The Flamenco Academy - Hardcover

Bird, Sarah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400040841 ISBN 13: 9781400040841

Publisher: Knopf, 2006

Synopsis

From the author of the widely praised The Yokota Officers Club, a superbly alive novel about two young American women caught up in the fevered excitement of the flamenco revival sweeping the Southwest.

The place is Albuquerque. Cyndi Rae Hrncir, called Rae, seventeen and shy, is twice spellbound, first by high school bad girl Didi (“Dirty Deeds”) Steinberg, already embarked on a search for stardom, then by a devastatingly handsome young flamenco guitarist, Tomás Montenegro. Soon the girls are in college, where they abandon themselves to the disciplines and demands of the university’s flamenco academy and to the hypnotic storytelling of their teacher, Doña Carlota, Tomás’s great-aunt. While never losing the insistent beat of the dance, Doña Carlota mesmerizes her students with the complexly embroidered story of her childhood growing up among the cave-dwelling Gypsies of Andalusia. She initiates them into the traditions, the rhythms, and the steps of flamenco puro, with its central imperative: “Dame la verdad”—Give me the truth.

Locked in a volatile triangle and driven by obsession—Didi’s with stardom, Rae’s with Tomás, Tomás’s with his mysterious heritage—these three emerge as the brightest stars on the New World flamenco scene, while secrets and desires, longings and betrayals pulse just beneath the glittering surface of their compelling performances.

A sense of passion and danger has always surrounded flamenco. In The Flamenco Academy, Sarah Bird delivers a novel with a sense of history and character that matches the drama of the dance it so brilliantly celebrates.

About this title

About the Author

Sarah Bird is the author of five previous novels: The Yokota Officers Club, Virgin of the Rodeo, The Mommy Club, The Boyfriend School, and Alamo House. She is a columnist for the Texas Monthly and has written for The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, O Magazine, Glamour, and Mademoiselle, among other publications. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, George, and son, Gabriel.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

Flamenco has Ten Commandments. The first one is: Dame la verdad, Give me the truth. The second is: Do it en compas, in time. The third one is: Don't tell outsiders the rest of the commandments. I come here, to the edge of the continent, to honor the first commandment, to give myself the truth.

Waves, sparkling with phosphorescence in the darkness, crash on the shore just beyond my safe square of blanket. I cup my chilly hands around a mug of tea that smells of oranges and clove and search for that first streak of salmon to crack the far horizon. There might be one or two early risers, insomniacs, troubled sleepers, who will see the light of a new day before me. But not many. I am alone with my tea and my thoughts.

The waves roll in all the way from Asia and slam against the shore. Their roar comforts me. It almost drowns out the sound of heels, a dozen, two dozen, pounding on a wooden floor, turning a dance studio into a factory manufacturing rhythm. That is the ocean I hear. It is broadcast by the surge of my own blood, pulsing en compas, in time, to a flamenco beat. My heart beats and its coded rhythms force me to remember.

Once upon a time, I stepped into a story I thought was my own. It was not, though I became a character in it and gave the story all the years it demanded from my life. The story began long before I entered it, long before any of the living and most of the dead entered it.

I start on the night that I saw the greatest flamenco dancer of all time perform. That night I had to decide whose story my life would be about.
Chapter Two

It was early summer in Albuquerque, when the city rests between the sandblasting of spring winds and the bludgeoning of serious summer heat to come. New foliage made a green lace against the sky. The tallest trees were cottonwoods and they spangled tender chartreuse leaves shaped like hearts across the clouds. It was the opening evening of the Flamenco Festival Internacional. A documentary about Carmen Amaya, the greatest flamenco dancer ever, dead now for forty years, was to be premiered at Rodey Theater on the University of New Mexico campus.

I dawdled as I crossed the campus. The air smelled like scorched newspaper. The worst forest fires in half a century had been blazing out of control in the northern part of the state. Four firefighters had already been killed and still the fires moved south. That morning, the Archbishop of Santa Fe announced that he would start saying a novena the next morning to lead all the citizens of New Mexico in prayers for the rain needed to save the state, to save our beloved Tierra del Encanto.

I slowed my pace even more. I wanted to reach the theater after the houselights were out so that I could see as much of Carmen Amaya and as little of "the community" as possible. I dreaded being plunged again into the hothouse world of New Mexico's flamenco scene. Tomorrow, when I started teaching, I would have no choice. Tonight was optional and only the promise of glimpsing the greatest flamenco dancer ever could have dragged me out.

Although we, all us dancers, had studied every detail of Carmen's mythic life, although we had pored over still photos and read descriptions of her technique, none of us had ever seen her dance. Film footage of her dancing was so rare and so expensive that we'd had to content ourselves with listening to the legendary recordings she made with Sabicas. We memorized the sublime hammer of her footwork, but hearing was a poor substitute for seeing a dancer move.

Only the news that the documentary contained footage of Carmen Amaya performing could have gotten me out of my bed and into the shower. The shower had removed the musty odor of rumpled sheets and unwashed hair I'd wrapped myself in for the past several weeks since I'd taken to wearing my own stink as protection, as a way to mark the only territory I had left: myself. I wouldn't have been able to face the humiliation of seeing "the community" at all if I hadn't had my newly acquired secret to lean on.

When I was certain that Rodey Theater would be dark, I slipped in the back and took the first empty seat. Only there, alone and unseen, was it safe to take the secret out and examine it. It strengthened me enough that I corrected my slumped posture. I'd leaned on my new knowledge to get this far; tomorrow, somehow, some way, the secret would guide me to what I needed, what I had to have. Of course, tonight it changed nothing. To everyone in the theater, which was every flamenco dancer, singer, and guitarist in New Mexico, I was still the most pathetic creature imaginable: the third leg of a love triangle.

The credits flickered; then Carmen Amaya's tough Gypsy face filled the screen, momentarily obliterating all thoughts from my mind. It was brutal, devouring, the face of a little bull on a compact body that never grew any larger or curvier than a young boy's. As taut with muscle as a python's, that body had made Carmen Amaya the dancer she was. A title beneath her face noted that the year was 1935. She was only twenty-two, but had been dancing for two decades.

She oscillated in luminous whites and inky blacks, gathering herself in a moment of stillness, a jaguar coiling into itself before exploding. A few chords from an unseen guitarist announced an alegrias, Carmen's famous alegrias. The audience, mostly dancers as avid as I, leaned forward in their seats. Hiding from random gazes, I slumped more deeply into my seat, considered sneaking out. Even armed with my secret, I wasn't strong enough yet for this. There would be questions, condolences, sympathy moistened with a toxic soup of schadenfreude. I wasn't ready to be a cautionary tale, the ultra-pale Anglo girl who'd dared to fly too close to the flamenco sun.

I was pushing out of my seat, about to leave; then Carmen moved.

A clip from one of her early Spanish movies played. The camera crouched low. Her full skirt whirled into roller-coaster arcs that rose and plunged as those bewitched feet hammered more rhythm into the world than any pair of feet before or since. I dropped back into my seat, poleaxed by beauty as Carmen told her people's hard history in the sinuous twine of her hands, the perfectly calibrated arch of her back, the effortless syncopation of her feet.

I tore my eyes from the screen long enough to pick out the profiles of other dancers, girls I'd studied with for years, women who'd instructed us. They were rapt, mesmerized by the jubilant recognition that Carmen Amaya was as good as her legend. No, better. That not only was she the best back then, but if she were dancing today none of us, forty years after her death, could have touched her. I wished then that I were sitting with those other pilgrims who'd made flamenco's long journey, who understood as I did just how good Carmen was.

I joined in the muttered benediction of oles, accent as always on the first syllable, that whispered through the theater; then I surrendered and let Carmen Amaya's heels tap flamenco's intricate Morse code into my brain. Though I had willed it to never do so again, my heart fell back into flamenco time and beat out the pulses with her. Flamenco flowed through my veins once more. From the first, flamenco had been a drug for me, an escape from who I was, as total as any narcotic, and Carmen Amaya hit that vein immediately, obliterating despair, rage, all emotion other than ecstasy at the perfection of her dancing.

The brief clip ended. We all exhaled the held breath and sagged back into our seats. An old-timer, white shirt buttoned up to the top and hanging loosely about a corded neck, no tie, battered, black suit jacket, appeared onscreen. A subtitle informed us that he had once played guitar in Carmen's troupe.

"Tell us about Carmen's family," an interviewer, offscreen, asked.

"Gitana por cuatro costaos," the guitarist answered. "Gypsy on four sides." The translation of this, the ultimate flamenco encomium, made my secret come alive and beat within me. Blood, it was all about blood in flamenco.

The withered guitarist went on. "Carmen Amaya was Gypsy on all four sides. We used to say that she had the blood of the pharaohs in her veins back in the days when we still believed that we Gypsies came from Egypt. We don't believe that anymore, but I still say it. Carmen Amaya had the blood of the pharaohs in her veins. That blood gave her her life, but it also killed her."

"What do you mean?"

"Her kidneys. The doctor called it infantile kidneys. They never grew any bigger than a little baby's. La Capitana only lived as long as she did because she sweated so much when she danced. That was how her body cleansed itself. Otherwise, she would have died when she was a child. Her costumes at the end of a performance? Drenched. You could pour sweat out of her shoes. She had to dance or die."

"Bailar o morir." As the guitar player pronounced the words, his lips stuck on his dentures, tugging them up, holding them rolled under so that he looked like a very sad, very old marionette. "Dance or die. Dancing was the only thing that kept her alive."

"Bailar o morir." He was right. I had to start dancing again. The last few weeks had brought me too close to the alternative. For the first time, I was happy I'd agreed to teach. But that was tomorrow. Tonight, it was essential that I be gone before the lights came up. I glanced at the exit and debated whether I should leave.

When I looked back, though, a clip from one of Carme...

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1400040841
• ISBN 13: 9781400040841
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400