Rain, Dance

Yesterday I went grocery shopping in Barrio Bajo (Lower Neighborhood, ie, downhill from my apartment on the cliff). I got lost coming home, the advantage of living on a cliff, however, is that as long as I was walking upfill I knew I was pretty much going in the right direction.

The disadvantage of living on a cliff becomes apparent during rainstorms. When it rains lightly, the stones in the paths become slick and dangerous. When there´s a downpour, like today, the town turns into a whitewater-rafting course.

Patra and I discovered this as we tried to navigate our way to the bus station. We were determined to get to Jerez de la Frontera, a near-by town, to try out a flamenco class, and thus we set out with one raincoat (mine) and one umbrella (hers). Almost immediately my feet were completely soaked, due in no small part to the small river that rushed past our front door. We were to find--and cross--several more rivers speeding downhill, shooting around corners, spraying off of the tops of buildings. Only when we were just over halfway to the bus station (normally about a twenty-minute walk) did we remember we could have taken a taxi. Ah well, we thought, on with the adventure.

When we were just two blocks from the bus station, albeit two blocks uphill, we came to a flume (formerly a street) with mud at least six inches deep coursing its way downhill. Patra and I looked down at our shoes. We did not want to cross here. We skirted the river down along the sidewalk, looking for a shallower and narrower place to ford. Some of the mud-river spilled onto the sidewalk and sprayed up in fountains when it met with streetlights. A few frantic Spaniards were tipping an old picnic table own to fend off the muddy water from flooding their store.

Finally we found a spot where the river was only two or three feet wide and went for it. Luckily, neither of us slipped or splashed a large stream of mud up onto ourselves. We made it to the bus station with a few minues to spare, and began wringing out our sopping clothing as disapproving Spaniards looked on ("Why didn´t you drive?" they asked, and, "Why did you walk in such a storm?")

It was not raining in Jerez, though we saw acres of flooded fields on the way. We looked for dry clothes to buy for our flamenco lesson, but there are a few trends in Spanish fashion that we are not yet used to (more on that later), and we didn´t find anything quite right.

The flamenco class was in a lovely studio owned by a man named Antonio, nicknamed Ël Pipa,¨who has festooned the place with posters and larger-than-life still shots from performances he´s done. At noon, when the class started, there were five of us; Patra and I were hopeful that Antonio would make the class a little easier, knowing that two-fifths of it was just beginning. As we started the warm-up--balletic arm-movements and the classic flamenco hand-movement known as "la flor," or "the flower"--two more women came in with a nie- or ten-year-old boy, who I assumed was just a son accompanying his mother for lack of anything better to do. They all went off to change and were soon back. Antonio nodded, and gestured toward the little boy, Cristian. Cristian came to the middle of the room and continued the warm-up while Antonio looked on.

Shit. This kid was good. As was everyone else around us.

I began to realize HOW good when we started the footwork. Imagine how fast you could possibly make your feet go, then speed that up, oh I don´t know, a hundred times. That´s what we were contending with, trying to learn from. It was almost impossible to learn the steps by watching anyone´s feet because they were moving too fast. Patra and I fumbled around for the next hour and a half, picking up only the parts that didn´t deal with moving our feet. At the end, Antonio "El Pipa" came over to tell us that he thought we´d had a good class. This assessment was based mainly on the fact that at no point during the two hours had we sat down. I guess that´s good (the most important part of learning something is the magnitude of one´s desire to learn?) but I´m still not sure if that means I learned anything.

As I rode the bus back to Arcos I imagined one of those montages that occur in just about every movie ever made about sports, where the protagonist (or team under the coaching of the protagonist) starts out miserably, unable to catch the football or winded after a lap around the field. Then come the shots of practices after dark, rehearsals with bloodied limbs, running in the rain, always looking determined.

I guess, in our montage, we´ve already got the rain scene.