dancers, supplying strong, steady rhythm and covering up when she made a mistake. Didi was so intent upon Tomás and he upon her that they both looked straight through me. With the stunned feel of an accident victim having trouble believing the catastrophe happening right in front of her, I wobbled out of beat and backed away.
After marking time long enough to gather myself, I moved forward more strongly. Attempting to take the lead, I reached out my arms, the universal signal for a llamada, my warning to Tomás that I was going to come in on the twelve. At the same instant, Didi surged back and brought her hands down on the ten, a clear call for a desplante that would come in on the one. Tomás flicked his eyes from Didi to me, trying to interpret the conflicting signals. He could only take direction from one of us.
Tomás had exactly the amount of time it takes to lift one finger to decide which one of us to follow. He hit a golpe on the one Didi had called for with a metallic clarity that rang like a bell signaling the end of a round. I was the fighter who went to the corner. I was out. Completely fuera de compás, more off the beat than I’d been on my first day in Doña’s class, I stumbled along, dancing as if I were wearing casts on both feet.
While Didi performed the sweeping desplante I’d choreographed, I withdrew. As I executed simple marking steps, Didi hiked up her skirt, calling for what she loved the best, an escobilla. As Didi initiated the driving footwork that characterizes an escobilla, Tomás accelerated his playing to keep pace. Didi hammered the floor, her feet stirring the dust left by years of students.
Didi’s frantic footwork had the hollow echo of a porn star, hydroponic breasts being trampolined by some gym stallion. Tomás urged her on with a hectic cascade of notes as they both struggled toward a theatrical climax. It came in a machine-gun burst, Didi jackhammering her feet, Tomás fanning triplets so furiously his hand blurred, a frenzy of motion that built higher and higher like a wedding cake with ever-more-elaborate garlands of sweet icing piped on over a tasteless base. Didi signaled and Tomás magically managed to crash down on a final chord exactly as Didi stamped to a resounding finale. The elite audience applauded. Didi had gotten it, the money shot.
Didi stood panting, her sweat and hard breathing the only part of the performance that was real. Everyone except Alma and Tomás, however, leaped to their feet applauding wildly. Alma looked at me and shook her head, her expression a combination of disdain for the praise being heaped on Didi and disappointment with me.
Didi reached out and hauled me into the winner’s circle. “Don’t forget Rae. This is really her show.” Her calculated graciousness was as transparent as an opera diva thanking her dresser and just as easily dismissed as the group continued their hosannas. Contained within their congratulations was a foregone conclusion: Tomás would select Didi. She had saved us, saved me, saved the academy; that was what was on everybody’s face. I had frozen and, in the space of one compás, I’d lost what I wanted most.
As Tomás laid his guitar down on the chair and came toward us, I saw the years, decades, stretch ahead of me. I saw that they would be spent living and reliving the moment when I had trembled on the shore, when I had not dived in and Didi had. Years that would stretch into decades when I’d struggle to find a way to believe that my blood sister had not betrayed me. If Tomás carried away the slightest impression of me, it would be as one of the worst dancers he’d ever played for. I saw that those years would commence the second he reached our circle and told Didi that, of course, she had been selected, she was the one. She would be his partner.
His great-aunt’s warning came back to me: 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.
The question I couldn’t ask Doña Carlota came back: How does a small tree kill a big tree?
Before Tomás could reach Didi’s charmed circle, I stepped out of it and stopped him. I felt as if I were at the top of a roller coaster with no memory of how I’d gotten there.
“I would like to dance.” My voice was a croak.
“You just did.”
“Not really. Not... I’d like another chance.”
Tomás glanced over my shoulder at the group waiting for him in the winner’s circle, then back at me.
“Please,” I whispered. “I know you’re not going to pick me, but I’d like another chance. I’m really not a bad dancer.”
He leaned in close to me, his lips brushing the hair around my ear, and whispered in a kind voice, “I don’t think you’re a bad dancer. But, maybe, a good dancer who is having a bad day.”
“All I want is the chance to redeem myself. Nothing more.”
He nodded and, walking back to the chair, asked over his shoulder, “What do you want to dance?”
By this time, Didi and the others had turned and were staring at us so that they all heard when a voice that was not my voice, answered, “Por siguiriyas.”
“Did she ask for a siguiriyas?” someone behind me whispered unbelieving.
I barely believed myself that I’d requested the darkest, the deepest, the most jondo of all the palos, siguiriyas, the song of lamentation, the song of mourning. It was as if a grade school piano student had announced her intention of playing Rachmaninoff. It was presumptuous and absurd, yet in that moment of losing a dream I’d named to no one except the best friend who’d just stolen it from me, the song of death was the right one to ask for.
Tomás shook his head. “No. Siguiriyas is to be sung, not danced. Siguiriyas is not for this.” He waved at the metal folding chairs, the faces, avid, ready to judge. “Siguiriyas is not for today. Not for you.” He reached for his case.
I started clapping, palmas secas, claps that rang out like rifle shots. One, two, three! Four, five, six! Seven, eight! Nine, ten! Eleven, twelve! I kept on, slamming my palms together on the eight where the siguiriyas count began. The rapping was a call, a command. Coded within it was not only the unique rhythm of the style I was demanding, but the message that I knew the password. That I had a right to ask for it. Tomás stopped closing the latches on his guitar case.
I clapped even louder, chanting out the rhythm, starting on the eight, “bomp, bom, bomp, bom, bomp, bom, bom, bomp, bom bom bomp.” I hit a counterrhythm with my foot and clucked my tongue loud as my nail-studded heel hit the wooden floor. I used every syllable of the secret language I’d spent all those years learning and I asked for this, for one last dance before I slid forever from Tomás Montenegro’s awareness.
Too late, years too late, I fought to reach the sun.
Tomás turned and stared at me for a long moment before he heaved a sigh of resignation, pulled his guitar out of its case, nestled it on his lap, then slowly raised his hands and began clapping the beat back to me. He was annoyed. I didn’t care. If I was going to disappear forever from his thoughts, at least I would mark my passing with a wrinkle or two of irritation.
Tomás curled his hands and body around his guitar and strummed. This time his playing was dry, unadorned. He wasn’t trying, I knew that. His body was angled away, as close as he could get to turning his back on me. In a world where communication had to be immediate, electric, this was the ultimate insult; he was shutting off the current. He’d already dismissed me. It didn’t matter. Dismissal fit this palo, this moment. Where his bulerías had been an ocean, the parched desolation of siguiriyas required a desert. He played a falseta of Diego del Gastor, the master of old-school flamencos from el arte’s ancient heart in Jerez de la Frontera.
I stood, keeping the rhythm with a soft, muffled palmas sordas. Then I walked toward him.
He glanced up, merely a perfunctory check asking if the tempo, the style, were right. The barest of professional courtesies. Nada más. I nodded. He settled himself. I breathed in, breathed out. Tomás started the entrada, playing the six-beat compás of the siguiriyas. Where other guitarists would have rushed in to ornament the silence with flourishes, tremolos, picado, where every note would have been frilled and filigreed, Tomás allowed the time I needed to descend to flamenco’s most profound depth.
My hands twined in languid floreos that fanned the fingers out and around the pivot of my wrist. I lifted my arms as slowly as mist rising off a dark lake, and just that, just raising my arms above my head, filled one, two, three compases.
Tomás’s elemental playing was a broad and infinite avenue to any destination I chose. On the last note of the entrada, I stepped forward, putting my foot down on the boulevard of his toque. What lay before me was not the typical dancer’s challenge. This could not be a technical exercise. In choosing to dance por siguiriyas, I had chosen flamenco’s essential challenge: Dame la verdad. Give me the truth, say something true. The one true thing I had to say at that instant was good-bye. The time that had started one night when the moon vanished was about to end and my fate now was to bid it farewell. My every movement was heavy with that inevitability in a way that made me understand at last what it was to dance con peso, with weight. Every compás, every falseta, every note I’d danced while trying to create a musical bridge to Tomás crushed down on me.
I did a twelve-count llamada, my loaded feet pounding the earth, pouring out the rhythms I would never need again. I held nothing back. I threw out every golpe-tacón-punta combination I’d learned. I tossed them away in double, triple time. When I was done, I had nothing to lose. All I had was the solitary promise flamenco ever makes, the promise of eternity if you can create one moment ravishing enough.
I was infinitely lighter walking through my paseo. Flamenco had been a yoke I’d harnessed myself to. The instant I threw it off, my shoulders rose—“Lift! Lift! Lift!” My chest expanded, growing thick and deep and, seizing control, I started the desplante precisely on the eight count.
For the first time, Tomás looked up, ready to seriously follow, ready to seriously play. He sat up, read the declaration I was choreographing before him, composed his response and struck a B-flat chord that broke every heart in the room because no B-flat would ever be played with such cruel beauty again. In it was all anyone needed to know about flamenco. The chord was played in honor of that exact instant, an instant that he and I had created that was gone before it could be noticed.
Tomás stared straight into my eyes. He studied every curl of each finger I fanned upward, read what I wrote in those twining arabesques and translated them into languages I understood, though I’d never heard them before. He was a mirror that reflected my betrayal, anger, grief. Every pluck of the string was a pact made with the eternity of now, the only place where flamenco truly exists. He was an amplifier that let me hear for the first time what my own heart sounded like. There was no possibility of lying, of hiding: I hated Didi and I danced that. She had betrayed me and I danced that. I danced my stubborn stupidity in wanting Tomás and my grief that I would never have him. I was dancing it before I saw the loneliness it had all sprung from.
Tomás stroked an A minor that made the angels weep. The past three and a half years vanished, taking with them every longing I’d ever had. Each note Tomás played was only for this second, an instant that was gone as soon as he’d thought of it. He was a lens that magnified, clarified.
An odd bubble of exhilaration rose within me like the moment when my father had taken his hand away and I’d ridden a bike for the first time. Tomás played that as well, the fear, a clutch of panic, the certainty that I was going to die the second my father took his hand away. Then soaring. I danced the wobbling, tipsy giddiness of life and the soaring that is only possible because we’re all precisely one inch of rubber away from falling forever.
My body danced the realization before it hit my brain: This is what flamenco is, knowing you’re alone, you’re going to die, and dancing anyway.
I touched my forehead, the realization overtaking me so powerfully that I fell out of compás. I glanced at Tomás, who responded instantaneously to that split second of vulnerability, playing those emotions with a tenderness that undid me even further. Seeing that I was lost, he took control and switched to A minor to signal a silencio, the section where the guitarist claimed center stage while the singer and dancer rested. Gratitude for his kindness, for rescuing me, poured out to him in the sweep of my arms.
He created an asylum for me by laying back on the driving rhythm and filling the silencio with melody. While I collected myself, I executed some simple marking steps until I was ready to call for the next sequence. He decanted strength into me with each falseta he strummed.
It saddened me to realize that I was leaving flamenco just when I finally understood it. I strode forward, decisively calling for the escobilla. If I’d thought about any of this in advance, I’d never have considered introducing an escobilla with its machine-gun footwork into the deepest, most jondo, of all the forms. But I hadn’t thought, hadn’t planned. I was stepping into each new second and letting whatever instant I found myself in dictate how it was to be expressed. This second demanded an escobilla.
Tomás switched effortlessly out of the melody and transformed his guitar back into a percussion instrument. His hand blurred on the strings, pouring out a flood of precise rhythm metered by rousing thumps of golpe. He was the best accompanist I’d ever heard, live or recorded. His beat was so strong, with accents as clear as stepping stones, a dancer would have to be deaf not to be able to follow its path.
I moved aside and let my feet follow the rhythm. Doña Carlota had always told us to aim for a spot one quarter inch below the floor. I aimed for hell and woke up every sleeping demon at its dark center. They swarmed up into my heels and I pounded out my fury and rage at Didi’s betrayal. Maybe it wasn’t justified. Maybe she’d genuinely been trying to help me. Maybe she’d had my back. I didn’t care. I was pissed off and danced that in my farewell dance.
I grimaced, not caring what my face did as long as my feet could do what they had to. As I hammered out my message of anger and wounded pride, I understood the arrogance in flamenco. It rose up in me, seeming to pass through every century of exile and ostracism endured by the outcast people who’d created it. I stood directly in front of Tomás and held my swaying skirt up so he could see my beautiful legs, my astonishing footwork. I wanted him to get a good look at everything he was passing up. The fool.
I was in command again and ordered yet another escobilla. I increased the tempo, not believing myself how fast my heels were striking. Tomás leaned forward, strumming faster to give me the propulsion I needed. Yet, as my feet slammed harder and faster, time slowed and I felt myself escaping the gravity of everything I’d ever known. Fog, mists, clouds fell away until I was out of any atmosphere I’d previously breathed.
I looked around and saw every detail of the room. I noticed that my teachers were clapping palmas, snapping pitos for me. They were shouting jaleo, praise and encouragement: Óle! Así se baila! Eso es! Que toma! Que toma!
In slow motion, I saw a bead of sweat roll down the side of Tomás’s face, tracing the beautiful, dark curves of his hairline until he leaned forward and it trembled for a moment at the edge of his eyebrow before dropping onto his guitar. There was only one thing I wanted any longer: for Tomás to keep playing. I knew then why Vicente Romero had died onstage dancing one last escobilla. I knew why cantaores had drowned in their own blood singing one last letra.
These deaths no longer seemed tragic to me. I understood every one. I felt I was on the verge of piercing a veil, learning the unlearnable, knowing the unknowable, when Tomás began to stare at me. Not at a dancer he was trying to follow, at me. His gaze drew me back into the present. I stared back and found what I had to express contained within that second: desire.
In some distant corner of my mind, I was ashamed of the desire that I was revealing more nakedly than if I’d stripped off my clothes. My mother’s face, pinched, silent, stoic, floated into my consciousness. I stamped my shame down until it turned to rose petals beneath my heels, filling the studio with their fragrance.
I finished with a thunderous closing that Tomás had to labor to keep pace with. When it was over, we stared at each other, panting. It wasn’t that I knew then we would be true lovers; we already were.
How does a small tree kill a big tree?
You take the sun away from her.