“We moved. It is the gypsy inside of us.”
William stares at him. Then rushes across the road.
***
The noise is deafening.
The CD shop is quite small and narrow, yet stretches a surprisingly long way back. It is already full of people, mostly Spanish, many of whom are happily singing along with the blaring music. This is William’s idea of hell and the surge of hope he felt on that bench in the square swiftly evaporates into the music-drenched air.
Then he sees her.
The young woman is bent over what he assumes must have been a glass counter, with its most precious items displayed beneath. All sealed and secured, until a man with a special key can release them. It is obviously such a man, or indeed woman, with whom Lu is talking so volubly.
William’s gaze lingers once more on her face. He stands transfixed, for a moment, by the aching beauty he still remembers. A beauty he recognises now as being deepened by the years, rather than withered from them. Not just on the outside but – more importantly – the beauty that lies within. It isn’t Luisa Sutherland that he is wanting to change, he reassures himself, but rather the circumstances that changed Luisa Sutherland. And himself, of course, along with it.
Which makes him even more determined.
William knows that he has to attract her attention, across the decades, amidst all the noise and bustle. But he can’t physically reach her. In his pulsating, musical world, there are stacks of CDs and a display of curious musical instruments, not to mention curious customers, barring his way. So he has to resort to an undignified yell.
“LU? HI!”
The young woman turns at this, as indeed do most people in the record shop, despite the racket they themselves are making.
“Oh. Gordon. How are you – today?”
She smiles at him with genuine delight, without raising her voice. Because, as he soon realises, there is no need. Her shop is most probably empty. It certainly isn’t playing Now That’s What I Call Andalusian Music no 86. He finds himself wondering if she would offer so disarming a smile to any considerably older man she might be forever bumping into on her honeymoon or whether she considers him just the slightest bit attractive. Unfortunately he can’t quite hear the words that might afford him some clue, as they are burying themselves beneath this same smile.
“COULD YOU SPEAK A LITTLE LOUDER?” he yells.
“Why?” she asks, not unreasonably, wondering why he doesn’t just move a little closer. He really is a quite peculiar man, she thinks to herself.
“ER – MY EARS. YOU KNOW,” he explains, pointing to his ears in case the concept is proving too tricky for her. “AGE!”
“Oh – OKAY.” He can see her give a bemused shrug to the phantom jeweller. As well she might, for the elderly man, who is most probably six feet under by William’s time, has no idea as to whom his pretty young customer is shouting. “THIS IS BETTER? YOU CAN HEAR ME?”
William turns to a fellow customer, who is staring at him. “Bloody madness.” Which, whilst undoubtedly true, isn’t totally satisfying as an explanation. “JUST! I HOPED I’D RUN INTO YOU AGAIN.”
Lu just nods. Had she thought about it, she might have wondered how come this curious Scotsman keeps turning up in places she just happens to be. But she is a rather sweet and really quite innocent girl and the concept of stalking hadn’t yet fully taken hold in late Eighties Spain.
“I WANTED TO APOLOGISE TO YOU. FOR YESTERDAY,” he continues.
“APOLOGISE? PERQUE?” she responds, getting rather used to this empty-shop shouting. She hardly notices the wary old jeweller swiftly returning and locking up the precious items he has only just taken out.
“You could apologise to us too, Señor,” mutters a disgruntled music-lover.
William just ignores this. “CAN WE TALK SOMEWHERE LESS CROWDED?”
As the customers respond with a heartfelt “por favor!”, Lu looks around the empty jeweller’s shop and wonder if Gordon, husband of the oddly named Fanta, is actually insano.
“I was making a gift. For Will,” she explains, and, if he doesn’t hear, so be it. “His watch, it is not working. And he always need to know the time! I come back later. Buenos días.”
This farewell is to the jeweller, who finds himself both disappointed and rather relieved.
The CD shop customers, however, are wholeheartedly the latter.
38
Wherever I walk in this city, thinks William, I find myself beside the bloody river.
He is trying to remain pleasantly casual as he strolls with Lu, but in his head he is desperately seeking some place where there are relatively few people, at least ones whom he can see. And a location that most probably hasn’t changed too much within the last thirty years. It takes only one mistake, he reckons, such as walking on a bridge that was only constructed in 1992, to freak out the poor young woman completely. Unless of course her Catholicism gets the better of her and she sees him in a new and rather more radiant light.
When he comes across what looks like a massive park, he beams at his young companion with genuine gratitude.
“Here is my favourite place in all of Sevilla!” she exclaims, throwing her slender arms wide, as if better to express her appealingly childlike delight. William feels he could almost pick her up and swirl her around, but he would most probably rupture something, even before she could begin fending him off with her small but powerful fists.
“Parque Maria Luisa. She is named as me. Luisa. It is so verde,” she enthuses. “You have been here before, yes? Much of it is done for the Exposicion. 1929.”
“I think I remember it. The park I mean, not the Exposition! Isn’t there a very grand building somewhere round here? Aye. They may have used it in some sort of film.”
For a moment he notices a curious sadness wash over the young woman’s face. But just as swiftly it has gone. “Si,” she smiles. “It is DH Lawrence of Arabia!” And suddenly William remembers and feels some of this sadness, but he can’t quite recall why. “Is also Jardin Botanico. Many beautiful trees and flowers. And palomas. The doves, yes. As my friend!”
As they walk along the tree-lined avenues and into the heart of the massive park, they occasionally side-step people who, to each other, aren’t there at all. To William it looks like she’s a wee bit tipsy and he can only assume that he must appear very much the same to her. So he tries to do his swaying just outside her eyeline. Then Lu says something that takes him completely by surprise.
“You and Fanta are having the big argument yesterday at corrida, yes?”
He hadn’t realised that they had begun the row to end all rows even before they had fully quit the Sol. Or perhaps the young woman, an artist and photographer primed to observe, had simply picked up from their body language that a major storm was brewing. Yet, before William can explain or perhaps even defend himself, she surprises him once more.
“This is wonderful.”
Wonderful?
“Is it? How so?” He is going to add “pray tell me” but she wouldn’t understand and facetiousness is not the look he’s going for.
“Si. You are still together!” she explains in delight, like it is just so obvious. “This is what marriage is, I think. The fighting and the making it up. The staying. You are – how is it – an ‘example’.”
She laughs at this, almost as if she is embarrassed. William just smiles thoughtfully. Perhaps this is the “example” he and Luisa have kept in their heads all these years. From their own honeymoon. He decides he won’t go there – it’s a maze out of which he’ll never find his way and he’s learning that, when magic intrudes, logic flies straight out of the window. And, of course, the “still together” bit sadly doesn’t ring quite true.
They reach a water lily pond. William is reminded of being dragged screaming by Luisa to Monet’s home at Giverny and, to his surprise,
rather loving it. He waits for this younger version of his personal art-appreciation instructor to sit on a bench.
Her body language leads him to believe there is room beside her. As there is clearly a bench still there, albeit most probably not the same one, he parks himself next to her and prays that some predatory stranger from the past doesn’t decide to sit down on top of him and strike up a conversation with a beautiful young lady. One who is sitting quite on her own and appears to be talking to herself. (Hopefully, the latter activity would put even a determined predator off.)
“Fanta, she works, yes?”
He still can’t quite get used to his wife being a fizzy drink, although it is not totally inapposite, so he just nods. Yet it appears that his inquisitor is after more.
“She went back to college, Lu – when our wee Claire was ten. She’s a conservator now. A bloody good one actually.” He smiles at Lu’s puzzled face, as she repeats the meaningless word to herself. “She preserves things. You know, old documents. Photos…” He smiles, wryly. “Memories.” Now one of his own memories flutters back, one at which he is certain the young woman will be utterly amazed. “D’you know, Lu, she’s actually held Shakespeare’s will – right there in her hands.”
Lu’s face registers not so much amazement as shock bordering on total disgust. “NO?! Dios mío!” She cries out. “They still keep it? And they let the ladies touch it?!”
It’s William’s turn to be puzzled. “Eh? A will is just a document, Lu, that— Whoa! You didn’t honestly think—?”
She blushes sweetly. She did honestly think. At exactly the same moment, they each begin to roar.
“I cannot believe you thought—”
“Yes, okay, Gordon.”
As if he isn’t enjoying sufficient complication, an elderly nun chooses this moment to approach William with a collecting bowl. He hasn’t the least intention of talking to her, nor of dropping coins into what will undoubtedly appear to Lu like thin air or worse, so he simply waves her off.
“I think you like the niños,” says Lu, staring in the nun’s direction, with a soft smile.
“Huh?” says William.
It takes him a while to work out that there must be small children in Lu’s vicinity, or at least in her eyeline. Kids who most probably have their own children by now, but nonetheless it is to them that she thinks William is waving. He is certainly not going to disabuse her. Especially not when she has led him straight into the avenue towards which he has been painfully struggling.
“Ah. You want a lot of niños, don’t you?”
“Oh, si,” she laughs, although she is clearly deadly serious. “Many. But Will, he say that for the kids, you need much money.”
“They aren’t cheap to run, Lu.”
“I know this. I do know this thing.” She stares out at the lily pond, and perhaps also at the children. “But sometimes, Gordon, I think he will never have enough of the money. To be happy. Never enough to have the kids. Not even one kid. Even if he win at the bloody casino every single day!” She can sense his shock as she turns to him. “Excuse me, please. He say to me, Lu, bad things they are always around the corner. I say to him, we are not around this corner! We are here.” William tries vainly to interrupt. “Will, I tell him, you are good writer. I say this. But it takes the time. He want to make the money from it now. He want all the nice things he never had. I understand this. I do, Gordon. But not tomorrow. Yesterday!”
William stays silent for a while, watching the water lilies gently bob. So much life beneath the stillness. He wonders if there are frogs here this time of the year.
Finally he responds, still gazing at the water. “It’s hard to imagine what it’s like to be poor, Lu. If you’ve never been there.” She starts to pick at her hands. William watches. “What do your parents think of him?”
He has no idea why he asks this. It’s not as if he isn’t all too aware of the disapproval, the sneery rumblings that used to cause such pain and anger and feed his own lack of self-worth, like blood to a tumour. Perhaps it still smarts, he thinks with some sadness, even after so many things – and people – are dead and buried. Even after he had thought these feelings were buried with them.
“WHO CARES WHAT MY PARENTS ARE THINKING?! I am NOT my—” He wonders if they can hear the shouting, back where she is. She’s certainly looking around, a bit shamefaced. “Oh, excuse me. I am Spanish – always the shouting.” Shame the nun didn’t hear it, he thinks. It might have finally sent her packing. (Where, sadly, a middle-aged man talking to his imaginary friend clearly hasn’t.)
But now he’s stumped.
He knows that there is something he has to tell her, some important wisdom that he needs to impart. Simply a gentle but firm warning from a friend that will hopefully change her life and equally hopefully his. Yet this is something so out of left field, so intrusive and personal, not to mention fundamental, that there is absolutely no way he can get there with this person. Someone who thinks he is nothing more than a kind, if somewhat eccentric, stranger.
Then the drums begin.
They’re still far off but he notices that Lu has unclasped her slim fingers and is tapping her guidebook. His old guidebook, the one so recently quoted by Luisa, whilst the pages showed their age. The tiny sapphire in her ring sparkles as it catches the light. He bought that ring for their engagement, he recalls, from a stall in The Barrers, the huge Glasgow bric-a-brac market. Luisa had it reset in an elegantly thin, silver band, on – what was it – of course, their twenty-fifth.
Okay, so Lu can hear them too. Not the same drums surely – he has no idea how long drums survive – but most probably played to the same rhythm, accompanying the local procession at a similar time. There are not so many options and the great cathedral figures in them all.The idle tapping on the guidebook continues.
A memory now. But of something never experienced.
He leaps up, looking back down at her hands as they grip the precious volume, encouraging her to join him. “You know, Lu, there’s something I’ve been wanting to see for thirty years.”
She knows she should be getting back to Will. But he has said that he wishes to write. Just for a couple of hours. Hours in which she could have found that watch.
But there is still time.
39
The light inside the small chapel is dim, sepulchral.
Its heavy wooden doors are partially closed, with just enough room for the odd intrigued visitor to slip in. Most are content to wait outside.
A massive float rests on the ground, ancient gold glistening, candles lit and flowers strewn, awaiting its final adornments. The Blessed Virgin looks down on her devoted band of brothers and sisters, as patient and indulgent as ever.
The paso reminds William, curiously, of a prone camel, resting in anticipation of a strenuous journey. The legs it requires to unfold, flex and ease itself jerkily upwards, however, are not its own but those of the devout huddle of white-vested men, the costaleros, currently swigging from water bottles and deftly winding thick cloth “turbans” around their heads as they await the orders of their boss, el capataz.
Outside, in the narrow streets, the cohorts of Nazarenos and cross-bearers chat volubly and swap news, in order to get in as much soccer, gossip and bull before the long, slow silence of the procession.
William wonders if silence is more excruciating for Spaniards. He doesn’t, however, express this notion to his guest, as it might appear inappropriate and she is in any case too involved in whatever she is looking at. Which he prays – to whoever is around – approximates in some decent measure what he himself is observing.
As if on a signal, the sturdy men manoeuvre themselves beneath the enormous structure, ready to hoist it up.
“Lucky they’re all the same height,” remarks William, “or Mary’d be in for a bumpy ride.” This isn’t simple speculation. He has seen it for himsel
f, on both visits, after the bearers have stopped several times for liquid refreshment, which hasn’t always been water. By the end of a long evening, Mary and her special son can look like they’re having quite a party up there.
While Lu watches spellbound – curiously, she has never thought to catch a procession at salida, its very commencement – William begins his hastily conceived and most probably supremely inept master plan. He glances again at her guidebook, as if he has the power to reach beneath its glossy covers.
Here goes.
“Someone once told me, Lu, that there are 115 processions this week! Imagine, 115! And each one starts off from its own wee parish church – just like this one – at exactly the same time every year.” He turns nervously towards her. “You can see the float, Lu?” She looks at him as if he is mad, then simply nods. Perhaps in order not to derange him further.
“Anyway,” he continues, briskly. “See, each one sets off on its own journey – same time, same place.” He pauses, because he needs his next words to register, however mundane they may sound at first hearing. “Unless, of course, it rains.”
She simply nods. Makes sense. As his daughter would probably say, no biggie. But he has more.
“Then it’s far too risky. Obviously. I mean, some of these floats go back to the thirteenth century. That’s even older than me!” He laughs, so she smiles politely, clearly more fascinated by the preparation than the conversation. “So – if rain stops play,” he persists, “and things aren’t exactly right, Lu – she just waits patiently for the next year.” He waits not quite so patiently. Finally, after some seconds, she responds.
“And if it rain the next year?”
Now she is on board – now he can dial up the intensity. “Well – there’s a right time for everything, isn’t there? Y’know, processions, honeymoons—” He turns to her and raises his voice above the clamour that is slowly building around him. “—niños.”
A Meeting in Seville Page 17
