2012
Jaén is a small city that sits snug between rising green mountains and forestry, a caravan route in ancient times. A crossroads between the travelling Arabs from the South and the Roman Christians from the East. From the Sierra Mágina mountain range, the city starts to edge into view - a sprawling municipality fanning out from its medieval nucleus at the feet of the Santa Catalina hill. The cathedral stands monolithic in the centre of the city, it’s large dominance over the skyline gives the momentary illusion of a powerful metropolis transplanted into what is an otherwise unassuming, ancient town. As you walk past the cathedral and head towards the large hill where the Jaén castle sits, you enter a completely separate world. Between the cathedral and the castle, there is the neighborhood of La Merced which stretches up to the foothills of the castle-topped mount.
Houses with colourful plaster walls lined steep, stairstep alleyways. A plump stray cat with arresting emerald eyes hopped onto the hood of a small beaten up yellow Opel, and a group of people spontaneously break into brief cries and claps of flamenco, as the spirit moved them.
To one side, a group of children were gathered around in a circle. Six or seven girls were chattering away in a language lost to anyone but them, and a slightly older girl sat on an abrasive brick wall, overseeing them. The elder could have been no more than 12, and the younger children ranged between six and nine. One was clapping her hands together rhythmically, another tapped each feet, and between them there was a metronome for the others to dance to. They were practicing flamenco, talking, and giggling.
“I will be famous like Carmen Amaya!” exclaimed one, thrusting her hips to the side and jutting her arms out behind her.
Carmen Amaya is largely considered the godmother of flamenco, through her artistry and virtuosity, she effectively altered the history of the artform. She crossed not only boundaries of the discipline by incorporating techniques from different types of dance, but she physically crossed continents through the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, she was the most famous gypsy woman that ever lived, and an idol to all of the gypsies that lived and breathed through the beat of the Spanish guitar and physical percussion that was flamenco.
As the other girls laughed along with La Andalucera, the elder girl peered over the hook in her strong nose, looking up from the daisy chain she had been weaving.
“Come here.” she spoke low, but commanded the attention of the whole group. The clapping and tapping of the feet stopped. The group of girls edged closer, with La Andalucera at the front. She seemed to be the eldest of the young children, and her older sister drew her brows closed in a tight frown as she muttered under her breath.
“You keep your voices down. If papa hears, you’ll be in the cage. You know it.” La Andalucera matches her older sister’s expression of disappointment. “And I won’t say anything, but you have to look after these rats until mama returns from the market. Tell her I went to get bread if I’m not home.”
Gypsies are traditional. Girls are domesticated from an early age and taught to look after their younger sisters, and undertake chores and jobs in the house from a young age. Families are large, and ambition to break free from the community are seen as disrespectful. Nobody should be bigger than the family, family is everything.
The priority for a girl should be to find a good husband who will provide to her one of the larger houses in the community, from a respected family. She should have no ambition to make money herself, or to do anything beyond raise, teach, feed and clean a healthy pack of children who would then go out into the world and repeat the same.
In addition to the concepts of remaining within the community and ensuring the future progeny succeeds, there is also a clear age-based hierarchy among the children and adults of a family. You do as your elder says, no matter what. So that is what La Andalucera did, despite her objections.
The older sister slipped away, to do something evidently that she was keeping from her parents, and La Andalucera reflected her bad mood on her newly found subjects.
“You,” she pointed at one who had curls in her hair and a red and white dress on, “shine papa’s dinner shoes. And after you finish, wash those potatoes.”
“But -- “
And now it was the turn of La Andalucera to turn disciplinarian. Interrupting and answering back to an order was a major faux pas. She stepped toward the five year old who had dared question her. The rest of the sentence would have been ‘we washed them already this morning’, but that isn’t how it worked.
“Your job is not to question, but to do.”
La Andalucera was as indoctrinated as any of them on the surface. But below the surface the truth was slightly different, for she didn’t care for the customs or the hierarchy, but she would certainly use it to her advantage when given the opportunity. She enjoyed the feeling of power she had when she could force people to do something against their will.
Olvidable
30th August 2021
La Andalucera pushed her black leather boots against the plastic seat in front of her, as she perched her bottom on the edge of the folded chair in the nosebleeds of the Michelob Ultra Arena. Damian Ayla was circling Betsy Granger as the final of the first night of wrestling excellence was coming to its conclusion. She was intrigued.
On the one hand, there was a world-famous name synonymous with success and greatness, a member of Legacy, associated with the crème de la crème. She was the crème de la crème herself. Famous in her own right, formidable.
And Betsy Granger stood across the ring from a sociopath. A word that had been used to describe her own self almost any time somebody mentioned her
Damian Ayla was meticulous, aggressive, pointed. He wasn’t taken with the fanfare that came along with her. Ignored it, focused intently on his goal and didn’t permit any variable to impact his outcome. It was beautiful to her, and as she walked through the hallways of the backstage area following the outcome, all she could hear were gasps as groups of people talked to each other. Crew, vendors, stray family and friends, security.
Nobody had really noticed her back there. She had been invited as an esteemed guest of Ophelia Knight, who’d been passed her information by a mutual acquaintance, but there was no mention of backstage admittance. Since adulthood descended on her, though, La Andalucera hadn’t really been much of one to listen to or respect authority.
Given that the crowd were dispersing through the main exits and the show was over, security were barely even paying attention anyway. She saunted through, a smile plastered on her face because the one that she felt was the better competitor had won, even though it hadn’t been clean. Granger had the match dead to rights before Kayla Richards slid under the bottom rope and put paid to any hope of that happening, but La Andalucera was of the opinion that it was only a matter of time. She’d watched through the night and seen the way Damian moved, and his wife Tara.
More evidence presented itself when she arrived in the female locker room, and noted that Tara Ayla had no possessions there. One of the women there remarked that she had made certain that she would have a private locker room with her husband, they kept to themselves and didn’t fraternise. The tone was saccharine, dripping with condescension, but as La Andalucera surveyed the room she felt like she understood. These women were at war tonight. Adrenaline, high emotions and high stakes, but yet here they stood for the most part gossiping like highschoolers.
Kayla Richards pushed through the door behind La Andalucera and threw a ball of tape she’d unstrapped from her wrist into the wall, then disappeared straight into the shower stall. She meant business, at least, and as she disappeared, La Andalucera’s attention was caught by the beaten finalist, who had her head between her knees. She looked distraught, heartbroken, frustrated. She’d been so close to Excellence, and had it whipped out from under her like it was nothing.
To her side, a younger girl with red hair was chirping. She seemed to be talking at a hundred clicks per minute or more, and Betsy was grinning and biting her tongue through it but it was clear to anyone with an ounce of social eptitude that this was the last conversation she wanted to be having. La Andalucera didn’t understand a whole lot of what was being said, but the younger girl - Chelsea Skye - was giggling and talking about this new boyfriend of hers.
La Andalucera had her own opinions on the pair of them and their choices of bedfellows, and it wasn’t exclusive to them either. But she took delight in knowing that she was laughing and making fun of her sex life with this colleague who seemed friendly but certainly was not a friend. Pity might have surfaced should she have felt empathy for Betsy Granger having to deal with this, if it wasn’t so masked and buried by the disdain that she carried for her.
To La Andalucera, they represented something vile. They were yet more sycophantic breeders who sleepwalk in goose-step autonomy behind the masses into carbon copy lives and don’t stop to think for one moment or question anything. School, college, job, husband, house, pets, children. Copy paste. Suit pants and single breasted blazer, scraped back hair and just enough makeup to make you unrecognisable. Two clones at different places on the same conveyor belt.
As one poured her heart out, and the other paid lipservice to the concept of empathy, La Andalucera thought only about smacking the taste out of their mouths. She restrained herself, though.
Now wasn’t the time to make her presence felt. Because the hardest hits are the ones that you don’t see coming, right? She needed to stay under the radar, and when a road agent asked her who she was, she gave an answer that made sense to nobody.
“Many beautiful flower give her perfume to the desert.”
The road agent’s eyes almost crossed as she tried to get her head around it, but between La Andalucera’s accent and her demeanor, it didn’t feel like a worthwhile pursuit. She smiled, and La Andalucera smiled back. The gypsy lady slumped down, sitting on her heels and digging her fingernails into the black denim jeans she was wearing. All around her were the people she was intending to sign a contract to become the peer of. Amongst these women were the people she’d share a ring with.
So, the task was to find out what use each of the faces in the locker room had.
Some would be useful in the short term, some in the long term. Some would be disposable but even in their sacrifice they’d serve some use. So she shrunk like a violet, into herself, watching them all. Observing.
The loudmouths, the ones that like to keep to themselves, the strategists, the ones who talk before they think. The talented ones, the ones that make up the numbers. La Andalucera wanted to be anonymous, apart from to the very few that she’d open her mouth to.
Her goal was to be forgettable. Olvidable.
When she was a kid the way she stayed out of trouble was by not being seen. Right now, she wasn’t looking for trouble. She was looking to get the high ground, position herself favourably. She smiled at Chelsea Skye when they made eye contact and then La Andalucera waved her pinky finger in the air, trying to politely acknowledge her conversation. She still didn’t really know what they were talking about but clearly she’d made her own assumptions about the mullet-haired guy that was following her around like a sad little puppy all the time.
Inolvidable
Present Day
AirBnB was a fantastic invention, and given her current situation of having recently arrived in America, knowing nothing and nobody and needing to travel for work, it was a godsend. To her it felt like a spiritual modernisation of the nomadic people that she descended from, and despite the fact that she was no longer part of that community, it still felt apropos to have some sort of transcendent connection to her roots.
Her fingers gripped into the balcony rail that overlooked the city of Los Angeles. She could see the Staples Center from where she stood, hip pressed to the concrete wall and fingernail tapping into the steel rail.
“What do you say, when nobody know you? And nobody know me? Everyone real quiet. Talk in metaphors.”
Her ebony hair clung to the side of her olive-skinned face, wind pressing it into her eyes. She stepped back from the balcony a little and then faced the house.
“When I was growing up in the Spain, everyone told me I can’t do it to be a wrestler because it’s for boys. I will be too weak, the girls are just to sell drinks in the bar, but I proved them to it. And now I am in America, where is different, where everywhere I am looking I see girls doing this.”
“I don’t know if they ever learned to fight the men, or if the number of girls mean they can learn the easy way to fight. What I think is that I have an advantage because I got spit on every day in the locker room after they found out I fool them. Oh and then after they spit on me they try to fuck me. I have to be strong, not like the ones who fight to the death and then braid each other hair in the locker room.”
“But that was the Spain. Here it’s different. We fight the men, we fight the women. Just happen that this time I have two women to fight and I am sure that they are just waiting to see about what La Andalucera is. It is a curiosity that I do not share.”
“Because Holly Rhodes she is not interesting, I see the story before. Young chica who think she will be the next surprise, she will defeat all the obstacle and then be valiant and victorious in the end. She will rise to occasion after some adversity, and good conquer all. Didn’t anybody teach you about nice guy finish last? About life isn’t movie? About fairytales only finish because after the credits roll, the bad guy come back to finish the job properly. Impossible for the good guy to win because he do not have the ruthless instinct to finish the job.”
“When I talk to people, like security guy over in arena yesterday, he laugh at me when I tell him that Damian Ayla deserve it to be the champion. That blond idiot Granger too stupid to pull trigger, standing looking at crowd try to think she beautiful icon, and before she knew it.. RAKATA! Head shattered. And Ayla don’t wait around to figure that shit out, he take the gift.”
“She might be flatter that I compare to Betsy Granger. Because girl like she want to be girl like Granger but to me they have no substance. Vapid clone, sleepwalk in denial into same pre-fabricated life that everyone tells you to dream for. That’s how she will be beaten, by doing the same thing they all do. Focus too much on how much she doesn’t know me, and overlook me, and then I can make hole in canvas with her head.”
In her hand, she twists the cap from a Budweiser and smirks.
“Other hand, other opponent. Not so many bright eyes or bushy tails, but more experienced. Maybe she think she seen a one or two like La Andalucera before. She maybe have more confidence then, maybe think she know that despite her ignorance she have seen at least one type of bitch in each shape in the past.”
“Maybe she right.”
“A girl can dream, Xari. Dream that she can make her mark. I mean already you have flag in the ground because you eliminate the one who they think going to win whole show, Kayla Richards. You blind side her when she distracted and advanced. Great initiative and all of a sudden everyone wondering what to happen next. But they wonder for no reason because you run into the Godslayer and he doesn’t need to open the deity elixir to vanquish the red head soccermom. He barely broke sweat, he make it look as you are average. Uninspiring, forgettable.”
“For all the hard work you did to be in semi final, everything is lost when you are crushed under heel of Damian so convincingly. Better next time to slip out quietly in battle royal and let someone else get embarrassed one to one. Maybe you learn your mistake and stay out of way whilst I change the face of the Holly.”
“Y si no? Then you will be the same as her. Changed. For me it is like a service, so if you don’t want to call to me La Puta Ama, then you can call to me the Darwin. Surviving only the strongest ones.”
To be a social chameleon and not cause a ruckus is one thing, but it was clear the time of peace was over for La Andalucera. She pulled the beer to her lips, shrugged her shoulders.
Last week she sat in the locker room, observing them all, wanting to be completely forgettable.
This week? She’d make sure she was absolutely unforgettable.
