“Hola!”
“Guapa!”
“Estás allí?” Are you there?
I opened my eyes and yawned, listening to the boys talking on the street beneath my window. “Está allí?” “No lo sé.” “Canta algo.” Is she there? I don’t know. Sing something.
“Solo por tus besos, solo por tus besos…” Just for your kisses, just for your kisses…
I sat up, leaned over to the window, and pulled back the curtains. The primos stood below, looking like my own little gypsy Rat Pack. They’d come to wake me from my siesta. That’s right—I’d taken the siesta to the limit, sleeping for an hour between eleven p.m. and midnight. It was the only way I was able to go out dancing with the primos, then get up for work in the morning.
“A dónde vamos?” I called down. Where are we going?
“El Carda,” they said, shrugging as if to say, “Where else?”
Where else was there to go? The gypsies weren’t allowed into any other bars in the city, and with a primo behind the bar in Cardamomo, the boys could drink for free.
These were the same boys I used to watch dancing on the street corners of my neighborhood. It was only a week ago that I’d rushed to the window whenever I heard them pass to listen to them sing. Now they came by singing to me every night. They were Diego’s primos. Well, a few of his primos. It seemed like every gypsy under the age of twenty-five was his primo. And the ones over twenty-five were his tíos, or uncles.
Yes, I’d spent both my dance budget and my food budget on the dress, but I didn’t care. These boys danced as well as any teacher at the Amor de Dios, and they hadn’t taken a dance class in their lives. So though I couldn’t go to class, I was learning every day. When I passed the boys on the corner on my way to teach English, they would show me a step. I’d try it a few times on the cobblestones, and when I had it down, I’d hurry off to the metro. I’d practice on the platform and in the reception of the company where I was teaching while I waited for my student to appear. Then on my way home the boys would show me another new step.
I even had my first guitar lesson under the trees in the square where the gypsies all got together in the evenings. I was walking back from work when I saw the primos gathered around a stone bench where one of the boys was sitting with an old guitar. They waved me over and asked if I knew how to play. I shook my head, and they sat me down and arranged my fingers over the fretboard, showing me how to strum the introduction to a soleá.
When I gave the guitar back to the primos, one of the boys played a bulerías as another sang and the rest clapped compás. I shrugged to myself and said, “We’ve come a long way from Level Two.”
Now it was my midnight wake-up call, and boys were calling up impatiently, “Venga, niña! Nos vamos de fiesta!” Come on, girl, we’re going out to party!
I slipped out of bed and back into the black dress—after all, I had to wear it as much as possible to get the price-per-wear ratio down. I grabbed my heels, tossed a pair of earrings in my bag, and skipped out of the apartment. As soon as I’d closed the door quietly behind me, I stepped into my shoes and clacked down the stairs to where the gypsies were waiting.
We walked up the street, the boys clapping their hands to the flamenco music in their heads. Every so often one would break out and sing, as the others murmured, “Así es…”
People we passed on the street stared at the strange sight of a pale-skinned, red-haired girl and a group of dark-eyed gypsy boys. We walked up a lane that was so narrow the moonlight couldn’t even reach us, then turned a corner into a square that was full of gypsies.
The primos saw Diego’s car parked on the other side of the plaza, so we walked through the throng to where he was standing with a group of long-haired guys singing along to the music playing on his car radio.
I fell for Diego the first time he sang flamenco in my ear in Cardamomo, but each time I heard him sing I fell all over again. I once heard it said of a flamenco singer that he sang “with his heart in his mouth,” and that was how Diego sang. With his brows drawn and his eyes closed, the gold rings on his fingers flashing in the lamplight as he threw up his hands. “Olé…” And when he opened his eyes, that wicked sparkle returned, and I was under the gypsy spell again.
“Anda, niña,” he said, opening the door of his car for me to get in. He climbed into the driver’s seat and called out to the primos to get behind the car and push as he revved the engine. I stuck my head out the window and watched as a crowd of boys in suit jackets and sunglasses pushed Diego’s car up the street until the engine caught.
We drove through the old streets of Madrid with El Cigala playing on the radio. Diego sang along, beating his hands on the steering wheel in time. I leaned back to enjoy my gypsy adventure. It wasn’t exactly a painted caravan, but it wasn’t too far off, either. They say guys buy sports cars to get girls: Porsches and Mercs never did it for me, but I was a sucker for Diego’s gypsy mobile.
The primos went out dancing every night. At Cardamomo, Tuesday was no different than Saturday. And it was in the early hours of the morning, when the dancers and musicians who had been performing in flamenco tablaos and theaters around town started arriving, that the real show began.
When I complained to Diego about missing my dance classes, he told me to look around. “Who do you want to learn from?” he asked. His tío at the bar was Enrique Morente’s cousin. The guy who had just walked in with a guitar played with Tomatito, and if that wasn’t enough, Tío Joaquín Cortés was standing around looking bored.
“Anda, niña,” Diego would say. “You don’t need the Amor de Dios.”
Diego hadn’t taken a class since he was thirteen, and he performed all over town. But that was because he learned all he needed to know from la familia—the family. Of course, gypsies don’t need to go to a dance school because their whole lives are one long dance class. Diego had illustrated this point by showing me videos he’d taken with his phone at his cousin’s wedding.
The first video was of his grandmother, who was sitting on a wooden chair surrounded by a group of black-suited musicians. Her wrinkled brown skin and toothless grin made her look like one of those thousand-year-old tortoises. If you can picture that swathed in polka dots, you’ve got her. She held a walking stick in one hand and pounded it into the floor to mark the compás.
She hoisted herself up out of her chair with the help of her walking stick, and then this woman, who was a hundred years old if she was a day, started dancing the sexiest flamenco I had ever seen. I felt my jaw drop. My grandma wouldn’t dance if you got half a bottle of dry sherry into her, but this granny made Beyoncé look tame. Then two more little old ladies got up to join her. These three old women in their cheap cotton dresses were suddenly Diana Ross and the Supremes, doing a fully choreographed hip-swiveling number. “Wow,” I murmured.
Then he showed me a video of a girl he said was his ex-girlfriend. She was dancing a bulería, and I stared at the tiny screen not really understanding what I was seeing. Yes, she was an incredible dancer, but she was…huge. I mean, really big. She was the kind of girl who, had she dared to come to Level Two looking for new season fashion, would have been met with tight smiles and redirected out of the store to a plus-size boutique. What was skinny-as-a-rake Diego doing with a girl like that?
“You need a good butt to dance flamenco,” he said.
I couldn’t help taking that as a criticism of my skinniness. What is wrong with this country? I wanted to shout. Why is everything upside down? I hadn’t spent my whole life denying myself a second helping of everything to have a guy show off his size fourteen ex. I was so used to being hungry that I couldn’t even imagine how someone could get to that size. I needed an explanation, but I didn’t know how to ask for one.
“In Spain you like women who are more…” I faltered, and he finished the sentence off for me with the word enteras: complete, whole. So Marina had been right when she’d told me to go down to the market and buy myself a culo. She’d known that I was missing something…
Perhaps I’ve been wrong to deny myself all these years, I thought. It wasn’t even a conscious decision that I’d made; it was just that ever since I was fifteen, every time I saw anything that resembled a curve or a bulge on my body, I switched to a diet of carrot sticks until it went back to wherever it came from. But maybe—and I was only prepared to say “maybe”—I could have my cake and eat it, too.
The gypsy girls certainly did, anyway. There were never more than a handful at Cardamomo. The ratio was normally twenty guys to one girl, which suited me just fine, because it made me feel like the star of my very own flamenco extravaganza. As soon as I lifted my arms up to dance, I’d find myself surrounded by dozens of dark eyes and clapping hands.
But Diego would push through them and step forward to dance with me, and I had to admit that no one else danced like he did. There was a style and elegance to his movements that the other boys just didn’t have. He wore a white cotton shirt under his black suit jacket, and it was open to reveal a heavy gold medallion with a picture of Jesus’s face on it. It was quite possibly the ugliest piece of jewelry I’d ever seen.
“Do you believe in God?” I asked him when the song finished.
“Sí,” he said.
“And heaven and hell?”
“Sí.”
“But hell with, like, flames, and devils that poke you with forks?”
He nodded, seriously. I was amazed. I’d never met a person who actually believed in hell before.
“And heaven?” I asked. “What is heaven like?” He told me that in heaven everyone dances sevillanas. “I want to go to your heaven!”
In that case, Diego said, I should start praying to the God of Flamenco.
“I will!” I promised. Next time I went to the cathedral I would ask the God of Flamenco to bless my feet and make them fast and wise, and get me back to dance class, and save a place for me in flamenco heaven so I could toma que toma until the end of time.