Only in Spain

by Nellie Bennett

  Coming up the street toward me was a different procession. These men carried a giant doll in a lavish purple gown with a massive crown on her head and one pert tear glistening on her cheek. I guessed she was the Virgin of something or other. Were they going to make her dance, too? She was certainly dressed for it.

  Just then I got a text message from Zahra telling me she was trapped in a café on a corner near her apartment. The message ended: They are eating something wonderful. Come here!

  The siren song of a mysterious and culturally specific delicacy! After only three weeks in Seville, I was beyond trying to resist. I knew that whatever it was they were eating in that café would not be made of tofu, but I didn’t care. I was already planning my route to the corner café like a guerrilla tactician.

  It took me half an hour to cover what was on a normal day a two-minute walk, and the incense wafting through the streets was starting to make me cough, but I got there. Zahra was standing in the doorway of a café that was packed with Sevillians eating coils of yellow pastry. The smell of deep-fried dough was even stronger than the incense.

  Pushing our way through a crowd of women draped in black lace, we somehow got to the bar. Behind the counter, a man in a white uniform was cranking a machine that turned out a thin coil of yellow paste into a vat of bubbling oil. Whatever this new delicacy was, it had to be wonderful: anything that involves that amount of bubbling oil must be good. The dough was fried until it was crispy then placed on paper to dry for all of about five seconds before it was chopped up and served to the customers, who tore off pieces and dunked them into cups of coffee or thick hot chocolate.

  From the signs up around the bar that said CHURROS €1.50, I guessed that these were churros. I wondered briefly what the macrobiotic take would be on deep-fried yellow stuff and liquid chocolate. The yellow stuff looked very yang, and the chocolate was clearly very yin, so I supposed that about evened it out.

  We ordered a plate of churros and two cups of hot chocolate, which appeared before us at lightning speed. I tore off a piece of that yellow dough; just touching it covered my fingers in grease. Then I dipped it into my cup of chocolate as the other people were doing and bit into it.

  Outside on the street, thousands of people were having a religious experience, but sitting at the bar of the café, I had one of my own. That mouthful of crispy featherlight dough covered in grease and dipped in thick hot chocolate was so divine I had to close my eyes for a minute. Zahra was trying to talk to me, but I held up my hand to say, I can’t eat this and listen to you at the same time. She understood.

  • • •

  The drumbeat went on day and night for the entire week. I could hear it when I lay in bed at night, and it was the first sound I heard when I woke up in the morning. It beat while I brushed my hair and cleaned my teeth and while I was getting dressed to go to class.

  Out on the street I used the sound to navigate the quickest way around. When it got louder, I knew there was a procession somewhere nearby, so I’d take a side street to avoid getting caught again among a thousand pious Spaniards. This didn’t always work; sometimes there was no avoiding the processions, and by the end of the week my jacket was streaked with wax from ducking under the giant tapers that the hooded men carried, and my clothes and hair stank of incense. Although the processions were streets away, we could even hear the drums in the studio, and the smoky incense wafted in through the windows. Sometimes I thought that the drumming had stopped, but it was just that I had gotten so used to the sound that I stopped hearing it.

  On Saturday night Zahra and I went out without a plan. We wandered through the little archways and down the cobblestoned streets, going from bar to bar around the bullring in the center of town. We heard singing and followed the sound until we found ourselves in a tiny bar where a man was singing copla, traditional Spanish songs.

  After a glass of wine we went back out onto the streets and wandered again until we heard a guitar. We followed the melody to a tiny bar where a guitarist was beating out a bulería and a girl in ripped jeans twirled around him with castanets between her fingers.

  After that we wandered down to the river that runs through Seville, Río Guadalquivir. We crossed an old stone bridge and walked slowly through the streets, stopping to gaze into the brightly lit shop windows at spectacular flamenco dresses. Next year, we promised, we’d both come back and buy one.

  We kept walking until we heard more live music and saw a crowd of people outside an old bar. They were standing by the door, all pushing, trying to get in. We joined them, pushing our way in just far enough to catch a glimpse of what was going on inside.

  A woman in a black dress with heavily painted eyes and a bright red mouth stood in front of the crowd. She balled up her fists and belted out a love song. But she was not singing for any man. She was singing for her beloved Seville. When you fall in love in Seville, she sang, you fall in love with Seville.

  A man came through the bar handing out cards with pictures of one of the Jesus statues on them. Underneath was written El Jesús del Gran Poder, the Jesus of the Great Power. I didn’t understand; how was the Jesus of the Great Power different from the Jesus of the Sacred Heart or the Jesus of the Wasted Flesh or the Jesus of the Pained Facial Expressions? How many Jesuses were there? And what about the Virgins? Everywhere I looked in Seville there seemed to be a Virgin, but they all had different names. There was the Virgin of Pains, the Virgin of Miracles, the Virgin of Eternal Sorrows. Surely there was only one Jesus and one Mary, but the Virgin painted on the tiles above the entrance to Inés’s building was different from the picture of the Virgin in the frame that hung above the radio at my favorite fruit stall in the market, and the Virgin that was paraded down Calle Feria was different from the other Virgins carried down different streets.

  And everyone seemed to be particularly attached to their own version. The man with the card explained to me passionately that El Jesús del Gran Poder was very important and I should keep him with me always. Looking at the card, I didn’t feel much of a connection to the statue’s wooden features, though I did like his floor-length purple velvet cloak with gold brocade. The Sevillians certainly like their gods to be well dressed.

  Just then, the lights went out in the bar. The only light came from the candles around a small framed picture of a Virgin that hung on the wall. The musicians began to play and the singer gazed up reverently at the illuminated figure and sang to her.

  Zahra and I extracted ourselves from the crowd and went back onto the street. We turned a corner into a little lane and stopped, both struck by the scene before us. The moon was hanging so low in the sky that I felt if I reached up on my tiptoes I could touch it, and the stars looked like the twinkling fairy lights on the ceiling of Santa’s Cave on Level Six of the department store back home.

  I knew that my stay in Seville would soon come to an end. I could feel time speeding up: every day seemed to go faster and faster, like it was moving to the rhythm of bulerías. The day would come when I would have to pack up my suitcase and get on a plane back home.

  But how could I possibly go back to that world I had run away from? How could I go back to eating lunch at twelve and dinner at six? I’d learned to take my coffee with a dollop of brown sugar in the warm midmorning sun; how could I go back to coffee in paper cups on the run? And how could I go back to breathing in air conditioning after the incense of Semana Santa, or squirting perfume on my wrists when I’d gotten used to crushing orange blossoms and rubbing them on my neck?

  How could I live without flamenco? Here flamenco was part of daily life, not just restricted to an hour and a half once a week. And there weren’t any sevillanas bars in Sydney where I could pick up new moves and dance until dawn.

  In any case, I knew I had to dance. My body had gotten used to the daily training, and I was living on endorphins and compás. When I caught sight of myself in the mirror in the studio, I found it hard
to believe that the girl dancing confidently in red shoes was the same one who had tried to hide at the back of the class just weeks before.

  I didn’t know what I was going to do when the time came to say good-bye. The very thought filled me with dread. In Spain I was living on cloud nine, and I didn’t want to go back down to earth.

  We walked back across the old stone bridge over the river. “This is a magic night,” Zahra said. “Anything we wish for tonight will have to come true.” And so I closed my eyes and made a wish. I wished that I could live in Spain forever.

  THE KISS

  Or

  Sí, claro, toma que toma!

  Zahra smoothed her hands over the bodice of her new flamenco outfit. It was her favorite color, not Hermès orange, but brighter, and the skirt was white with big orange polka dots and three layers of ruffles.

  This was her final fitting; in three days’ time both she and I would be sitting on airplanes that would propel us back to our homes. It was an odd coincidence that we were both flying home on the same day, and that it was the day after the opening of the Feria de Abril.

  Zahra was lucky to have her dress finished in time as this was the busiest time of the year for dressmakers: everyone wanted a new outfit for the feria. The shop was packed and there was barely room for me to stand. Shopgirls were helping women into long ruffled dresses, taking note of last-minute alterations, and bringing out shawl after shawl to drape over the dresses.

  Zahra was pushed away from the mirror by a woman in a bright red dress who wanted to see her own reflection. A stressed shopgirl followed her carrying a selection of combs; with an apologetic glance at Zahra, she held the different combs up above her customer’s head for her to pick one.

  It looked like Saturday afternoon on Level Two. In a week I’d be back at work. I didn’t want to think about it. The saddest thing about leaving was that I had only recently begun to feel at home in Seville. Adapting to a new culture, especially one so different from my own, wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t until the end of my stay that I actually started to feel like I was in sync with the people around me. Everyday life was starting to feel like less of a struggle, and I’d accepted that searching for a smoke-free café and a supermarket open on a Sunday in Seville was as pointless as it would be to expect flamenco-singing police officers or a glass of red wine for a dollar fifty in Sydney. It just wasn’t gonna happen. And as soon as I let go of my ideas of how the world should be, I was able to enjoy all the Spanishisms I had come to love. I had learned that midday is a perfectly respectable time to have coffee in the sun, just as midnight is a perfectly good time for dinner. I’d even temporarily suspended my veganism. “Only in Spain,” I said to myself each time I indulged, knowing that when I got home I’d go back to brown rice and tofu.

  I knew I had to return to Seville, and I dreamed of coming back to live. I imagined myself doing my weekly grocery shopping at the market, instead of Woolworths Metro. I pictured myself sitting in the café every morning, listening to the strum of a distant guitar, before swinging my dance bag over my shoulder and going off to class. But how was I going to do it? I racked my brains for a solution, but I couldn’t find one. I didn’t speak enough Spanish to get a good job, and the minimum wage in Spain was too low to permit me to live and dance. If I wanted to come back to Seville, I was going to need a plan.

  • • •

  That evening I went back to the school to practice. When I walked in, I could hear music coming from the studio. The door was closed, so I stood outside and listened, remembering how I had stood in that same doorway not so long ago watching the advanced class.

  I could hear a singer, a guitarist, and a percussionist, as well as the sound of a dancer’s shoes on the floor. The dancer was in the middle of a fast and complex footwork pattern. The music dropped out, and just the percussionist kept going. The dancer was racing the beat, going faster and faster.

  I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the dancer drilling his feet into the floor, not daring to break his concentration even to wipe the sweat from his brow. Then there was a triumphant stamp, stamp, stamp! and a pause where I could imagine the double or triple or quadruple turn, then the dancer cried out, “Ay!” and landed on the floor.

  It was Enrique. I could tell from the sound of his voice. I wished I could look into the studio; I would have loved to see him dance. I thought about pressing on the door to see if it would spring open as I’d done once before, but I didn’t dare, so I went off to get changed.

  But just as I was coming out of the changing room the door of the studio opened and there was Enrique, his eyes sparkling. “Australiana!” he said, seeing me. “Qué haces aquí?” What are you doing here? I told him I’d come to practice, and he said, “Ven.” Come.

  As I followed Enrique into the studio, he told me that the dance he’d been rehearsing with the musicians was the same one that we were doing in class, and that he was adding a crazy footwork section to the end of it. He clapped and told the musicians to get ready to go again from the beginning. I looked around, confused. What? He wanted me to dance?

  “Venga,” he said, telling me to get ready to start. The guitarist strummed the introduction, and I felt my arms lift up above my head as they had done countless times before. My wrists twirled and twisted, my fingers reaching out and curling back in, and then at a strum of the guitar, I grabbed the end of my long skirt and—ratatatatatatatatatata!—drilled my feet into the floor in the first section of the dance.

  “Olé!” the singer said, but I was already moving on. The dance went so fast that I had to always be two steps ahead of myself. The singer began the verse, and I twisted and twirled to the music. Dancing with live flamenco musicians was something I’d only ever experienced from the back of the classroom, hiding behind a group of better dancers, hoping that no one would notice me. But this was a totally different experience. I could feel the guitarist’s eyes on my feet as he followed me, while I kept my ear cocked to the percussion to stay in time.

  All those evenings alone in the studio paid off in those few minutes. When it came time to jump up and slam the floor with my shoes, I didn’t hesitate, and I knew just when to pause and linger over a roll of the shoulder and a flick of the hip.

  “Que toma que toma!” the singer cried.

  As I came to the end of the dance, Enrique came up and danced beside me. We went into those complicated steps that had so intimidated me when I had first seen Enrique performing them, and this time I nailed them. And when we went into the triple turn, I heard Enrique say, “Vamos, niña!” and I leaned in and threw myself around, one, two, three times!

  “Olé!”

  That one was me. I laughed with joy at the thrill of my first ever triple turn, landing perfectly on two feet at the same moment as Enrique. Our eyes met in the mirror as we clapped our hands, slapped our thighs, and skipped forward, one, two, three, threw one arm up in the air as if to tell the world to go to hell, and turned on our heels. I lifted up my skirt and swished it from side to side as we danced around in a circle.

  “Olé, Australiana!” the singer said with a wink.

  That was as much of the dance as I knew, so I took a step back and watched as Enrique went into his footwork solo. He stood in the middle of the room, his gaze fixed ahead of him, then slowly lifted his foot and went into the first rapid section.

  “Olé!” the singer said as Enrique once again paused, clapping and listening to the compás. Then he threw himself into another complicated section, and then paused. After a couple of bars he started again, this time building up and building up until his feet were racing over the floor so quickly they were just a blur.

  He stared straight ahead, his lips barely moving as he counted to himself. His boots hit the floor harder and harder and then he spun around once, twice, three, four, five times, landing with his arms outstretched and his head thrown back. “Olé!”

  Enrique
stood like this a moment as the singer jumped out of his chair and sang a verse. Then he opened his eyes and started to dance again. I joined him in the middle of the floor, swishing my skirt and twirling my wrists as we moved around the studio, waving good-bye to our imaginary audience and pretending to go offstage as the singer sang his last words and the guitarist strummed the final chords of the song.

  • • •

  The next day was my last class with Enrique. It was the Friday before I flew out, and it was the day before the Feria de Abril. I threw myself into the dance, reminding myself that it would be the last time.

  But in spite of my determination to make my last class the best, I was out of compás. Perhaps it was because part of me was already on that plane over the Pacific. Though I tried to throw myself into the steps, I couldn’t recapture the joy I’d felt dancing alone with Enrique and the band.

  When the class was over, I stayed behind and went through the dance again, trying to glue it into my memory so that I could take it home as a souvenir from Spain. As I was dancing, Enrique appeared in the doorway and asked me if today was my last class. I nodded, sadly, and told him it was.

  “Cuando vuelves?”

  I hesitated before answering this question. When was I coming back?

  Enrique saw my hesitation and pressed me to come back soon. “Has aprendido mucho en poco tiempo.”

  He was right. I had learned a lot in my short time in Seville. I remembered how he’d tried to speak to me before my first class and I’d just stared back at him like a stunned possum. Now I could understand him.

  “Sí,” I said.

  The only problem was I couldn’t speak Spanish, as he pointed out with a smile. “No sabes decir más que sí?” You don’t know how to say anything but “yes”?

  “Claro,” I said, pulling out another of the words that Zahra and I had picked up on our nights out dancing.