A Year in the World (7 page)

  Shrimp croquettes

 
Pan de ajo con carne mechá casera
(garlic bread with larded loin)

 
Chipirón a la plancha
(grilled squid)

 
Empanadas con jamón
(pastry with ham)

 
Empanadas de carne
(with meat)

  Fried anchovies

  Fried tiny fish that look like minnows

We
have had late dinners at several of Sevilla’s top-rated restaurants, which often are in lovely buildings. Some we found overblown and mincingly formal. Others are rustic, with hams hanging from the ceiling and the grill fired up for fish and steaks. We find that we prefer the adventure of going to three or four tapas bars instead. The restaurants seem more or less like restaurants on other trips, whereas the tapas scene connects us immediately to the rhythm and liveliness of the culture.

We
change hotels when our reservation at the Don Alfonso runs out, and suddenly shiny little Czech Skodas are all over the grounds for a convention. We check into a hotel in the Santa Cruz area, where we stay for a couple of days because of the lovely courtyard and the exotic but homey atmosphere. Then we move to another courtyard hotel, where we take two small rooms. On the first day the electricity fizzles out and we go without heat, light, and hot water overnight. No one seems too concerned, so we just walk and walk, come home, light candles in the room, and brush our teeth with bottled water. I’m consoled by all the patterns of tile on the stairways, the trickling fountains, the guitarist who plays in the loggia late in the afternoon, and the desk clerk who loves the history of Sevilla. He greets us, “Did you do a good journey?” The English infinitives
to make, to do
are hell for foreigners in any conjugation and often produce lovely twists. The next day we are moved to a larger room, as a reward, I suppose, for not complaining. I soak in the big blue cement bathtub and think of the poet Antonio Machado, born in one of these palatial houses, where he heard always the sound of water falling. As an adult, he dreamed of a fountain flowing in his heart, dreamed of a hot sun shining in his heart. Such dreams came straight from this place of his childhood and nurtured him throughout his life. Lying in bed, I imagine my heart as a hot sun.

Andalucían
towns always have been a source of fantasy. I’m shocked to find that Sevilla has plain-to-ugly surrounds and way too much traffic. Somehow traffic never figures into my travel idylls. It’s a heavy spoiler when I arrive somewhere and could be on San Francisco’s awful Highway 101. Many European towns have awakened. They’ve closed off traffic in historic parts of their cities. Florence leads, and I wish all cities would follow suit. We quickly learn where to go in Sevilla’s old parts to experience the place’s essence and to avoid cars. The horse-drawn carriages manage to feel authentic, lending romance with the sound of hooves and the slow pace.

One of the most civilized aspects of this town is the vast greenness of Parque de María Luisa, which must be a cool green respite when Sevilla turns into the frying pan of Andalucía in summer. We walk the whole morning amid the mimosa and banana plants. The park is full of whimsy—fountains and duck ponds, tile benches, gazebos, and waterfalls. Great tropical trees with roots that seem to pour out at the bottom of the trunk, at home since the explorers returned from New World voyages, make me search for identifying labels, but few have them. One, an
árbol de las lianas
, came from the Amazon. The Swiss Family Robinson could have made their home in the spreading branches. A blind man walks slowly down a path. He knows his way, perhaps by scents and the texture of gravel underfoot. At the monument to the nineteenth-century local poet Gustavo Bécquer, someone has left an extravagant bouquet of bright lilies in the arms of one of the allegorical marble women. Her cool flesh and the hot pink flowers surprise the January morning and make me hope the poet’s language was capable of such contrasts. A local history describes him as “an incorrigible Bohemian, who earned a precarious living by translating foreign novels,” and who “crooned a weird elfin music.” I know him as hopelessly romantic, in the sappy mode, but who occasionally broke through with sharp perceptions such as:

In a brilliant lightning flash we are born

And the brilliance still lasts when we die.

So short is life.

Something about a park is timeless: glimpsing the wild bouquet in the arms of personified love, and the poet up on his pedestal, I think of them standing there all through the blunt and stultifying Franco fascist years, as though love poetry mattered. I resolve to start leaving armfuls of flowers at my holy spots, not just a wildflower or sprig of daphne picked along the way.

We exit the park near the last place where people were burned during that precursor of fascism, that evil twin of Franco’s era, the Inquisition, when church and royalty in cahoots went unilaterally crazy, unchecked and blind. Sevilla—here people burned, here marble statues to venerated poets are still visited, here the energy of flamenco could raise the dead, spin them around, and lay them in the ground again.

In no other city have I grasped so quickly the layout of neighborhoods and monuments. A glance at a sixteenth-century map in a book was all it took. The park, the river, the anchor of the Giralda tower, and that long walk the first day make me feel that I know this place instinctively. We even take shortcuts and land exactly where we want. Getting to know a place on foot connects me to particulars—a green apartment building with a terrace jumbled with banana plants, a grand, peeling turquoise door, the mustard-yellow trimmed bullring with red and black posters of matadors, the tall palms pinwheeling in the sky, the enchanting patio gardens and trickling fountains along Callejón del Agua, Water Street.

I could live here. Is there a Callejón del Sol for me, a Sun Street? With my spotted background in Spanish, and the knowledge I have of Italian, I could cobble together a walking-around Spanish in a few months. I begin to imagine a house with a two-level courtyard and a fountain always singing; tiled rooms, patterned like oriental rugs, are dappled with light from the intricate windows. In the summer I can press my cheek to the tiles for coolness. The gardens are rooms, as the Arabs knew, and the sound of water smooths my sleep. Perhaps I dream of the desert. The shutters of carved wood close on storms that sweep across the plain. The bath is a remnant of a Moorish
hamman
, with a deep soaking pool. The vision includes a small blond child playing in the street and calling out his first word in Spanish:
amigo
.

I feel especially at home on Sunday morning in the Plaza del Salvador, where families sit at outdoor cafés sipping orange juice and taking in the sun, while babies climb out of their strollers to chase pigeons. After mass at Iglesia del Salvador, the handsome dark-suited young men with slick hair and the girls in short, short skirts stand under the trees at outdoor tables, as though at a party, drinking beer and eating chips. A cart sells pinwheels. All this under fragrant orange trees in the company of the looming church built on the foundations of a mosque. Rather fantastic children’s clothing shops and bridal shops surround the plaza. Probably the impetus for both occasions begins here. We succumb and buy a white outfit for the baby we await in our family: fine cotton smocked a million times in blue, finishes with multiple tucks and dangling ribbons. I wonder who will slide into the pleated arms and pose for a photograph before carrots stain the front.