The K-Pop Idol in Andalusia

Part One — The House That Doesn't Sing

Outside it was forty degrees. Inside the cave it was cool.

Ana sat on the line between the two. Sacromonte’s summer scorched the hillside white all afternoon, and people were pushed into the shade, and out of the shade down into the caves. A narrow, deep hollow with its walls limewashed white. The heat of the day couldn’t follow her this far in.

Sound could. This cave doubled everything — one guitar string, one stamp of a heel, and even the moments when nothing sounded at all.

The tourists filed into the wooden chairs. Lukewarm water bottles in their hands, cameras around their necks, pamphlets fanning. Half of them had come in without knowing what this place was, and the other half believed they knew. Ana sat on the low chair beside the stage and did not count them. She listened to the rhythm of them sitting instead. The ones who hurried. The ones who came in late and apologized their way down a row. The ones who couldn’t decide where to sit. People had a beat in the way they walked, and Ana had been reading the beat before the face for a long time now.

Old Curro lifted the guitar onto his knee in the corner of the stage. His hand went across the strings once, twice, tuning. The chatter in the cave dropped on its own. Ana laid her hands on her knees. Tonight, her instrument was these hands.

The first palo was a soleá. Slow, heavy, a song for someone who’s alone.

Curro’s guitar laid down the skeleton of the twelve-beat cycle — the compás everything else would be built on. Ana set her clapping on top of it: palmas. Starting muted, then opening into the bright sound that struck the cave wall and came back. Clapping wasn’t language, but it was the most exact language Ana knew. Not early, not late, setting the flat of her palm down in the precise place between one beat and the next. She had done this every night for five years.

The place where the singing should come arrived.

The bar where the first verse of a soleá rises. Once, her throat would have opened here. It didn’t now. Ana changed the grain of her clapping by a single layer instead — and the customers didn’t notice, and the tourists assumed it was simply a night without singing, and that was enough.

Clapping was safe. No matter how long she did it, clapping never brought anything back. Singing was different. If she opened her throat, the last night she had opened it came up with the breath. So for five years Ana had used only her hands.

Onstage, the young bailaora rose and began to dance. The audience’s eyes went to her. Ana preferred it that way. Nobody watched the palmera. A palmera is there to keep time, not to be looked at.

That was when Ana saw the man.

Back row, against the wall. An Asian man, sitting alone. Cap pulled low, mask tugged down under his chin. Asian tourists weren’t rare here, but they mostly watched the stage through a lens — phone up first, checking the screen, reassured it was real only once it had appeared there.

Not this one. His hands were empty. Both of them resting on his knees, watching with his eyes only.

No. Not watching. Listening.

Ana looked a little longer. His right hand was moving very slightly on his knee. Fingers, one after another, in sequence. At first she thought it was a tremor. It wasn’t.

He was counting. Twelve.

She knew he was counting the beat because her own palms were clapping that beat. His count and hers were the same.

Tourists don’t count. Tourists just listen. The only people who count are the ones who learned this music in the body — people who have to stand on a stage, and people who have to hold one up. The habit of walking your fingers to twelve doesn’t arrive overnight.

The dance reached the llamada. The call that says now it moves on. The bailaora’s feet struck the floor three times and stopped, and Curro’s guitar drew breath, and Ana’s clapping went into the stillness with them. There are places in flamenco where the sound stops. Not empty — written. A silence set down in the score. The whole cave dropped together into that half-beat of quiet.

And in that quiet, one footfall sounded.

Not loud. The heel of a shoe striking stone once. But that once landed exactly in the place that had been left empty. Between beat and beat, in the half-beat nobody had asked anyone to fill.

It was so precise that Ana thought at first Curro had done it. Curro looked up with a face that said he’d thought the same.

He hadn’t. It was the man in the back row.

He wore the expression of someone who didn’t know what he’d just done. His foot had answered on its own. Something worn into the body had heard a call and returned it by reflex. He was looking down at his own right foot as if it had just belonged to somebody else.

The cave went still.

The tourists had no idea what had happened. A beat had slipped and caught again; part of the show, they’d have assumed. But the three people on the stage knew. The bailaora stopped and turned to look. Curro’s hand hung above the strings. And Ana —

Ana looked at the man’s face for the first time.

Not that she saw it. Half of it was under the cap and the mask; there was hardly a face to see. She felt like she’d seen it anyway.

It was the face of someone startled by a sound he’d made himself. A body that had answered without asking its owner’s permission, and no way to take it back.

Ana knew that face. It had happened to her, too. Sometimes, clapping, her hands would find the place where the singing goes. Laying an accompaniment under a song that wasn’t there. When that happened Ana would correct her hands quickly, and nobody ever noticed, and afterward her heart would run for a while. As if she’d been caught — as if someone had seen that her body still remembered the song.

Neither of them said a word. He had the face of a man with no Spanish, and Ana was five years into not making sounds she didn’t have to make. But in that short space something passed between them. They had recognized each other. Two people whose bodies had once made a sound without asking.

Curro found the strings again. The practiced guitar carried the soleá on and made the half-beat accident into nothing at all. The bailaora turned back and finished. The tourists applauded. Ana’s hands returned to the beat as though nothing had happened.

But her clapping shook, very slightly. Not enough for anyone else to know. Enough for Ana to know.

It was the first time in five years. Ana was not a woman who dropped a beat. After she sealed the singing away, precision was the one thing she had left. The reason she could stay in this cave without a voice was that her hands had never once been wrong. And tonight those hands had wavered half a beat, because of an empty-handed man in the back row.

When the show ended and the lights came up, the seat was empty. He had gone. Nobody had seen him stand. A man who had come without a sound went without one.

Ana looked at his empty chair. Then at her own hands. There was still a faint sting in her palms where the beat had slipped.

Outside the cave, the hill was still breathing out the day’s heat even at night. The white walls glowed faintly in the dark, and between them every alley held a pool of black shadow. Ana stood a long time on the line where the white met the black. Something had come into that cave tonight and gone back out, and she couldn’t put a name to it.

He was a man she couldn’t talk to. She didn’t know his name, or where he’d come from. There was no reason she would ever see him again.

But his foot had filled a place nobody had asked anyone to fill.

Ana thought about that half-beat for a long time.

Sion didn’t look down at his own foot until he was outside the cave.

What that foot had just done — he knew and didn’t know at the same time. His body had answered on its own. A call had come from somewhere, and the foot had replied. It was the thing he had done tens of thousands of times on a stage across eight years: someone gives a cue, you put your body on it. That one thing, Sion did better than anyone alive. Which was why his foot, in a strange cave in a strange country, had gone ahead and answered without being asked.

The problem was that nobody had given him a cue.

It was a performance. He was in the audience. An audience’s feet don’t answer. His had, and in that moment every person in the cave had looked at him. The woman clapping beside the stage most of all. Sion couldn’t hold under it. He stood and left the way he had come, without a sound. That was one of the few things he knew how to do. Disappear without being noticed.

The hill was warm even at night. The white walls were still giving back the day. Sion pulled the mask the rest of the way down and breathed.

Nobody here knew him. That was a good thing, though he couldn’t have explained why. Explaining had never been Sion’s job. In meetings, the choreo team explained the choreography. The producer explained the track. In interviews Dohan-hyung explained the group. Sion’s job was to take all of it and do it with his body.

He took the piece of paper out of his pocket. An address in Granada, written by hand. Jieum had given it to him.

A few weeks ago, at Viti — the lighthouse studio in Iceland. Sion had been circling the same spot for weeks, unable to finish the second song. The first one he’d finished. The song built from the sounds of the jungle, the one that went into Jae-i-hyung’s documentary. Sion’s first composition. People had been surprised: the quiet one wrote something. Sion hadn’t been surprised. That song wasn’t made, it was moved. The sounds were already in the jungle; all he had done was take dictation.

For the second song there was nothing to take dictation from.

Jieum played Sion’s files at the console over and over. Then she said, “The sound’s good. But these aren’t your sounds. They’re sounds you know.”

Sion didn’t understand. He did know how to keep not-understanding off his face. Jieum knew he hadn’t understood, too.

“Put it simply,” she said. “You’re good at going out and finding good sound. But there isn’t a single sound in here that you made.”

Then she wrote the address down. She said that a long time ago, a Korean guitarist’s recordings had circulated quietly among people who did music. That the man had spent his life chasing sound and ended up in Granada. That he had passed away, and someone he’d left behind was still doing flamenco in that neighborhood.

“What you’re looking for might be there. It might not. But right now you need to go somewhere.”

Sion understood the part about needing to go somewhere. The rest, he didn’t.

So he came. It was his sabbatical month. The first month in eight years he had been separated out from the group. The clause Dohan-hyung had forced through at contract renewal — a sabbatical month, support for individual music. Hyung had been the first, Jae-i the second, and this time it was Sion. His hyungs had each gone off somewhere and come back with something of their own. Only Sion still hadn’t found anything.

His phone buzzed. Seung-mo-hyung.

Comeback schedule’s out. Report date in three weeks. Your track’s going in, right?

Sion looked at the screen. Three weeks. A song he hadn’t even started had to be finished in three weeks. He started to answer. His fingers stopped over the keys. Yes hyung would be a lie. I don’t know would worry him. Words were always one of the two — a lie, or a weight. So Sion mostly said nothing. Silence, at least, was never wrong.

He sent a thumbs-up instead. Hyung would understand from that. As much as there was to understand.

He put the phone away and walked. As he walked, the fingers of his right hand moved on their own. One, two, three… twelve. Back to one. He couldn’t remember when it had started. In the practice room, even during breaks, his fingers counted. Rubin said he counted in his sleep.

Sion knew why. If he dropped the beat on a stage, all five of them went off their marks. Sion was the one at the center holding the reference, and if the reference shook, the group shook. So he counted. Because if he didn’t count he might drop it, and if he dropped it there might be no reason for him to be standing there.

Other people called it diligence. Sion knew it was fear, and that was another thing he’d never put into words.

He hadn’t even flipped his name.

Jae-i-hyung had flipped his real name into a stage name when they debuted. Han I-jae, Jae-i. Turning yourself over onstage and becoming someone else. Sion hadn’t done that. Jung Sion. The same name on the stage and off it. There’d been nothing to flip — on the stage and off it he was equally without words, equally a person who lived through his body.

Strangely, though, hardly anyone called that unflipped name. The names of quiet people don’t get said much. His hyungs were more likely to knock his shoulder than to say Sion. Fans called him the main dancer. He had a name; it just rarely got made into a sound.

Whether that hurt or whether it was easier, Sion had gone back and forth on for a long time, and had come eight years without settling it.

On the way back to the small room he’d taken in the Albaicín, an old man in an alley asked him something in Spanish. It might have been directions; it might have been a light for a cigarette. Sion didn’t understand. He had no Spanish. His English was short. He held up an open palm and shook his head, and the old man shrugged and went on.

A country where the words didn’t reach. And strangely, that was comfortable. Here, his having no words wasn’t a particular thing about him. Here, nobody’s words reached anybody, and so his silence didn’t look like something missing.

In the room he sat on the bed. He didn’t open the laptop. If he opened the file he’d stall in the same place. Sounds that were good and weren’t his. Sounds he knew. Sounds he could move and couldn’t make.

He looked at his right foot.

He thought about the sound that foot had made in the cave. The one strike that filled a half-beat nobody had asked anyone to fill. That wasn’t a sound he knew. That was… an answer. Something had asked, and his body had answered. Not a set piece of choreography on a stage — his foot coming down by itself in a place nobody had assigned. For eight years he had taken movement other people made and completed it with his body. Today, for the first time, his body had put out something of its own.

Half a beat’s worth.

Sion thought about that half-beat for a long time.

And then, before the second song for once, he thought about the woman who had been clapping.

Sion didn’t know flamenco. He didn’t know what her role beside the stage even was. But one thing had caught on him. She hadn’t opened her mouth once for the entire show. She used only her hands. And the sound of that clapping looked like it had more to say than anything happening on the stage.

And when Sion’s foot made its sound, she had looked at him. Not a startled face. A face that knew. The face you make when you see something happen to somebody else that has happened to you.

Sion knew that face. He’d been looking at it in the mirror for eight years.

Tomorrow, he thought, he should go back to that cave. Why, as usual, he couldn’t have put into words.