Denise S. Robbins

 Denise S. Robbins

Sevilla, Seville

“It’s Sevilla,” says Emmy, waiting for the crosswalk light to turn. “It’s Seville,” says her husband Abe before joining the crowd bull rushing the street. Emmy jogs to catch up, pushing her way through Black Friday shoppers. Black Friday in Europe was surprise number one. Why celebrate Black Friday if you don’t celebrate Thanksgiving? Surprise number two: Sevilla is not the quiet small town it appeared to be from a quick (and likely faulty) Google image search, but a massive, overcrowded metropolis, half as dense as New York City. They had wanted to get away from city life, to relax and explore the countryside, and Sevilla was in the south of Spain, and they’d never heard of cities in the south of Spain, and the flights were cheap, and they’d just gotten through a raw and debilitating fight, so a vacation was the perfect salve. She’d booked the tickets with him looking over her shoulder and they’d promised each other it would all be better from now on and they kissed and kissed and went to bed and kept kissing, and woke up and kept kissing, and kept on kissing, it seemed, between phone calls and work hours and sleep and meals until they were here. 

“Everyone at home calls it Seville,” says Abe. “We’ll sound like idiots if we come back and say Sevilla. Hola todos, en Sevilla en España, hay una biblioteca!”

“That makes no sense,” Emmy says to Abe. She winces as a local teenage boy laughs nearby. Laughing at Abe? At her? She shrugs at the teenager to signal that she’s in on the joke, but he’s looking away, kicking off a fawn-colored cat running between his feet. “We haven’t even seen a library. Just a hundred Christian bookstores.”

“Exactly. We don’t speak Spanish.”

“The name of the city is Sevilla. That’s what it’s called. Don’t the people who live here have a right to decide what it’s called?”

“Look, we made it to the statues.”

Towering above Emmy and Abe, Hercules and Julius Caesar stand on ten- foot pillars. The setting sun casts an orange glow on the two stone men.

“It looks warmer up there,” says Emmy. She wraps her scarf around her neck. It’s shaded and freezing on the Alameda Plaza where she and Abe are standing, but the statues are tall enough to capture the final slice of sun before it sets. She closes her eyes and thinks of the movie Hercules, and how, if she were in it, she’d be in the Greek chorus, chanting prophetically on the sidelines, ignored, while her husband, Abe, would think himself a warrior, protecting a dynasty and creating a legacy, and they both stand in the falling breeze until—

“What’s that?” asks Emmy. Something scuttles around Hercules’ feet, a dark creature impossible to make out. Its shadow passes upwards. The sun disappears. A black cat, who was grooming itself on Julius Caesars’ pedestal, runs off. Abe is shoved roughly forward.

“Hey!” he yells as the teenage girl who stumbled into him, drunk with laughter, says, “Obrigado, saw-ree,” and screams as she catches up to her girlfriend’s outstretched hand.

Emmy holds out her mittened hand for her husband.

He looks at it, holds up his own thick mitten, and says, “Really?” She grabs Abe’s hand. As they walk through the crowded plaza, their fingers scrabble at the fabric, trying to find a holding point. Abe’s other mitten is tugged off by something neither of them can explain; suddenly, it’s on the cigarette-butt-ridden ground.

“Really?” he says again, picking it up from something red and sticky.

Another strange dark creature scampers between their legs, followed closely by a calico cat, which chases it into an alleyway. “What was that?” asks Emmy.

“What, the rat?”

“Too big to be a rat.”

“Huh.” He’s folding the goop-covered mitten inside out in complicated finger movements that involve touching it without touching it.

“It was running on two legs.”

“Next time you see it, tell me. We have a million things to see.” He sticks the balled-up mitten in a pocket and pulls out his phone. “Church… church… museum… museum…”

“That sounds so touristy,” says Emmy. “Let’s do something authentic. Something cultured. Whatever the locals do.”

“What the locals do? Go shopping, or drink cava. Take your pick.”

“Something interesting. Something wild. Let’s jump off a bridge or find some ghosts. Something we can only do as a family of two.”

“We explore. We forget. We soak it up.”

“Soak up that red goo.” Emmy examines the ground where his mitten lay before, hoping the liquid was from a melted lollipop and not a human orifice.

“Exactly.”

“Where to next?”

He looks at his map. “Let’s go to the royal palace.”

“You mean the Real Alcázar? The big thing? The big touristy thing?”

“Yes. The royal palace. It’s on the other side of town.” Abe charges ahead through a crowded pedestrian street and Emmy follows close behind, past bars and tables of people smoking and drinking, past Christian bookstores, past a Christmas market of nativity scene dolls. A girl holds a red pencil out to him, gesturing for him to take it.

“What is it?” he asks. The girl says nothing but waves it forward under his nose with a smile on her face. The pencil has a big eraser at the end in the shape of a donkey or a horse or a dog, it’s unclear.

“She’s giving you a pencil con perritito,” says Emmy. “She’s so cute.” Abe takes it. 

The girl now holds out her hand. “Cinco Euros.”

“What?”

Two big men come over and begin shouting at them in Spanish, each with a hand on the young girl’s shoulder. Emmy flips through her money belt. The smallest bill she has is a ten. She hands it to the young girl and pulls her husband away.

“Awful, how they use her like that,” she mutters. Looking back, she can see the girl holding another pencil out at passersby, as the two men—how had she missed them before?—stand five feet away, leaning against the brick between storefronts, arms crossed, eyes laser-focused on her.

“We would never do that to a child,” he agrees.

“No, we wouldn’t.” Emmy flashes him a look, but he doesn’t take the bait. She wants him to know exactly what she’s thinking. She knows him well. She knows his every mood. And she feels he knows her. He does. He must. Talk to me about our future children. She beams the thought into him. Whether or not they exist. If he’s not ready to talk, he should just say so. Right? But when will he be ready? When can anybody ever be ready? She tries again. “Ours would be—”

“Look. Another Christian bookstore. Are we going to Hell yet?”

“Do you want to?” She looks at the bookstore, frustrated by the interruption, but finds its facade exquisite and fascinating. Above a blood-red doorway, there’s a gray awning with stone creatures on the cornices with evil little faces. “Just look at those little gargoyles,” says Emmy. “Gremlins? Whatever they are. They’re creepy. I like them.” Emmy pulls out her phone. “I think they call them duendes.”

“Duende is an art form,” says Abe. “Not a creature.”

“It’s both,” she says, reading from her phone. “It comes from the same place. Duendes are evil spirits. Duende is the spirit of darkness and soul. It also represents the symbol of transformation from one plane to another. It can be found in Iberian art, music, and dance, like in Flamenco dance. Oh, I want to see a Flamenco!”

“But there’s nothing there,” says Abe.

The cornices now have simple leafen molds, sat upon by a tortoiseshell cat. The gargoyles seem to have completely disappeared. What had she just seen?

“You must’ve imagined it,” says Abe.

“Must I have?” she asks icily. “Maybe I need a drink.”

“It’s too early.”

“Not for everyone else here,” she says, nodding to the many nearby bars with patrons spilling out to the street. But she agrees. She takes him by the elbow and they push through the pedestrian zone. For a brief and glorious minute they walk through the crowd without hassle. Cobblestone to cobblestone. Hand in hand. The two of them, rising above the chaos. Then the crowd pushes. They hear honking. A taxi is trying to get through. Abe pulls Emmy to the side of the street, underneath an awning. Then she feels a scratching on her shoulder.

“Ahh!” she pushes off whatever is crawling, but whatever it was, it’s gone.

“Let’s get out of here,” says Emmy, barely hanging on to Abe’s elbow in the crowd.

“Is it always like this or is it just Black Friday?” asks Abe, stuck between two tall men.

“And why do they celebrate Black Friday?” asks Emmy. She strides ahead now; her husband follows. They walk past old buildings that yawn over them like caves. There must be various street musicians in the alleyways—electric Flamenco meets karaoke Adele—but they are almost impossible to see amid the crowds. Emmy can’t tell for sure but there is definitely something scampering across the awnings, leaping over alleyways from building to building. Small shadows rise and fade on the building walls. There’s another drummer—the same drummer?—in the next alleyway, playing along to a sound system with pop music, battering pots and pans.

“I recognize this song,” says Emmy. “Let’s watch a minute.”

She can’t place the song but it’s electronic and makes her remember parties, dancing, how she met Abe, at an alumni event, twelve years ago, before they married, before they dreamed of their lives together, before they ever asked each other if kids had a place in this dream, before they deliberated and fought and briefly separated and wondered and wondered some more. They met at a smokey billiards bar, connecting over how poorly they hit the cue, and how long the game took because they had so many things to say to one another, and then this song came on, or something like it, so she asked him to dance and he said, I’m terrible but yes, and he was terrible, arms in the air, pushing his head forward like a pigeon, bending his knees and standing up again, in ways that matched the techno music and made her laugh. They were young. Now, less so. But they can still dance. Emmy grabs Abe’s hand and begins hopping from foot to foot, until the drummer catches her eye and points with his drumstick to a cardboard sign that says “You dance, you pay! Es trabajo!”

“Let’s go,” says Abe.

They reach the park surrounding Real Alcázar, but it’s closed. Abe grabs the locked gate and shakes it in frustration. A black cat with green eyes sits next to him and blinks.

“It’s okay,” says Emmy, finding the space between his arms and the gate. “We can still pretend we’re inside, right?”

He squeezes his arms around her and pulls out his phone. “Sure. Here are some photos. We’re walking through the castle, and we walk by a patio… another patio… another patio… oh, now a salon! And another salon… a garden… a fountain… a garden… a room… a hallway… a gallery…”

“The Gallery of the Grotesque?” Emmy points at Abe’s phone. “What’s that?”

“Looks like it has tiles of fauns, centaurs, unicorns, other mythical creatures, and a statue of Mercury. Now moving on in our virtual tour, tie your virtual shoelaces—”

She looks down and sees her shoes really are untied, which she fixes prompt- ly. “But what about the history? I want to feel the evil soul of the place. The duende.”

He pulls up a description. “This palace was built by Castilians on the site of an old Muslim fortress. The Arabic word for palace is ‘al-qasr.’ I probably said that wrong. It was destroyed with the Christian conquest of Seville in 1248, which led to Christians eventually controlling the entire Iberian Peninsula, when the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada fell in 1492.”

“That’s more like it. Destruction and conquest. When Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Wasn’t that the year they expelled the Jews and began the Inquisition? Was Columbus Jewish? Was his expedition a punishment?”

“Apparently there’s a free Inquisition museum in the basement underneath the Triana market.”

“But we were there for lunch! I didn’t see a museum.”

“Me neither.”

“That was such a lovely market.”

“Is it still lovely, now that you know it’s above a museum about torture and death?”

“Those empanadas nearly killed me. In a good way. Let’s go back tomorrow.”

“Yes.” Abe laughs. “You know, I feel so much better now that we’re not in that crowd.” He turns around and leans on a motorcycle.

“Me, too.” She rests her head on his shoulder. “It’s so nice when it’s just the two of us.”

He pulls her in to kiss him and she feels like a movie star, leaning on a motorcycle while kissing her hot and hairy husband in Spain. Then they watch three cats leap around a blue polka dot stroller as a young mother pushes it down the sidewalk. Every time Emmy thinks one of the cats will get bopped by the stroller, it jumps away. The mother brakes the stroller right in front of Emmy and Abe.

“Is this… your motorcycle?” Emmy asks, imagining with some enthusiasm how to strap a stroller to a motorcycle.

The mother, blond and well-kept, doesn’t respond. There’s a baby in the stroller, blubbering and pointing right at Emmy and Abe. It appears to be a request to touch the motorcycle on which Abe is currently leaning. The mother rolls her eyes at Emmy and Abe, allowing them in on the joke, the one that goes isn’t my child ridiculous and wonderful? She lifts her son from the stroller and sets him on the motorcycle seat. He is wearing baby jeans and a baby jean jacket. Emmy estimates the boy is ten months old, barely old enough to stand up, now seated precariously on the motorcycle. The mother says “ten cuidado,” which Emmy is pretty sure means ‘be careful.’ The baby grips the motorcycle handles and says, Vroom, vroom! which Abe echoes with a laugh, the same in every language. The cats, still surrounding the baby on his motorcycle, meow in Spanish: miau.

When the mother and child leave, Emmy pulls her husband’s arms around her waist. “I have to admit. I don’t love Sevilla.”

“Me neither. But I’m glad to be here with you.” Abe brings her close and leans into her hair. The words, this touch, it makes her melt. It makes her want to forget all about their fight and why they are here in the first place. A fight about nothing, but a fight about everything. He wants children, now, suddenly. For years he never wanted them; she didn’t think she wanted them either, but maybe that was because he didn’t want them; and now that he wants them, she does, too, she wants them so badly, but are they ready? Is he ready? And what made him change his mind, and could he change it again? And the fact that she thought she didn’t want them, was that real? What about the fact that she’s spent multiple nights lying awake, staring at the blank ceiling, worrying about what they would look like, these tiny perfect things, would they get his slightly crooked nose or her unfortunate teenage acne? Would they bring the better parts of them together, or the worst parts? Would he remember to take the children to the doctor or give them the right food? What if they’re allergic? What if they’re sick? What if they die? Will she blow up with emotions at every little thing? Will they fall apart? The fight, the one that led to the plane ticket purchase, had been over something small. Something stupid. Abe didn’t do the dishes when he said he would. It wasn’t that he didn’t do them. It was that he said he would, and then he didn’t. She didn’t mind doing dishes. But if he wanted to be a father, if he really wanted this, wasn’t she allowed to count on his word? Wasn’t she allowed to get upset if that word fell apart? She wishes she didn’t care, that she could forget all this right now, with his hand in her hair and her nose in his neck, and she tries, she tries to forget, to immerse herself in her surroundings, because that’s what travel is for, isn’t it? Discovering strange buildings and strange people and the strangest thing of all, yourself.

They watch a man wearing an official-looking orange vest unlock the park gate. Behind him he pulls a large crate, then opens the crate door. Twenty cats scamper out into the streets.

“Porque los gatos?” Emmy asks the official as one of the cats—a big orange bearlike one—rubs itself on her legs.

“Para comer los duendecillos.”

“To eat the duendes!” She turns to Abe. “I told you. They’re duendes!”

“He said duendecillos.”

“Right. Baby duendes.”

Abe asks the man, “Que significa duendecillos en Inglés?”

“Diablillos. Como las criaturas que no pueden comer después de la medianoche… como la película… Gremlins.” He points to the cobblestones where, in a quick flash, Emmy sees a wrinkly claw-like hand reach out from the cobblestone cracks, tripping pedestrians as they walk by.

“Gremlins!” Abe grumbles to Emmy. “Get out of here with this guy. He thinks we’ll believe anything just because we’re tourists.”

“He said duendecillos,” says Emmy. “He was just trying to explain what that meant. Maybe it means something else. But haven’t you seen those little things? I keep telling you I see something weird.”

“No. And I thought you said they were huge.”

“Those huge things. Those huge little things.”

“I thought you said duendes bespoke death.”

“I did. But it’s not always death. Sometimes it’s about”—Emmy takes out her phone—“a radical change in forms.” She rubs her flat stomach instinctively. Abe looks at her. Emmy looks at him looking at her. At this moment, he is inscrutable to her.

“I’m exhausted,” says Emmy. The orange cat, teeth bared, snaps at the hand sticking out between the cobblestones.

“We’re old,” says Abe. “It’s what we do. Complain about being tired.” The duendecillo’s hand disappears in a poof. The maintenance man waves and walks off.

“We’re not old,” she says. “But what if we are old?”

“We’re not old,” he agrees.

“What if I changed and never changed back?”

“You’ll always be beautiful to me.”

“What if we’ve waited too long?” says Emmy. “What if my body can’t handle it?”

“Only one way to find out.”

“What if we hate it?”

“But what if we love it?”

“What if something terrible happens?” says Emmy.

“It won’t.”

“But what if it does?”

Abe says nothing.

“We could always just hang out with other peoples’ kids. Like that polka dot stroller. That was nice.” She searches the crowd but the boy and his mother from earlier are gone.

“That was nice.”

Emmy’s stomach rumbles. “I’m starving. Let’s eat.”

“It’s too early.”

“Not for us.” But she agrees. “Let’s walk to the big cathedral, then. Everyone says we should.”

“Everyone says we should do a lot of things. That doesn’t mean we have to.” He holds out his bare hand. She grabs it with her mitten.

They stay as close to the park fence as they can, but they’re on the wrong part of the sidewalk; angry glares arise from the crowd now enveloping them, trapping them against the fence. Then, with a brief opening, they dash to the correct side. Alleyways are filled with flamenco dancers who stomp angrily on wooden boxes. Emmy has to pee, but she just went an hour ago, so she keeps it inside. She can tell Abe is hungry by the way he stares at every picture of patatas bravas on windows of touristy restaurants. There’s a blister forming on the back of her heel from all the walking. The straps of Abe’s heavy backpack are dragging down the sides of his jacket. It’s now dark but the thousands of Christmas lights hanging over the street remain off. They reach a street and sidewalk that are blocked off, shunting them through the old Jewish quarter, where five cats are raging an epic war, screaming at one another, claws out, and everyone avoid that part of the sidewalk, so the whole group crosses the street, creating a new crosswalk in the middle of cars who are helplessly stuck honking. More duendecillos appear to Emmy, clutching the awnings overhead.

On the street, there are babies strapped to backs. Toddlers on shoulders. Laughing ten-year-olds, smoking teenagers, and many young lovers, like Emmy and Abe used to be, when they thought this was all life needed to be: living and loving and living some more. Finding a space in the crowd before it disappeared.

The honking increases in tone and tempo and settles into a single beat. It’s a marching band, coming down the street, in straight lines five across, pushing everyone else to the side of the already crowded sidewalk—the cats scatter away. The duendecillos on the cornice above Abe and Emmy jostle with the noise. The duendecillos on the street scatter at the marching band’s approach, diving into alleyways and disappearing into dust.

“I recognize this song,” says Abe.

“It’s the Final Countdown.”

He hums a few notes along with the trumpets.

“You can’t sing,” says Emmy. “We’ve made it to the Cathedral! Look.” She points up. Across the square there’s a great gothic thing with gargoyles on every corner.

“Don’t you mean El Catedral?” says Abe.

The marching band goes on and the street fills back in with people. “I have to pee.”

He opens the map on his phone. “There’s a park nearby. The Plaza de España. They’ll have a bathroom.”

They walk alongside the marching band. The drumline is jarring. A count of four, another count of four, then a count of five and a half. A duendecillo falls on Emmy’s shoulder. “Get it off! Get it off!” But nothing’s there now but a white dropping on her jacket.

“It’s just guano. Relax.”

“I’m fine.” She nearly kicks a white cat, who hisses at her, baring pink gums and red eyes. “Don’t tell me to relax.” She hisses back at the cat, who runs off.

They reach the end of the pedestrian zone, now rimmed by speeding traffic. There’s drumming in their ears. Duendecillos on the cornices stare down from every few feet. The crowd is an amorphous, drifting mass. Abe and Emmy push through smokers, through kissing couples, through shoppers with five bags on each arm that have stopped in the middle of the street to show each other their goods.

“Where is this fucking plaza?” Abe says to himself.

“What’d you say?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, tell me.”

“I said, where is this fucking plaza.”

The harshness of the words cut into her. It’s not directed at her, but it is. His anger. She can feel it. “Do you want to go home?” Emmy shouts.

“To our jail cell in the flea motel? No.” They get stuck behind an old woman with a hunched back and a cane. He walks to the side and pulls Emmy with him.

“I mean home, home,” says Emmy. “Do you think we shouldn’t have come?”

“Are you crazy?”

“I think maybe we shouldn’t have come. Or we should’ve gone somewhere else. We should have gone to a beach resort like everyone else does.”

“I think we’re in a bad mood and we’ll be fine soon.”

“How? How will we be fine? How can a mood just disappear?”

Abe doesn’t reply. His silence is oppressive.

“I didn’t know the city would be like this,” says Emmy. “It was a big unknown. That’s what we like, right? Diving into the unknown. Let’s go to Spain! Let’s pick a town out of a hat! What does the world have to show us? But we didn’t know what we were getting into. We should have done more research. We hate cities and we hate tourists. We should never have come.”

“So let’s go somewhere else,” says Abe. The entire crowd has slowed to a standstill. Up ahead, there’s shouting and car honks. “What’s that suburb you found? With the Roman ruins? Italica? Let’s do a day trip tomorrow.”

“But at least we can leave Sevilla. At least we can go somewhere else. What if we could never leave?”

“We picked the wrong city. It was a bad luck of the draw.”

“You keep avoiding the conversation. We’re running out of time. I’m running out of time.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to say you’re as terrified as I am. That this is the biggest decision of our lives and you say one thing and then you say another and now you say nothing and no matter what, we need to talk about it. Do you understand that every year we put this off it becomes more dangerous for me? And what if we still say no and regret it? And what if we say yes but it ruins me? Or ruins us? What if it hurts too much? How can we ever decide something like this? What the fuck is going on with this traffic?” Emmy turns away and pushes through to the curb, one foot in the gutter. The street is sloped downhill, then veers right. The crowd continues shouting. Emmy spots the polka dotted stroller from earlier. The happy drooling baby sitting unsteadily on the motorcycle materializes in her mind. She realizes the stroller is rolling quickly down the street, heading into an intersection with oncoming traffic.

Emmy runs. Abe, catching sight of the scene a half-second later, runs after her, runs faster. She’s running as fast as she can, and when she sees Abe at her side she finds a new store of speed, something Herculaic. Her feet are flying on the cobblestones. His arms are pumping. There’s music blasting, and drumming from everywhere. Emmy and Abe run, thinking of nothing, though there are flashes of visions that threaten to come, of memories and possible futures, of how-to books and diapers and a tomato-faced scream, of a foot that flails in protest and won’t fit into jammies, of a shirt that shrunk and won’t come off, of a fall down the stairs or an unfightable infection, a disaster—the terrible tragedy no one expects, of an empty house, of the canyon of distance between the emptiness that precedes and succeeds life.

They simultaneously grab the stroller. Inside, sleeping soundly, is a wrinkly, breathing, spiky-eared duendecillo.

The baby in the jean jacket that should be in the stroller is on the sidewalk, standing on a stone rail. His mother, laughing, holds his hands to keep him steady, as a crowd forms to watch him dance. Cars are honking at Emmy and Abe, yelling all kinds of expletives to get out of the street, instantly translatable. But they can’t stop looking at the duendecillo.

Its fur is the gray of sand, the gray of every color zoomed out, distorted, and twisted into static. It opens its eyes, big yellow eyes with round pupils that expand in the light, gleaming red in the stoplight, then green. For one whole minute it blinks, enough time for the light to change and change back, for angry drivers to give up and drive around them, one wheel on the sidewalk to avoid them, and then, both. Emmy and Abe will say it stared straight at them, into them, and through them before it jumped out of the stroller and disappeared in a poof.

“You saw that, right?” asks Emmy.

“I saw it,” says Abe, taking her hand.