Chapter Thirty-Two #2
“Of course you are,” says William, like he knows.
Senor Barbadillo, proud husband, exclaims loudly, “The best in Sevilla!” His Senora 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 Senor senses this. “I tell him because you look forty years, carino. Younger! You feel the legs, Senor. 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 Senora’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, Senora, two left feet. Ask my wife.”
“My husband does not dance,” responds Luisa, although no one has actually asked her. “It is when he is at his most stiff.”
William stares at her, but Luisa 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 knows also that it would be wildly imprudent of him 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 poor Lu, who is looking everywhere save into the ring itself, in which he assumes the picadores of her 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 cooler Sombra, in innocent delight.
The distinctively raw smells of blood and sweat suddenly assail William’s nostrils and strike a chord of familiarity in his tumbleweed head that scares him half to death.
He realises with mounting dread that his own mind and memory are 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. William 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, attempting 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. You know this. The guy’s business could make all the—”
She isn’t listening. Not any more.
“I can SEE them!” she yelps. “Oh, Dios mío! There – in the Sol!” William closes his eyes, as if this will erase what they are both now acknowledging. “Sí! Of course! This is where we were sitting!”
There is no point in William explaining that he couldn’t get bullfight tickets for love nor money back then. That isn’t even history now. What do they call it – false memory? But how on earth did he—?
Before he can stop himself, he blurts out what his 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, languorously, like one of those glossy shampoo commercials for emerging, 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, more disconcertingly, 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.”
Senor 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.
“It 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 Argentinian puta that I am.”
William rises too, but is drawn back down again by his host, before the grumbling 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 Senor, 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 1995.