The weary ball seeks its final resting place. And settles on number 8.
***
The city is gently winding down as William strolls back to his hotel.
The processions are long gone and the huge, yellow street-cleaning trucks are making their own less devout but just as driven pathways through the wax and petal and pastry-strewn streets.
He carries a fresh bag of churros and some chocolate, but he isn’t dipping.
Deep in thought, he is more confused but also more determined than he has ever been. Yet a part of him is still able to notice how frequently he can walk through a place with his weary head bowed and his eyes looking relentlessly downwards. He realises this now, because he finds himself counting discarded McDonald’s cartons and feeling almost upset that this should be one of the markers distinguishing this extraordinary city from the one in which he honeymooned.
As he resolves henceforth to spend more time looking up, a painful thought jolts him.
“Or was that the next spin? The one I never got to play. Bugger!”
***
Will is just as confused yet perhaps even more determined. Which is why he is asking Lu with such urgency for the remaining chips she still holds in her hand. When she shakes her head and makes to go off and cash them, he slips into pleading mode, with a bit of imploring thrown in. He only desists when there is a loud gasp from the croupier and a firm tap on his shoulder.
The rookie gambler finds himself looking first at Lu, whose eyes have grown impossibly wide. He turns slowly to see a large black toreador hat, under which is some unruly blond hair, a noble, smiling-through-adversity countenance and a heavily bandaged nose.
Sandy manages to explain the situation to Paloma in dumb-show. Putting the entire roulette game on hold, he points accusingly at his old friend, like some righteous, Old Testament prophet, then mimes a sharp headbutt. Will joins the charade, for all their benefits, by faux-disembowelling himself in contrition. The other players round the table are intrigued at the same time as they are pissed off, because they are here to lose money, not get involved in childish games.
A preoccupied Lu makes her fatal mistake. She rests the chips she holds on the rim of the table, so that she can minister to Sandy, who makes no bones about his yearning for a good minister. Seizing the opportunity and the remaining chips, Will sets them firmly down once more – on the elusive, resonant number 17.
His distracted young wife suddenly realises where most of their honeymoon money has gone. Lu can only watch in helpless horror as the ball revolves, its demented rattle piercing her brain like a particularly sadistic torture devised by Torquemada himself.
Sandy watches too, the throbbing pain in his face tempered by the smell of excitement just inches away. And the scent of a probable blow-up thereafter.
The innocent, unknowing ball comes to a stop. On number 17.
“YA FUCKING DANCER!” yells a delighted punter, which is probably not an expression he picked up at a casino movie, even in Glasgow. And hardly the insouciant cool of his dreams.
Will turns to Lu, who looks more relieved than elated, and hugs her in that feet-off-the-ground, solar plexus crushing way that only love and a totally undeserved windfall can elicit. But Lu can spot the fire in her new husband’s eyes, a glow that to her mind almost matches his hair. She is seriously concerned that he doesn’t blow all their newly won chips, the colourful motherlode Paloma is delightedly pushing towards him, on the date of his ma’s last hospital visit or his first wet dream or some equally arbitrary number that will set them back where they started. Or worse.
She catches Sandy’s gaze. He shrugs, knowingly. The exchange of two people who have never had to worry much about money, as they jointly fear for someone dear to them who patently has.
Shaking her long, shiny hair in a resolute twirl, she grabs Will and practically drags him away from the table towards the cash desk, suspecting that, whatever she does, this wad of pesetas is not going to be in his wallet for long.
31
“Luisa?”
There is no way William Sutherland can know that at the exact moment he is powering up the stairs to habitacion 381 – because he is impatient and the bloody lift stubbornly refuses to arrive (where are you, Pablo, when I need you?) – his disquieted wife is kicking her heavy suitcase through the same lift doors three flights up in preparation for her final descent. Had he appreciated the almost farcical nature of the situation, at three o’clock in the morning on this singular Semana Santa, he might not be so stunned when he opens the bedroom door and walks into an empty room.
“Luisa?” he calls again, just in case she is hiding playfully in the spacious wardrobe or stifling giggles behind the half-open curtains.
He hears the bell, as the lift arrives back on his floor. Returning to the corridor he notices that Pablo – who else? – is waving at him. Not a come-quickly wave, more the wave of an old friend happy to be reacquainted.
Sod him, thinks William, charitably, but he moves towards the lift anyway.
“For the record, amigo, my home team is Partick Thistle,” he tells the old man on entry, knowing that this is gobbledygook to him.
“Churros,” responds Pablo, after a few moments, as the lift descends.
William looks down at the bag in his hand, as if he has almost forgotten what he is holding. “Get your own,” he says and walks out of the lift.
He glances around the deserted lobby, although he knows that the odds on finding his missing wife here are pretty unenticing. A restraint he recognises as particularly British prevents him from asking the young man dozing off at the reception desk, beneath a large TV screen, whether he has seen a woman in the vicinity vaguely resembling the woman he came in with.
If he had to capture his wife, for identification purposes, in words or actions, the descriptors short, dark and well-rounded would probably cut it, with a patently sharp mind and a friendly attraction. Easily outlined to a weary receptionist, even with pastry in hand. But if asked to go beyond the superficial, flesh out the identikit version, he couldn’t readily think of a suitable action to describe the lack of connection, that perpetually postponed meeting of minds, the familiarity that brings occasional comfort, more often the reverse, but in truth simply is. Or indeed the growing distance between them, the sense of being apart from each other when each should be a part of the whole. And current circumstances – vacated room, deserted lobby – suggest that this sorrowful gap is most probably wider than it ever has been before.
But now he has a sense of how to fix it. Thanks to – well, who knows? But he has always been a problem-solver, hasn’t he? For God’s sake, isn’t this what has kept them afloat all these years?
The lights of an approaching car draw him towards the entrance. A cab is pulling up and from the shadows of the hotel’s forecourt he watches Luisa emerge, dragging her suitcase.
“LUISA!” he yells, rushing towards the revolving door, Britishness suddenly abandoned. But if she hears, as she surely must, she doesn’t acknowledge him. He pushes the doors so fast with his forearms that he almost sends himself round for a second time. But instead he topples out, one foot clipping the other, and manages to halt just inches from her furious face.
“Where the hell have you been?”
For a moment he is silent. She has clearly been waiting for him for hours and no explanation, true or false, could possibly ratchet down the white heat of her anger.
“Doesn’t matter,” he says, weakly. “Walking. Thinking. Where the hell are you going – at this time of the night?”
“Well, it isn’t the casino.”
He just looks at her in astonishment. Why would she recall this now? Unless…
“Oh, of course, you still remember this,” she continues angrily. “Because you make the money. Always the bloody money.”
William is staggered, although he realis
es that he probably shouldn’t be, by how swiftly old memories can be erased in another’s mind and replaced at a stroke with fresh new ones. Memories he has himself only created this very evening, by interacting with a young couple just down the road and half a lifetime away. He has no idea what to say to this.
“I’ve got churros,” is what he comes up with, although this is rather stating the obvious, as the bag he holds is now sodden with grease and the accompanying pot can be filled with only one thing tonight.
“Well, are you not the lucky one?”
“No,” says William.
“It is three in the morning,” responds Luisa, “I am five kilos overweight, I have the raised cholesterol and a sugars problem – and I am probably leaving you. You still think churros are the answer?”
“Not on their own.”
“Señora!” The taxi-driver has had enough.
“There is hotel at the airport,” explains Luisa. “And then tomorrow the first thing…”
“Will he be there to meet you?”
Before she can answer, if indeed she intends to, William sets down the churros on a wall and grabs her suitcase.
“Be careful of your back,” she cries instinctively.
“Señor!” protests the driver, at the same time as the impulsive case-grabber is assailed by a pain that predictably shoots up his spine and attacks all available muscles.
“Jesus Christ!” he yelps. “You can tell who most of the bloody clothes belong to!”
Luisa takes advantage of the spasm that is by now almost like a family friend and snatches back the case, telling him that she told him. The couple continue to tussle as the great cathedral looks silently down. The cabbie, who is also looking silently down, has had enough. He mutters a curse, leaps back into his purring cab and roars off.
“Tu puta madre!” suggests Luisa, as she watches him go. Angrily, she starts to look around, still gripping her case in readiness. As if another cab is just waiting to take up the slack.
“Don’t leave me, Luisa. Please.”
She turns to look at him in disbelief. That this softly spoken, plaintive entreaty could find such yearning expression in a man she believes she knows so well shakes her for a moment. But he hasn’t finished.
“I’ve learned stuff today, Luisa. Important stuff.” He moves tentatively towards her, as if scared that she might recoil. “One more day? Just you and me, together, eh? Brand-new start. In this bonkers bloody place. It feels right – doesn’t it? Luisa?”
He thinks about adding the “forgivingness” bit, his golden legacy from younger but wiser souls, but senses she may not be in the frame of mind to be absolved right now. His new-found magnanimity, whilst undoubtedly heartfelt, could unlock more boxes than it seals. And so he just lodges it in his mind and waits for an opening. It will come.
She sets her case down. Without quite looking at him, she shrugs. “What is one day – after thirty years?”
William exhales deeply, the way his overpriced osteopath has advised him, and lifts the case. She eyes the churros still on the wall and grabs one, as her husband gazes at her with a genuine fondness she notices but hardly recognises – it has been so long. She indicates with a gentle motion of her head that he should set the case down again, and he finds himself suddenly filled with a new sensation that feels strangely like hope.
“So, tell me, William,” she asks him, with some interest, alert despite the hour. “Tell me this important thing you learn. Please. This great big thing that will make tomorrow so different.”
If William has gleaned anything over the years, it is that, when an opportunity arises, you seize it.
“I’ll tell you exactly what I’ve – Tomorrow? Oh shit! Luisa—?”
He stares at her, as a look not unlike horror takes over his face and one not a million miles from total puzzlement envelops her own. Her eyes ask “what?” as her mind wonders briefly if he is having a stroke. With his next words, she reckons that a stroke is too good for him.
“I’m meeting this big client tomorrow. The one I came here for. The ceramic king himself. Azulejos. He exports all over the world! Señor Barbad—”
Luisa doesn’t need to hear any more. Certainly not what the idiot’s name is. She grabs her case and stomps slowly but angrily back into the hotel, leaving her irredeemable spouse hapless and helpless.
“You’re invited too,” he mumbles weakly. Although, as he calls up the details of the man’s generous invitation, he suspects that this isn’t going to make her any more thrilled.
32
“Bastardo!”
After the great cathedral and the famed Alcazar Palace, the magnificent Baroque-style Plaza de Toros de la Real Maestranza de Caballeria de Sevilla is the most visited monument in the whole of Seville and generally acknowledged, especially by Sevillanos, as the Mecca of bullfighting. (Not an inappropriate comparison, when one considers the reverence in which this pursuit is held in certain Spanish circles, even as that other religion is being celebrated just down the road.)
The matadors who practise their precarious art in this beautiful but challenging ring are amongst the most celebrated in Spain. And their fans, all twelve thousand of them on capacity days, the most unforgiving. The statue outside the gates, of that bewitching but tragic gypsy Carmen, cigar-girl and dusky Sevillian temptress, welcomes the world to the romance and spectacle that is the essence of corrida.
So there is no reason in the world why kindly Señor and Señora Barbadillo should presume that their female guest this afternoon would rather find herself in the seventh circle of hell.
“Bastardo!” is the word she keeps muttering under her breath. But not so far under that William – who needs no translation this time – isn’t hugely relieved she’s not seated right next to his ebullient prospective client.
Señor Barbadillo, a florid Sevillano in his mid-sixties, with a belly that stubbornly refuses to stay contained within his expensively loud, short-sleeved silk shirt and chest hair that feels the same about his collar, is extremely proud of the seats he has obtained for his new friends from chilly London. And the influence it took to secure them.
“You are very lucky, my friends. These seats in the Sombra, they are like the gold.”
When William looks quizzical, the man patiently explains that the seats here are divided between those in the “Sol” – the unrelenting sun – and the ones in which they find themselves: “Sombra” – the shade. With more than an inference that only peasants, or tourists who know no better, occupy the former.
There are representatives of all species here today. The Maestranza is buzzing. And, if Spaniards can be noisy in trains and restaurants, even in cathedrals, they excel themselves in bullrings. It is as if their reputation as the highest decibel form of humanity is in constant danger of challenge and they have to keep reasserting its dominance.
William can spot a few obvious tourists here and there, amongst the over-animated spectators. They’re the ones whose heads appear to swivel all around, like that kid from The Exorcist. But he is fairly certain the bulk of the crowd is composed of locals or at least their compatriots, many of them corrida aficionados. All primed for a pleasant afternoon of chopitos and carnage.
Señora Barbadillo, a striking, raven-haired woman, considerably taller and probably slightly younger than her husband, leans over to add more colour to the introduction. Like several of the ladies around her, she holds a small bunch of flowers. Perhaps, ponders William, these are to be thrown into the ring. Or maybe they are just to mask the smell of death. “Is finest corrida in Spain,” she says proudly. “So – in whole world, si Luisa?”
“It must be my birthday,” says Luisa, who does some more muttering for William’s benefit. “I cannot believe you do this. To bring me here again!”
It takes a moment for William to absorb what she has just said, amidst the music that has just b
een turned up to max. And of course he’s pretty tired – neither of them had the best of silent nights. He can’t even look at what is going on down below – he can only stare at Luisa.
“Luisa, this is very important to – again?” He’s shaking his head. “Luisa, we never came here.”
Señor Barbadillo feels that his own importance needs reinforcing one more time. Or perhaps he has simply run out of conversation. “No sol, no sweatings.”
“Aye. Perfect,” says William, still thrown by Luisa’s last remark. “Very – generous of you, Cristobal. Eh Luisa?”
“Perhaps this time I ask a matador to put me out of my misery. With a big sharp—” William feels that a nudge at this moment would not be inappropriate. But it only seems to make things worse. “Ooh, sshhhh… Clients! Ssshhhhh!!! I see her husband gives her flowers.”
“I gave you churros.” Her scoff reverberates around the ring and down the ages.
Señor Barbadillo, who William thinks would have to be deaf and blind not to pick up the tension in the costly seats to his right, carries on gamely with his hosting. “Somebody say Jesucristo is not the only death we think about in Sevilla this week. But the bulls, William, they do not get up again on Sunday!”
He gives a huge, irreligious roar at this, then looks around to see if anyone else, equally rich and well-connected, has caught the multilingual wit emanating from Barbadillo, the tile-king. His wife clearly has and scolds him quite unconvincingly. “Cristobal!” She too is not averse to looking around, presumably to check if anyone is acknowledging their suitably Sombra presence.
William joins in dutifully with the laughter. He has discovered over the years that a subtle mimicking of the reactions or emotions of a prospective is more likely to encourage that warming disposition and eventual business. He has laughed at some shit in his time. He draws a line at overt racism or sexism but, hand on heart, he can’t honestly admit to having sacked or rejected any client because of it. He salves his conscience just a tad by overcharging them.
A Meeting in Seville Page 14