Chapter Seven
Luisa is also on the phone, although she can barely hear anything above the clamour of the swirling crowds.
She remembers this historic, metal-arched bridge, The Puente de Isabel II, or Puente de Triana as she used to call it and assumes the locals still do.
She can just about glimpse the muddy River Guadalquivir down below, as she moves westward with the joyous masses, a different gang of Nazarenos and apparently most of Seville.
Making for the ever-vibrant and proudly distinctive Triana district, on its almost-island.
Every week seemed to be a fiesta here, she recalls.
The bars, the flamenco, the street music.
But perhaps this is because she was young.
And just perhaps she can feel young again, she thinks, on such a special week. As young as she is trying to sound, in this curiously difficult courtesy-call to her daughter.
“Well, for me, memories,” she responds lightly to the effusive, yet clearly anxious, interrogation from London. “Of course. Wonderful memories. But, Claire darling, you know your daddy. He never remember anything… Eh?… No, no bullfight!”
She finds herself smacking her hand against her bulky leather bag and shouting at her mobile, as if to show the totally disinterested world processing around her that Luisa Sutherland has no intention of ever watching an animal killed for sport.
“We do not go to bullfight on the honeymoon, my darling, so not this time. You will not see me dead at corrida!”
Luisa only half hears her amused daughter talking about methinking and protestething too much – which she knows is just her funny way of speaking. The older woman’s nostrils are suddenly assailed by an aroma that, despite the anatomic impossibility, goes straight to her heart.
“Churros!” she says out loud.
Now her daughter laughs, that uninhibitedly rich and infectiously dirty roar. Encouraging her – go on, Mum, you’re on holiday – as if the pancreas gives breaks to its customers the way credit card companies are wont to do.
Luisa is at the tiny, kerbside stall now, surrounded by jostling patrons of all ages.
Each one a part of that blissful, time-honoured ritual – the ecstatic dipping of a steaming, deep-fried choux pastry coil into rich hot chocolate, followed by a hungry stuffing somewhere near the region of the mouth.
Around them, Christ and his wooden disciples wobble and sway to the relentless beat of the drums. And she wonders once again why God, in whom she no longer believes but still chastises on a regular basis, would make something that tastes so good contain within it such potential for harm.
Not unlike sex in many ways, she ponders, wistfully.
“No,” she tells her daughter, “no churros,” thereby informing herself.
Luisa moves reluctantly away and swiftly changes the subject.
“Perhaps your daddy, he will go see the bulls fighting this time.” And now, naturally, the question comes.
And the mother answers with a harmless lie.
“Er, yes, he is here. Sí. Of course… But he walks very fast up ahead, you know, as he is always doing.”
Luisa finishes the call with a kiss and puts on speed, as if trying to catch up with her mythical husband.
Scuttling through the crowds and into Triana, she surprises herself with her dogged determination.
Why did the middle-aged Spanish lady cross the bridge?
What exactly, she wonders, is on this other, so perceptibly different side of the city, this earthily picturesque arrabal with its craft markets and potteries and tile factories, that is making her so anxious to find it?
And what yearning has impelled her to follow and now overtake this particular procession?
One of so many in this extraordinary city, flowing, like the river, in all different directions.
She thinks she knows, but she isn’t as yet certain. Even her recall, universally acknowledged as far superior to that of her spouse, is not faultless. Nor is she sure why she is tapping her mobile again, finding a number that isn’t in its stored memory but firmly lodged in her own.
Yet, before it even connects, to a distant office some thirteen hundred miles away, Luisa Sutherland, late of Madrid, now settled in suburban Richmond, finds herself frozen to the spot.
Eyes shaded and unblinking, barely disturbing the turbulent surge, like a pebble in a stream, quite unable to move.
Making her own tiny almost-island, she stares at something right in front of her.
Something that sends an almost electrical tremor juddering through her system.
Something she thought she might never see again.
Luisa isn’t yet as certain in her mind as she is in her heart.
So she burrows deep into her capacious but sensibly inexpensive leather bag.
Her Mary Poppins bag, as William once called it, not entirely with affection (since, on a recent occasion when he had to hold it for her, the bloody thing nearly wrenched his back).
From its infinite depths she fishes out a small, fake-leather photo album, brand new despite its incongruity in this digital age.
She can sense that her movements are unnecessarily frantic, as she flicks it open, scrabbling for a page. Luisa knows that she can’t actually calm down and also that she doesn’t altogether wish to.
Finally she sees it.
A photo of a small, prettily tiled courtyard, a stone fountain at its centre, with a spouting, snub-nosed cherub doing the honours and stone benches all around.
Embraced by abundant orange trees bestowing some welcome shade.
It’s an image from thirty years ago, most probably to the day.
And there, smiling into the expertly adjusted lens, is a gangling young man with a straggly beard almost the same hue as his strikingly red and less strikingly managed hair.
Despite the unrelenting sunshine, he holds a small, black folding umbrella.
Luisa looks back into the courtyard, outside whose closed gates she stands transfixed.
It is empty now, but the fountain, the stone benches, the faded, old tiles are much as they were three decades ago.
Even the trees seem unaltered. She finds herself staring upwards at a small, first-floor bedroom window, its freshly painted shutters swung open to welcome the Easter light.
Luisa wonders who is behind those shutters right now and if they might be anything like…
“Hello… Luisa…carino…?
The crackly voice on the phone spirals her back to earth. Just as the surging, chattering, churros-fuelled crowd picks her up like flotsam and drags her helplessly onwards towards the next busy square. The next procession.
So she doesn’t see the heavy front door of Hostal Esmeralda opening.