A Meeting in Seville

by Paul A. Mendelson

She looks at him and is clearly surprised by the intensity that makes his blue eyes gleam in the darkness, like the tiny facets of her ring.

  “Time it wrong, Lu, and things can get spoiled. Maybe forever.” More intensity, to compensate for the dimness in the lighting. “Trust me. I know whereof I speak.”

  William fears he may be seriously overdoing it, metaphoring himself into obscurity. Yet he can tell that she is listening. He can almost see her mind processing this, accustomed as he is, after all these years, to the slightest shift in her expression. Time for a lightness of touch. “Which is probably why we Brits always carry precautionary measures.” As she turns to stare at him, he digs into his laptop bag and pulls out the least expected item from within its folds. “Our trusty brollies!”

  He waves his cheap, retractable umbrella jokily in the air and is relieved to see her smile. And offer a slight nod, as if she might just possibly be starting to catch on. ‘Big if’ he thinks, as the sleeve of his jacket glides up to facilitate the brolly-brandishing. He notices that her attention shifts instantly to his watch. Without asking, she touches it, but so delicately that he doesn’t even feel the pressure on his wrist.

  She looks softly into his eyes.

  It’s a look he hasn’t seen before, at least not this time round. Or at least not aimed at him. He intends to stare back at her and smile in a deeply meaningful way, as if somehow to seal in the points he has made so obliquely. To etch them into her mind. But as he moves towards her, his face just inches away from her own, he breathes in that familiar scent, takes in the almost painful loveliness, and finds himself dissolving, falling into her.

  “Luisa—” he murmurs.

  A blast of light suddenly hits them as the doors to the church are flung wide open and the huge, gleaming float is finally hoisted up with enormous love and strength to its full, processional height.

  His lips gently brush her forehead. The float moves out of the darkness into the light, like a child leaving the womb.

  40

  Luisa Sutherland has no idea where her husband has gone, but she has a pretty fair idea where she would like him to go.

  After yesterday afternoon’s confrontation in the streets outside the Maestranza, with each partner attempting to insert the ultimate barb and pierce the decisive artery, they had continued the evening in a slow-bleeding silence, broken only by fractured mundanities that made the silence seem like bliss. As if each was watching the other slip farther and farther away, whilst still being mere inches apart.

  Luisa has a vague memory of William whispering goodbye to her in the bedroom this morning. She was struggling to cling on to sleep, like a shaky bridge on the verge of collapse, yet has no real clue as to the literality of her husband’s farewell. But he’s certainly not out here with her now, enjoying a late breakfast on the hotel terrace. A breakfast she hardly eats. So perhaps it was exactly as he had spoken.

  Even though she is quite in the shade, under a bright umbrella, Luisa still wears her sunglasses. She knows that beneath them she looks ravaged, although she can’t actually remember crying. Perhaps it was in that rocky sleep.

  “Excuse me? Er, scusa mia?”

  She hadn’t noticed the two ladies from New York, but they have clearly been noticing her. Their warm smiles don’t quite mask the intense curiosity in their faces, as they stare at her and more especially at the vacant space beside her.

  Luisa turns, instinctively removing her shades, so that she can engage with these total strangers more politely. Even though this is the last thing she wishes to do. She realises how British she has become, after all these years away from home.

  The shock on the ladies’ faces is instant and ever more transparent as they try feebly to disguise it. “Is okay. I – get the hay fever,” explains Luisa.

  The women nod and cock their heads to the same side sympathetically, although they clearly don’t believe this for one moment.

  “Oh, poor you!” says Marilyn. Then, all sympathy done, she thrusts her iPad at Luisa. “We were just wondering – could you take our photo?”

  “We’ve seen you in town,” endorses Shelby. “You know your way around a camera.”

  “We’re on our honeymoon!” Marilyn almost yells this out. Luisa isn’t sure whether this is simply background information or some sort of threat that if the photo isn’t up to scratch it could blight the most important moment of their lives.

  “They’ll have to reconsecrate the whole of Seville after this!” laughs Shelby, lightening the mood for at least one of her listeners.

  Luisa, despite everything, is a professional. She takes the iPad and stands up. Moving around, she estimates where light and shadow best suit her subjects, whilst those subjects scrape their chairs around noisily, leaning in every direction to ensure they’re firmly in shot. The photographer dearly wishes she had lenses and dials to fiddle with, and some rope to tie the wrigglers down, but agrees to work around these limitations.

  As she takes the first of what she imagines will be a considerable range of shots, in order to achieve the yearned-for result, a third party intrudes on the marriage. Pablo’s concerned head has bobbed in from the side and is staring directly into the iPad.

  “Señora – aeropuerto?”

  Luisa watches the ecstatic if somewhat frozen smile on Marilyn’s face dissolve. “The airport!”

  The iPad nods.

  “You’re going to miss Easter Sunday?” says Shelby.

  Luisa just sighs. “It cannot match the first one.”

  The New York ladies nod. “Hard act to follow,” says Marilyn.

  41

  William had no idea that, in his absence, Seville has become such a modern, dynamic, avant-garde city. He feels that someone should have told him.

  He realises that he is far more at home here in the shadows of groundbreaking architecture, such as he has just unwittingly encountered: the startling high-rise towers, the stunning new bridges, vibrant thoroughfares where history and ritual don’t assail him at every turn. And he can maintain the comforting sense that commerce is still the major religion of the world.

  He left Lu, somewhat reluctantly, a while ago. Hopefully with more pressing thoughts in her head than simply buying him the watch he has been constantly wearing these thirty years. Since then he has been wandering aimlessly around the throbbing new city, smoking his way through his first ever packet of Ducados, which he reckons taste as bad as they smell.

  He must have a whisky.

  Just one.

  When you’re waiting for your world to end – or, more hopefully, to begin – you deserve some company from home. And, if the world remains exactly as it is, thinks William, well, at least you’ve seen a couple of things you really never in your life expected to see and are one peaty shot more prepared to deal with the years of stultification to come.

  ***

  Will isn’t touching his beer.

  It has been warming beside him, on his table outside the Yellow Café, all the time he has been writing. He is perfectly aware that, when he is in creative mode, the drink – whether it is soft or hard, hot or cold – is simply his entry fee to sit for hours and piss off busy waiters. The guys who clearly prefer a table to be occupied by customers who drink like fish, eat like pigs and tip like they don’t know the exchange rate. He once expressed curiosity as to whether Jean Paul Sartre did the same at Les Deux Magots in Paris, but Lu didn’t know what he was talking about, so he pursued the conceit no further.

  He hasn’t yet noticed Lu, who watches him from a corner of the square. He is rarely aware of her observing him “at work”, which she does quite often, or of the overwhelming love she feels at these moments. A love combined with an envious awe that someone can be so lost in the world of his own imagination that he is totally untouched by any of life’s more readily accessed wonders.

  As she finally approaches his table, she n
otices, on the vacant seat next to him, a small gift bag from a local store. It could, of course, be something he has bought for himself. But, as he never buys anything for himself, because somewhere rooted deep inside him is the sense that he doesn’t ever merit a treat or a reward, she reckons it’s a safe bet that the gift is for her.

  The first time he is aware of her approach is when she leans over to kiss him away from his narrative and simultaneously scoops up the bag in a single whisk. Before he can stop her, she manages to pull out a little red beret, almost the same shade as the leather bag she is carrying. She has it halfway to her head before he shakes his own.

  “Hoy, you! That isn’t for now.”

  “When it is for?”

  “I’ll tell you when it is for when we get to when it is for.”

  “You are the spoiling-sport,” she chides, dropping the soft beret back, with exaggerated regret, into its temporary home. “Well, then, you cannot have what it is I have for you, until this time also.”

  He laughs, pulls her close to him for a hug and swiftly rummages in her bag as it hangs on her shoulder. Before she can stop him, he whips out a small, paper sack nestling on the top and withdraws it with an almost theatrical flourish. She grabs it back in some desperation, before he can open it, most probably because she doesn’t want the world to see what she has just purchased from the local farmacia.

  “This is not the thing!” she admonishes. “Now you must buy me fino and you read me what it is you have written.”

  He shrugs and lifts his pad with a flourish, preparing to impress her with flowery paragraphs she cannot yet fully understand. He is perfectly content to know that she will praise him unreservedly, regardless of comprehension, and give him the simple strength to carry on. He has never loved her more than at these moments and hopes that this will go on forever, although he strongly suspects that honeymoons never do.

  A chill suddenly passes over him, as he thinks he won’t ever again be as happy as he is right now. And yet still he wonders, just for a moment, how he might enjoy right now even more.

  42

  William Sutherland has never been so scared in his life.

  He had assumed that the whisky would calm his nerves. Or, if this didn’t quite work, the second or third and those disgusting cigarettes might just dull the edges. Yet, if he had to describe himself right now, the words “intensely sober” would spring to mind. A descriptor he has not hitherto found necessary nor the least bit useful.

  There is something in the air and this time it isn’t the Ducados.

  The sky is as relentlessly blue and cloudless as ever, the Andalusian sun scorching believers and apostates alike, yet he can sense within the outward calm a definite trembling. It is as if the world is gearing up for something, or a vigorous storm is due, but he knows that this is more of a British thing, where it seems you can’t have three days of fierce and clammy heat without the heavens getting all overwhelmed and teary. Yet the universe does appear disturbingly askew right now, unsettled, an elemental mirroring of how he himself feels inside.

  Or perhaps, in his arrogance, he is simply globalising his own, small-scale but intensely real panic.

  William is almost relieved to see the familiar purple minivan parked outside the hotel as he begins his walk up the pebbled drive. His old pal Pablo is there too, gently ushering in the latest visitor, hefting her expensively smart leather case with the spryness of a man half his age. He notices William and waves in recognition. William feels inordinately pleased to see the old guy, although if he mentions Manchester United one more time he may just rip his lungs out.

  This new guest looks rather elegant, he thinks, even from the back, as a set of well-manicured fingers dip crisply into a large and expensively soft, leather bag. She is not young: her clothes are too smart and timeless. Yet she is clearly fit and agile, the firm muscles in her tanned legs made more striking by the height of her heels, as she takes the steps to the door with a noticeable briskness. Here is someone who obviously looks after herself, he reckons, because she clearly feels she is worth looking after. And who, judging by the instantly deferential look on the doorman, expects others to do the same.

  As she disappears, this person who seems so at ease and at home, in a way he recognises that he seldom is, William finds himself remaining in the courtyard, almost paralysed with anxiety.

  Will the Luisa Sutherland he encounters be unchanged, when he turns up again, after so many hours, in their “second honeymoon suite”? Or have her memories (and his too, presumably, in time) been subtly yet irrevocably altered, along with their histories and their lives?

  Perhaps, he thinks, he should simply prepare himself for one suitcase less, in a suddenly stark hotel room formerly occupied by a wife who, not unreasonably, grew tired of waiting. She could be on her way to the airport right now, for all he knows, with that same angry cabbie. To be met just a few hours later by her duplicitous, crooked-nosed, smooth-talking lover. And, indeed, how could he blame her?

  Or perhaps not. If all has gone according to plan.

  He suddenly feels an alarming, almost sexual rush of excitement burst with terrifying speed, like an electric charge, through his veins. An oddly primal yet curiously illicit thrill rattles his frame, energising yet disturbing, like nothing he has ever experienced. His heart begins to thump, his breathing becomes more rapid. Sweat forms on his brow, as a fiery contest between overweening ego and genuine apprehension starts to play itself out in his head.

  Then, just as swiftly, the ‘symptoms’ recede.

  What the hell -?

  Not for the first time this week, William wonders if he is slowly becoming insane.

  ***

  The room is pleasantly dark as William opens the door.

  He is not surprised to find the shutters drawn on such a dazzling day. The sounds of the nearby shower in full flow are comfortingly reassuring.

  Closing the door, he calls into the bathroom. “Only me!”

  The shower finishes and a few seconds later the bathroom door opens.

  Into the bedroom steps a shapely young woman, very blonde and clearly, even in the half-light, totally naked, save for the large bath-towel she is draping casually around her head. Back-lit to perfection, she skips lightly on damp and immaculately pedicured bare feet to the shutters and sends them flying open.

  “Hi, babe,” she says, smiling over her shoulder at William. “Get those extra pillows?”

  Now?

  43

  The shutters bang and light blasts in on the stranger, in all her unidentifiable glory.

  “AAAHH!! I am so sorry!” yells William, immediately swirling away towards the door.

  “That’s okay,” says the young woman cheerily, “no biggie – we can ask for them downstairs, when we go out. Hope you found your cigars.”

  Cigars?

  She trots back into the centre of the room, casually flicking the towel over her glistening body. He can’t help but notice that she is very pretty. To his amazement, however, when he fully takes in her smiling face, she also looks disturbingly like young Lu.

  Yet this is so obviously not Lu, young or old – and she is clearly not in the least embarrassed by his presence. She is either a vaguely demented exhibitionist or something is quite catastrophically awry. William so hopes it is the former.

  “Oh my God!” is all he can say right now.

  “You’ve seen it before, Willo!” And there goes theory number one. “Can you be an angel and pass me my lippy?”

  He has no idea where her lippy might be and can only just work out what it might be, but anything that gives him a legitimate reason to turn away from the alluring yet terrifying vision jiggling around before him has its own therapeutic appeal.

  Until what he sees in the mirror turns this briefly held assumption to ashes.

  “Oh – sweet – Jesus!” he says, as
the full horror strikes him.

  It’s still recognisably William Sutherland, but now with a perma-tan that would make Donald Trump look like a Noh theatrical, a full head of what has to have been horrendously expensive hair, from whomsoever it came, and no obvious sign of – or need for – spectacles. He is clad in tight-fitting, designer clothing, in which he would never have been allowed to be seen dead, or wished to be seen at all. And yet, as he stares in appalled wonder, it is all just starting to become terrifyingly familiar.

  “Honestly?” says his new companion, smiling at him. He remains transfixed by his – or at least someone’s – reflected image. “You guys are worse than we are. Hey, what time is it over here?”

  He checks his watch and recoils yet again, like an over-the-hill boxer being punished for even trying. There, on his bronzed wrist, occupying a slice of bodily real estate that, for exactly thirty years, has been the family home of a stylishly understated, high-end Spanish watch, is a gold Rolex about the size of a small meteor.

  William knows that, before he slips into stress-induced catatonia, he has rather a lot of questions. Enquiries peculiar to this stage of what might well be his life but is looking remarkably like somebody else’s. Yet perhaps it’s simply a life into which he has just stepped for a while, like an Airbnb of the spirit.

  “Who are you?”

  She looks puzzled for a moment. He senses that this may not have been the most prudent query with which to launch. But then she laughs and puts on a truly appalling Scottish accent. “I’m fine, thank you, Wulliam – and hoo’s yerself?” He just nods, bemused. “Well, I’d be better with my clothes. Unless you were contemplating—?”

  “Er no. NO!” he says, in panic, as he realises exactly what she is offering. “But thank you. For asking. You just – get yourself dressed. Now. Please.”

  She waves a gym-toned arm, her eyes still promising wondrous things to come, and trots back into the bathroom. William slumps onto the newly made bed, wishing that it would gently fold up its makings and clamp itself around his exhausted – albeit reconfigured – body, sucking him swiftly down into oblivion.