Chapter Thirty-One
“Luisa?”
“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. He still carries the greasy bag of cooling churros and the essential chocolate dip in his hand.
“Story so far, Pablo. Now that you’re asking. Looks like my magical mystery meddling only went and got our loving threesome even bloody closer! And maybe just a wee bit richer.”
Pablo nods. Of course he does. William reckons that if he told the older man he was going to chuck him head first off the Giralda Tower, the man would smile, nod and reference that most iconic of English football teams. Yet somehow this doesn’t stem William’s flow.
Perhaps lift-confessions are the Holy Week variants of the elevator pitch.
“But perhaps, Pablo, I have been barking up totally the wrong tree!” he exclaims, slapping his head in a eureka moment, as he recalls this evening’s surreal conversation, (not that they aren’t all surreal) at the Hostal Esmeralda. “Or even the wrong bloody forest!”
The lift doors start to open but William sees no sign of Luisa.
“What’s ‘forgivingness’ in Espagnol?”
“Churros,” responds Pablo.
“No it isn’t.” He shoots out of the lift, unshared local snacks and all.
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 peculiarly 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 genial attraction. Easily outlined to a weary receptionist, even with indigenous pastry in hand.
Yet if asked to go beyond the superficial, flesh out the identikit version, he couldn’t readily think of a suitable sequence 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 wholly apart from each other when each should be a part of the whole.
And current circumstances – vacated room, deserted lobby – imply 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. Or at least how to begin. Thanks to – well, who knows? But he has always been a problem-solver, hasn’t he? For pity’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.
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?” she almost screams at him.
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 yet again 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 created only this same 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, aren’t you 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.”
“There is a 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.
“Senor!” 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 gazes silently down.
“Don’t leave me, Luisa. Please.”
She turns to look at him in disbelief. That this plaintive, softly spoken entreaty could find such yearning expression in a man she believes she knows so well rattles her for a moment and sends her off-stride. But he hasn’t finished.
“I’ve learned stuff today, Luisa. Important stuff.
About moving on. About you and me. Well, mostly me.
” He moves tentatively towards her, as if scared that she might recoil.
“One more day. Just the two of us, together. Brand-new start, eh, in this bonkers bloody place. Feels right – doesn’t it? Luisa?”
The cabbie, who is also gazing 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.
“One more day. All I ask.”
He thinks about adding the “forgivingness” bit, his golden legacy from those younger, wiser souls, but senses that whilst the concept might be lodging itself quite seamlessly into his own psyche, and can hardly be the worse way to move into the future, Luisa may not be in the frame of mind to be publicly absolved just yet. However magnanimous the gesture.
And so he just parks the notion 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, which she notices but hardly recognises – it has been so long.
Luisa 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 that you learn from wherever you have been. Please. This great big something about you and me, well mostly you, that will make tomorrow so different.”
If William has gleaned anything over the years, it is that, when an unanticipated opportunity arises, you seize it.
“Okay. I’ll tell you exactly what I’ve—” He suddenly stops as a not unfamiliar panic takes hold. “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. Y’know, the one I came here for? The ceramic king himself. Azulejos. He exports all over the world! Senor 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 recalls the finer details of the man’s generous invitation, he suspects that this isn’t exactly going to make his second-honeymooning wife reckon all her birthdays (or anniversaries) have come at once.