No hay quinto malo. That was the new Spanish expression I’d learned. Literally it means that the fifth one can’t be bad. It’s bullfighting talk: at every bullfight there are three toreros (bullfighters) and six bulls, and the best bull is always number five.
The fifth bull had just run out onto the sand. Even from my spot in the arena I could see he was a big one. I sat forward in my seat as the crowd around me cheered. This was Las Ventas, Madrid’s bullring. A huge arena, painted golden yellow and red ocher, the colors of blood on sand.
I never really understood the bullfight. A guy standing in front of a bull, twitching a red cape—it always made me think of cartoons I used to watch as a kid. Anything red would make the cartoon bull go crazy and pitch some unsuspecting person into the air. But it was so quintessentially Spanish that I felt I had to try to understand it. Back in Seville, Enrique once told the class that if you don’t like the bullfight, you’ll never dance flamenco. In the end it’s the same art: the dancer impersonates the torero, and the torero moves like a dancer. I had been repulsed by the idea. The bullfight had always seemed so barbaric to me. But now I could see that he had been right. The bullfighter positioned himself in front of the bull, like a dancer waiting for his cue. He had the same stance that we had learned—chest raised, shoulders pulled down, chin up. Just watching him made me long to be back in the studio.
The bullfighter took out his red cape now, and a hush descended on the crowd. The bull lowered its horns and pawed the sand. “Ay!” the bullfighter yelled. The bull charged and the bullfighter held his position. He dragged the cape over the sand as the bull’s horns just missed him. The crowd called out, “Olé!”
This fight was part of the Festival of San Isidro, the patron saint of Madrid, held every May. Tickets were virtually impossible to get, but mine had been a gift from one of my English students, Tomás, the director of sales at Andrés’s company. The company had season tickets to the bullfights so they could take visiting clients. This particular day he had a spare ticket and he’d given it to me.
Tomás was a bullfight aficionado. Actually, the word “aficionado” originally meant someone who is enthusiastic about bullfighting. Tomás taught me that. In his spare time he wrote articles for a bullfighting magazine, and whenever he had a new piece published, he’d bring it to class and we’d translate sections of it into English.
Mine was a sombra ticket, a seat in the shade. Though it was spring and the afternoon sun still wasn’t that hot, the tradition of dividing tickets into sol (sun) and sombra came from the south of Spain where the sun is scorching. The sombra tickets were the most expensive and sought after.
I was entranced by the audience as much as by the fight itself. The arena seated twenty-five thousand people, and looking around, I couldn’t see an empty seat. The crowd seemed to ripple as thousands of women lazily waved fans. People still dressed up for the bullfight, the men in crisp cotton shirts and blazers, and I saw many polka-dot handkerchiefs poking out of pockets, red carnations on lapels, and little Spanish flag tiepins. The women wore wonderful combs in their hair like the ones the Sevillians wore to the feria.
Sitting in the arena, I remembered a picture I’d once seen of Ava Gardner and Orson Welles watching a bullfight. They were both sucking on cigarettes and looking tanned and rumpled in the afternoon sun, just like two Spaniards. I hoped that I looked Spanish, too. Hmmm, probably not. I was so pale after the winter that Juan had nicknamed me “La Transparente.” And even with my blue eyes hidden behind my sunglasses, the mop of red hair I tried to keep back in a ponytail was a bit of a giveaway.
The torero held out his cape and called to the bull. His weight was forward on the balls of his feet and his arm was outstretched. The bull charged, and the torero deftly twitched the cape and turned his torso so that the bull’s horns just grazed the gold embroidery of his costume.
Watching him made me remember my classes with Enrique. That was the way he had wanted us to move. It was the distillation of drama in the subtlest movement. I half closed my eyes and felt myself back in the studio in the backstreets of the Macarena. My feet back in my red shoes, and the soft folds of my skirt against my legs. I felt myself lifting up onto one toe, trying to hold my balance as Enrique pressed one finger sharply beneath my rib cage. Gira.
What was the passion I felt in those days? That desperate, crazy love that gripped me on the nights when I walked in and out of the bars around the bullring with flamenco in my head and the moon in my eyes? I remembered the night that Zahra and I heard the woman singing in that little bar by the river. “When you fall in love in Seville, you fall in love with Seville.” But I hadn’t just fallen in love with Seville; I had fallen in love with Spain.
I felt that same passion again as I watched the bullfighter move around the ring like a flamenco dancer. But why? What was my link to this crazy, wonderful country? I couldn’t have been more foreign if I tried, so what was I doing, rising to my feet with a crowd of Spaniards, drawing in my breath as the bullfighter spread out his red cape and the bull, lowering his horns, pawed the sand? As it charged, the bullfighter lifted up onto his toes with the balance of a dancer and plunged the sword right between the bull’s shoulder blades.
And all around me the crowd cried, “Olé!”
• • •
I climbed the stairs again, up past the butchers and grocers until the smell of fish and meat was replaced by varnish and cigarette smoke. It was mid-May, and the Amor de Dios was full of activity. Dancers were hurrying up and down the corridors, and girls in long skirts crowded around the notice board, writing down class times. I’d done my sums, and it looked like I’d have enough money by the end of the month to take a class, if I pulled my belt in an extra notch.
I edged my way in to see what classes were up on the board, and as I gazed at all the different possibilities, a young guy squeezed in next to me and pinned up a flyer for a show. “Qué buscas?” he asked me. He looked like every other guy at the Amor de Dios, with long black hair and those dark eyes that I was starting to build up resistance to. What choice did I have, when the guy who made my coffee in the morning was a more gorgeous version of Javier Bardem, and the bus driver who took me out to the suburbs to teach was Enrique Iglesias’s long-lost twin brother? I’m not even going to talk about the riot police who wander around Madrid in their chic black uniforms. I couldn’t get weak at the knees every time I left the house.
“Qué buscas?” He asked me again what I was looking for, and I told him that I was trying to choose a dance class. He told me to try his cousin’s class. “Muy gitano,” he said. Very gypsy. Everyone wants to be “gypsy” in flamenco. Actually, it generally goes that the whiter you are, the more gypsy you want to be… Take me, for example.
The flyer he’d pinned up was for a show; he was the lead dancer, Diego Caballero. He handed me one, and then he mentioned that, if I was up for it, maybe we could go out one night…to a little place called Cardamomo.
I hadn’t forgotten the name. That was the place Juan said the bad gypsies went. I took a second look at this boy. Yes, he had those high, sharp cheekbones and that strong nose, and his eyes were even darker than average… I was finally getting picked up by a gypsy.
And he wanted to take me to Cardamomo! When I’d pressed him, Juan had told me stories he’d heard about the fights that went on there. He assured me that every gypsy in the place was armed and that the girls were more dangerous than the boys. All I had to do, Juan warned me, was dance with the wrong guy, and the gypsy girls would be outside waiting for me. He told me about girls who had been disfigured by the gypsies’ long acrylic nails. They’d attacked foreign girls before, hacking off their hair and spraying their blue eyes with purse-size hairspray.
If you know what’s good for you, he’d told me, you’ll keep away from Cardamomo. And I should have remembered his advice as this gypsy boy wrote his number down on the flyer. I should have, but I was too busy thinking about what I was going to wear.