A Meeting in Seville

by Paul A. Mendelson

  If he hadn’t felt a sense of urgency before, this latest development has given him a jolt no cocktail ever invented could match, even if the tiny umbrella had pierced an artery. Unfortunately, his misguided preamble is less than encouraging.

  “O-kay. Before they come over – no, no one’s coming over. Ignore them. Me. Okay.” He takes a deep breath, as he realises that the young couple are hanging precariously on his every utterance, the way eighteenth-century society would watch performances by the insane. “Will, Lu – I think – well, to be honest, I know – that I’ve made a pretty big mistake.”

  “The tan?” suggests Lu.

  “Not the tan! Well, maybe the tan,” says William, thankful that he hasn’t as yet removed his worn but effective panama hat. “See, I had the – what would you call it – the effrontery to interfere in the lives – aye, the lives – of two total strangers.”

  “Yeah?” says a suddenly interested Will, most probably sensing a juicy story. “Who were they, Gordy?”

  William just sighs. He feels totally lost. There’s just no way…

  And then he hears the rumble.

  It appears to be coming from just outside the main door. Almost as if a crowd out there have begun to stamp their feet. William tells himself it’s most probably some type of cleaning machinery being wheeled past. Or inappropriate muzak played in error. He actually prays for an earthquake but in the meantime chooses to ignore it.

  “What I’m trying to say is, Lu – Will – what the hell am I trying to say?”

  He is left with little time to find out.

  The door to the roof terrace bar suddenly smashes open.

  To the frenzied strum of finely tuned Spanish guitars, a troupe of high-class flamenco dancers bursts in, the men in tight black trousers with crimson sashes, the women a swirl of brilliant red.

  Their accompanying musicians sway noisily around them as the flamboyant newcomers make immediately for the table full of beaming Barbadillos and proceed to perform solely for them, proud heads held high, arms raised and swivelling, as if no one else in the bar exists. Although, of course, everyone in the room watches and cheers and whoops in delight.

  Señor Barbadillo is grinning like an Andalusian Cheshire Cat at the “unexpected” visitors and at William (see what I did!), but mostly at his overwhelmed but adoring wife. Señora Barbadillo looks like she doesn’t know whether to smile, cry or pick up a stray castanet. William has a pretty good idea that she will happily manage to do all three and more.

  “Oh, thanks a sodding bunch!” he hears himself cry into the ether, as he senses his entire life being systematically crushed under a stampede of brilliantly polished, black patent leather shoes. While Will and Lu, not privy to the surprise but fairly surprised anyway, move swiftly from bemusement through bewilderment into the fast lane on the autoroute to terror.

  It’s all going really well.

  56

  “Cumpleaños Feliz, Cumpleaños Feliz, Te Deseamos Todo, Cumpleaños Feliz”

  The indomitable troupe bellow their version of Happy Birthday as the delighted instigator screams out “SURPRISE!” in English, like the Señora didn’t know.

  William can only watch in panic.

  The surprisers are clearly about to “work” the room and an all-too-brief moment later he sees Señor Barbadillo pointing him out. Why not just crucify me now? he thinks, which he knows is sacrilegious but at least not untimely.

  William turns back to the young couple and tries to block out the sounds of a dozen professionally disdainful and probably paid-by-the-hour Andalusians stamping their arrogant, Cuban-heeled feet, as if killing a sudden outbreak of cockroaches, in rhythm to a repeated chanting of what he fears must the The More Soon You Than Me! signature tune. It is hardly Malagueña but it appears to please the crowd.

  Closing his weary eyes, William attempts with commendable futility to block them all out, as they make a foot-stomping beeline for his apparently empty table. He prays, in a way he never has before, that having imprinted their presence on the shuddering floor of the roof terrace, they will feel sufficiently spent and creatively sated to return to their host’s table for thoroughly justified refreshment.

  No such luck.

  They decide to dance, stomp, sing and play around him.

  All around him.

  As close to him as they can possibly get.

  They are, of course, as he has to keep reminding himself, totally invisible to Will and Lu. Unfortunately William’s reaction couldn’t be more in the young couple’s faces if it were projected onto a state-of-the-art cinema screen lowered from the merciless heavens. All that Will and Lu can see is a bizarre assortment of pissed-off twitches and despairing twists from a solitary and increasingly peculiar Scot. Whilst all William can think is that, if Spaniards are noisy when they’re talking, you should hear them when they bloody dance.

  It is when one over-exuberant bailaor tries to remove William’s hat and he, not unnaturally, resists that he notices Will and Lu’s eyes open wider than alcohol usually permits. Their jaws drop in unison, like characters in a cartoon. William soon computes that to them his hat appears to be wobbling right around his head entirely of its own volition.

  “How the hell do you do that?” asks Will, not unreasonably.

  “I used to be in a circus. Now, as I was trying to say—”

  He moves his chair out of the orbit of the dancers, which proves totally fruitless, as they appear as determined as a swarm of locusts to go with him. So he has to make his impassioned address on the move, as the young couple’s eyes follow his weird trajectory with undisguised wonder.

  “The thing is, guys – the thing is—” What is the sodding thing, William? “Well, I’m afraid that sometimes—” okay, go for it, pal “—sometimes older doesn’t necessarily mean wiser.”

  You think?

  He knows that he is talking in platitudes – in fact he knows that what he is saying would give platitudes a bad name – but he simply can’t get a handle on it. The dancers aren’t necessarily the cause, but they certainly don’t help.

  He gazes around the terrace, his current discomfort zone, which is rapidly filling up with excited patrons enjoying the free entertainment. Including the involvement of the poor stooge in the panama hat. Some of them even applaud him.

  As he squirms around, to avoid the plague of hat-snatching flamenco bastards, the room begins to spin. It can’t be alcohol – he hasn’t had any. And he isn’t twirling nearly fast enough to induce the dizziness he feels. So perhaps he has finally succumbed to full-blown mental disintegration. A condition he recognises as having been in development long before he ever landed in Seville.

  And suddenly the only thing he can think of doing is to laugh.

  Not just a giggle or a vaguely disquieting titter. He’s talking full-throttled, big-bellied, frame-rattling laughter. The sort of mirth-suffused, booming roar that comes from the gut and the heart and the soul and can float high over a balcony and resound way into the flame-filled, Iberian night. Laughter that he was born with and that is everyone’s birthright. Laughter that sings with the innocence of youth, soars with the what-the-hellness of age. No stiffness. No resistance. No worries, pal.

  “AWAY YE GO!” he bellows, in his new-found glee.

  “He like to shout,” explains Lu, who has had some experience here. From hers and Will’s points of view there are just a few guests on the roof with them, quietly drinking and enjoying the view. Along with one extremely loud, perma-tanned, panama-hatted, jacketless, watchless, elderly lunatic, who came here on his honeymoon way back in 1958 and apparently hasn’t matured much since.

  So, when Señora Barbadillo herself rises gracefully from her family table and stamps towards him, making the classic movement of doves with her thickening but still nimble fingers, encouraging him to stop being British, if only for this milestone night, he
can see just one way to proceed.

  He rises from his chair and begins to dance.

  William Sutherland, uptight and stuffy Scot, captive to a throbbing beat that could have been womb music had the womb not belonged to an illiterate factory worker from Greenock. Willo S himself, sashaying on a cool Spanish terrace, in the lush April evening, with a seductive local celebrity whose age is no longer a secret and whose special day this is.

  Seeming to one fascinated, but justifiably wary, young couple as if he is dancing with absolutely no one, to no music at all.

  Not terribly well.

  William begins to shout even louder above the clamour, reminding Lu once more of yesterday morning’s hitherto quiet jeweller’s shop and William of his hitherto relatively un-shouty life.

  “What was it the late, lamented John Lennon sang, before he died thirty-eight years ago?” Why are they both staring at him like that? “Eight years ago! Eight!” He moves to the rhythm. Or at least he hears the rhythm and moves. “‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans’. Or something like—”

  He stops, as if frozen into a dramatic pose.

  Had he been a professional dancer, this might have been the stunning yet natural conclusion to his performance and the music would have reached a similarly exhilarating end. But, whilst he is clearly and surprising game, the man is no mover – in this or any incarnation – and to at least two members of his audience there is no music at hand to be inspiring any sort of climax at all.

  Yet, no one watching this terpsichorean display, from either era, could fail for an instant to note the glorious sense of revelation that suddenly bathes his face, like those scintillating coloured lights that magically switch on down there in the city as darkness begins to fall. And William knows that his young couple are totally attentive. If for no other reason than the sight of a respectable, grown man losing his grip on sanity – or at the very least on self-control – can’t be anything other than horribly fascinating.

  “For once in my life,” he cries, “I’ve run out of bloody plans!”

  As he laughs uproariously once again, he notices that Señora Barbadillo and her little troupe are laughing with him. Perhaps because they feel it is safest to do so or maybe they’re just happy. And laughter – even that of a balmy, barmy Brit – is infectious.

  “Not a spreadsheet or an agenda or a window to my name!” he continues, then adds “or a production schedule,” in deference to his current self.

  He holds out a nut-brown hand – which he can’t help but notice is rather well manicured – to Lu. “So I’ll just have to go – where the music takes me.”

  Lu doesn’t rise immediately, so he beckons her upwards, gently and with a warmly avuncular smile. Nothing to fear here.

  She looks at Will, who shrugs. Humour the old loon. So she nods and rises gracefully from her chair. Like a young woman at her first formal event, Lu Sutherland moves with a shy smile to join William on what wasn’t, until now, the dance floor. The only music in her ears echoes of a final procession way down below.

  Yet, when his lovely young wife begins to dance unaccompanied, her lithe body swaying like a willowy sapling in the breeze, her delicate feet tapping in the flimsiest brown pumps, the grace and beauty of it almost breaks the older man’s heart. He drinks in her glowing-eyed, innocent warmth, like the cocktail he doesn’t dare order, and tries not to tell himself that all this will be lost to young Will in just two years, as it is lost to William now. A loss he feels in every cell of his body, but especially those that still contain his most precious memories.

  He attempts to match her movements, so effortless in their elegance, which of course is futile. Especially as the beat in Lu’s head is most probably so very different from that of the musicians practically in his face.

  And then he senses a different, more powerful movement directly behind him.

  Señora Barbadillo has decided that she too will dance with William Sutherland. It would be impolite, she reasons, to allow this famous, successful, blouson-less and rather ridiculous man in the ill-fitting hat to writhe and contort on his own.

  If William finds dancing with two formidable, accomplished women, of differing ages and from different eras – neither of whom is aware of the other’s existence – unimaginably taxing, he tries bravely not to show it. Hopefully, he reasons, the perspiration he can feel running down his face, and everywhere else beneath his expensive summer clothing, will be put down by the casual observer to some highly unfamiliar exertions. Brought on by a spontaneous display of Caledonian flamenco.

  “Legs are doing well, darling,” he tells the older woman, because he feels they deserve some acknowledgement on their birthday. And this can’t have been so misplaced, because he hears quite clearly two very attractive Spanish women murmur “gracias”.

  On an impulse, William grabs the red rose from Señora Barbadillo’s hair, hoping its thorns don’t rip her head open, and grips it between his beautifully capped teeth. This is, of course, before he realises that to poor Lu it seems like he has plucked the flower completely out of thin air.

  “Conjuring school,” he explains, to which Lu just nods, as if nothing about this man could possibly surprise her by now.

  “What happened to your beautiful watch?” she asks.

  He flashes his naked wrist, then adds what he considers a flamboyant touch by raising his arms and clicking imaginary castanets. “Gave it to a tiny peasant! Ay ayy!!”

  Calming down, because he’s exhausting himself let alone anyone else, he moves closer to Lu and tries to lower the level of near-hysteria in his voice. He ratchets it down to repressed panic, which he hopes she may not detect. “You have no idea what I’m trying to tell you, cariño. Could be because – after thirty years – I’m only just figuring it out myself.”

  Thankfully, Señora Barbadillo dances off. Perhaps because she wants to rejoin her family. Or maybe because the flying Scotsman is now talking in hushed tones to a large, potted plant.

  “We can’t control our whole world, Lu,” continues William, with a gentle smile. “No one can. Stuff – happens. Aye. It does. ’Fraid so. But you know what? You know what? It’s not the bad stuff that does you in. Not really.” He finds himself on the verge of tears, which he isn’t certain will aid his cause, but neither can he help it. “It’s being someplace else when all the good stuff’s going on.”

  There!

  For reasons he can’t totally fathom, he feels the urge to execute a move that will choreographically nail for all time the profound insights he has just received and felt impelled to share. He essays a bizarre manoeuvre that involve both feet leaving the ground and, inevitably, he stumbles mid-flight. Happily, a shocked Lu manages to catch him before he can do too much damage. For a second he savours the support and breathes in that particular scent he still recalls with such painful longing.

  Yet he knows that respect and decorum dictate he must reluctantly break away.

  She isn’t his and may never more be so. As yet his raging epiphany appears to be no more than a one-man show.

  Stepping back, he sweeps up their half-sipped cocktail, as if to propose a toast to his newer, wiser self. He notices, without huge surprise, that the glass and its contents at once appear to look their age. Yet, before the couple can spot this sudden desiccation, he swigs it down in one. Amidst the gagging and retching, he manages to complete his life-changing thought process.

  “You’ve just gotta go for the whole bloody cocktail!” he proclaims, rather neatly in his opinion. He muses that he might have made a decent writer after all. Another life. “1988. Mm. Vintage!”

  He hears applause from the Barbadillo family across the floor. He doubts that it is for his dancing, so he reckons it must be for his guts.

  And then it starts to rain.

  But it’s 1988 rain. He watches as it falls on Lu and Will, but feels not
a drop on himself.

  “Come on, Lu,” says Will, leaping up. “We’ll get soaked!” He moves off to find shelter beneath an overhang at the central bar.

  Lu watches him, then takes in the rain and finally lets her gaze rest on a smiling William.

  Suddenly she cocks her head, clearly hearing something that William can’t detect but knows is resonating deep within her. He suspects, from what his own ears have been telling him these wondrous days, that it is something primal. Something that strikes more than the ears, something that thrums with the soul. Perhaps the sound that has been so familiar this mystical week. That of distant drumming.

  Whatever it is, it appears to be having some effect.

  Lu shakes her head, at Will, at the elements, at the world. And stays where she is, lifting up her face to the skies and letting the glorious rain soak her. Because this is where she happens to be and here is where the rain is. She swings her head around, like a puppy emerging from a river, droplets singing into the night air.

  William moves into her rain. Embraces it as it dances off her.

  He knows that he can do no more, though he is far from certain that he has done anything. So he simply offers this joyous young woman the same brief, heartfelt adios he gave his last two “wives”.

  “Goodbye, Luisa.”

  She looks at him and smiles. A knowing smile, although perhaps she doesn’t know quite yet what she knows.

  As he passes the Barbadillo table, where they apparently can’t keep still for a single moment, he turns back. To see Lu sexily enticing Will towards her, slender arms extended and weaving, drawing him sinuously closer, as if by an invisible cord. Will resists – until he can’t resist any more. He picks up a minuscule wooden umbrella from the bar and joins her under the downpour.

  William leaves the young couple dancing close together in the pouring rain. To absolutely no music at all, except the song in their heads.

  ***

  It is only when he reaches the lift that the realisation hits him.