When we first met, my wife asked me to join her in Jerez, Spain, where she wanted to spend two weeks studying with one of the best teachers of flamenco. There was no room at the fancy hotel where the rest of the students were staying, so we ended up at a cheap pension in the rough part of town. It was a ramshackle old building with a chessboard marble floor in the lobby and a worn banister running up in elegant oblongs to ever dingier flights near the skylight. The room was small, we left the windows open at night, and that was when, amid the noise and the cats yowling and the smashing of glasses, we heard the singing.