I relived the show in my dreams that night. Tossing and turning, I saw again the way the dancer’s feet had attacked that tiny stage. I wanted to be her. Yet when I’d looked closely at her beige-colored shoes, I’d noticed that they were wrecked from dancing. How was it that such an extraordinary artist had to dance in ruined shoes? It was a strange concept for me: I came from a world where people could afford to buy an extra pair of shoes whenever they felt like a bit of a lift. We even have a term for it. It’s called retail therapy, and we’re told it’s healthy.
The more I dwelled on this, the more remarkable the dancer seemed to me. That is the dedication of the artist: training her entire life to put on a show regardless of whether she was paid for it. I couldn’t have had a sharper contrast to the world of Level Two.
I opened my eyes and saw the first hint of morning light out the window. As I lay there, I could still hear the rhythms of the guitar and the dancer’s feet in my head. I promised myself that I would throw myself into my classes and dance my feet to the bone. I would train night and day if that was what it took, but I would learn to dance like the dancer in the tablao.
But the confidence and certainty I felt as I lay in bed burst like a bubble when I stepped into the changing room of the dance school later that morning. A group of girls spoke in Spanish as they sprayed on deodorant and pinned up their hair, and two Japanese girls in long black skirts stared into space as they practiced rapid footwork on the tiled floor.
There seemed to be an invisible divide between the gorgeous Spanish girls in their shrugs, leotards, and worn-down flamenco shoes and the giggling tourists who were getting ready to go into the beginners’ class. Two American girls were talking much too loudly in English; the sound of their voices made me wince, because I knew I should be in their class. I called them tourists, but how was I any different?
Some people thrive under pressure, but not me. My brain checks out, my stomach seizes up, and my body shakes like jelly in a thunderstorm. I’ve always been that way. And not just for big things; exams, flights, phone calls that I don’t want to make, all that kind of stuff makes me nervous. Raise the stakes a little and I’m a mess.
As I left the changing room, I saw the teacher, Enrique, walking up the corridor toward the studio. When I’d peeked into the studio Friday, I hadn’t seen much more than glimpses of his racing feet and fluid silhouette, but as he was walking toward me, I realized he was the very embodiment of all the romantic dreams I’d ever had.
Maybe this was why I’d come to Seville. Maybe it was written in the stars that we would meet. He was going to be my dance teacher, and after hours of sweating over complex footwork, we would fall in love. It would be a whirlwind love affair that would later be made into a Hollywood movie starring Antonio Banderas and Kirsten Dunst. And we would take our adorable flamenco-dancing kids to the premiere…
“Eres la chica nueva?”
He had stopped outside the studio and was talking to me. I swallowed and tried to see if my vocal cords still worked. “Uh?”
“Vas a tomar la clase?”
“Eh?”
“No hablas español?”
“No…?”
He gave up and walked past me into the studio, and I felt myself deflate in the face of my own idiocy. I really had to learn some Spanish. I scurried to the back of the room where I hoped I would be as inconspicuous as possible.
“Chicas, vámonos!” Girls, let’s go. He clapped his hands and all the girls started to dance.
That’s it? I screamed silently from the back of the room. No instructions, nothing? How on earth was I supposed to know what to do? But I seemed to be the only one who had absolutely no idea of what was going on. Everyone else knew the routine by heart. This was my worst nightmare come true. Deciding I had to just do something, even if it was wrong, I tried to mimic the girls in front of me. Toe, heel, tap, shuffle, ball, heel—ahhh! what the hell?! And now to the left, toe, heel, shuffle, point, ball, heel—aha! That was it! I cracked the code!
Enrique raised his voice above the noise of stamping feet and said, “Con faldas!” With skirts! The dancers picked up the corners of their skirts and held them out, swishing them to the right and to the left as they moved. I stopped momentarily at this beautiful sight. All the girls moved with an ultrafeminine glamour, holding a perfect curve in their backs and twirling the ruffled skirts around to right and left. But just as I lifted my skirt and held it out, trying to imitate the movement, again they changed the routine on me.
What a disaster. I wished I could sink into the floorboards—anything rather than standing like an idiot while these beautiful Spanish girls danced rings around me.
The guitarist walked in and sat down to tune up. When the girls came to the end of the dance, Enrique added on a new step, a lightning-fast combination of stamping feet, tapping toes, and I didn’t even know what else.
The class started to practice the new step, repeating it over and over, and Enrique walked between the rows, listening carefully. Someone was out of time, and he knew it. Of course it was me. He walked between the dancers, every now and again stopping the class and telling one girl to do it on her own. Then he would nod his head and move on.
I started to panic. I had absolutely no idea how to do the step, and I knew that if he asked me to repeat it I would just burst into tears. I got more and more nervous as he came closer and closer to my corner, and the more nervous I got the more my feet clattered on the floor.
Once he made his way to my back corner, he knew he’d found his culprit. He silenced the class and pointed at me. Everyone turned around to stare. I took a deep breath and did my version of the step.
He shook his head and demonstrated the step again. I stared at his feet, but he was moving so fast that I couldn’t see what he was doing. Feeling everyone’s eyes on me, I grabbed at my skirt and did something, but I was so far off that the sound of my own feet made me wince.
“Escucha,” he said. I looked at him blankly. He pointed to his ear. Ah…he was telling me to listen. He repeated the step again, and this time instead of watching his feet I tried to hear the rhythm.
I took a deep breath and replayed the sound in my head, then, without giving myself time to think, let my feet copy the rhythm pattern back. Enrique nodded and said, “Bien.”
Bien. That, if I wasn’t mistaken, meant good. He said “good”! I gave a sigh of relief. I’d passed the first test. I was so happy I missed the next step that Enrique added on to the end of the sequence, and once again I was the only girl in the room who had no idea what she was doing.
I guessed I might as well get used to that.
• • •
As I got changed after class, I repeated to myself over and over again, “I did it.” I was the worst person in the class, and I knew I didn’t deserve to be there, but it was the flamenco class of my dreams, and if I had to practice for hours every day just to keep up, I would.
Just as I was about to leave, a woman walked into the changing room. She was in her midtwenties, with jet-black hair, pale skin, and large, almond-shaped eyes. One thing I’d learned on Level Two was how to size up a customer in an instant, and I immediately noticed that her skirt was new and expensive, and the Louis Vuitton tote she was using as a dance bag was no fake. She put a foot up on the bench to unbuckle her shoe, which was the deepest, velvetiest purple. Before I realized I was staring, she had caught my eye in the mirror.
“I love your shoes,” I said.
She gave me a wink. “Me too,” she said. “I bought them here, in Plaza del Salvador. But you know I need to get another pair, in beige. I saw a dancer at the Casa de la Memoria with that color shoe.”
I knew straightaway she was talking about the dancer I had seen the night before at the tablao. The image of those beige shoes all scuffed and streaked with black, tapping away on the tiny wooden stage, was fixed in my mind.
“You saw her also?” She pressed her hand to her heart. “I just love her clothes. The suit she wore in the beginning, the shirt with the ruffles and the bolero-style jacket? We have a shop in Zurich that sells this kind of thing. And the dress, the orange one? That is my favorite color. Orange, not like Hermès orange, but brighter, you know?”
I asked her if she was Swiss, but she shook her head and said, with a bat of her fanlike eyelashes, “No, I’m Persian.”
Persia…I did a quick mental cross-reference and came up with: Middle Eastern country, possibly mythological, famous for carpets.
She saw my hesitation and helped me out. “Today it is called Iran.”
Ah, right. That Persia.
We left the school together, and as we walked, she told me her name was Zahra; like me, she’d come to Seville to take dance classes for a few weeks. She asked if I’d join her for a coffee, and I hesitated. After my traumatic experience with the pig skin, I had decided to avoid Spanish cafés. But Zahra had already taken me by the arm and was leading me toward her favorite place.
We stopped at a cute little café that had a few tables out underneath the orange trees. The blossoms were just starting to open, and their fragrance wafted down to us. “I love this smell,” she said. “I want to find a perfume that smells like this. In Spain it is called azahar, you know? It is an Arabic word.”
“Do you speak Arabic?”
“Yes, I studied it at the university, and I use it a lot in my work.”
“What do you do?” I asked.
“I manage Middle Eastern investment for a bank in Zurich. And you?”
After hearing that she managed the wealth of some of the most oil-rich nations of the world, I was embarrassed to tell her that I was a shopgirl.
“Oh, that must be so much fun!” she said. “I worked in a shop as well after I finished in the university. I just loved it. Of course, now I work in the bank, which is a very good job for me, but it is so stressful.”
As we lingered over our coffees, a delivery truck pulled up outside the café. Two men climbed out and started unloading beer kegs from the truck. One man stood up on the tray and hurled the kegs down to the pavement below, and the other man grabbed them as they rolled across the street. One keg broke open as it hit the ground and beer spurted out of it like a fountain, but the men barely glanced at it, just kept on with their work.
“Can you imagine if this happened in Switzerland?” Zahra asked, looking down at the lake of beer that was forming in the street. “Zurich is like the Swiss watches, you know? Everything has to be perfect. But here the people live with…with toma que toma! I love this expression. It is what they say in the flamenco shows.”
“What does it mean?” I asked.
Zahra shrugged. “I don’t know. Toma…toma means ‘take,’ no?”
“Take it, take it?” I suggested.
“Yes! This is what the singers always say to the dancers in the flamenco shows. Take it, take it!” She started to repeat it each time the delivery guy threw down a keg of beer. “Toma…que toma…que toma…”
She called the waiter over with a wave of her impeccably manicured hand and ordered a second coffee. Then she lowered her Armani sunglasses and gave me a wink. “This is Spain, chica. Toma que toma!”