Dulce Maria: My Flamencita
I walk into the small hall and I’m instantly hit by the hot air within. It makes me take off my baseball cap and wipe my already moist forehead with the back of my hand, pushing up the errant strands of my heavy dark hair away from my face. There a few people sitting in the chairs that formed a circle around the stage; it is barely six o’clock and the performance doesn’t start for another hour but already I could count at least eight familiar faces from school, along with their parents. It surprised me because I hadn’t expected this to be taken with such aplomb by the community. The only reason I’m even here so early is because my parents own the hall and bar beside it, and my mother enlisted me as part of the decorators.
My name is Soledad Arroyo and my family is well known in this part of the Hispanic Community because well, my dad runs one of the biggest bars and my mother is involved in every singe club and project in our little part of New Mexico, not to mention that my Casanova brothers have probably gone out with every girl above fourteen in our town and so those who don’t know my parents any other way, know them because they’ve come to issue a warning to my brothers to leave their daughters alone.
“Solo, have you seen Mario?”
My mother appeared by my shoulder and I jumped slightly; even though she’s a little on the plump side, Esperanza Arroyo is like a cat on her feet and I’ve never been able to do something covertly in our house without her walking in on me. I shrugged nonchalantly but looked around all the same.
“Nope, I haven’t seen him but he’ll be here eventually. It’s not like he can skip on tonight.”
My immediate older brother is a bailaore and one half of the dancing duo that would be performing tonight and most probably the reason a third of the girls would be present. They call him a 'freaking mega hottie', but then that only goes to show their poor taste and the caliber of girls he hangs out with. Anyway, for all his faults, which include being a nosy jerk, a slob who never puts the toilet seat back- but then girls are a minority in my house- and an arrogant prick, Mario is incredible on his feet. He’s so graceful and fluid, that sometimes just watching him dance is enough to make me forget that he’s my annoying brother and start liking him…but only for a moment. Still that’s not why most people are coming to watch the performance; the sensible people amongst us are here to see the most beautiful bailaora in the whole area dance the Flamenco.
The Flamenco is an incredibly draining dance but I think they are trained to make it all look like a breeze. Still, it’s filled with rhythm and sensuality, and it takes a good dancer to pull the audience along and actually feel the heat. Dated back to the era of the Conquistadors and even as far as Andalusia, the Flamenco has chiefly Gitano roots and is one of those dances that has diluted through the General Hispanic culture. I have a personal relationship with the dance because before my mother became my mother, she was quite a well known Flamenco dancer and when she had me, she hoped I would at least carry the tradition. No such luck.
As fate would have it I, her youngest child, happen to be the only girl in a brood of seven. I pretty much finished home economics after my oldest brother Julio smashed my tea set and gave me a soccer ball in recompense. My entire out of school education has been graciously provided by my hermanos and their gaggle of friends and I can proudly declare that I’m as tom as tomboys come. So she gave up on trying to convert me by the time I was eight and focused instead on my much more comported, more manageable best friend Dulce Maria or as I call her, Orphan Annie.
She’s not really an orphan; Maria lives with her mother and step father not too far from the bar but she spends so much time in my house that my mother sometimes says she should be paying rent. We’ve known each other since we were four and exchanged childhood illnesses-measles- when our mothers met in a supermercardo and engaged in a fifteen minute haggle over the last pack of toilet paper while we played tag. A few days later our steps would cross in the clinic and the rest as they say, is history.
I’m still ambivalent about my mother’s feelings for me but she absolutely adores Maria; I think she believes her true daughter was switched in the delivery room and I came home with her. The funny thing is that my best friend believes so too and they are always in cahoots with each other. It was to my mother Maria turned when they gave us a project in school and she had to discuss the origins of the Flamenco and she was only too happy to help, going as far as teaching Maria a few steps. When she did so well, it was my very same mother that began talking about imparting her knowledge to Maria and that was where this whole performance came to be. In my opinion it’s a good thing that Maria got so taken with the whole Flamenco thing because, as my mother constantly laments, it’s a dying art; too few kids these days are like Maria and too many are like me. I should be jealous of the amount of time by best friend spends with my mother but then, with my brothers’ and father’s attentions, I have enough to spare. Besides, mom was the only maternal figure Maria had; her own was absent the day maternal instinct was being given to women.
People were pouring in with full force by now, many of whose faces I’d never seen before. It made me wonder just how far my folks carried the whole PR and advertising thing…not that it’s particularly bad for business; my father came onboard with it when mom mentioned that the audience would probably want to wet their lips after the show and incidentally there’s bar just next door. I’m supposed to be decorating but the way I see it, no one is here to watch the decorations, and so I moved to the other side of the hall and leaned against a pillar. This was vantage position; I would watch the whole performance without being bothered by pesky family members.
I watched as Maria walked in from the smaller door and hurried over to my mother. They probably wanted to do make up and wardrobe now…where the hell did my brother cart himself to? My mom said something to her- probably in the likes of good luck and “dazzle them”- and gave her a bear hug. Esperanza’s hugs are noteworthy because they are as rare as blue moons and just as difficult to recover from. Maria probably just lost a few bones in her vertebrae after that but she lives for my mom’s hugs. The closest thing to physical contact that she got from her own mother was the regular beating and yelling.
To say I hate that puta Carmen and her scumbag husband Francesco is like saying the Pacific is a big lake…biggest understatement ever. All they do is smack her around and put her down; nothing Maria ever does is good enough for them, not her super straight grades or the fact that everyone loves her, or that she takes part time jobs just to pitch in to the family pocket. Carmen is almost always either stoned or boozed or stoned and booze and Francesco never even noticed he had a step daughter…until she turned fourteen that is. The bastard tried to mess around with Maria but she smashed his head in and ran away to us. My parents even had a big row about it because mom wanted to keep her permanently but dad refused. According to him, we don’t get to pick our families and taking Maria completely from them will involve a lot of things, things that were best not meddled with. So the best we can do is open our doors 22/7 and be there for her.
Just thinking about her parents is enough to make me angry but I push the anger away. Tonight is Maria’s night and it won’t do to focus on negative things; I plan to enjoy every part of the performance. I look around and realize that the hall is packed to the maximum and what’s more important, the show is about to begin. The musicians and singers are taking their seats in the periphery of the circular stage and any moment now the dancers would emerge. Maria walks up and my breath catches. She’s wearing a bold red gown, cut really low in front and with a full flared skirt that just touches the floor despite the high heels she must be wearing. Cute as she is, Maria is not very tall, barely even reaching my shoulders. Her long hair is done in a mass of twists and braids piled over her head and adorned with a hibiscus flower.
She looks so amazing, and I know my mother did her very best in making the dress. As I stand half hidden by the pillar, Maria glances around the room and smiles when our eyes meet. She winked and I gave her a thumb’s up sign just as my brother walked up to the other side of her. I watch him glance up and down Maria’s body and blush when she raised an eyebrow. Even though he’s twenty and two years older than us and has so many groupies already after him, Mario has a secret crush on by best friend. Not that he’ll get anywhere with her though; Maria has eyes for only one person.
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I think it all started last fall, just after school began for our final year in high school. We were in Mrs. Brantley’s literature class and she was reading the English translation of a contemporary Spanish poem but I’d pretty much zoned out from the second line. I tend to do that a lot in my English class, luckily that’s also one of my stronger subjects and not Trig, my least favorite class or I’d have tanked in a major way. Anyway the whole class finished and was having a discussion about the themes without me and she was explaining stuff to them. I thought I heard someone say, “Don’t worry Maria, we all know who your heart-cooler is”, and all eyes turned to me. I blinked and looked around but they were all giggling.
“What?”
Maria shook her head but she was blushing furiously.
“Never mind Solo, they’re just being idiots as usual, tontos”
I looked down and realized the poem was a love poem. Later that day, we were upstairs in my-well our- room hiding out from doing the chores downstairs when she turned to me.
“Well who’s your heart-cooler?”
Most of the conversation in class had gone without my consciousness so I had no idea what she was talking about.
“What’s a heart-cooler?”
She shrugged and folded her legs under her.
“I guess from what Bee said about it, a heart-cooler is that person that ‘quenches the dangerous ardor of the heart’s fire’, you know, the one person fans the flame and yet brings it back down. The poet was talking about his lover and how she was the one person that could push all his buttons.”
“Erm…I dunno, I guess I can’t think of any one…”
Then our eyes met for a moment and she suddenly blushed and looked away.
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The hall stilled into silence as the lead musician strummed the first chords on the Flamenco guitar and I felt the hairs on my neck rise in anticipation. He strummed again and is then accompanied by the others in an easy paced rhythm. Flamenco is expressed through three forms; the toque -- the playing of the flamenco guitar, the cante (singing), and the baile (dancing) and seeing as none of the Bailaores was by any means a professional, the Palo was more Canto Chico and the mood, Bularia. I watched as Maria twirled and whirled on stage, looking from my distance, more like a flickering red flame than a dancer, her sound of her castanets distinctive over the rest of the music and clapping. She twirled once more and kicked high into the air, a bare leg flashing for an instant before retreating among the voluminous folds as she stomped her feet and snapped the castanets in tandem.
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For much of our senior year people were saying that because Maria and I spent so much time together and more or less ignored the boys, we must be going out. It was just a rumor but the talk continued everyone started going on and on about it and eventually even I started seeing things the way they did. Maria is a touchy feely person and we never walked together without her hanging unto my arm, we sat so close that we basically shared a seat and sometimes even sat on each other’s lap and she spent most nights in my bed, not to mention the fact that we were seldom apart for more than ten seconds or that we had matching clothes- which is partly my mother’s fault- and wore each other’s class ring.
I began to see why people would think we were a couple even though we were not; just best friends that had almost no boundaries… I never realized until that others weren’t that close and then I began to wonder. We’ve been best friends for so long and literally grown in each other’s skin that we didn’t figure that there could be something more to it. Then a few months later in our winter break, mom sent us out to the store and on our way back, Maria moved closer and slipped her hand into my pocket. Surprised, I turned to her and she shook her head, withdrawing the hand when I slipped mine into her pocket. There wasn’t much explaining to do; it just felt right. Three days later, we were cleaning up in the kitchen after the Christmas party when she looked up from the sink and giggled.
“Someone hung mistletoe up here.”
I too looked up and was about to say something when I felt her lips on mine. Right there in the kitchen, a soaking sponge wedged between us, I had my first real kiss and it was whoa…I don’t know where she got the practice but Maria was a damn good kisser. And so our Christmas present to each other was…each other-that and I was kind of broke…
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My brother was showing off his own dance moves and I had to admit, they did look good together. Like I said before, it takes a particular blend of people with the right chemistry to make the audience believe the expressionism behind the dance and those two were pulling it off. She shimmied closer to him and teasingly snapped the castanets in his face and he responded in kind, arousing a few hoots from the audience. Meh…the idiot was just using this as an opportunity to try and feel cop a feel. He better not try anything stupid
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So we’ve been going out for all of eight months now and not very many people know. My mother knows; she walked into my room unannounced one day and found us making out on the bed and then turned around and walked out, muttering something about kids of today. Mom took it better than I expected but I always suspected she secretly wanted Maria to take a fancy to one of the boys… I guess she decided that one Arroyo was as good as another. I’m not sure about the six losers but since my mom knew, that meant my dad found out by the end of that day. I could picture the conversation; he dragging his tired body to bed after a long day at the bar, and then my mom just conversationally puts in.
“By the way Jorge, your daughter likes girls.”
I guess they are used to it, seeing as my brothers have a new novia every third day, but Dulce Maria is the only girl for me.
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I watched as my girlfriend twisted and sashayed in my brother’s arms and then, with one energetic stomp from him and clash of the castanets from her, along side the musicians’ strum and the entire audience’s one clap, the dance was over. Everyone gave them a standing ovation as they leave the stage and I guess the whole performance must’ve set the mood because the musicians started with another pace of songs and most people got up to dance.
I moved away from my birds’ eye and over to the small door by the side, knowing they’d probably gone to the rooms at the back to change. Maria was already out of her dress and in her jeans when I walked into her room and she looked up, startled by the abruptness of my entrance but then smiled when she saw it was me.
“Did you see us dance?”
I nodded and moved closer, my face splitting into a wide grin.
“Of course I did, and that was totally awesome. When you guys were practicing, it didn’t seem so interesting but you blew me away.”
I watched her blush with pleasure and pull her tee-shirt on.
“Thanks, your brother is a wonderful dancer but guess who I was picturing in my head while I was out there?”
Now this could be a tricky question…who was the popular singer/dancer on the charts?
“Um, Justin Timberlake?”
Maria rolled her eyes and playfully slapped my arm.
“No silly, you! You guys look so alike that I kept looking at him and seeing you.”
I shrugged and refrained from saying it could just be the lighting and that she’d finally proven my suspicions that Mario looked effeminate but that was a joke for later. I took her hand and pulled her closer for a kiss but our lips only touched before I caught my mother’s reflection on the mirror. She rolled her eyes when we pulled apart and gave Maria yet another bear hug…I was beginning to feel sorry for the poor girl now.
“That was wonderful; I almost forgot that you only learned this in a few weeks.”
A few grueling, muscle wrenching weeks, I might add. I rarely saw my girlfriend throughout that time, only when we got up in the morning and right before I dropped to sleep, when she would crawl in and flop tiredly against me. Still it was worth it and her performance was a thing of beauty.
“Thanks mom, I really couldn’t have done it without your help.”
Recently Maria had gotten into the habit of calling my mother mom but I guess Esperanza has filled that role for years now, so it was okay. She beamed at her, sniffed at me, and left the room but I knew we wouldn’t have any privacy in here.
“Come on, let’s jazz”
Maria nodded and stuffed her things into the duffel bag she brought. We stole out of the hall and made our way into the cooling street without anyone knowing. Her dance was over, and now it was time for ours.
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