Chapter Eleven
Luisa is also staring at confetti. This time on a photo of similar vintage.
She sits in a pretty, shaded square that she still remembers from her student days, barely a stone’s throw from the river.
With a café cortado and her favourite golden fino on the table beside her, she flicks through the small faux-leather photo album she has put together, somewhat tentatively, for this unpredictable week.
The first picture is of her far-younger self – could she ever really have looked so young and slender – as she leaves the Central Registry Office in Glasgow’s George Square with her brand-new husband.
She’s ducking playfully under a shower of coloured paper and a less colourful shower of Scottish drizzle.
Not the wedding she had been hoping for.
But then, of course, he was not the husband her family had been hoping for.
They would sooner have travelled to Hell than to Glasgow (in fact, they had suspected the two were twinned) and William’s ailing mother could never have managed the journey to Spain, had this even been an option.
Luisa finds her hand instinctively moving towards her neck, as it so often does, searching for the tiny silver cross she hasn’t worn or even owned for years.
Before she flicks onwards, she calls William again.
He hasn’t been picking up his phone, which can only mean he has fallen asleep after all those whiskies, although even this doesn’t usually stop him.
He would most probably answer the phone from his coffin, she reckons, or at least check the Wi-Fi. She leaves another message.
She should be making her way back to the Hotel Herrera, to begin their gifted time together, but there’s just one more stop she wants to make en route.
Another, sunnier photo. This time of a café, but not the one she sits at now.
This picture is of their café, the pretty one so near the cathedral, the one with the bright-yellow and black awning.
The café to which they kept returning, wherever they had visited and whatever they had been up to that day.
Doubtless it has gone now or at least changed colour, yet she still recalls exactly where it was.
And there in the thirty-year old photo is Will.
Her Will. Sitting outside, at a small table, waving.
She can hardly remember him when he looked so happy and finds herself shivering, because this makes her feel so sad.
Another wedding picture now. Of a later wedding. This occasion far less fraught.
She can see that this time her husband, once so cruelly disapproved of, is manfully affording his own son-in-law at least a modicum of respect, even if it can’t really be mistaken for affection.
Yet there’s no mistaking the love in the older man’s eyes for the bride, that intensely joyful young woman, blended to perfection from a mixture of races, letting loose her expansive, gap-toothed smile.
Those satin-sheathed, fist-pumping arms are upraised in pure triumph.
Got him! The spark never seems to diminish, thinks Luisa with a grateful smile, and she prays that it never will.
One more photo, from a much earlier time, one she knows that she cannot and must not overlook, despite the pain. Not this week, of all weeks. And then she should move on.
“You are very pretty lady.”
She looks up with a start. The handsome African man is selling jewellery. It’s curling over his outstretched arms like a family of lazy snakes and is quite beautiful, but she’s not in a buying mood.
“And you are full of shit,” she says.
“Sí,” the smiling man agrees. “But you are still pretty lady.”
She nods a brief, amused thank you. At my age, she thinks ruefully, you take what you can get.