Only in Spain

by Nellie Bennett

  But here I was in Seville sitting in the dappled sunlight with Zahra every morning drinking coffee. You can’t drink Spanish coffee without adding a bit of sugar to mask the burnt taste, so I’d gradually been seduced from sipping straight black coffee with my back to the sun, to drinking café con leche (coffee with milk), to now indulging in café con leche with half a sachet of brown sugar mixed in and the soft Sevillian sun on my face.

  And to tell the truth, I was enjoying the seduction. I’d been secretly thrilled the day I went to the bakery and discovered they only had white bread. What choice did I have? I had to buy a baguette. As I broke open the crust and breathed in the smell of fresh bread, I remembered with a grimace the bitter sprouted-grain loaf that I used to buy from the co-op back home. Spreading on a little bit of Inés’s butter, I whispered to myself, “Only in Spain.” Still, at night I would lie awake worrying about my descent into decadence. I could feel the free radicals crawling over my face and eating away at my flesh. I wondered, Will I survive Seville?

  In my search for healthy food, I ventured out to the main department store in the middle of the city. Even the center of Seville maintained the air of a village in the south of Spain. The streets were all painted white and lined with orange trees, and the little boutiques had painted fans in the windows and mannequins decked out in extravagant flamenco costumes. Following the international code of department stores, there on the lower ground floor was a food hall, and they had a section with preprepared meals.

  Unfortunately, all the labels were written in Spanish, and as far as I could tell, there were barely any vegan options. It was mostly pork and chicken and crumbed seafood. But they had stewed green beans and some kind of casserole that looked vegetarian, so I got a serving of each and hurried home to eat the first real meal I’d had in days.

  The casserole was good, but I couldn’t tell what was in it. I was halfway through when Inés came into the kitchen, looked at my lunch, and said, “I thought you said you were vegan? You’re eating riñónes.”

  I froze. I didn’t know what a riñón was, but it didn’t sound like a vegetable.

  Inés didn’t know the word for it in English, so she got the dictionary from the lounge room. “Kid-neys. It is very typical.”

  Kidneys. I was eating kidneys. I didn’t care how typical it was. Inés couldn’t stop laughing at the expression on my face, but I didn’t share the joke. When I told her with a throb in my voice of my struggle to find healthy food, she asked, “Why don’t you go to the market?”

  “There’s a market?”

  It turned out there was a bustling market close by, in a big whitewashed building behind an old stone church. I’d walked right past it without having any idea it was there; the problem was that I couldn’t get used to shops shutting at one and reopening at five, and kept going out shopping when everything was closed.

  I went out early the next day to explore this new market. I wove my way through the crowds of shoppers and past cheese shops and butchers with strings of red chorizo sausages hanging from the awnings and pigs’ legs with hoofs still attached. (Who’s buying that?) I wandered between the rows of stalls all selling Technicolor fruit and veggies and stopped at a stand that had flamenco playing from an old radio. As I waited to be helped, I tapped my feet against the concrete floor.

  “Olé, Olé!”

  I turned around and saw a man in a green apron carrying a crate of mandarins. “De dónde eres?” he asked. Where are you from?

  “Australia,” I said.

  “Au-tralia…” the fruit seller repeated, wonderingly. “And did you swim all the way here?” The other fruit sellers laughed, delighted with the joke.

  He asked what I wanted, and I pointed at the pears and said, “Tres,” then a couple of oranges and a bunch of grapes.

  He packed them in gray paper and weighed them on the scales. “Ya tá?”

  I didn’t know what that meant, so I just nodded and repeated back to him, “Ya tá.”

  On my way out I passed a little stand that sold different kinds of bread: heavy ryes and loaves studded with pumpkin seeds and caraway, and in a little fridge I saw they even had tofu loaf and sprouted-grain bread. My heart sank right down to my sneakers. I could say good-bye to my morning baguettes. Now that I’d found organic spelt bread, I couldn’t keep pretending white bread was my only option.

  I picked up my pace and walked quickly past the healthy bread stall. Let’s just pretend we never saw that…

  • • •

  There it was, shining in the morning sun: a great wall of shoes. Flamenco shoes of every imaginable color were on display, every shoe that had ever appeared in the midnight fantasies of obsessed flamenco dancers. They were all perfect, all begging to be taken down and broken in with ankle-twisting footwork.

  But I only had eyes for one pair. I’d noticed them as soon as I stepped in the door: a perfect pair of red shoes. As I picked one up, my inner shopgirl gave me the sales pitch: “Every woman needs a pair of red shoes. They brighten up any outfit.” But I didn’t need convincing. These shoes were mine.

  Zahra picked up a beige shoe. “This is my shoe, chica. You know people think it’s good to match the color of the shoe to the color of the dress, but the shoe should match the color of your skin. It makes the leg look longer.”

  Long legs or no long legs, I was in love with my red shoes. And when I tried them on, even Zahra knew there was only one thing to say: “You have to have them!”

  We each left the store with a new pair of shoes, swinging our bags back and forth like excited children. As we darted in and out of shops, looking at oversize earrings and gazing at hand-painted fans and heavy embroidered shawls, I realized something wonderful: I was having fun. Since I had started working on Level Two, I couldn’t go into stores without noticing shelves in need of dusting, smears on the glass cabinets, and price tags hanging out of garments. I’d find myself overcome by the need to straighten hangers and organize pieces according to size. But with Zahra, shopping had gone back to being a game.

  We walked through the streets, gazing at window displays of extravagant flamenco dresses. “When do they wear those dresses?” I asked as we stared at a particularly outrageous red-and-white polka-dot dress with matching accessories.

  “It is for the feria.” Zahra explained that the Feria de Abril is a big festival that happens every year after Easter, and everyone gets dressed up and dances sevillanas, the traditional dance of Seville. “See, chica!” She pointed at a poster with a painting of a woman in a flamenco costume looking seductively over a fan. I’d seen these posters all over town but hadn’t understood what they were for.

  I noted the date on the poster—it was for the day before I was to leave Seville. When I told Zahra, she stopped and looked at me. “Really? Me too!” It was a wonderful coincidence. We’d both booked our return flights for the day after the first night of the feria.

  All week Zahra had been telling me she wanted to go to a tapas bar she’d heard of called El Rinconcillo. “It is so toma que toma. It is a flamenco tapas bar. We have to go!” When we’d finished shopping, we decided to go there for lunch. “It’s the oldest tapas bar in Seville,” she said, leading the way through the streets of the Macarena, following her own internal GPS.

  I wasn’t so excited about the idea; I figured there would be nothing even vaguely vegan on the menu, and I hated being the girl who nibbles on bread and gazes longingly at food she can’t eat. And I knew that Zahra would try to tempt me into eating something delicious. She’d noticed how thin I was, and how much weight I’d lost since we first arrived. It was only natural that I’d lose weight: I was dancing three hours a day and struggling to find enough food. But Zahra didn’t approve.

  “Look, chica! This is it.” It certainly looked like the oldest tapas bar in Seville. The front of the building was covered with colorful painted tiles, and garlands of onions and garlic
hung from the dark wooden beams above the bar.

  We elbowed our way through the crowd to a spot at the bar. From there we could see the waistcoated waiters bringing sizzling dishes from the kitchen. There were servings of fish in tomato sauce, deep-fried squid, and various kinds of meat.

  “What do you think?” said Zahra. “We take one meat, one fish—ooh! What is that?”

  I told her to order whatever she wanted but that I couldn’t eat any of it. She dismissed me with a wave of her hand and called the waiter over to give him our order. The waiter marked a line of mysterious numbers down in chalk on the wooden bar in front of us. It took us a moment to figure out what it was; then we realized that he was chalking up our tab as we went. Such a simple but effective system, which I suppose relies on the honesty of the customer not to lean over and smudge off a couple of numbers with a sleeve.

  Our first two tapas were almost hurled across the bar. The plates spun around and settled in front of us. They were bacalao—salted codfish—and carrillada, beef cheek.

  Zahra took a piece of the codfish. “You have to taste this!”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Why not?” she asked, surprised. “Fish is vegetarian.”

  Fish is vegetarian, indeed! I thought angrily as I broke off a piece of bread and munched on it. I hadn’t eaten anything that morning, and the smell of so much food was almost enough to make me fall off my stool.

  “Chica.” Zahra pushed the plate toward me with a twinkle in her eye. “Only in Spain.”

  I regretted having shared with her the secret of my baguette; now she was using my own words against me. But then again, I thought, breathing in the smell of the fish, how often does one have the chance to eat tapas in Seville? And, as Zahra would say, such toma que toma tapas…

  I sighed and picked up a fork. “Only in Spain,” I said as I sliced the fish with the edge of my fork and raised it to my mouth. Then I experienced heaven. “Oh my God!” I moaned through a mouthful of what had to be the best fish I’d ever eaten.

  But Zahra had already moved on to the second dish: beef cheek, cooked so slowly that it falls apart on your fork. Her eyes rolled back in her head. “It’s divine. You must try it!”

  “I can’t. That’s meat!” I protested.

  “This is vegetarian meat,” she said through a mouthful. I was weak and I knew it. The smell of the meat was too much for me to resist, so I decided that there was no use fighting it. Only in Spain.

  And if I’d thought the fish was good, it had nothing on the beef. It was so tender I could have sliced it with a spoon. Before I’d finished my first mouthful, another plate came spinning across the bar toward us. Albóndigas, meatballs in rich gravy.

  “Don’t worry,” said Zahra. “This is vegetarian meat also.” It was so delicious that we mopped the plate clean with bread.

  When we’d finished eating, I stared down at the empty plates that were lined up in front of us. I couldn’t believe what I’d just done. I was a disgrace to the vegan community. When I got home, I’d have to hand in my co-op card and my green bags and go into the brown rice rehab program.

  “You know, this is really incredible,” Zahra said, looking around her. “The bars here are always full of people. Do these people have jobs? Who is in the office?”

  I had no idea. Zahra was right: at nine o’clock the cafés were full of people having their morning coffee, and they were packed again at eleven as everyone came out for their second coffee of the day. From twelve the streets were filled with people out drinking aperitifs, one o’clock was time for tapas, three was time for lunch, then everything closed down for siesta until five.

  “I tell you, chica,” Zahra said, looking around at the Sevillians who were getting louder with each glass of wine. “These people know how to live.”

  THE COMPÁS

  Or

  ¿

  ‘!|¢∞2å¨Ç*^–}[ª

  “Come on…where are you?”

  I’d been sitting at the computer for fifteen minutes, pressing every key in every possible combination, trying to find the @ symbol.

  “Come on,” I begged the keyboard. “Just show me where it is!”

  All I wanted to do was check my email, but the Spanish keyboard was making it impossible.

  “Come on, you stupid thing…”

  The computer was in a little library on the third floor of the dance school. It was a place where students could come to watch videos or check out CDs, brush up on flamenco theory or check their email. Well, supposedly.

  ¢∞¬#5[]ñ…}ç¿

  Hang on. Most of those symbols I’d seen before, but ¿ was new to me. An upside-down question mark? I was pretty sure I didn’t have that on my computer back home. What did it mean? Why would anyone use an upside-down question mark? I pondered this for a moment before going back to my search for the @.

  ‘·2$)($¨^*¿¡

  What? They have upside-down exclamation marks too? But why did the Spanish feel the need to invert their punctuation? Do the upside-down symbols have a different meaning? Do they mean the opposite? What’s the opposite of a question?

  Finally I hit on the @ and was able to get into my email account. Of course, when I started typing, I had the same problem trying to find the right keys.

  In the end my email looked like this:

  Hi everyoñe¡

  Please excuse the rañdom punctuation…I¡m still tryiñg to figure out how to use a Spañish keyboard. Check this out: ¿’¿?¿!ç¿¡!

  Pretty cool„ huh¿

  As I walked back to the apartment, I could hear a man singing flamenco. It was la hora de la siesta, siesta time, which was from about three to five o’clock. I was always amazed by how this bustling city became a ghost town for two whole hours during the middle of the day. Inés had told me that it was considered rude to call someone during la hora de la siesta, because you would be disturbing their afternoon nap.

  But the singer’s voice broke the afternoon silence, and as I came to the old stone church on the corner, I saw it was a street sweeper. He was standing beneath the orange trees, leaning on his broom with his eyes half-closed as he sang.

  The wind blew the orange blossoms he’d swept up away down the street, but he didn’t notice. The blossoms, or azahar as Zahra had called them, were fast becoming my favorite thing about Seville. It was the first time I’d been in a city that had its own fragrance. I wished I could buy a bottle of it so that wherever I went I could breathe in Seville, but there was no way any perfume could capture the smell of these streets. It was a mix of the sweet smell of the orange blossoms, the fried fish from the corner tapas bar, and the whiff of cigarette smoke from the man who’d just walked past. I knew that this smell would always remind me of these days in Seville, walking up and down these little streets on my way to and from dance class with my head full of rhythms.

  “Da da dum…da do di da, da da, da-da…” I repeated softly to myself. The only way I could memorize the footwork patterns from class was to practice them over and over again. And even then I normally managed to get them confused between classes. They were such complex patterns that I found it almost impossible to keep them in my head.

  I always stayed in the studio after class was finished, repeating the new steps again and again, trying to make them stick in my head. But I hated practicing when there were people around, because I knew I was making mistakes, even if I didn’t know what they were.

  Today, Enrique had poked his head in while I was practicing and had seen me repeating the new choreography out of time. He had stopped me and told me to clap the compás, and I was forced to admit my shameful secret—I didn’t know how.

  He stared at me in disbelief. How could I have made my way into his class without knowing compás? Of course I knew of it: I knew that every different flamenco style had its own rhythm pattern and that was what all the clappin
g in flamenco was about—someone’s got to keep the time. I just never wanted it to be me, because it’s really, really hard.

  Enrique started clapping the beat, slowly. I watched his hands. He clapped some beats louder than others, and left some out altogether. This kind of clapping is called palmas.

  “Soleá,” he said.

  I knew that soleá was the name of the type of dance that we were doing and that there were twelve beats to the bar, but that was about all I knew.

  He started clapping again, this time numbering the beats out loud, emphasizing certain beats. “Uno, dos, TRES…siete, ocho, nueve, DIEZ. Uno, dos, TRES…siete, ocho, nueve, DIEZ.”

  Okay, so: one, two, three, then seven, eight, nine, and ten. But what happens to the four, five, six, eleven, and twelve? They’re silent? And the three and the ten are accented? I followed along with him, but I still kept getting mixed up.

  Enrique took my hands in his and clapped them together. “Uno, dos, tres…siete, ocho, nueve, diez. Uno, dos, tres…”

  But I gazed up at him, lost in those flamenco eyes, and everything he said simply went in one ear and out the other.

  Afterward, I followed him out into the hall. He took a pen and wrote on a scrap of paper, Sólo Compás. He explained to me very slowly in Spanish that this was the name of a CD that I had to buy and wrote down the address of a shop where I could get it. He told me to listen to it all the time—at home, when I was having my coffee, when I was walking down the street. “Todo el tiempo,” he emphasized. All the time.

  • • •