A Meeting in Seville

by Paul A. Mendelson

  “They’ll track me down, wherever I am,” he persists, but notices that his partner still doesn’t give a smile. He can’t have missed one: he is staring quite hard into her face.

  “Why do you look at me? All the day since we come here, you stare like you are seeking for something. It is not nice.”

  “Can’t a guy stare at his wife in Spain? No wonder we’re Brexiting.”

  William knows that he can’t keep scrutinising Luisa, like a map that might just tell him where exactly he lost his way. So he checks his watch, as he so often does. It’s an elegant object and far from new. The leather strap has been changed several times, as has the glass, but the face, with its slim Roman numerals, seems – he almost smiles at the word – timeless. He notices that Luisa is also looking at it, yet clearly not to check the hour. Their eyes meet, as if a memory is suddenly being shared, not of itself unpleasant yet one of which neither chooses to speak.

  “William, are you all right?” she enquires, with some concern. “That thing this morning – with the child. And you are looking so pale. Even for you. This job, it makes you ill, I think. We are not so young now. And, please, no more wine this evening.”

  He lifts the bottle, a tad tauntingly, then pours what little remains into his wife’s glass. His hand remains holding the stem, as if in some way he is holding on to her.

  “Luisa, seriously, you have to listen. Please. It’s not the work – or the booze. Not this time.”

  He must make sure he has the right words. It has never seemed more important. Yet he has the abiding fear that once he hears these words, however apt and well-chosen, as they stream from his own quivering mouth, it will diminish the momentous events of this afternoon to the symptomatic display of a nervous, alcohol-induced crisis. Which he may well have believed it to be, were it not for the old guidebook now nuzzling against the ever-faithful laptop in his bag.

  “You see, after I went off on my own—”

  “Do you remember this place?”

  Frustrated by the interruption, he hears himself foolishly following her tack. “I’d have remembered these prices! We never came here, I’m certain of it.” A random thought strikes him and he isn’t sure why. “Oh, by the way, thanks for the le Carré. I should’ve said.” He shakes his head. “I used to read so many novels, didn’t I?” Now he’s almost talking to himself, as he looks around the bustling room, but seeing only a time long gone. “Even thought that maybe one day I’d—”

  “William,” she interrupts again, “I think we should use these days. This occasion. To – you know. If you are not ‘too busy’.”

  “No, I’m not ‘too busy’, Luisa,” he says, crossly. “And here’s my bloody starter for ten. I saw YOU today. The young you. Right there – in the cathedral!”

  There! Now it’s out. He has said it. Make of this what you will. That I’m losing the plot, most probably.

  “Aah,” she smiles, “and did I look like this?”

  Out comes the photo album, as if he has simply plucked a tender memory from the ether and given her a welcome prompt. He is instantly confronted with a photo of their younger selves, in the courtyard of the Hostal Esmeralda. Taken no doubt by an accommodating member of staff or fellow guest.

  “I make this book – for the occasion. ‘William and Luisa. 1988 to—’”

  Luisa stops mid-pitch, sensing, through the uneasy stillness, a stiffening reluctance across the table. Yet she decides to flick doggedly on as though William, once teased by glimpses of what’s in store, like the trailer for a film he has been desperate to see, will find it impossible to resist.

  She pauses at their wedding pictures. Harmless stuff. Heartening, in their innocent way. And then on to that photo of the Yellow Café, with him sitting under an umbrella – for heatstroke prevention this time, not showers – offering her his wave and that funny, vaguely uncomfortable, half-smile.

  Luisa feels sure that William will warm to this, touched by these happier recollections, but his anguished face tells her that she is so wrong. Perhaps he misses his red hair, she thinks, the way she misses her impossibly slim figure and the innocent sparkle in her eyes. And everything else that speaks of being young and having the rest of your life ahead of you.

  Or perhaps, as Claire almost said, the past is a foreign country. And somehow they’ve mislaid their passports.

  Yet she knows that it runs far deeper than this. And that they both miss what’s missing – what got lost along the way. Something that a few snapshots pulled from a handbag, like a conjuror’s dazed rabbit, can hardly resurrect. Long-established fault lines, which a few days in a familiar city, however resonant the memories, may serve only to turn into chasms.

  And still she turns the page.

  Now a young Sandy sits there, at that same outdoor café, beaming into the camera. He has his arms around them both and his chair close to Lu’s.

  Swiftly onwards. Through the years.

  “I’ll go settle the bill.” William is on his feet and moving away. From her and especially from her fake-leather memory-bank. “You’re like this bloody city, Luisa. You reside unflinchingly in the past.”

  Luisa drains her glass and shrugs at the elderly couple at a nearby table, who appear to have been watching them with barely disguised interest. She doesn’t notice her own husband looking back at her.

  Rattled. And scared.

  ***

  As he slips the restaurant bill into his wallet, which he does religiously, even when there isn’t the slightest chance that he might claim it back, William pauses. He always takes this breath, perhaps just for a second and regardless of how pressed he is. The photo inside the worn and tattered leather, of Claire as a small child, never fails to capture those tiniest bits of heart and mind that aren’t ground away or otherwise engaged.

  He has barely registered the musicians playing in the busy street beside him. A talented guitarist and trumpeter, they perform what he has to assume is authentic local music, tailored for maximum reach and generosity. It is sufficiently on message to cause little Spanish girls to leap up and practise their flamenco for clapping onlookers. Some are even in their tiny costumes, which they must have insisted that they wear tonight and probably all of this special week.

  As he looks up, William notices another not-so-little Spanish girl, moving with accomplished grace to the local beat. Playfully clapping her hands and stamping for her smaller companions.

  Luisa hasn’t caught her husband watching, which only adds to the moment. William is able quietly to observe her, strutting her stuff with flair and power, almost blurring under the string of festival lights, utterly lost in the music. As if he has simply happened across an accomplished native lady of a certain age and decided she merits a brief interruption to his journey.

  He spots others watching in the crowded night-time street and wonders if they find this person attractive. He wonders also, despite the piercing memories being summoned back today, whether he himself still finds her so. Or whether he merely feels that, given the available evidence, he surely should. (If indeed such thoughts are still on his emotional radar.) But he recalls now, as the events of today sink in, how very attracted he once was. They talk of falling out of love, he thinks, as if it’s an accident that happens in a moment, whilst in truth it’s love that slowly falls out of you.

  Finally she spots her watcher and beckons him, somewhat unkindly, to join her in the dance, knowing that he would far rather jump off a bell tower. As he stands his ground, she shrugs and proudly flamencos towards him, smart holiday skirt swirling, sensible shoes stamping, pointing her camera even as she moves.

  “It’s like they’ve taken everything anyone’s ever known about Spain,” observes William, “and delivered it here in a truck.”

  Luisa is about to take his photograph – even though she knows it is something he has never fully enjoyed and dislikes even more these day
s – when a young Spanish woman approaches them. She takes the camera gently from Luisa’s hand and helpfully pushes her towards her unenthusiastic husband, for the perfect, romantic shot. The couple try to pose politely for this kindness, so that they can all swiftly get on with their lives. But life, as so often happens, gets in the way.

  Another woman, misreading the scene, assumes the photographer is a friend or daughter of the couple, who would surely prefer to be a part of the picture rather than simply its facilitator. So she virtually shoves this innocent third party right between William and Luisa, snatching away the precious camera with a single swipe.

  The bemused Sutherlands have no idea whether to protest or endure, nor how many more innocents will be recruited to this farce, whilst the good-natured stranger in their midst tries not to giggle. Happily, the photograph is swiftly taken; the latest snapper is no Richard Avedon. And the helpful locals soon depart, each delighted in their own kind way at a job well done.

  Luisa looks at William. He seems torn, as if waiting for some sort of permission to react. But he can’t help it. He has to laugh. And Luisa finds that she has to join him, wants to join him, the mirth erupting like a flamenco troop bursting in full flamboyant glory onto a stage. For a brief moment they roar and chortle together.

  But inevitably the laughter ebbs. And dies. Leaving them somehow even more bereft than before.

  “Maybe we should be getting back to the room,” says William.

  “What for, William?” says his bride of thirty years, and walks slowly away into the crowd.

  15

  The Plaza del Cabildo, just around the corner from the cathedral, is brilliantly lit. So, when William finally catches up with Luisa, having navigated his way with less agility but far more brute force through the festive night-time throng – all of whom appear to be seeing the entire medieval world and every passing nun through the lenses of their smartphones – he has no trouble recognising what she has been aiming for. And vaguely regrets what he called out to her on the way.

  “See, is not an ‘el McDonalds’ now,” she taunts him, because she probably still doesn’t know the expression ‘oh ye of little faith’.

  Across the small square is the establishment to which Luisa has been referring, since long before they arrived, as ‘our café’. The one in all the photographs.

  William seems to recall them patronising a load of differing establishments last time round and the sangria being equally as disgusting in each. But he keeps this opinion to himself and simply expresses surprise that Café Amarillo still has a yellow awning after all these years. Luisa doesn’t bother to explain to him that Amarillo is Spanish for yellow. He should know some bloody Spanish by now.

  “See! Just as it was!” she exults.

  There you go.

  And there’s even a young couple cuddling there, he glimpses through the roiling night-time crowd, probably sitting at ‘our table’. The crowd momentarily thins, drawn in different culinary rather than spiritual directions, and William realises that he knows the loving couple rather too well.

  Oh, God!

  The sensations he felt earlier this afternoon, which have been racking his body in the subsequent hours like major aftershocks, even as he tried not to think about them, rush back in with a new ferocity that almost fells him. It’s not just her now, invading his present; it’s him too.

  A matched pair!

  William Sutherland knows his own system, the inner workings that churn away and keep him just about upright and functioning. He is pretty damn certain that this is becoming too much for them. He knows too, without the slightest doubt, that he has to get Luisa out of here, get both of them out of here, if they have any chance of maintaining their sanity. And, however questionable, their ‘status quo’. Even if this sighting – as he still more than half suspects, despite mounting evidence – is merely his own personal delusion.

  And yet he can’t move.

  He wonders why it is demanding such a colossal effort to draw himself and his wife away. Like an addiction he can’t quite sate or an attraction too fatal to resist. But, of course, he tells himself, how could it not be so? How could anyone with any curiosity – no, simply with a heart that beats – turn away from such a scenario?

  Yet, somehow, for both their sakes – for all their sakes – he knows that he must.

  “Okay. Seen it. Still yellow after all these years.” He turns to go, the demon vanquished. For now. “So let’s—”

  “This girl – why does she wave to us?”

  What?

  He turns back and sure enough the young woman is waving. He knows that Luisa won’t have been able to make out the faces yet, her eyes aren’t what they were. Nor in truth can he – it’s Lu’s brightly patterned dress that he recognises from earlier. But it’s only a matter of time.

  “YOU SEE THEM TOO?” he cries, anticipating the inevitable.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I thought it might just be me.”

  “You thought what might—?”

  Luisa doesn’t complete the question, because she doesn’t need to. The young woman is striding briskly towards them, with a huge smile on her face and words of complete nonsense emerging from between her full, smiling lips.

  “Sherlock Holm-ess!”

  “Oh Dios mío!” gasps the mature version, suddenly not so mature, clawing for her husband’s arm with the affection of a rabid pit bull, in painful parody of former companionship.

  Lu beams at them both in sheer delight. William could put this down to her undiluted elation at encountering him once more, after their last magical encounter, but recalls with a twinge that this is much more how Lu sees – or saw – the entire world.

  “Hello – again!” she enthuses.

  “Oh, hello there – Luisa,” responds William, grateful at least that his lips still move. He has grave doubts as to the stability of the almost calcified figure he is supporting on his arm.

  “You have my book of Sevilla?” asks the young woman, not unreasonably. “I think perhaps I am losing it.”

  William, who also thinks perhaps he is losing it, tries to smile. “’Tis better to have loved and lost – than to gather no moss.”

  Lu laughs sweetly, showing her perfect, white teeth, but this playful, almost flirting, banter does nothing to restore Luisa’s equilibrium. Or indeed her sanity. What comes next serves simply to seal the deal.

  With a shrugged apology, William returns the crinkled old book warily to its rightful owner. At which point, as feared, it instantly becomes brand new again in her welcoming young hands.

  If Lu notices this, it mercifully doesn’t register. But she surely can’t fail, thinks William, to hear the long, high-pitched yelp emanating from the older woman, as if she has just been publicly impaled on a skewer. Thankfully, Lu is far too courteous to remark on it, sounding as it does like Luisa is in torment over surrendering a volume that wasn’t hers in the first place.

  “Gracias,” she tells William, running her long fingers delicately over the glossy cover. “Thank you. You will join us at our table, yes?” She explains to Luisa. “My husband – he is Glasgow also!”

  Luisa can only respond with a demented nod. William’s protests – that the young couple would surely prefer to be on their own – go unheeded. (He almost adds “on your honeymoon” but recalls just in time that Lu hasn’t as yet let this nugget slip.)

  As Lu moves back to her table, expecting her invitees to follow, Luisa finally spots young Will. She can’t as yet make him out too clearly – just enough to confirm that the world is ending and she is going totally insane.

  “AYYY!! I cannot breathe. I go to be sick.” She turns to William. “You knew? How can you not tell me? Most husbands, they tell their wives a thing like this.”

  “I did try, Luisa,” protests William, limply. “You’d only reckon it was the drink talk
ing.” He realises how unsteady he is and how chilled the still-warm square has suddenly become. “I have to say – you were a lovely young woman.” This observation doesn’t appear to calm her. Nor does his adding “wasn’t too bad myself.”

  “No. This is nightmare. I dream it, yes? This is not real, William.”

  “Well,” sighs William, shaking inside quite as much as Luisa is doing in plain sight. “Only one way to know for sure.”

  16

  The table for four sits well into the teeming square. Away from the main entrance to the enduring Café Amarillo.

  As he and Luisa have been invited over, William has to assume that the young couple are kindly offering up two spare seats. Fortunately, from William’s point of view, he can’t see any of his own contemporaries sitting there. To the onlooker of 2018 this table is currently quite empty. And, in this city, on this week, quite desirable.

  He wonders how it would play if another couple from today were actually parked at those very same places where the young couple sit so innocently. He can only guess that it would endow Will and Lu with some sort of weird double image – and that you wouldn’t see William for dust.

  But how do you work out the rules for a situation that so totally transcends them?

  The older couple walk slowly towards their young hosts, whilst their legs dutifully inform them that they shouldn’t honestly be relied upon for much support in the imminent future.

  “This man, he is my husband,” announces Lu proudly, as the older couple slump into their plastic chairs. Around them everything else seems totally normal, people drinking, laughing, constantly playing with their smartphones and tablets, which only serves to make the situation even creepier.

  Wait until they see William and Luisa chatting to thin air.

  “Hi, I’m Will?” says the young husband, a distinct question-mark in his voice. He appears quite bemused by two extremely nervy-looking old farts plonking themselves down in front of him.