Dancing Toward Morelia

Later, after dance rehearsal, in his small Dupont Circle apartment in Washington, DC, José tells me about the cook he recently shared a night with. “He was what you say, sa-wheet—but ay,” José says, “he smelled como garlic.” He mouths a kiss.

We sit on his living room rug eating turkey-and-cheese pita sandwiches, legs crossed, papers and books spread around us. I’m teaching him “English better.” We have been swapping languages for two hours, once a week. One hour of English grammar with me, the Chicana who never learned to speak Spanish fluently (pocha), and one hour of Spanish with him. Plus, he promises to tell me his story about how he left Mexico for the United States. He likes that I am interested and insists I write it down. He has been in DC for fifteen years, bussing tables, working at a free health clinic, saving money to someday build a house back in Morelia, Michoacán.

But “someday”—that is so José. Someday I will get better pay. Someday I will find a man. Someday I will…

He pokes a José finger (long and accusing) at me, and inserts two slices of jalapeño, al estilo escabeche, into the pita pocket.

“Well, he probably thought you smelled like too much jalapeño,” I say.

“Ay,” José says, “you don’t have these guy things.”

“Ha!”

It’s getting late, and I don’t want to hear any more about his date. I want him to continue the other story, the one where he performed in a circus outside of Dallas with a traveling act from Tijuana.

▴ ▴ ▴

Our dance company rehearses two nights a week, sometimes three, if we have a big performance. José is the maestro of our company, a folklórico group that performs at all the major Latino and embassy events. Each week, around 6:15 p.m., all twelve of us trudge up the three flights of creaky wooden stairs of an old church where a hardwood floor and mirrored wall serve as our dance studio. We are mostly Mexicanos, but there are also Guatemaltecos, one Panameño, and a Brasileño. We come from day jobs at construction sites, restaurants, retail stores, the World Bank, and assorted desk jobs.

Then there’s me. A single thirty-two-year-old. Chicana. Freelance writer. Broken Spanish. An orphan who feels she has finally found a family. Reaching for the sounds of a familiar past.

José and Maestra Maria Elena are the only professionals in the company, the rest of us an assortment. We do this for no money, rather for the simple yearning of traditions desired, remembered, or imagined. When we enter the studio, we pull off our shoes and toss them onto the worn pine floor—work boots, sneakers, heels, or soft-soled shoes we bought at Kmart, the Salvation Army, Nordstrom, or TJ Maxx. We pull on our tacones, flamenco-style shoes with nail heads on the soles and heels. I face the floor-to-ceiling mirror in my rehearsal skirt, trying to forget that taxes are due next week and I have yet to itemize anything.

When we girls are in our rehearsal skirts, flared cotton prints that come just barely below our knees, Maria Elena gives us the first signal for us to take positions for Jarabe, the song most Americans know as the Mexican Hat Dance. Everything is a count, and we have to pay particular attention to the accent on the odd numbers, necessary counts for dips or turns. We raise our arms beneath the skirt folds, fingers entwined near the fabric’s ends. We make the figure eights with our arms, unloosening the day, first one side, starting small, then getting bigger, then the other side. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight!

Somewhere in our shared Mesoamerican experience, our lives unfold with each snap of the skirt, and I am able to forget the receipts scattered on my coffee table. But mostly I am able to forget that I am the detritus from my past, a life out West where road trips with Grandpa still sing to me from the painted desert in New Mexico.

As soon as we finish our warm-up, together with the guys in their ankle boots, our zapateados stomp defiantly in unison on the wood floors. And instead of Grandpa, other images emerge from the dance: We become the music of Jalisco. We become the bold Mexicanos who fought for their independence. We women become the soldaderas, the women who fought alongside the men during the Revolution.

But no room for sorrows or victors here. ¡Repiten! So, we do the dance over and over. Maria Elena walks in front of each of our lines, yelling on the odd-numbered counts so that our skirts swirl in precise anthem. Un. Dos. Tres. . .

▴ ▴ ▴

“I don’t want to hear any more about your date,” I tell José.

“Ay, Rosa, morena,” José says, smacking his lips as he finishes his sandwich. A professional dancer, he is always dramatic in his movements. He has already lived an adventure, and I want to know more.

“So, tell me,” he says, “what do you think if I tell you I’m going back home? I’ve made my plans. I bought land. Small, eh, but mine.” He sits cross-legged, fingers touching knees in a near meditative pose, fluid even in his stillness.

“What?” My eyes freeze on his, my face instantly flushed. “You’re really leaving?”

Truth is, I don’t want him to leave. Who else in my life would believe in me? Teach me? We make sense together. His is a story of fear, mine, of loss.

We met a year ago, when I first joined the company, learning as all the apprentice dancers first do, standing behind the company, watching and then trying to run through the steps. My body felt heavy, my shoulders hinged forward, my feet awkwardly fumbling to reposition themselves. He ribbed me at first (“pocha, pocha”) and then stayed late during the winter months when the group rehearsals slowed to help me learn.

He was responsible for teaching new people who were willing to commit the time to improve. Winter practice would help me be ready to also learn the new dances the company had been working on, and the company always needed someone who could help with the grant-funded daytime workshops at the local schools.

“We play catch up,” he said that first night. He had me do each step, slow at first, repeating just three steps for one full hour. We worked on these remates, over and over. “Center light!” he said, exhorting me to “lift” from the top of my head.

The first few weeks after the José practices, I’d return to my apartment, my feet on fire. I’d stay in the tub until the water turned lukewarm. Afterward, I’d rub Vaseline on my feet and put on cotton socks and sweat pants. I’d limp into the kitchen to boil some pasta, my weariness a distraction from the contortions of deadlines. Finally, after three months, and in a sleeker version of myself, I’d earned every damn remate to be sharp enough to dance with the veteran dancers in the coming fall. He would never say it, but José believed in me. So now his “someday” has arrived and my body once again feels heavy and unbalanced sitting in his apartment.

“But your life is here. What about the dance company, your job at the clinic, the dance workshops for the schools? I thought you were happy.” What about me, I want to ask.

My head starts to ache.

“I have money now to build my house,” he says. “My home. Before I am old.”

He is forty-two years old, limber and poised. I can’t imagine him ever getting “old.”

We’re both quiet. The nearby squelch of the Metro bus could be one in Morelia. I realize he wants someone to write his story, so he can prove he lived it—so he can return to Mexico.

I take a deep breath. “Okay, this time start way back.”

▴ ▴ ▴

After his mother left the family, there wasn’t enough food for four children. José quit school in fifth grade and worked at his father’s small neighborhood grocery store. This was in a small town outside of Morelia, the capital of Michoacán, bustling with light manufacturing and the export of avocados, strawberries, and corn from surrounding farms. For José, Morelia was a world away from his pueblo.

On a small TV in his father’s store, José watched the exuberant Mariachi bands and the joyful leaps and twirls of the folklóricos. He kept time, tapping his feet, studying the men’s brisk foot turns in their botas. When he was seventeen, he hammered the short nails onto the soles of his own hard boots. No importa that he cut his finger trying to angle the nailhead flat. He’d dance behind the counter when business was slow. He studied the dancers, watching for when the right foot and then the left would be the hard count and a quick pause, sometimes double time, los remates y los redobles.

One day a man came in and saw José dance. He asked José’s father if the boy had taken classes. The man offered him free lessons, which led to some funds for attending a school of the arts in (“Can you imagine?” he says, “el Distrito Federal, México, Mexico City, Chilangolandia, morena”) and a chance to move far from the outer dusty edges of the strawberry farms.

There were other promises made—good pay and auditions for various professional companies. José left with the man the next day. The school was a real opportunity. But then, after his schooling ended, so began another job—as a paid escort. It paid well.

“Dates,” José calls them, artfully waving his hands. A few involved dinners. Others were late afternoon satisfactions near Chapultepec Park. But these ventures stopped abruptly the night a mustached man entered his flat uninvited. José remembered the oily smell of the man’s shirt, the uneven nails scratching at his arms as the man held him from behind, the smell of peeled oranges from the vendor just outside the window, and a wrecking ball of a headache as José wrestled himself free, throwing his fists at the man. José stumbled out the door and ran, feverishly waving his hands as he escaped down an alley and into the streets.

He jumped on the subway to el centro, where days later he found a cheap apartment and a job in a local restaurant a few bus stops away in Coyoacán. After waiting tables for what he says was “too long,” he was hired by a couple of small dance companies, which led to an audition with Mexico’s prestigious national ballet folklórico company, a series of intense tryouts that left even the nimble José exhausted. “It paid off,” he says. “I got a job with the traveling company.” He was eighteen. The group performed on large stages in Greece, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands the first year.

In the decade that followed, the group traveled to China, Japan, South America, the United States, and all over Europe. “The crowds, they loved the dances—de Chiapas, Jalisco, Veracruz, y los norteños,” he says, of the dances from the northern states like Nuevo León, Sonora, and Chihuahua. “So many wonderful experiences. All those glorious stages.”

He looks away. “But then, morena, somebody tells you when your time is up, even though you don’t feel it,” he says. “Okay, so I was a little sick, but just for poco tiempo. And everybody wants the younger dancers. No matter how good you are.”

Outside, the sluggish spits of the Metro bus disrupt José’s voice. The next one won’t come for another thirty-five minutes. I want to stay, but the kinks in my body say otherwise. I need to walk. I stand and brush the breadcrumbs off my lap. It’s Saturday and I can still catch the 42 at Dupont Circle. The sun has turned a light orange and is slipping away. I, too, am sinking. Already he feels gone.

“Ay, Maestro,” I tell him. “It’s late. Hasta la próxima.”

▴ ▴ ▴

José insists I must write my story, too, but I resist. “My story’s so…so—” I begin, but I don’t finish. I want to say my story has fewer characters and rollicking events.

When I was a child growing up in New Mexico, I tell him, Grandpa became my guardian after a car crash killed my parents the night they were driving back from the movie theater. Grandpa lived down the street, and he was watching me while they were out.

(“I remember so little of all that came before, Maestro. Mom reading to me at night. Dad working on the car. Trips to the Dairy Bar for ice cream.”)

The weeks after the crash were mingled in lost phases of back and forth between Grandpa’s house and Aunt Dolores’s apartment. All I knew was that in the end it was decided that I was to stay with Grandpa. Over time, the memory of Mom’s smile and Dad’s laughter faded with the end of each day, their only images captured in a couple of photo albums.

On the weekends, Grandpa and I would explore. We’d stop at Dawson, Lake Valley, and Cuervo—silver, gold, and coal mining booms left the towns rich with ruins: cabins of brick, stone, and wood. Their insides bared frescoed walls. Wooden posts leaned away from an imagined wind. Remnants of Paleozoic limestone steps led to a small house. I envisioned Apaches on the hillsides, eyeing the Westward settlers who sought to possess their land.

Sometimes I made myself spin. The blur of blue sky, peach stone, brown earth. All of it wrapped me in its swirl. Arms out, I reached for the edges of this arid nest, craving its solace. Other times, I’d stare at the bushes, mesmerized as I rested in the shade. There was an indescribable comfort to these excursions. The comfort of being lost. Being lost so you don’t feel it.

Along the hillsides of the Black Range, we picked up fragments of limestone-framed fossils with dizzying names—brachiopods, crinoid plates, and horn corals. Grandpa taught high school science before he started working for the Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, and the poetic names all seemed to come back to him.

Once, we approached one of the water utility sites near the far edges of Bernalillo County. “See, that line there?” Grandpa pointed to a cut of grass in the distance where he once oversaw the installation of a water supply pipeline. (“Funny, Grandpa loved to describe the way the pipelines fit, moving his hands like he was working a marionette.”)

Sometimes I’d see him studying my face. Maybe he saw me looking far away, but mostly looking inside myself, worrying about the future. He knew that about me, and he always had a remedy.

He placed a fragment of fossil in my hand.

“Here, mijita,” he said. “Know the things in nature, and then you’ll know yourself.”

I held the fossil to my chest, warmed by the lull in his voice.

“And if you ever feel lost, just think of me. Count to three.”

Once back on the road, we would stay on Route 27 for another forty miles until we hit a cross route that would take us back to Albuquerque.

One night (“I was eight,” I tell José), I woke to hear a blaring Golden Girls episode on the TV. My body twitched, and my book, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, fell to the floor. I got up and went into the living room. Grandpa was in his favorite chair, asleep, it seemed, both feet on the ottoman.

“The rest—” I start to say. But I can’t finish. I look at José, who nods me on. “Now I know that Aunt Dolores is the one who wanted to keep me after my parents died in the car accident.”

I had lived two years with Grandpa, and all I knew was that in the last year with him, there were phone calls from Aunt Dolores to his house. Sometimes he would forget to call her back. (“He would start to forget a lot, Maestro. To pick up groceries. To pick me up from school. To take me to a friend’s house.”)

When Grandpa looked back at me from the casket, I imagined him saying, “Mijita, do something that makes your heart sing.”

Eventually, I got used to signing permission forms with Aunt Dolores as my guardian. Writing had become my refuge, and good grades earned me a journalism scholarship to a university in Washington, DC. I was thrilled at the prospect of not only a different place, but the idea of possibilities still to come.

The night before my flight out East, I stood on the back patio and gazed upward at the inky sky. I smoothed the fossil in my pocket, saying my silent count.

▴ ▴ ▴

“My story of fear? Okay, so let me tell you that one,” José says. Fear, he says, tastes like “small metal bits, like the ones my father made me chew for the D I got in science.”

“Me, una decepción,” José says. “And years later, I disappointment myself también.”

“But you were sick,” I say.

“Ay, mija, the professional dance is for the young and healthy. What else for me? I was twenty-seven. I had no money, no family with money, no brains for school. I needed more.”

The circus, he said, was just something to hold him over when he could figure out a plan.

So José became a performance announcer. Sweating through heavy makeup and a shimmery red jacket with matching pants and hat, he gestured wildly as he introduced the magic act, the trapeze artists, and the wild animals and their trainers. After the acts ended, he helped the performers take down their dressing rooms, helped anyone who needed an extra hand, packing up for the move to the next city.

For a while these tasks allowed José to forget the loneliness that would wash over him. He imagined that instead of welcoming a circus crowd, his body was demonstrating dance technique. That instead of clapping his hands to exhort the circus audience, he took a bow on one of the finest stages in Mexico City. That finally, with money saved, he could buy a house—someday—in Morelia.

Sometimes he would sit on the cot in his trailer and make plans, his sparkly jacket folded beside him. He could live like this for perhaps another year, he reasoned, for there were daily rituals that gave him a kind of familial joy: The travel. The post-show drinks. The first breakfast bell at 8 a.m., which rounded the animal trainers, a cabal of men who ate their sausage and eggs like savages, finishing them with cigarettes, coffee, and backslaps.

Yes, he could do it for a while longer. Be a circus man.

“We travelled to los pueblos outside of Mexico City,” he tells me. “Ay, but then, there was Antonio.”

Antonio’s precarious job was one of the featured acts—the “taming” of El Señor, the Bengal tiger, a beastly creature with long white whiskers. “That was when there were still tigers in the circus,” he says.

Timidly at first, but then completely mesmerized, José watched for hours as Antonio ran through his routines with El Señor. They performed in a large, tall cage that took up three-quarters of the middle ring in the center of the large tent. The interactions between man and beast were their own form of dance—the crack of the whip, the treats, the voice commands, and the posturing between the two as they circled each other.

One day the front office announced the circus would travel to the outskirts of Dallas. The travel in the trailer caravan was long—nearly twenty-two nonstop hours—but the group was excited to learn they would perform in a large arena. They arrived late at night in the parking lot, intent on unpacking in the morning. When the first breakfast bell rang, however, the cast and crew soon learned that Antonio had left while everyone slept.

There was a hushed mad scramble as Raul, the manager, met with the trainers to work out a solution. The night of the performance, Raul gave José the leather whip. “This motherfucker’s yours. You know the drill,” he said, his low voice fading as the noise of the crowd grew. As the other trainers moved away from him, José felt Raul’s hands on his back, pushing him into the large cage.

“But de verdad, morena, this big cat ’eez no joke,” José tells me.

The crowd, applauding the tightrope walker, was restless, awaiting the finale with the striped beast, which José had to feed. “I was so pinche scared, pocha, no one really showed me how to feed him. ¿Sabes qué? That’s the kind of job you get when you’re new.”

But now, he was penned inside the cage with the big cat, a beast, a pacing and panting orange monster. José gripped the massive leather whip with his right hand and felt his knuckles knot.

Behind the massive head in front of him, the crowd was a blur of colors, a kaleidoscope that punctured the stale popcorn air with a fierce roar of its own. José knew then for the first time what it really felt like to feel fear. But what was the feel of fear before you die? The taste of metal as his father reprimanded him? The smell of popcorn and tobacco? A small rush of air rose over him, and he swore it carried the citrus scent of orange peel—its clarity, sharp and bitter. The memory seized him as he recalled the thrust of the man in his dark room. If he died tonight, would anyone even know?

Would anyone even know?

But he couldn’t go home, not now. He needed a new life. His own.

Then he saw a movement behind the tiger—the crowd had risen in their seats—as the animal jumped off a performance box. They, too, knew El Señor was too close. That something was wrong. Maybe they saw the look on José’s face or the way the animal advanced toward the sparkly suit. Screams fell around José’s ears, and as the beast came toward him, José felt a wet, sloppy pant hit his cheek, smelled the thick, rotten stench.

He remembers clearly his own hand before him, the taut grip of the whip as it lashed across the animal’s face. He felt the heat of the animal, and a heavy thud of its legs. Someone in the audience threw a firecracker into the ring. At the splatter of pops, El Señor swung its huge head around, snarling, and the crowd’s screams heightened.

“Thazz when I knew,” José tells me, a distant look in his eyes, “I must…I must—. Fuck it…run!” And then he laughs, a scream-like yell that makes me drop my pen. I imagine José’s thick dark hair unfurled beneath his hat, his hands shaking as he unlocked the cage door, then ran erratically in his sparkly red suit, tripping over backstage cables and out the canvas back door.

I picture him fleeing, his limbs flinching at dark shadows outside the tent, performing a hastened dance in the musk of night. He hid among alleys and bushes and then made his way to a gas station.

He made a quick phone call to friends of friends, and in a couple of hours they picked him up at the gas station—an Amoco station.

“Ay,” he says, “‘A moco.’ Por favor.”

He laughs.

I lean back, slapping my notebook, laughing, too, until I’m coughing.

We can’t stop, bent over, wiping our eyes. Eventually, José gets out a bottle of rum. He uncaps it, still heaving, and holds it out to me. “Ay, mija,” he says.

We take sips between hollow breaths.

▴ ▴ ▴

Two years later the emails start to come.

“Have you finished your story?” José writes. I am embarrassed because I have yet to finish it, and already his house in Morelia está completa. He emails me a picture. It is a simple, bright and tidy place—white siding with purple shutters (“a la Sandra Cisneros,” he writes), white bougainvillea in pots on the patio. He has his arm around a younger man. They look happy and relaxed.

“Ay, Maestro,” I respond. “You are big stuff there, too.”

I have already sent him his stories, nicely formatted with a title page in a PDF file so he can print them out. It is April in Washington, and the school tours are in full force, with tourists crowding Woodley Park/Zoo and the Smithsonian stops.

I tell him that I am one of the veterans now and that I help teach the new dancers. I tell him this is also my last season with the company. I have a full-time office job with a large nonprofit—with benefits—and a schedule that makes it hard to commit to the long rehearsals during performance season. I’m applying for a journalism fellowship that will support my interest in digital storytelling. I am even seeing someone. Imagine, Maestro, I met him on the 42!

I tell José we are beyond that fuzzy, fond period, and settled—in a good way—and living together. We joined a community garden, a salute, I think to Grandpa. Know the things in nature.

A few more months pass without an exchange. Still, I think of José one fall evening before the stage curtains part for our performance at Gettysburg College.

During the first half of the show, just we women enter, stage left, lights dimmed. We balance lit candles on our veiled heads as we perform La Bruja —“The Witch”—a measured heel-ball-step dance from the state of Veracruz. In solemn procession we move across the stage, arms spread wide in long white dresses, black aprons fastened about our waists. Spanish folding fans, attached as long necklaces, swing gently as we sway forward.

Rich with its slow African- and Spanish-inspired son jarocho melody, La Bruja illuminates the power of women to overtake the darkness of life—men, money, or whatever. As the vocals emerge powerful and sorrowful, I am haunted by the sounds of the early Spanish conquistadores who entered the ports of Veracruz with their religion and swords, and who left behind their lesser evils: their music—the tambourines, the small guitarras and the harp. Something from my past lingers without any sort of clear context. Maybe resilience is our communion as women, and for one night, I think:

I am not an orphan.

Our final dance is my favorite, El Son de La Negra, “Song of the Dark Woman.” This classic Mexican dance rouses the audience with its feverish rhythms, and elicits gritos (loud calls) of los mexicanos in the crowd. Our brightly colored skirts slice the glare of the stage lights overhead and our men tip their sombreros in this most energetic of the performances.

I dance with a tightness in my throat, knowing that perhaps this will be the last time ever in my life I will do zapateado like this, boots storming against the floor, arms sweeping up so that even I, like the applauding audience, am mesmerized by the colored silk ribbons along the hem of my skirt as it whips upward toward the lights—the snap of each figure eight like it’s my last breath, turning on the odd-numbered counts instinctively.

I also think of how this night, this same time zone, maybe a thousand miles away, El Maestro might be dancing to the same beat as I do, tapping his boots under a restaurant table. I see him drinking from a bottle of Bohemia as his lover signals to the approaching mariachis. The musicians and the patrons are oblivious that he is El Maestro, a man who will see the same sunset he remembered as a child.

And when the Gettysburg crowd stands, clapping and whooping at La Negra’s closing notes, the mariachis’ melodic gritos will call out in a city called Morelia. Where hope finds its place in the odd-numbered counts.

Un. Dos. Tres.

Un. Dos. Tres.

Un. Dos. Tres.