A Meeting in Seville

by Paul A. Mendelson

  “Hi, I’m W—”

  William stops himself just in time.

  He is already hugely relieved – whilst also just a tiny bit irked – that the younger couple show absolutely no signs of recognition, or even the vaguest niggling unease, as they confront their older counterparts. But for Will and Lu to hear their own names thrown back at them, by total strangers with similar accents, would be – at the very least – unsettling. Yet he finds himself at a total loss.

  Until he spots a passing waiter deftly transporting a tray of drinks, on his way to a larger table. On the tray is a familiar brand of gin.

  “Gordon!” he announces. “Yeah. Gordon. And this is my wife… er… er…”

  Luisa is beyond stumped.

  Helplessly, she follows her husband’s eyeline to the same moving tray. “Fanta!” she cries, with unwarranted exuberance. She can feel the younger couple’s eyes on her. William’s too. “I was orange when I was born,” she explains feebly. “Jaundice. You cannot call a child jaundice.”

  The newlyweds just nod. Lu, being Spanish, doesn’t quite understand. Will, being normal, doesn’t understand either.

  William notices that the young couple sit very close together. Hands constantly brushing, shoulder nudging shoulder, needing always to touch. Each word spoken by the one absorbed with the eyes as well as the ears of the other. He is also conscious that he and Luisa have set themselves down quite far apart, with bags of shoulder-room, eyes facing resolutely forward. It would seem perverse to shuffle up now into snuggle mode, should he even wish to do so.

  “You are on holiday here, yes?” asks Lu, now that the curious introductions are over.

  “No,” responds William, then feels Luisa’s eyes on him. “Well, yes, I suppose. Of sorts. Thirtieth anniversary. Pearl, isn’t it – I think. We were here on our honeymoon.”

  The younger couple are beside themselves. “We are on OUR honeymoon!”

  “NO!” cry William and Luisa, in a mock astonishment that, by rights, should fool no one.

  “Hang on. More importantly,” says Will, “Rangers or Celtic?”

  To Will’s delight, the older man begins to sing “Follow, Follow, we will follow Rangers” to the tune of a well-known hymn, even though William is well aware that they both, for their sins, follow Partick Thistle. But he knows that this is a standard Glaswegian test of religious affiliation rather than specific allegiance. Within seconds, Will is joining in. He only stops when the shirt William is wearing begins to buzz and vibrate.

  “What the hell is that?” asks the younger Presbyterian, pointing directly at William’s throbbing breast-pocket.

  “It’s just his—”

  “PACEMAKER!” announces William swiftly, cutting Luisa off and frantically thumping his bulging chest, until the unfortunate buzzing terminates of its own accord. “Anyone for a drink?” he croaks, through the pain. “Before I die.”

  William rises to find a waiter. So does Will.

  “I’ll get them,” insists the younger version.

  “Away ye go!” says the older. “You’re on a budget… I imagine.”

  “Away ye go!” responds Will. As they look at each other, he seems a bit perturbed, as if his senior might think he is taking the piss. “I mean, it’s okay. Really.”

  They both find themselves standing up to summon one of the busy waiters, each man waving competitively in a totally different direction.

  “That’s our waiter,” exults Will. “Señor!”

  Luisa, who isn’t as yet one hundred per cent in the loop or the loopiness but is catching on fast, momentarily wonders, amidst her barely controllable trembling, why Will is summoning a passing monk. Her current husband’s muttering under his breath “A pint of Benedictine” doesn’t really help. Nor does it ease her growing nausea that the men suddenly click and stretch their necks, backs and heads in an almost identically choreographed routine, like two robots of differing generations who both love Michael Jackson.

  Meantime the waiter goes off, clearly in search of richer pickings.

  Luisa takes a deep breath, stretches a smile across her face that looks as natural as a bride’s at a forced wedding and wades into the madness. “So – Will – you look like married life, it is suiting you. Yes?

  “Ask me again in thirty years, Fanta! But, hey, way too spooky. Two Glasgow lads and we each marry a Spaniard!”

  William and Luisa are in there like bullets, intent on dispelling any more hints of creepy coincidence. Unfortunately, not with the same faked history. Luisa proudly claims herself an Argentinian, just as William is rooting his exotic wife in sunny Puerto Rico.

  “And Argentinian!” continues her biographer bravely. “Moved to Buenos Aires as a wee baby. Her mum did Evita’s hair.” He dare not even look at Luisa now. But he can hear the familiar sighs kicking in.

  Lu, bless her, is totally fascinated by this. “Aaah! I think your children they must have the interesting blood.”

  She can’t fail to notice that the hitherto twitchy older couple seem suddenly very still. Their faces appear to have softened in an instant and jointly sagged, the rabbit-in-the-headlights look replaced by something more profound, its roots far deeper.

  “Oh, lo siento,” she apologises, on the cusp of mortification. “Perhaps you are not – do not have—”

  “Is fine!” Luisa is swift to ease the poor, young woman’s discomfort, the pangs of which she feels, not unnaturally, as if they are her own. “We have a beautiful daughter. Her name is Claire. Si. We adopt her, from a children’s home – when she is five years old.” She can’t believe she is sitting there telling herself her own future, yet at the same time it feels strangely natural. She looks at William, as if to convey “how weird is this?” But all his attention is fixed on Lu.

  “She’s married now, Lu. Sadly,” says William. “Well, not sad for her. Apparently.”

  “I miss her so much,” adds Luisa.

  “We both miss her, Fanta!”

  “They give us this whole holiday!”

  Luisa is suddenly lightening up, as if she has resolved to park the gargantuan madness of this entire grotesque situation. Just until she can be somewhere safe, in which to collapse or scream or simply lie down and die. “I tell Claire that many years ago we make the promise. To come back again to Sevilla after thirty years! But young couples they make these promises—”

  Luisa can tell that the young woman is clearly moved by this. It would appear to resonate quite neatly with her own romantic thinking. As indeed it would, she concludes, since it was her that thought it. Yet when Lu responds, idly playing with the cross on a silver chain around her neck, Luisa realises that the past still has its ability to catch her unawares.

  “Ah! Will and me, we want many niños. Then they will give us many holidays!”

  Luisa finds herself unable to speak. She simply gazes into the younger woman’s luminescent face, absorbing the hope and wonder in those tender eyes. Until she is interrupted by a dismissive laugh from the brash young man with the shock of red hair.

  It’s almost a snort, the distinctive timbre of which Luisa recognises, to the extent that it makes her want to smack him. Or at the very least take the young fool publicly to task.

  Fortunately the voice of what can only be a New Yorker breaks in.

  “Thank God – two vacant seats!”

  ***

  William and Luisa stare up at the newcomers in horror.

  The two middle-aged ladies, each adorned with ornate, baroque sunglasses on glittery strings and festooned with guidebooks, point professionally decorated fingers at the one remaining table in Seville with two seats still unoccupied.

  The first lady, the larger of the two but only just, elects herself spokesperson. “We spotted you guys at our hotel. The Herrera? The city’s like a can of sardines tonight.”

  Her partner
(and William, at least, has formed the view that they quite probably are partners, whilst at the same time berating himself for the assumption) turns the observation into a firm request. “Okay if we join you guys?”

  “NO!”

  There is no mistaking the decisiveness in the seated couple’s voices nor its frantic intensity. The two New York ladies are clearly taken aback. But hardly more so than the younger pair, whom William and Luisa can see but the visitors, thankfully, cannot. Will and Lu are trying and failing quite politely to seem unfazed by their new acquaintances, who have just screamed with loud and synchronised negativity into the empty air.

  The slightly larger newcomer sings to her friend, as if by putting the words to music she somehow cocoons them. “We’ve interrupted somethingggggg!”

  “Vamos, Marilyn. Adios todo el mundo,” says the other.

  The women smile uneasily and sidle off, hand in hand. William and Luisa, who never go out of their way to offend unless absolutely necessary, nod a pleasant yet still utterly disconcerting goodbye.

  “So!” says Will, striving for a normality that is rapidly dissolving in the sultry evening air. “Er – how was Sevilla in 1958?”

  Huh?

  “NINETEEN FIFTY-EIGHT?” yelp the older couple in bewildered unison, immediately screwing things up again on the normal front.

  It is William who catches on first. Gamely, he attempts to steer the storm-tossed and by-now seriously leaky craft back into the shallows. “Oh. Yeah! Er – thirty years ago – Fanta?! Backwards from today? From 1988?” He is sounding increasingly desperate. “On our honeymoon?”

  Out of the corner of his eye he can see his wife of thirty years struggling, as if someone has just told her that the world is flat after all and unfortunately the table she’s chosen is perched right on its crumbling edge.

  “Yes. Married April 1958!” laughs William, manically. “Well, as the poet Philip Larkin famously said – ‘sexual intercourse began in 1963’. So we were ahead of our time, Lu.”

  “Gordon!” Luisa’s admonishment at least reassures him that she is back in the game.

  “I love Larkin!” exclaims Will, clearly delighted to be returning to more stable ground. “I’m an English graduate. Glasgow Uni. But where on earth did you two meet – a Scot and an Argentinian?” The solid nudge that Lu gives him doesn’t chasten him in the least. “What? You married a writer, Mrs S! Everything’s a story.”

  They barely notice the flicker of sadness that sweeps across William’s face. And why should they? He is moving on with some urgency, his apparent quest now to elicit information from them. Information that, of course, he already knows, yet somehow needs to hear again.

  “Writer, eh? Aye… well. You must have a fine imagination.”

  “Will is so good with the imagining, Gordon,” boasts his new wife. “I say to him, Will, one day you write the books for children and I am doing the pictures.” She smiles a bit sheepishly. “Is good to dream – yes?”

  Luisa looks wistfully yet not unkindly at William, needing with a curious urgency to check on his reaction. To her surprise, he shifts his chair even further away from her, edging himself closer to Lu.

  “British Embassy – Buenos Aires – 1958. I was out there to help our Israeli friends find Nazi war criminals—” William is aware that Luisa is staring at him open-mouthed, but he doesn’t care. William ‘Gordon’ Sutherland is on a roll. “—When into my office trots this lovely, young, Argentinian woman. Wanting to tell me of – of an elegant brothel that a notorious ex-SS commandant is known to frequent. Aye. She’d seen through his disguise, Lu – as a… porcelain salesman. Azulejos.” He is watching their faces – the young couple are riveted. And why wouldn’t they be? “That was enough for us to find our man – in the bedroom of one of the ‘working girls’. Who just happened to be – you guessed it—”

  As the couple gawp, Luisa nearly chokes.

  Will – thankfully – has the grace to move things on. “O-kay. So – what do you recommend, Gordon? Y’know, that we do here in Seville?”

  “Well—” begins William, but Luisa is in there, before he does any more damage. Perhaps only William can pick up the genuine fear in her voice.

  “You must do – exactly what it is you were going to do, Will. Exactly.” She rises abruptly from her chair, realising, as she stands, just how rigid her entire body has become. “Now I think we let you get on with your honeymoon. Gordon? GORDON!”

  “Eh? Oh. Yeah. We’d best be—”

  “Wait! Por favor.”

  Lu is standing too. And holding out her bulky camera. Luisa immediately takes it and whilst it can’t help but suddenly look its age, it is clearly in the most capable of hands. She swiftly adjusts it, with a familiarity that might confuse a more suspicious mind. Now she signals the couple to sit down close together and smile, instructions they are only too willing to obey.

  On the move himself and scooping up his precious laptop bag from beneath his feet, William spots that a paperback book has slipped out of the dark holdall resting against Will’s chair. He casually picks it up, noting with a smile that it is indeed Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl. Luisa’s recall was, as ever, total. He slips it back into the young man’s bag, amongst the notepads and the duty-free fags, where it belongs.

  Luisa takes the photo. Fortunately, the camera appears still to be functioning. She hopes, for the youngsters’ sake, the roll of film inside it is too.

  With waves, nods and some relief, they leave the blissfully ignorant and faintly bemused honeymooners to enjoy their evening. As they have every confidence they will.

  Neither William nor Luisa notices Pablo, sitting at a small table beside the café entrance. He enjoys a quiet coffee and a Ducano as he watches his new guests stagger slowly away.

  17

  “In miracles, Luisa, water turns to claret! In miracles, the Virgin Mary pops in for tea! In miracles…”

  William barrels unsteadily through the good-natured crowds milling idly around a small shopping street quite close to his hotel. The throng, happily oblivious to the time-clash phenomenon taking place in their midst, are on their leisurely post-tapas, pre-dinner way to do some late-night, classy designer or tourist tat shopping. And catch the evening’s next procession, which is visibly and noisily imminent.

  William just wants to lie down.

  Preferably with his mouth wide open, under an optic of Scotch.

  Nothing makes sense any more and he’s bloody sure no one round here is going to help him, not even the local archbishop. “Moving in mysterious ways” is no succour to him right now and the drumming he can detect coming closer is as nothing compared to the drumming in what he used to comfortably call his brain.

  Pilgrims with rosaries and agnostics with cameras receive equally short shrift, as he bangs elbows, bags and the occasional well-placed knee against anyone daring to stand in his way. Children and old people included. An equal-opportunity bruiser, he’s not even being British and saying “sorry” all the time. They don’t apologise in Bedlam.

  He proclaims his bewilderment back over his shoulder to his similarly shell-shocked wife, who is struggling through the swirl to keep up.

  “In miracles, I make a profit during this sodding downturn,” William continues relentlessly, “and we don’t have to wonder where our next bloody euro is coming from! So don’t talk to me about miracles!”

  She wasn’t, actually.

  Luisa was thinking that at least the evening’s lunacy had kept him away from the constant checking of his email. Which – when she considers it – is indeed a miracle. But as soon as she catches up with him, he turns round and shouts into her face. This is, of course, in order to be fully heard above the chatter but also because he wants to shout into her face.

  “I’m a bloody marketing consultant, Luisa. We don’t do miracles!”

  Even as he yells t
his out, some inner commentator tells him that these particular words have most probably never before been bellowed within the ancient walls of one of the greatest cathedral cities in Europe, on the most important week in the Catholic calendar.

  And now, of course, the procession arrives.

  Right on schedule, he imagines; no mañana for this lot. There’s no way he or anyone else can move around and beyond it. More Nazarene hordes, more parishioners with a cross to bear, another vast band of brothers from the hermandadas. And, rising up above her ravishing floral and candlelit nest, precious metals glinting in the sunlight, Mary herself. The newly bereaved and exquisitely carved mother, gazing down with such heartbreaking love and grace on all her children.

  From a tiny balcony just above them, an elderly man, surrounded by his family, suddenly begins to sing.

  Even William, who thinks he can never be surprised again, is stopped by this. It isn’t that the voice is so very beautiful, at least not to him, but somehow the depth of untarnished emotion sends it close to heaven.

  A small woman, dressed entirely in black, whom he discovers standing peacefully beside him, tells him “saeta”. He has no idea what this means but he guesses she is putting a name to what he is hearing. It feels spontaneous, this “saeta”, as if the impenetrable words the man chants so fervently come directly from his heart not a hymn sheet.

  It is Luisa, long-lapsed Catholic, who breaks the spell. “So – what? We ignore this? How? How we are to ignore this not-miracle?”

  “I don’t know, Luisa! Don’t ask me – I just don’t—” He looks up at the singing man, disconcerted, but his own words speak of more earthly matters. “Did you see how she looked?”

  Luisa knows that he is talking about her. Luisa – Lu – Montero. Lu Sutherland for the past four days. As she was. As she never will be again. “Full of life,” she ponders. “Full of dreams.”

  “I’ll give them a wake-up call in the morning.”

  Luisa grabs him with an urgency that takes him unawares. “No. You do nothing with them! You hear me, William? Nothing! … SUDDENLY I AM SCREWING NAZIS IN BUENOS AIRES?”