Throb of the Globe

She arrived in late August. Agosto was harsh that year. I breathed heavily, almost panted with all those throngs on the streets, white stones of Coreo Central blazing indifferently in the heat. She was just another one of them, those who come and go.

Next morning, when she left the room, the sun was already up. Still gentle, it was spilling the golden treacle over the pavements yet untrodden, caressing the windows, porches, roofs. She floated through, enchanted by the tints of dated door signs, aspirations sculptured into shapes, passions outlived into eternity, reddened brick earth and marble clouds… I knew she did not intend to stay more than a couple of days. Young people usually find my rascal sister much more engaging. And I don’t care. In fact, I was not going to take my hat off for her as well.
She was stupid enough to go to a bull fight and spent the rest of the evening in WC: it was a cigar smoke or a spectacle that made her sick. Bewildered, she was roving the streets in search for something she didn’t have a name for. Maybe it was the Cathedral that made her linger. Intact from hundreds of devouring gazes, there it stood, a glaring splash of the pale blue in the heavenly azure, all bathed in the lavish streams of light gushing like ecstatic beams of love. She bought a yellowed photograph of Manolete at an antiquary near Sol and spent hours talking to a bookshop keeper about toros, in bad Spanish, of course.

Two weeks later she was sitting alone in a café. It was dark, and trees cast grotesque shadows on a crumbling ochre wall. A big-breasted puta in black was leaning against it in-between ghostly sidewalks. She looked almost like El Greco’s Virgin Mary to her. A waiter brought more tapas. The distant tinkle of silverware merged in her head with the clang of knightly swords. My past, the centuries of pain and glory, all condensed in the bittersweet purple depth of sangria. In her reverie she put a flower in her hair, just like a flamenco dancer in the show did. She remembered the hypnotic waves of wrists coupled with a thunderous drama of heels, tenderness of a guitar, sting of clasping hands, alegria de vivir and blood in one’s mouth. Suddenly, she saw it in my eyes – the inseparable duo of beauty and violence, the enigma that lies at heart of my land. The duet as terrifying as it is mesmerizing. She would never speak to anyone about it, but deep in her heart, she forgave the man who killed the bull.