A Meeting in Seville

by Paul A. Mendelson

  And now the trumpets sound.

  The crowd goes quiet, or as near to quiet as they are able, which isn’t actually that close. The participants – matadors in their suits of lights, embroidered with silver or golden thread, picadors on horseback, bandilleros or flag-men and their crew enter the arena. The band plays life-affirming pasodobles as the cheers erupt and the players take up the formalised positions that ritual dictates.

  Finally, the bull arrives, adorned with the rosette of his proud estate, unwitting star of the show. This one, obligingly shaking his massive head and snorting wetly, is a jet-black and achingly noble beast. As William assumes they all are, at least at the outset. His enormous neck bulges on cue, mighty shoulder muscles glistening dangerously in the sun – no Sombra for him – as he kicks up dust and wonders what the hell he’s got himself into. He is about to be tested for ferocity by the matador and bandilleros, flaunting their magenta and gold dress capes. As the discerning crowd makes its own informed assessment.

  He is not about to disappoint.

  All this is explained in great detail to William, who finds himself genuinely fascinated – he has been wanting to witness this spectacle for over thirty years. Yet it is beginning to feel disconcertingly familiar and he is not totally sure why. Perhaps he saw the movie.

  “Tercio de varas,” announces Cristobal, “with the – the lances, yes? The matador he watch the bull very carefully, he study him with his whole head, while the bandilleros they do the workings with the capes.” The portly host turns to William, genuinely hoping he is as impressed as he should be. “And then he is doing the veronica.”

  He is puzzled to see that his esteemed British guest is now staring fixedly to his right, well away from the action and deep into the sun-drenched rabble, with his mouth wide open and an expression of pure shock in his eyes. How can anyone not be held spellbound by the prospect of veronica?

  “Señor – William? It is okay?”

  It is very much not okay. Yet there is no way William can tell the man what or who he has just seen. And it isn’t Veronica. He only knows that he feels some empathy with the bull.

  ***

  Across the Maestranza, in the Sol, almost all eyes – and a lot of chunky cameras – are on the picadores. Working in pairs, they prance the ring on their blindfolded and seriously well-padded horses, goading the bull with their lances. One pair of eyes, however, is firmly closed and pressed painfully tight into the shoulder of a young and totally absorbed red-headed man.

  Will tries gently to turn his young wife’s head back, so that she can see what she is desperately trying to miss. He can’t understand for a moment how she wouldn’t be enjoying this, her national sport. Especially when he has had to pay so much for the seats. They’re in the glorious Andalusian sunshine, for pity’s sake, best seats in the house, watching angry bulls being goaded and tormented. Even allowing for massive sunburn and definite heatstroke; how much better can life get?

  “Hey, Señora, meet me half way,” he says affectionately. “At least open your eyes.”

  ***

  “So – what do you do, Señora?” asks William, with more assurance than he’s feeling.

  He realises he is fast slipping down the client sociability league and has to clamber back up before it’s too late. Gamely, he tries to ignore what right now he – and, thank God, only he – can see just a few metres and several sunny degrees away from him.

  “I am flamenco,” announces Señora Barbadillo, her large hands fluttering in unconscious confirmation.

  “Of course you are,” says William, like he knows.

  Señor Barbadillo, proud husband, exclaims loudly, “The best in Sevilla!” His Señora tries and fails to look modest. “She is sixty years age this Sunday – the Easter Sunday!” She doesn’t even try not to look disgruntled. To his credit, her Señor senses this. “I tell him because you look forty years, cariño. Younger! You feel the legs, Señor. Feel!”

  William really isn’t in the mood right now for feeling any sort of limbs, even those belonging to the spouse of a prospective client, although he has probably done worse in his time. Nevertheless, he leans across the expansively soft belly of his host and extends an arm. His fingers touch and then grasp the solid, sixty-year old calf muscle that is being exposed for his benefit. He whistles, which feels both stupid and appropriate.

  “Very – substantial. You hear that, Luisa? You want to feel Señora’s—?”

  “I give you lessons, William,” offers the owner of the leg. “Good prices.”

  William pictures his wife dancing so joyfully in the crowded street with that sweet little girl, flamenco impromptu, the night they arrived. And the numbing paralysis that appears to set in, freezing every cell in his resistant body, whenever such activity is offered or even mentioned to him. He remembers now, with a helplessness bordering on despair, that he couldn’t even dance at his own wedding. In that tiny room above the pub, the one crowded with friends, bereft of family, reeking of Tennent’s lager and lust. Not even when roaring drunk can he lose this almost primal hostility to simply moving with the music.

  “Sorry, Señora, two left feet. Ask my wife.”

  “The British are very stiff,” responds Luisa, although no one has actually asked her. “Except where it really counts.”

  William stares at her, as if she has finally crossed a line, albeit sotto. She is looking away from him and around. He knows that it won’t be long before she spots what he has already seen, with God knows what consequences. He also knows that it would be wildly imprudent, were he himself to stare again in that direction. But he simply can’t help himself.

  He already suspects that the day – along with his life – is turning into the aptly named bullshit and there is absolutely nothing he can do about it. Yet he can’t help feeling, amidst his paralysis, that he is not entirely free from blame.

  Over there, in the Sol, he observes Lu, who is looking everywhere save into the ring, in which he assumes the picadores of their own day are happily breaking down ligaments and making proud animals bleed.

  “Strictly Come Lancing,” he says, to keep the conversation going, before he realises that of course his hosts have no idea what he is talking about.

  Lu finally – and inevitably – spots him.

  Now she’s nudging Will excitedly. He’s clearly too engrossed to take any notice, but she still waves across to the Sombra, in innocent delight.

  The distinctively raw smell of blood and sweat suddenly assails his nostrils and strikes a chord in his memory that scares him half to death. He realises with mounting dread that his own mind is inexorably changing, along with those he has been trying – with admittedly mixed results – to affect.

  “Our lives fall apart and still you work. Now here is bloody miracle,” mutters Luisa, without looking at him. He watches as she picks at her fingers. He tries gently to draw her hands away from each other but she pulls them sharply back.

  “Not leaving me with much else, are you?” he responds, trying to catch her eye. But she is staring pointedly down into the ring, as if she would witness even this atrocity rather than engage with the person who dragged her here. “Luisa, I had to make this meeting. Things are pretty tough right now. The guy’s business could make all the—”

  She isn’t listening. Not any more.

  “I can SEE them! Oh, Dios mio. There – in the Sol!” William closes his eyes, as if this will erase what they are both now acknowledging. “Si! Of course,” she yelps, in disorienting glee. “This is where we were sitting!”

  There is no point in William explaining that he couldn’t get bullfight tickets for love or money back then. That isn’t even history now. What do they call it – false memory? But how on earth did he—?

  The new memory suddenly rushes in like a diverted river discovering its newly altered course. Before he can stop himself, he blurts out what h
is feverish mind has just churned up. “Dear Lord! I bought the seats from a bloody scalper outside the ground, didn’t I? With my winnings!”

  Luisa isn’t listening. Not to his ramblings. She is too busy taking the barrette from her hair and shaking her head slowly and languorously, like one of those glossy shampoo commercials for less sophisticated nations that her husband used to write when they first moved down to London. The hair, still rich and lustrous, isn’t as long as it was back then, nor as flowing, its natural colours given a modicum of tasteful help. Yet at once she seems more sultry and, just as swiftly, several degrees more Spanish. William can admire the brazen femininity, at the same time as he wonders why the hell she is doing this. And for whom.

  Their host is clearly impressed, which can’t be all bad. Beaming at his attractive guest, he nods down towards the ring. “Buena, Luisa?

  “Makes me proud to be Spanish.”

  Señor Barbadillo nods happily. Him too. Yet the tiniest doubts still linger. “The bull, William – he has very good life. All the grass and ladies that he want!”

  “Ha ha! Big surprise for him now,” mutters Luisa, which really doesn’t help. “I cannot sit here and ignore them,” she whispers crossly to William. “Is like I insult myself.” She stands up, drawing noisy sighs from those behind her. “Perhaps I go cheat on you with my husband, eh, William? Like the Spanish tramp that I am.”

  William rises too, but is drawn back down again by his host, before the aficionados behind him can become amateur picadores. “Luisa?” he whispers urgently. “NO! It isn’t safe. You don’t know what you’re getting into.”

  “Where does your wife go?” asks the podgy Señor, not unreasonably.

  “Sol. She wants to work on her tan.” Which sounds stupid even to William, but not as stupid as explaining that his mercurial spouse is rather set on visiting 1988.

  33

  Will and Lu are both waving now, but this time it isn’t Luisa who has caught their eye.

  “Might have known he’d have the bloody posh seats,” says Will, with begrudging respect. Lu has explained to him the way the pricing works here, which is clearly quite different from Firhill Stadium, the Partick Thistle ground, where sunburn is rarely an issue.

  They’re looking across into the Sombra, trying to catch the eye of their broken-nosed and bandaged friend, as he enjoys the action in relative comfort, his left arm planted firmly around Paloma. He’s nodding intently as his new love, a native of Seville and clearly no stranger to the corrida, proudly points out the finer details to him.

  “Next time,” vows Will, his eyes not leaving Sandy’s damaged but enraptured face, “we’ll be the ones with the toffs. Out of the ‘Sol’.”

  Lu strokes his face and dabs some more suncream on it. The novelty has clearly worn off and skin is already competing with hair in the ruddiness stakes.

  A sudden movement beside them causes both to look up.

  Luisa is standing in the neighbouring aisle, untrammelled head held high, one elegant hand perched perkily on a cocked and available hip. The other hand lightly taps the young man’s shoulder. Will immediately gives her a delighted smile, which she just as instantly returns. But this time Lu is holding back. Perhaps it is the way the older woman’s gaze is aimed directly and rather too narrowly at her husband. And most certainly not down there at the ring.

  “Oh, hi, Fanta!” says Will, “Bloody great to see you.”

  Lu tries to catch the eye of the older woman, this still-attractive stranger who is gazing down at her husband almost coquettishly. And what’s with the hair and the pose? she wonders. It seems curious, such wilful abandon on a woman that age. She certainly wouldn’t carry on like this.

  “It is good to see you also, Will.” Now the older woman acknowledges Lu, but as a casual afterthought. “And you.”

  Luisa has a vague sense that the spectators of her own era, those contemporaries who sit in the same two seats that she is currently addressing, are staring at her and wondering who the hell she is talking to. They appear to her as no more than vague ghosts, eclipsed by the impossible reality of the infinitely more vivid young couple from her past. But, of course, Luisa has no awareness at all of the young couple’s immediate neighbours, those innocent denizens of a previous millennium, who are reacting in a similar manner towards Will and Lu as they watch them converse with a patently empty aisle.

  “I had to pay some wee scalper a small fortune,” explains Will, “but we struck it lucky last night, didn’t we, Lu?” Lu shrugs – she has had luckier days. “Thanks to good old Gordon.” He catches Luisa’s confusion but it doesn’t seem to bother him. “Mind you, I should have bought Señora Sutherland here a seat facing the other way round!”

  Luisa laughs, as if her own attitude to the corrida is just so different. She lifts her head to bask in the sun’s merciless rays, content to shrug off the blight of a long Richmond winter and an unpromising early spring. “I like it better here in the sunshine, Will,” she tells him. “I become Spanish again.” It takes her a moment to understand why the attractively bearded young man looks so surprised. “Argentinian!” she swiftly amends. “So, Will, you have the cojones for the bullfight?”

  “I’ve supported Partick Thistle through the Eighties, Fanta. I’m used to slaughter.”

  “Si – but when your team lose, I do not think they are this night’s main course in a Glasgow restaurant.”

  The two of them fall about at this, and Luisa takes the opportunity to rest a hand on the young man’s pleasantly firm forearm. She can feel his rusty hairs rise, as if in attraction to her welcoming palm.

  Neither notices that Lu is looking pure daggers at her future, more worldly self.

  ***

  In the not-so-comforting shade, William tries to summon back his errant wife with fruitless flicks of his wrist, as if he is watching her wander obliviously into quicksand, too far away to be thrown a rope. His bemused neighbour can hardly fail to notice this, but is still unfailingly polite.

  “Your wife, she know these people?”

  “Er – quite a coincidence actually, Cristobal,” says William, as casually as he can feign. “They’re her cousins.”

  “Si? … But they are Japanese, Señor.”

  “Talk about bulls and bloody china shops,” says William, to himself. Because he has nothing else to say.

  ***

  The bandilleros strut their stuff with practised arrogance, deftly swishing their large, flowing capotes. Their brief – to pass and position the now-weakened but still-ferocious and understandably enraged bull.

  “So Fanta, these guys are—?” asks Will, with genuine interest. But Luisa, now sitting close to him in the aisle, isn’t exactly certain what manner of spectacle he is looking at. For all she knows, rain could have stopped play back then and a local girls’ band are ruining gems from the musicals. She hopes against hope that more information will be forthcoming. “The guys with the fancy kebab sticks?”

  Luisa laughs in relief. “Ah, bandilleros! Is funny because we use this word also, Will, for the tapas on the little sticks.”

  She catches Lu beside her husband, her head turned away from the skewering, rolling her eyes at this. Luisa really doesn’t recall herself being so possessive, but the evidence is staring her in the thankfully unrecognised face. She decides to ignore it. “Well, now that the picadores have wounded the poor bull, these guys they come in to make it so much the worse for him. You really like this, Will?”

  “Reminds me of Govan on a Saturday night. Or my old man on any night. No bull.”

  Luisa smiles at this, as she undoes another button on her blouse. And smiles even more as Lu’s bright eyes almost disappear into the top of her head. Finally, the young woman speaks.

  “Poor fat old thing. To be so close to death. On the last of its legs, I think you say.” With this she looks directly at Luisa, the sharp little ba
ndilleros making their mark.

  “LUISA!”

  Both women swivel instantly at the impassioned cry of a balding Scotsman, now making his urgent way down the aisle. Unfortunately, both women also respond with a “si”, which causes the young couple to stare at the older woman in confusion. Luisa just shrugs – easy mistake to make.

  “Er… fancy seeing you two,” says William. He smiles pleasantly in greeting, although his heart is racing, along with his mind and every sweat gland in his body, as he envisages all the ways this could go so horribly wrong.

  “Again,” adds Will, shaking his head.

  There you go.

  “Again?” queries Luisa, looking at William, who decides to keep his own counsel.

  “Aye. And again,” Will ploughs on happily. “Hey – thanks for ‘numero 17’, Gordon. Paid for these seats and more. He’s got the gift, hasn’t he, Fanta?”

  William tries to compute how much Luisa might be remembering. She clearly recalls them winning at the casino, which of course only happened this time round, but obviously struggles with how the kids came up with that winning number. It’s as if his “interventions” still only belong to him. For now.

  If the gods are playing with us, thinks William Sutherland, then they’re clearly making up the bloody rules as they go along.

  “Oh! Do you like to meet our friend Sandy?” says Lu, out of left field, or perhaps to divert Luisa’s attention. She is pointing away from them, into the Sombra. “We tell him about you – the second honeymoon people.”

  Jesus!

  Sandy?

  William and Luisa just look at each other. But before she can put a clamp on her tongue, Luisa nods and says “Ah, si. Of course. Sandy is here also! In the Sombra.”