The curtains that had been gold were mustard-colored in the early morning light. A shaft of that light illuminated Tomás. Hunched over his guitar, playing softly, he looked like a young monk bent over his prayers in a medieval cathedral. His music rose fragrant as incense toward the heavens. He had made love to me with the same pure intensity.
“Did I wake you?” He put the guitar aside and crept toward me in a jokey, panther-stalking-his-prey way that turned serious as he slid beneath the covers.
“We’re good together,” he said, later, holding me. He put two fingers lightly on my neck and two on the carotid artery on his own neck.
“What?” I asked, but he shushed me as he concentrated, his lips moving as he counted.
“Just like I thought. Our hearts beat in compás. The exact same palo. Gypsy compás.” Just saying the word Gypsy was a struck nerve and he bounded out of bed, dragging me with him. “Vamos ya! We have to start rehearsing. We should have started a month ago. The tour is already completely booked. I have to call the promoter and give him your name for advertising.” He clapped his hands like a director calling for a new scene to begin, for action to commence. “Okay, do we need to stop by your house? You have your shoes, a skirt? Do you need anything else?”
Didi might be there, in the small house on the alley. I didn’t want to see her. If I saw Didi, she would convince me that she had not betrayed me. Had not tried to steal my chance with Tomás. She would say she had not seen my signal that I was ready to step back into the lead. That whatever she’d done had been for me. I imitated Didi’s laugh, heedless, taunting, and answered, “Shoes, skirt. What else does a dancer need?”
“Ándale pues.” Let’s go then.
It was late afternoon when we emerged into a sunless day knifed through by a north wind. The worn seats of his old truck creaked from the cold when we sat.
“Takes a minute to warm up,” he said, turning the key in the ignition. I shivered in the cold. “Here.” He took his jacket off, wrapped it around my shoulders, and buried his face in my hair. The sun, already slumping down onto the West Mesa, broke through the clouds and lasered slices of light onto Central Avenue. Each crummy business—the Winchester Ammunition Advisory Center, the Leather Shoppe, the Pussycat Video, the Aztec Motel—was gilded in the dazzling illumination of late afternoon.
“Wait until you see this place where I’m staying,” he said as we sailed along I-25, high above a dusty plain that stretched out to our west all the way to Mount Taylor, a distant, snow-capped blue. “It’s mi primo’s from up north. He lets me stay there whenever I’m in town.” Though I’d driven I-25 dozens of times, that day was the first time I noticed that painted on the side of a cinder-block building was a woman in a flamenco pose, her hand tossed to the sky.
“What’s your cousin do?” It was a stupid question that I asked mostly to show him that I knew what primo meant.
“Little of this, little of that. Family business, you know. The kind of business they have up north.” He tipped his chin up, toward a north where family business was conducted that anyone who was enterao wouldn’t be stupid enough to ask about. “He’s not really my cousin,” he added, turning away to indicate that the subject was closed. At least to a white girl who wouldn’t understand the intricate gradations of northern New Mexican primos.
The sun isolated everything on the fields below in shimmering radiance: a cemetery, white crosses stippled into a barren field; a lot holding acres of repossessed cars inside high curls of concertina wire; a factory that made bandages; another that manufactured wooden pallets; a tow truck impaled on a thirty-foot pole; the dusty filigree of dirt bike trails looping over the knobby earth that sprouted little aside from rabbitbrush, Russian thistles, and old tires. Monolithic pylons marched across the landscape unspooling loops of silver power line. The light haloed Tomás sitting behind the wheel of a truck like a normal human being. I kept looking away, then back again, just for the shock of seeing him beside me.
Erotomania, I screamed in my mind at the therapist, Leslie. Here he is. He’s chosen me. But Leslie slipped away. It was Didi I wanted to tell, the only person on earth who knew that I had climbed Mount Everest, won seven Olympic gold medals, and been awarded a Nobel Prize. No one else knew what I’d done to win, who I’d had to become.
We turned on Rio Bravo. “Vive Como Un Rey.” Tomás read the message on a billboard urging us to live like a king, drink Budweiser.
He scraped open the ashtray, pulled out a partially smoked joint, lit it, and, holding it out to me, joked, “Vive Coma Una Reina.”
I laughed. Yes, I would, I would live like a queen.
We crossed the Rio Grande. It flowed beneath us, a broad swath of dull, aluminum-colored water bordered by cottonwoods grown to primeval size. On Rio Bravo, we turned off and made our way through a tangle of ever-smaller streets, lanes, and paths running along the river. We finished the joint and the day turned much jollier.
“Did you see that?” I asked, pointing to a row of a dozen identical navy blue T-shirts flapping on a line. They suddenly held a comic significance only Tomás and I understood and we laughed until Tomás ran off the dirt road. That made us laugh even more. As did a piñata in the shape of a pirate hanging forlornly from a big elm. As did a miniature horse nibbling a flake of alfalfa. The midget horse made me laugh until I was afraid I’d wet my pants. We stopped laughing long enough for me to point to an artfully spray-painted graffito swirling in hectic gang-style script across the side of a metal storage shed that carefully instructed all viewers, FUCK YUO.
The thought of some homeboy misspelling his rage against the machine then became the funniest thing either of us had ever seen. As we reached the house where Tomás was staying, he was pounding my back and I was trying to catch my breath. We stopped outside a high adobe wall and he punched a code in. A wrought-iron gate swung open.
On the other side was a compound with a massive adobe hacienda tucked into the shadows cast by several prodigious cottonwoods. The estate’s walled isolation made me recall Tomás referring to the “family business,” and the words drug lord’s palace appeared like a crawl beneath the unkempt opulence of the property. That suspicion was confirmed when we went inside. The house seemed to have been decorated by a thirteen-year-old boy with an unlimited line of credit: plasma TV, round bed with black satin sheets, monster sound system. Walk-in closets were filled with every article of clothing that FUBU and Sean John had ever manufactured.
“Can you believe this shit?” Tomás asked, laughing. Next to him a pump kicked on, powering a six-foot-high acrylic sculpture that sent tendrils of orange and magenta oil droplets shimmying up a wavy panel where lights and bubbles vibrated. “Mis primos from up north are pretty basic guys.”
I knew he was talking about the village in northern New Mexico that Guitos had told me was Tomás’s one true home. I wanted to ask about it, about his primos and their “family business,” but I didn’t. I was an alien trying to slip through customs with forged papers, trying to enter a country where I did not belong. I was not going to call attention to my outsider status by asking questions. Not about northern New Mexico, not about flamenco, not about los primos, not about anything.
Still, answers to my unasked questions were in the simple acts Tomás performed. When he built a fire, he had the practiced expertise of someone who has risen on many cold mountain mornings in places where warmth came from wood. Piñon wood. The fragrance of piñon filled the house, warming it even more than the fire.
“Una copita?” he asked me, tipping his thumb and pinkie up. He pulled green bottles of Dos Equis lager for us out of the refrigerator. “You like posole?”
“With red chile?”
“Claro. I’m going to make the best posole for you that you’ve ever tasted. Mi tío Ernesto taught me how.” He’d already soaked the dried hominy and put the fat kernels of corn on to boil in a cast-iron pot, adding garlic, Mexican oregano, onion, green chiles; then he browned a cut of beef I didn’t recognize.
“You don’t use pork shoulder?” I asked, showing off what I’d learned from Alejandro, who had told me that pork shoulder was essential for good posole.
“A lot of people do. I asked Tío Ernesto once why he didn’t. He didn’t have a reason, just that they always used beef in his village and it was always good. So why change?” Tomás asked, showing me how to pour boiling water to soften dried red chiles, then scrape pulp from the leathery skins to make red chile.
The history of New Mexico, of Spaniards in the New World, went into the stew of dried hominy, chiles, and meat. Certainly, Tomás’s history was there as he performed each step of the preparation with the devotion of an acolyte. Still, as he chopped an onion, I realized that this was the first human moment I’d had with him, the first moment with Tomás that wasn’t part of a fairy tale. That he was a real human and that we were in the same room, breathing the same air.
While the posole simmered, Tomás began my true flamenco education. In my years at the Flamenco Academy, I’d studied a complicated equation, but as Tomás played, he showed me that I had only solved half of the problem. The equation had to be balanced with a guitarist and a singer before it could be proved. I thought I knew how to work with a guitarist. I didn’t. I’d learned a basic vocabulary at the academy. That evening, Tomás began teaching me how to combine the simple words and phrases I knew into eloquent passages that would express what he wanted expressed about his playing. I had had my last yo soy moment during the audition. Tomás was not just the star, the featured performer; he was the entire reason for my being onstage. I was his interpreter. My job was to translate from the ear to the eye.
It was midnight before he put his guitar down and we fell upon the posole, devouring it with thick tortillas dripping with butter, washing it all down with Dos Equis lager. Tiny cups of the espresso Tomás brewed followed, so that we could stay up even later. It was near dawn before we went to bed and much later before we went to sleep.
That period before the first tour was a space out of time. Our hours in the house by the river were measured out in piñon fires. He played and I danced. I danced harder than I ever had before. As harsh as the great-aunt had been, the great-nephew was twice as tough. My life took shape around the spaces I occupied while dancing or making love with Tomás. Within both those areas, I found equal parts ecstasy and terror. These elements created a compound as unstable as nitroglycerin. I hardly dared breathe, fearing it would blow up, that he would choose someone else. I had been picked, but I never stopped auditioning.
Then a fax machine spit out a cloud of itineraries that floated onto the floor. Tomás picked up the sheets of paper from the promoter and began packing for the tour that would establish him in the United States. We left the house on the river where I had learned to translate into motion every note Tomás plucked. Walking toward the airport, dragging bags behind us like obedient dogs on leashes, Tomás and I fell out of step. Going on the road required him to put on psychic armor and as he strode ahead of me, it locked into place. We passed beneath the caped warrior reaching for the eagle and, for a moment, I wished Didi had been there to say good-bye.
Our first stop was Tulsa, Oklahoma. We played a medium-size hall at the university. That night, I understood what Tomás had trained me for. His was the name that caused people to open their wallets and pull out forty, fifty, a hundred dollars for a ticket. His was the face on the poster. The pressure was on him. My job was simply to provide a little movement, a change of pace. I was his foil. My paleness accentuated Tomás’s dark ethnicity. My understated dancing never stole the spotlight from his passionate playing. My white-bread American background never upstaged his pedigree as the Gypsy ward of a flamenco legend, gitano a cuatro costaos. The last year my family had lived in Houdek, Daddy brought home a novelty Christmas gift, a plastic flower in a pot, wired with fiber optics that would light up to music, flashing different colors for every tune that was played. I was that flower in a pot. That was the bargain I’d made, and I did everything in my power to live up to it.
For one month we did nothing but perform, party, make love, and travel to the next gig, where it all started again. In spite of being in a different city almost every day, a surprising sameness overtook our lives. In each new venue, we’d be picked up at the airport by someone I came to think of as the Guitar Nerd. The Guitar Nerd, holding up Tomás’s CD, met us as we stepped off the plane. He was frequently a college professor, often accompanied by his prize student.
All the Guitar Nerds were driven to prove themselves to Tomás. After a few warm-up compliments in which they’d proclaim Tomás to be the next Paco de Lucía or, if they were really reaching, far better than Paco, they’d work in references to their own flamenco backgrounds. The older ones would mention their time in “Moron” with “Diego.” The younger ones would ask nerdophile questions about nail filing: “Always in the same direction!” Or the merits of Hannanbach bass strings mixed with La Bella trebles over, say, just going with Luthier Concert Silvers on all six. To really prove themselves as initiates in the flamenco world, they would casually pass Tomás a joint.
After the performance, there would be a reception given by the head of the music department or the guitar society or whatever group had sponsored our visit. We’d sip Spanish red and eat olives and almonds; sometimes the faculty wife would attempt gazpacho or get her countries mixed up entirely and do taquitos.
Then the magic word, juerga, would pass through the group. If there were enough initiates, the real party would start right there. If not, the aficionados would slip away to adjourn at a bar or someone’s ratty apartment. There the focus would be on the true juerga’s nearly sacramental use of controlled substances. In short, everyone would get utterly baked. That was when I would have to be my most vigilant, for the flamenco minxes truly swarmed at juergas. Fortunately, I’d studied with the master and knew every trick in the groupie playbook.
We’d all take a brief break from the party for that evening’s performance, where Tomás would astonish the locals by playing with both passion and precision no matter how wasted he’d been only moments before stepping onstage. I’d provide a bit of color and motion. Then, the instant we took our last bows, we would be swept back into the bacchanal we’d just left. The party would typically go on all night and not end until whoever risked being mocked as anal-retentive for wearing a watch would yell out that our flight was leaving in an hour. Then there would be a mad scramble to the airport and, with many abrazos and besos, we’d be poured onto the plane where Tomás would promptly pass out.
In each city there would be an interview. It might be on the local NPR station, or the arts editor from the local paper would meet us in a coffee shop. The interviewer would have already read all the clips about Tomás, the stories that always mentioned the phrase gitano per cuatro costaos to explain that his birth mother and father back in Spain were both pure Gypsy. He would already know that Doña Carlota, a famous flamenco dancer and herself gitana par cuatro costaos, had been asked by the doomed addict mother, her great-niece back in Spain, to adopt the child because the family knew he would be brought up in the old Gypsy way.
The interviewers asked Tomás for refinements on the theme of authenticity. Did he feel he would be able to play flamenco puro the way he did if he hadn’t been brought up in the tradition? If he didn’t have Gypsy blood in his veins? They asked how his great-aunt was doing. Was she still living in Santa Fe? Did he see her often? After each successive interview, Tomás grew quieter and more distant. I knew why. I knew his secret, but I had already used it, used it to become an ally in his deception. Bit by bit, though, rather than being an ally, I became the emblem of his deception, a pretender slipping into camp under the protection of a powerful insider who was herself a fraud. His detachment grew until I came to live for the moments when I was onstage with him, dancing, being the flower in the pot that only his guitar could bring to life. Only then was he really with me.
The tour had been arranged in a circle. The top of the circle, the halfway point, was Madison, Wisconsin, where black ice covered the streets and Tomás had to loosen the strings on his guitars so the cold that tightened them wouldn’t harm the fretboards. When we reached the bottom of the loop, the southernmost and last stop of the tour, we stepped off a plane in Austin, Texas, into heat so tropically humid that Tomás filled his cases with sachets of drying agents. The first thing we were shown in Austin was the site of America’s first mass murder, a tower on the university campus where Charles Whitman had killed seventeen people including himself. The second thing was Barton Springs. Coming from the desert, the sight of a lagoon, a minor inland sea, cutting cold and clean through the center of a city, was the most improbable extravagance I could imagine. I had to possess this luxury, to have such opulence in my life.
That night, we played to a full house at the Hogg Auditorium on the university campus. After the show, a local aficionado dragged us to a tapas bar owned by a Madrileño who went crazy for Tomás’s playing and offered to let him play for as many nights as he wanted in exchange for a percentage of the bar. There was no room in the small club for a dancer. I could stay or go home to Albuquerque. I chose to stay and have a vacation from flamenco. I never went with Tomás to the club, never met anyone from the local flamenco scene.
We rented an apartment in Travis Heights, a leafy neighborhood dotted with birdhouses on tall poles that purple martins swooped around, eating mosquitoes. I bought a jade green tank suit and an old robin’s egg blue Schwinn and every day, as Tomás slept off the night before or practiced for the night to come, I rode to Barton Springs. My route cut through the campus of the Texas School for the Deaf.
I would sweat on the ride over, salty drops trailing down to my elbows, then plunge into the hypothermic waters of the chilly springs and stay until the sky was dark and the pool darker. Until the only thing that could warm me up was Tomás’s body. At first, he loved my coming home to him, still chilly from the polar waters, curlicues of wet hair dripping water onto my shoulders. But as the summer wore on, the heat bludgeoned us. He took to leaving the apartment earlier and earlier and staying out later and later. Of course, he was having an affair. Maybe several. It was not my place to ask. I was in his country on forged papers and could be asked to leave at any time. My only toehold, what helped me hang on, was knowing Tomás’s secret, knowing that his documents were falsified as well.
The last time I rode to Barton Springs, I was so sunk in gloom that I was halfway around the playing field before I sensed an entirely soundless game of soccer being played beside me. The spectacle of teams of young men screaming silently at one another in sign language mesmerized me to such a degree that I failed to notice a gaping pothole in the road ahead. I hit it, sailed over the handlebars, and skidded to a landing that flayed the inside of my arms.
The soccer team surrounded me, speaking in voices filled with complex harmonics, bird shrieks, and mechanical sounds. The coach and the rest of the team packed me and the battered Schwinn into a pickup and drove me home.
The windows of the little house were open and as I approached with my silent crew I could hear Tomás talking on the phone. All the heat that had cooled between us was there with whomever he was speaking to. His Spanish was too rushed, too animated for me to understand, but his excitement was easy to translate. I waved good-bye to my rescuers and, cradling my arm, opened the door. The instant he saw me, Tomás switched to English, pretending to be bored as he said, “Okay, well, I gotta go.”
Then he noticed my arm and rushed me into the bathroom. He washed the wound, patted on ointment, and bandaged it up. But the cut needed to be scrubbed to remove all the bits of gravel embedded in my flesh. Tomás couldn’t bear to hurt me and I couldn’t summon up the courage to clean the scrape myself. So, eventually, the scrape healed over the tiny specks of gravel that hadn’t been cleaned away and they left gray smudges that grew into the new skin like shadows beneath the surface. It didn’t matter; the only time anyone saw the underside of my arms was when I danced, and in flamenco, it was good to have shadows to reveal.