Chapter Fifty-Nine
The Café Amarillo, with its bumblebee-yellow awning and newly repainted black surround, appears much the same as in William’s previous incarnations.
Luisa hasn’t changed either.
She looks just as she did when he left her, another lifetime yet a matter of hours ago.
Except that now her bulky suitcase squats beside her on the pavement and she is smoking, something that this particular Luisa hasn’t done – or at least he hasn’t caught her doing – since a time long gone, when their world collapsed in on itself and they each sought comfort in whatever way they could.
This same world that in the last few days William had single-mindedly reconfigured, with perhaps the best of intentions and an almost total absence of thought, and then only just restored to how it was and always should have been, with its unpredictable seasoning of sorrows and joys.
For better or for worse. The rough and the smooth. And every other cliché with more than a nugget of truth.
Yet, despite everything, is it all far too late?
William Sutherland doesn’t approach his wife of thirty years straightaway.
Perhaps, he reasons, it is pure fear that battens him down in this quaint plaza, now pleasantly cooler in the gone-midnight darkness.
Or it could be that he simply wants to drink her in, like the white wine she quietly sips at the now deserted café, scarily certain that his days of being able to do this, days he so desperately wants, are not simply finite but quite probably non-existent.
He tells himself he knows so much about William Sutherland that he didn’t latch onto before this night. He knows that he is overwhelmed with feelings he has never allowed himself to feel.
Which is all good stuff. Yet William is fast discovering that it still takes two.
Or, in this case, more than two.
The old lady and her surly helper, who run and possibly own the café, are looking wistfully in William’s direction, as if willing him to drag the sad-looking woman with the suitcase away, so that they can please close up, for pity’s sake, and have some well-earned rest after so intense a week. Use of force cannot be far away.
Taking the hint, William walks slowly towards the table.
Luisa appears so lost in her thoughts, watching the smoke from her cigarette drift upwards in the breezeless air, that it is some seconds before she senses his presence.
She raises her head to look up. There is little warmth in her eyes, only sadness.
And resignation. He can hardly be surprised, yet the sheer relief of simply seeing her right here beside him, the original, authorised, less streamlined version, seems to overwhelm the reality of their situation and momentarily dampens his fear.
“You don’t smoke,” he says.
“Now you are telling me.”
William knows that he is so full of things to say to her, after all that has happened.
Meaningful things, words and sentences that could probably change everything.
Yet they seem to be dissolving unvoiced into the air, like the smoke from her cigarette.
Desperate to start afresh, he can manage nothing fresh nor even know how to start.
“Did you call the police to find me?” he hears himself asking and wonders why.
In the silence, he ponders that if “alternative” William, the bronzed one with the A-list hair (the presence of which he can still feel like some sort of follicular memory), has now never actually existed, where on earth has this current one been spending his time since he and Luisa last met?
He must have been somewhere. Perhaps it will come to him in time, he thinks, as some of the more inane, game-show memories recede.
He hopes so. He would be rather interested.
“I think I would have called the police,” he concludes.
“Then you are much better husband than I am wife.”
“No. No, I’m not, Luisa. I’d like to be. Not better – I’d settle for as good as.” He looks determined. “And I can be. This week has taught me – how to change things.”
He watches as alarm washes instantly over her face. “Not the past! Heaven forbid. Never the past. Yet just maybe the future?”
But he doesn’t finish, because Luisa is leaning towards him and sniffing loudly.
“I know that fragrance!” she cries. “You have been with me, haven’t you?”
“Not the way you think!”
William feels quite outraged, even though he couldn’t swear to her that the notion has never, for a single moment, entered his deluded head.
But not now. He has eyes for only one Luisa now, this Luisa, of all Luisas, yet in his heart he fears that it is already too late.
That this beautiful, stately and sadly under-appreciated ship has sailed.
“Are you going to leave me, Luisa?” he asks. Adding quietly, “I can’t honestly say I would blame you.” He thinks for a moment. “Why didn’t you leave me, in all these years – if it was so bad?”
When Luisa finally responds, it is as if she is talking to herself.
“I do not know, William. I do not know. Perhaps because it was never bad enough,” Then she turns to him.
“But now I tell myself that not bad enough to leave a marriage, is this good enough reason to stay?” She pauses.
He doesn’t dare interrupt. “And so I take the cab. I go to the airport.” She laughs, but without much joy.
“But I have not flown home alone in thirty years.”
“I wish I could give you a better reason for staying.”
She looks at him and shrugs. Which seems so very far from hopeful.
He senses the grumpy young waiter moving closer, desperate to clear the table and send the two old farts on their way. On our way to where? he wonders. Back to that barren place where we’ve been for so long?
William knows that he must do something.
It needs to be not a scintilla short of epoch-making and must encapsulate all that he has learned along the way, the sum total of everything that he has discovered on this long and tortuous journey deep into the heart of Sutherlandness.
It has to be of the moment, which he now concedes, despite all the strategies and projections, is all that there is.
It needs to come from somewhere at the essential root of his newly enlightened being.
A truth so profound that it will resonate in an instant and strike a hopeful new chord within the souls and minds of the two of them.
Uniting them once more, like two flares meeting in the night-time sky and surging upwards with impossible brightness.
Unfortunately, he still can’t think of a sodding thing.
Not a sausage.
Zero. Less than.
His brain feels as dry as his tongue. There is far too much stuff from this crazy week roiling around inside his woolly head. And he is so awfully tired.
Away ye go!
The excruciating seconds pass. With them, his marriage. And his life.
Suddenly, from nowhere, he hears the sounds.
Not drums this time. Or trumpets. Simply words.
New words. Words that seem to float out of his mouth – combinations of syllables he had no idea were even in there.
Words he has, of course, known in harmless isolation most of his adult life but never imagined he would string together into such a simple yet volcanic sentence.
“Senor? Some musica, por favor? For the dancing!”
Despite being married to a Spaniard, William has never been fully cognisant with how exactly “oh, for fuck’s sake!
” translates. Until now, as he hears it emerge unambiguously from the mouth of a grumpy waiter.
But he is gratified to see the old woman, who has clearly been listening, smack her sullen young colleague sharply on the neck and send him back cursing into the café.
He is not so gratified to watch the disdain grow on the face of his current wife. “You cannot fix a marriage by dancing,” she mutters. “You especially.”
“Can – if you believe in miracles.”
She shrugs, not wishing to be party to any more lunacy, on this or any night. “William, please, it is very late.”
“You’re not the first person to tell me this,” he says. “Not even the first Luisa,” he adds to himself.
He holds out his hand to her.
She sees it trembling, just inches from her own, and looks up into his face. She can’t pinpoint exactly how or why, yet somehow the man looks different. And perhaps – who knows – he is different. She will believe this when she sees this.
Luisa Sutherland, still of Richmond, Surrey for the time being, finds herself rising gracefully, if a tad wearily, from her chair, as if refusal might further unbalance her increasingly peculiar husband.
The relief on that husband’s face is matched only by the astonishment on her own, as to where her weary body might apparently be leading her.
He takes her arm gently. Perhaps it is this simple.
About four seconds later, the ear-shattering riffs of an obscure Spanish heavy metal track, with a particularly grating flamenco tinge, blast out from the café’s speakers into the square, shocking any stragglers and traumatising every pigeon nesting in the eaves of the great cathedral.
William turns to see the young waiter staring defiantly back at him. Dance to that, you Brexiting British arsehole.
For a moment, William is fazed and can’t move.
This isn’t aided by a nagging itch inside his shirt, which impels him reluctantly to remove his hand from Luisa’s.
While she stands bemused beside her table, wondering whether this lunacy will ever end, William dips a hand down under the dull, brown cheesecloth to produce a squashed but still remarkably vibrant red rose, courtesy of Senora Barbadillo.
He can’t explain why this should still be on his person, whilst his hairweave is no more, but isn’t he slowly learning that life is not here to be questioned?
Therein lies madness and he reckons he’s already used up his season ticket to that particular destination.
Better simply to go, as he recalls himself saying, with the flow.
Ignoring the painful decibels, he hands the flower to Luisa with a courtly flourish. Not overly charmed by where it has been, she takes it gingerly from his outstretched hand. He watches without breathing as, quite tentatively and despite her better judgment, she begins to soften. Slightly.
And so they dance.
Sort of.
Moving quietly, hands together but long-familiar bodies barely touching, they shuffle against the deafening music. Unsurprisingly (and not entirely due to ‘D.J.’ sabotage), the whole enterprise feels desperately, discordantly uncomfortable. And rather sad.
Hardly the stuff that dreams are made of. Or the kindling of hope.
Only one solution springs to mind. And it’s certifiably bonkers. Yet, in a week of world-spinning dementia, it seems to William Sutherland, late of Govan, Glasgow, almost normal.
Summoning all his available strength, which isn’t Herculean, he pulls a stunned Luisa more tightly towards him and spins her around, so that they’re standing beside each other, hip to hip.
Leaning his right hand over her shoulder to join hers, he abruptly pulls her left arm in front of him with his own to link hands.
Once locked in place and knowing that she can’t escape, he skips forward with her into the square.
“What the hell?”
“Just a touch of the Gay Gordons,” he explains, as he segues into a jerkily recalled but still recognisable highlight of ‘Scottish Country Dancing for Disadvantaged Eight-Year-Olds.’ “Although I’m not Gordon any more. Nor, of course, am I—”
She attempts to end the derangement once and for all; to pull away as her spouse of thirty years prances at ever-increasing and distinctly erratic speed away from the café and the tables and the din.
But, despite herself and her enchainment, she finds that her protests are less than half-hearted, as she suddenly can’t seem to stop herself from finding it funny.
Luisa suddenly remembers a skinny young man, a man with red hair and a fuzzy beard, clutching his chest and collapsing outside a restaurant as he checks out the prices.
A pale-skinned guy dropping his pants and spitting out water as he mimics a courtyard fountain.
A grinning Scot using a wooden cocktail umbrella to ‘protect’ his new bride from the rain and pretending to be a bull in bed.
So, despite the pain and anger and sheer disbelief, and the grumbling desire to knee her infantile husband in the un-kilted crotch, she starts to laugh. Softly at first, but building gradually in both volume and lack of self-control.
He gazes at her in amazement, as they wheel around, Scottish-style, to heavy metal.
He had forgotten what a glorious, full-throated, raspily Spanish laugh she has.
And how very beautiful she can be when her wild eyes sparkle and her still-refulgent, dark hair shimmers.
She lets the mirth that was always there and has never truly forsaken her fly carelessly out of her soul.
A mirth made even richer by the sharp, distinctive tang of pure alarm.
When did I last make you laugh, Luisa? thinks William sadly. Perhaps the last time I asked you to dance.
The remaining café staff watch the display in stunned bemusement. Passers-by, on their way back home or to their lodgings, stop for a moment to catch this respectable-looking, not unattractive, middle-aged couple, who are most probably British and therefore drunk.
A huge, yellow street-cleaning truck moves in and starts its work around them. Like a fellow member of the dance.