Susan Caperna Lloyd

THE REAL FLAMENCO 

An excerpted chapter from the forthcoming memoir, Dance It Up! Travels from Spain to India to Find the End of Grief

It was still dark. I threw on a jacket and crept onto the patio. My neighbor was at it again. He had been playing every morning at dawn, although I’d never actually seen him. He lived somewhere in the neighborhood.

A guitar strum. A downward beat. Then the cante, the singing. Piercing and discordant, a non-western scale like the muezzin’s call to prayer from a minaret. His voice shook. Rough, scratchy, maybe from smoking cigarettes for years. It was more like a sob. He was singing about someone who had died.

On the patio a cat’s ears stood up. The affila they called it, the sound of pain. Not happy stuff, the kind of music you hear in flamenco tourist clubs. It was a dagger in the heart. The song was a soleá.

The soleá was known as Deep Song, or cante jondo, which is what the Gypsies called it.

It was exacting, serious flamenco, not the lightweight kind, the “happy flamenco” that I’d been struggling with in my classes for three weeks now. I waited for this soleá every morning and could barely stand to hear the pain of it but knew I must.

My neighbor had to be a Gypsy and the Gypsies invented flamenco in all its forms. But Gypsy is not the right word. In Spain they are Gitanos and worldwide they are Roma. I’d learned right away in Granada that Gypsy is an offensive word and gives the Gitanos an unfavorable name.

Many Spaniards look down upon Gitanos as outcasts. Dirty. Their encampments look like junk piles. They will con you. Never believe them. Never talk to them. Don’t go into their part of town. They steal kids and hide them by dyeing their faces with walnut stain.

People believe all this.

The truth is that they still lived marginally after emigrating from India 1,000 years ago. They’d come across southwest Asia to Constantinople, then continued through the Balkans or across North Africa. Some stopped in Spain, but others remained nomadic. They were always moving on. But loss and death, prison, drugs, alcohol, and isolation still plague them. They are maligned. They are seldom part of any community except their own.

But those who settled in Spain picked up on Byzantine and Arab music they heard and absorbed other rhythms during their long migration. Some said it was in the cárceles, the jails where they were imprisoned during the Spanish Inquisition, that the first flamenco cante was heard, a cry of pain and sorrow. Deep Song. And it would have been a soleá. Over time, guitars joined the sad balladeers. The dancers came last. Movement was necessary to give the music physical form.

         Flamenco permeated the culture. Some Gitanos lived near me; I saw old women, men, the young girls, the little boys, dancing on dusty streets as they kicked the ground and flailed their arms in angst. I wondered what my sister Angela, a dancer, had known about this world of cante jondo. She was supposed to be there with me. Angela, in her forties, had died tragically the year before of alcoholism, and I was far from over it.

* * *

I returned to the apartment and began my daily ordeal, loading my blue bag with provisions for the day. A black skirt. Money for café in the automatic machine at school. Clothes to change into later. A light jacket. Socks. Tights.

And Angela’s red flamenco shoes.

At the school I buzzed on the outside and entered through the steel door, passing a row of                                         

couches inside one of the rooms built into a renovated cave where aspiring flamenco girls sat around, draped over guitar players strumming next to them. A scene out of Carmen. The girls came from all over: Russia, Czechoslovakia, Japan. One girl was from Tasmania. They seemed to be taking flamenco to wear provocative outfits, to be seductive, to attract guys. I doubted they   knew about Deep Song.

I went into one of the back classroom-caves to await the teacher. Ten or fifteen girls trooped in. The teachers weren’t even Gitanos. They were Spaniards. There is a difference. If you really had Gitano heritage, you needed connections, money, or fame to get a job or open a studio. Gitanos had grown up with flamenco and probably didn’t want to teach it. I didn’t blame them. It would be like explaining something you did every day, like brushing your teeth.

In basic class we were learning a buleria, one of the “happy” flamenco styles. It came from one of flamenco’s many palos, branches of the flamenco “tree” of different rhythms of which a soleá was part. The buleria originated from the Spanish burlar, to “joke around,”

as the teachers drilled us on hand and arm movements and complicated footwork.

“Put your hand out, wave it in and out. Up! Happy! Like a bird. Flutter! Make it sensual,” commanded the Basic class teacher, Maria. “Like this. Mírenme! You know what I mean.”

Upon hearing this, the girl from Russia, who seemed to have something going with the class’s guitar accompanist, winked knowingly at him.

He winked back. The other dancers noticed their exchange. Soon the whole class was fluttering. Arms, hands, fingers flying like the sexy top-knot feathers of Secretary Birds, the long-legged sagittarius serpentarius. But in this case, the aspiring dancers had no idea how to utilize their useless, gangly legs. No matter. Everyone hoped for a wink, some attention, from our Escamillo straight out of Carmen.

The joking and merriment continued.

I preferred my neighbor’s sad guitar.

Along with a Basic class I’d signed up for choreography. I had to learn a sequence of movements for an entire song. In that class we were learning yet another buleria. Rosario, the choreography teacher, was a Draconian taskmaster with no pity for those of us who could not execute, in one or two tries, the buleria rhythm and related foot, arm, and hand movements.

“Uno, dos, tres . . . count the beat! No, not like that, like so!”

I felt she stared right at me when she said this. Some of the students had been taking flamenco for years. Even they were frustrated. I couldn’t believe their stories. How they’d been to this very school five or six times. I tried my best to keep up in the classes. But my brain wouldn’t work to remember the steps.

Angela, if she had been with me, would not have counted beats. To hell with what anyone else did. She would have cut loose. Done her own thing. Escamillo would have definitely noticed, and the teachers would have been outraged. Hell, she probably would have gone to bed with Escamillo. She would have been the talk of the town.

I remembered Angela belly dancing at a college talent show and how the frat boys hooted and hollered like she was some low-class strip tease dancer. What a bunch of horny jerks. But she didn’t care as her ample breasts plunged out of her top. But, no doubt, her moves were amazing. She was proud of her performance. She would have done the same in Rosario’s class. Screw what people thought.

In another class I had to learn the counter beat. Mercedes, the instructor, gathered us in a circle, showing us how to clap on the beat then stamp on the offbeat. Around the circle she went. When she got to me, I felt encouraged. I could hear it. No problem. Just stamp the offbeat.

She stared at me with lizard eyes. Arms folded. Breathing down my neck. Like she knew I couldn’t do it.

I tried.

I failed.

Couldn’t coordinate my hands and feet. For several days I tried. The others watched in expectation. They felt sorry for me. What was my problem? But I felt I was getting better, even with all the eyes on me.

Lizard eyes was disgusted.

 Everything was about counting and technique. I went along with the program. I eventually did the counter beat properly, with no acknowledgement from Mercedes. But I wanted to express my emotions. My anger. My grief over Angela’s death. Flail my arms, pound my feet. Like the Gitanos. Dance like the wild old ladies. The young boys, the little girls. They did it. So what if my feet or arms did the wrong thing with this lousy buleria?

Angela and I would have made a team. We would have shown them. To hell with the buleria. Boring. Like reciting the Mass in Latin. Translating Herodotus. The Epistles of St. Paul.

It was like the piano scales the nuns at Catholic school made us learn before we could do anything cool like entertain our friends with “Chopsticks.” Oh my God. The piano drills. They went on and on. And here in Granada no one would give me a break when I needed it. Shut up and be quiet. I was trapped in a Victorian novel.

On went the happy face bulerias and smiley dancing. I still wanted the mad scene from Tosca. A few days later I got up the nerve in choreography class to ask Rosario if we could do a Deep Song rhythm.

She glared at me. “Oh no, señora! Cante hondo is only for the very advanced.”

Advanced in what, I wondered. What did it take to qualify?

“Can we just do a few movements? Could we do a soleá?” I pressed her. I was paying for these classes and in a week I was leaving for home.

“I assure you, señora, that you would not be able to do it,” she answered smartly, and continued the class.

Case closed. I was fed up.

The course was over in a few days anyway. But on my last night in Granada I did what Angela would have done. I took a taxi to a flamenco bar, definitely not on any tourist must-see list. It was in Sacromonte, a straight-up Gitano neighborhood across the river. A serious “Gypsy” place you weren’t supposed to go.

I went alone. The taxista driver bumped down the road from the Albaicín to the river’s other side and down into a kind of gulley. Ghostly white limestone caves lined the way. Specters from the past. Falling-off doors and windows somehow attached to rock. Some Gitanos still lived in them. The taxi pulled up to what looked like a roadside honky-tonk on the Mississippi Delta. I got out of the taxi and stepped into a ditch. I dropped my bag and an old Gitano on the broken-down stone road hobbled over to fetch it. “Gracias,” I said. It was pitch black outside. But I saw greenish neon lights ahead around a faded sign. I heard music. Something exciting and forbidden was going on inside. I walked up the pitted stone steps. Ahead was a battered antique door.

I held my breath and opened it.

It was another world inside. A rundown place like a family-style cantina. A neighborhood joint. Twenty or thirty people sat at wooden tables or stood around in groups as kids in grandfathers’ arms sat on the bar. Dogs ran around excitedly. Young guys watched a corrida re-run on a battered television, a red bullfight poster on the wall above.

The music had stopped. Was I too late? I looked around for musicians or dancers. Or something flamenco. I didn’t see anything. Maybe nothing was happening tonight.

I stood at the bar. It didn’t feel strange to be alone there. I ordered a vino tinto.

Then unmistakable palmas, the clapping, began from the patrons. Everyone was looking toward the corner of the bar.

A guitarist, a young guy, had started strumming. A middle-aged man in a fedora sat to his side. Old and weathered beyond his years, he was not a cartoon like Escamillo at the flamenco school.

 Aye! Aye! Aye!  His voice, scorching, almost a scream, shook the room.

This was the real thing. The count, the rhythm. The drop in octaves.

He was singing a soleá.

It was the muezzin’s call. Cante jondo. My hidden neighbor’s song.

Everything I wanted to hear.

An old woman in a black ill-fitting dress stood next to me. She joined in the clapping. Then her face contorted. She grimaced as she heard the song’s words. I strained to make them out.

“Silloncita de mi madre . . .

My mother’s little chair . . .”

         They were about the singer’s mother. She wasn’t just any mother. She was his mother; she had to be. His mother had died. The singer was in grief. His face contorted in pain and he recounted, he sung, tormented, as he looked at her chair.

         Her empty chair.

         What an image.

Like a flash photo, I saw my own mother’s chair. Apricot colored, it was an easy chair with attached footstool. Worn side arms. Very 1970s, back when people didn’t get new chairs all the time and kept things for forty years. She loved that chair. The first thing I saw when I visited her apartment. Its back was to the door, and I could see her head peeking over the top.

Good. Mom’s alive. I see her in the chair.

But I was worried about Mom.

She was in ill health and Angela’s death had devastated her.

         I thought of my Grandma Carolina’s death in the 1970s in New Jersey. She’d never seen her mother again after emigrating from Italy to the U.S. in the 1920’s. No reunion, nor even phone service to distant rural Italy. According to the stories I heard, Carolina’s last words were “Mama, I’m coming home.”

         Maybe the old woman next to me picked up on my thoughts. She looked over. There were tears in her eyes. “Do you know this soleá? Éste es . . . how do you say, el sentimiento? The feeling you have when someone dies.”

My God. Yes.

The void. Emptiness. You name it. Empty chairs, empty rooms, empty everything raced through my head. I nodded and almost felt physically ill.

The singer kept singing as the woman grabbed my hand. “Ay, Dios mío!” she spat out, shaking her head back and forth. She curled up her lips as if life was too much.

Then she walked toward the singer and signaled to him. The floor was open. Anyone could go there. She stamped her foot. Thrust her arms out. Brought them in across her heart. She started moving like a giant raven. Not a bird. A raven. An eagle. Her arms swirled like eagles’ wings. Like claws. Swollen legs beneath her skirt. Cheap shoes stamping, worn at the heels.

Ay, Dios mío.

My head spun. It was a scene from the past. . .

Grandmother Carolina. And Angela.

A day in early September, 1961.

My father’s parents had come by train from New Jersey to Oregon for the birth of Gary. Mom’s fourth child. She was in the hospital following a caesarian; after three girls, it was a boy. Angela was six years old and, in a few days, would enter first grade.

I was thirteen and adored my nonna Carolina. She was a dancer, too. Like Angela, dance was in her blood. In the kitchen she grabbed dishtowels, stuck them in her apron. Put sprigs of oregano in her hair. Danced in the kitchen. Thrust her hands out like the wings of some Icarus then fiercely stomped on the floor in her shoes from Montgomery Ward’s. Grandpa Antonio sat at the kitchen table like a good Italian nonno, playing mandolin.

Angela had come into the kitchen.

“Come Angelina! Dance with me.” Carolina, a big woman six feet tall, grabbed her. Lifted her up in a giant swoop. Angela had Grandma’s attention for a change. So much family focus had been on the birth of the baby boy.

They danced. Whirling with light quick steps around in circles. They followed each other like some Sicilian tarantella. I stood in the doorway, amazed at the show. Dad, on his way to the hospital and wondering what the merriment was about, joined me in the doorway. He looked proud. Impressed. What confidence Angela had. A natural. Strutting around like she’d danced forever.

Mother was still in the hospital a week after Gary’s complicated birth. Dad was there with her, and Angela was unsupervised at home with all the hoopla going on.

Everyone was coming and going.

It was around this time that it happened.

I didn’t know the truth until after Angela died. How she’d wandered into the nearby pear orchard and been raped. She was six years old. At some point the perpetrators had tied her to a tree then stuck a coke bottle up her vagina. Shamed, she’d never told the family about it; I only found out about it later from her best friend.

How did she know–she must have known–that dance could expiate her pain? That’s why we’d planned to come to Spain together, where she’d studied flamenco before. She wanted me to learn to dance with her. I’d said I would as soon as she completed rehab. It never happened. And now I’d come to Spain myself to make good on my promise, discovering that this very dance, this flamenco we had planned might release me from my own sorrow and grief.

Now past and present merged in Sacromonte bar as a young girl got up from a chair at the side of the room and joined the older woman. She was a dead ringer for Angela. Beautiful. Determined. Defiant. Sad. With melancholic eyes darting about, she marched up to the singer and guitarist. She wore a black flamenco skirt and a blood-red blouse pulled tight across her breasts.

 She announced her presence by slapping her arms downward to the beat. She wanted to dance. The statement was almost vicious. There was a hush among the bar patrons as they watched her. She was so young. Fifteen years at the most. The old woman in black stepped aside as the girl then crashed her foot onto the wooden floor.

The singer, watching her, began a new verse. The girl slowly gained speed to work into a frenzied footwork, the escobillo. Now the old woman joined her again. They took turns. They tore up the place. The girl’s red blouse ripped, right across her chest. The old woman’s stocking fell down around her ankle. They were covered in sweat. God, I wanted to do this. I wanted to get up and join them. The singer and guitarist fueled them on. The old woman saw my desire and motioned to me. She wanted me to come up! I almost did.

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it.

I stayed back and listened to the words about the mother’s chair, reverberating throughout the room. The patrons cried Olé! Olé! Olé! People stood on tables to applaud. It was not a performance. Or even a dance. We’d witnessed an internal possession. A defiance. Take that, you cruel grim reaper. You joker, death.

The possession permeated the room. Was this Angela’s possession? She and Carolina in the kitchen. Belly dancing in college. She’d even danced flamenco around Dad’s coffin at his wake. Dance as a demonic release for her? An internal beast, activated by experiences of pain, hurt, and shame?

And why was I so drawn into this dance?

Flamenco connected me to anger. My feelings. It was a body thing. A necessity. No thinking. No counting. I wanted to find duende, the “soul” Gitanos talked about, that thing that came from feelings inside. Like now when these women danced a soleá. No happy stuff! Feelings. Feelings that Angela had. Feelings I needed to get out.

And here I’d had a chance.

I talked to the old woman and young girl as they got ready to leave. I told them that I’d wanted to come up to dance with them. But I was not sure of myself. They said it wouldn’t have mattered. But, I asked, could they teach me to dance like that? Could I be a Gitana, go onto a floor, and express my deepest self?

The girl said yes, to come back to the bar next week. She and the guitarist would be there, and she would show me some things. What an opportunity. But I had to leave Granada, the very next day.

Returning that night to my room, I began packing. I knew what I wanted now but was uncertain how to get there, despite my time in Spain. Yet I felt inside I’d made some progress. The girl and old woman had opened a door. They were a vision, some light to illuminate the dark place I was in. I packed Angela’s red flamenco shoes, my skirts and souvenirs, and caught a flight to the States.

Mother died a month later, soon after I returned home.

The chair was empty.

I would go to Spain again.  

I would find those women. And I would learn to dance.

Susan Caperna Lloyd is an author, photographer, and filmmaker whose 30-year archive was recently acquired by the American FolkLife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. She explores grief, loss, and disappearing cultures from Mexico’s Zapatistas to Italian American ethnicity or a Buddhist pilgrimage in Japan. “The Real Flamenco ” is part of a book in progress, a memoir about the processing of her sister’s death through flamenco, Roma culture, and tribal dance in India. Her work’s trajectory began with her first memoir, No Pictures in MyGrave: A Spiritual Journey in Sicily (Mercury House, S.F. 1992) about her quest for roots in Italy.