Andalucian Face
By Michael Quin
After years of dreaming to arrive in Andalucia, my arrival oddly enough came just like a dream, yet part nightmare, or more accurately that surreal space between the two we drift around whenever traveling in foreign lands so long imagined.
The night my dream began was spent under the stars on the Portugese side of the Guadiana River. It had been a drunken, dry-mouthed and sweaty train ride from the madness of mid-summer Lagos to this town of Villa Real de Santo Antonio, which none of us had known or particularly wanted to know about, where a river crossing wasn’t possible until ‘mañana’, always 'mañana'…
All short on cash and ideas, we eventually voted to sleep in this dimly lit park in preference to a nearby church yard, which seemed a little too well lit for weary travelers like ourselves. As we recounted our desperate train ride during which Jay had been pushed to beg for water from and elderly Portuguese woman, I spied on our company in the park. Speaking Portugese in low round accents, they were shifting from one shadow to the next through the moonlight, with the caterpillar-like moustaches of 17 year old petty drug dealers yet to have their first shave. And with each hour the group seemed to grow, lingering in the park thicker than the hashish smells, always seeming very interested in us, and so grew our paranoia. After all, our heap of backpacks and surfboards (everything we owned between us!) stood ridiculously proud as a tower of booty, around which we appeared as unarmed sleeping guards.
Jay, a burly Central Coast surfer who’d stolen water from the old lady earlier that day, clutched a rusty pole in his sleeping bag and sprung up nervously with every snap of a twig or rustle of leaves. Luke, my travel buddy, had a cobble stone within reach under his lucky straw hat from San Sebastian. And there I lay, in a vigilant one-eyed doze, clutching a cobble stone even meaner than Luke’s, all for fear of Portuguese border town vagrants.
To our bewilderment, the Slovenian girls we’d wound up with after all admitting we were lost when the train stopped before reaching Spain, didn’t seem to appreciate the gravity of the situation. Once they’d stripped down to their skimpy singlet tops, in clear view of everyone, they joked nervously about their most immediate fear - the sprinklers. True enough, all night we were haunted by the sound of timed sprinklers. They sprayed their way through the riverside park, edging ever closer, hour by hour in a pincer movement toward our tower of luggage we slept around. Miraculously the sprinklers never struck. In any case, it wasn't through fear of water that I discovered how to lie without falling asleep for an entire night.
In the predawn I came to my senses, untouched and dry, to sit in awe of a golden sun illuminating the horizon past the silhouetted palm trees of the park, and eventually climbing above Spain on the far side of the river. In that time, whilst the others dozed and continued to twitch instinctively at the slightest of sounds, I sat in prefect tranquility, smiling at the welcoming Andalucian sun, without yet knowing how real that welcome would be to feel, and how intoxicating the beauty I would behold in the next few days. Eventually everyone arose with cheerful goodmornings and we made the river crossing to Huelva Province, Spain. A bus ride later and we were in the intense world of sights and smells that is Sevilla.
The scents whofting from tapas bars and unseen kitchens around narrow alleyway corners were so rich as to be almost indescribable. This intensity was matched by that seemingly ever-present and blinding sunlight which had welcomed me from across the river. I discussed with Luke whether the streets of Sevilla smelt more of Tabasco sauce or horse, which in turn reminded me of my faux pas in San Sebastian where I had insisted on drowning some quality tapas in my favorite hot sauce, to the disapproving looks of the locals. As I pondered I began to notice how many horses there actually were in the streets, well groomed and with plaited mains, often pulling beautiful old carts of black and yellow, or else milling around with their masters as if listening to their rough Andalucian jibes. I decided to forget about Tabasco sauce for now. There was too much to take in. I felt I was making memories to hold forever, and at this thought my satisfaction intensified. We were full of joy de vive, in contrast to our previous night's experience, exploring Seville with not a worry in the world but which angle to enjoy it from.
Luke and I decided to explore the area of Barrio Santa Cruz, walking always on the shady side of the street whilst admiring the radiant colours on romantic facades of the side sweltering in the sun it knows so well. In a daze we walked, unable to contain our smiles, feeling almost mad from lack of sleep and joy combined. In this daze we wandered the ancient Alcazar palace, a gem of Muslim architecture taken and retaken by Christian Spain as with so many Andalucian palaces, and enjoyed discovering through elegant archways, hidden courtyards and ponds of cool water.
In our daze we eventually wandered into a large park near the river in the heart of Sevilla. Shading from the midsummer sun during the lazy siesta hours of the afternoon, not a bother existed anywhere. Whilst Sevillanos slept by spinning fans, all that stirred for us was the earthly hum of that park, so tranquil as to seem surreal.
Overhead, large branches of varying species sliced shade into the searing sunlight in myriad shapes. Small shelters too lined several of the streams and ponds, and it was under one such shelter which Luke and I were relaxing, trying to discuss the wonder of this garden oasis, whilst getting distracted by the magnetic lure of the gardens gentle architecture. Our brick bench seats were indeed artfully crafted, reclined at a permanently comfortable 110* (or so we estimated it to be), and so at this angle we sat by our glassy pond, taking stock of the past days events and joyously proclaiming the parks subtler creature comforts.
The topic of conversation eventually led to a certain souvenir print I’d picked up earlier that day in a narrow alley of the old town by the Plaza de Torros. It was a print of an old poster in radiant colours, advertising the festivities of the Ferria de Sevilla 1973, with the spire of La Giralda flowing into a magnificent green flamenco dress decorated in polka dots. I chose it as a souvenir because I thought it had caught the intensity of Sevilla in colour, and because the face taking up the remainder of the poster was that of a radiant Spanish beauty with the classic looks often attributed to Andalucian women. Around her face fell long dark hair, partly held in a red flower to the side, and under long dark seductive lashes hid large inviting eyes. In the centre of the portrait were those full red lips, completing the picture of beauty where each feature distracts from the other to create something so sublime. She was the beauty we were chasing in Andalucia, personified.
Luke and I took a photo with her face between our heads, and then looked to the LCD screen to continue admiring her face. Would we see such a girl here, or was she too beautiful to be true? To Luke and I, in our sun-stroked euphoria, it suddenly seemed like we would, even if we didn’t yet know where or when. Our imaginations ran wild.
We set off from our garden oasis filled with dreams of Andalusian beauties, and headed for Plaza de Espana where we indulged in photographing the collenading columns of the grand red-brick structure. At the fountain we caught water in our faces and, refreshed, looked for more angles and shadows to catch for prolongation of the beauty we felt too much to digest in that moment. Once more we became lost in the streets and photographed old mansions from another time, and long shadows in charming streets littered with mopeds buzzing by in blurs or laying parked in postcard silence.
Like that high sun I’d awoken to, Sevilla had smiled on us this day, washing the colours over us in their bold splendor. So as the sun eventually lowered itself over Portugal in the west, a balmey moon was on the rise and sevillanos had still not dined, but Luke and I were already heading out to see what awaited us in the mysteries of a night out.
We stumbled into a section of town new to us and found scores of clubs and bustling bars spilling out of painted doorways into the parading streets. Eventually we settled at one such pub and with parched throats ordered ‘dos cervezas grandes por favor’, but ended up with small bottles of Heineken, a beer despised by the both of us. Luke smiled and commented how when everything has been so perfect a bad beer can seem a catastrophe, we both laughed and I joked ‘give me half a minute and I think I’ll be over it’. But there wasn’t even half a minute to wait, for Luke’s eyes had wandered from our beer conversation, and for Luke in those days that was quite something. I felt the gravity of something soon to come, but did not yet know why. Luke looked like he was trying to remember something, in a puzzled way, as if he’d seen an old face in the Sevillan crowd at the bar. I began scanning the same Andalusian faces, and it took me a wordless minute to realise, until Luke and I were both grinning wryly.
As I lifted the old poster from my bag under our wooden table and admired the face, then once more at the face Luke had spotted in the crowd, I could hardly believe my senses, for the one seemed the other with no difference at all. She stood at the bar, as elegant and beautiful as in the picture, yet all the more radiant in the flesh. Luke grabbed the print from my grasp and then began chuckling madly like I now was; laughing at coincidence, laughing at travel’s random moments which can suddenly seem so perfectly scripted, laughing at the small beers which were not coming close to quenching our epic thirsts, and laughing at our arrival in Andalucia, so perfect a welcome it had been.
After years of dreaming to arrive in Andalucia, my arrival oddly enough came just like a dream, yet part nightmare, or more accurately that surreal space between the two we drift around whenever traveling in foreign lands so long imagined.
The night my dream began was spent under the stars on the Portugese side of the Guadiana River. It had been a drunken, dry-mouthed and sweaty train ride from the madness of mid-summer Lagos to this town of Villa Real de Santo Antonio, which none of us had known or particularly wanted to know about, where a river crossing wasn’t possible until ‘mañana’, always 'mañana'…
All short on cash and ideas, we eventually voted to sleep in this dimly lit park in preference to a nearby church yard, which seemed a little too well lit for weary travelers like ourselves. As we recounted our desperate train ride during which Jay had been pushed to beg for water from and elderly Portuguese woman, I spied on our company in the park. Speaking Portugese in low round accents, they were shifting from one shadow to the next through the moonlight, with the caterpillar-like moustaches of 17 year old petty drug dealers yet to have their first shave. And with each hour the group seemed to grow, lingering in the park thicker than the hashish smells, always seeming very interested in us, and so grew our paranoia. After all, our heap of backpacks and surfboards (everything we owned between us!) stood ridiculously proud as a tower of booty, around which we appeared as unarmed sleeping guards.
Jay, a burly Central Coast surfer who’d stolen water from the old lady earlier that day, clutched a rusty pole in his sleeping bag and sprung up nervously with every snap of a twig or rustle of leaves. Luke, my travel buddy, had a cobble stone within reach under his lucky straw hat from San Sebastian. And there I lay, in a vigilant one-eyed doze, clutching a cobble stone even meaner than Luke’s, all for fear of Portuguese border town vagrants.
To our bewilderment, the Slovenian girls we’d wound up with after all admitting we were lost when the train stopped before reaching Spain, didn’t seem to appreciate the gravity of the situation. Once they’d stripped down to their skimpy singlet tops, in clear view of everyone, they joked nervously about their most immediate fear - the sprinklers. True enough, all night we were haunted by the sound of timed sprinklers. They sprayed their way through the riverside park, edging ever closer, hour by hour in a pincer movement toward our tower of luggage we slept around. Miraculously the sprinklers never struck. In any case, it wasn't through fear of water that I discovered how to lie without falling asleep for an entire night.
In the predawn I came to my senses, untouched and dry, to sit in awe of a golden sun illuminating the horizon past the silhouetted palm trees of the park, and eventually climbing above Spain on the far side of the river. In that time, whilst the others dozed and continued to twitch instinctively at the slightest of sounds, I sat in prefect tranquility, smiling at the welcoming Andalucian sun, without yet knowing how real that welcome would be to feel, and how intoxicating the beauty I would behold in the next few days. Eventually everyone arose with cheerful goodmornings and we made the river crossing to Huelva Province, Spain. A bus ride later and we were in the intense world of sights and smells that is Sevilla.
The scents whofting from tapas bars and unseen kitchens around narrow alleyway corners were so rich as to be almost indescribable. This intensity was matched by that seemingly ever-present and blinding sunlight which had welcomed me from across the river. I discussed with Luke whether the streets of Sevilla smelt more of Tabasco sauce or horse, which in turn reminded me of my faux pas in San Sebastian where I had insisted on drowning some quality tapas in my favorite hot sauce, to the disapproving looks of the locals. As I pondered I began to notice how many horses there actually were in the streets, well groomed and with plaited mains, often pulling beautiful old carts of black and yellow, or else milling around with their masters as if listening to their rough Andalucian jibes. I decided to forget about Tabasco sauce for now. There was too much to take in. I felt I was making memories to hold forever, and at this thought my satisfaction intensified. We were full of joy de vive, in contrast to our previous night's experience, exploring Seville with not a worry in the world but which angle to enjoy it from.
Luke and I decided to explore the area of Barrio Santa Cruz, walking always on the shady side of the street whilst admiring the radiant colours on romantic facades of the side sweltering in the sun it knows so well. In a daze we walked, unable to contain our smiles, feeling almost mad from lack of sleep and joy combined. In this daze we wandered the ancient Alcazar palace, a gem of Muslim architecture taken and retaken by Christian Spain as with so many Andalucian palaces, and enjoyed discovering through elegant archways, hidden courtyards and ponds of cool water.
In our daze we eventually wandered into a large park near the river in the heart of Sevilla. Shading from the midsummer sun during the lazy siesta hours of the afternoon, not a bother existed anywhere. Whilst Sevillanos slept by spinning fans, all that stirred for us was the earthly hum of that park, so tranquil as to seem surreal.
Overhead, large branches of varying species sliced shade into the searing sunlight in myriad shapes. Small shelters too lined several of the streams and ponds, and it was under one such shelter which Luke and I were relaxing, trying to discuss the wonder of this garden oasis, whilst getting distracted by the magnetic lure of the gardens gentle architecture. Our brick bench seats were indeed artfully crafted, reclined at a permanently comfortable 110* (or so we estimated it to be), and so at this angle we sat by our glassy pond, taking stock of the past days events and joyously proclaiming the parks subtler creature comforts.
The topic of conversation eventually led to a certain souvenir print I’d picked up earlier that day in a narrow alley of the old town by the Plaza de Torros. It was a print of an old poster in radiant colours, advertising the festivities of the Ferria de Sevilla 1973, with the spire of La Giralda flowing into a magnificent green flamenco dress decorated in polka dots. I chose it as a souvenir because I thought it had caught the intensity of Sevilla in colour, and because the face taking up the remainder of the poster was that of a radiant Spanish beauty with the classic looks often attributed to Andalucian women. Around her face fell long dark hair, partly held in a red flower to the side, and under long dark seductive lashes hid large inviting eyes. In the centre of the portrait were those full red lips, completing the picture of beauty where each feature distracts from the other to create something so sublime. She was the beauty we were chasing in Andalucia, personified.
Luke and I took a photo with her face between our heads, and then looked to the LCD screen to continue admiring her face. Would we see such a girl here, or was she too beautiful to be true? To Luke and I, in our sun-stroked euphoria, it suddenly seemed like we would, even if we didn’t yet know where or when. Our imaginations ran wild.
We set off from our garden oasis filled with dreams of Andalusian beauties, and headed for Plaza de Espana where we indulged in photographing the collenading columns of the grand red-brick structure. At the fountain we caught water in our faces and, refreshed, looked for more angles and shadows to catch for prolongation of the beauty we felt too much to digest in that moment. Once more we became lost in the streets and photographed old mansions from another time, and long shadows in charming streets littered with mopeds buzzing by in blurs or laying parked in postcard silence.
Like that high sun I’d awoken to, Sevilla had smiled on us this day, washing the colours over us in their bold splendor. So as the sun eventually lowered itself over Portugal in the west, a balmey moon was on the rise and sevillanos had still not dined, but Luke and I were already heading out to see what awaited us in the mysteries of a night out.
We stumbled into a section of town new to us and found scores of clubs and bustling bars spilling out of painted doorways into the parading streets. Eventually we settled at one such pub and with parched throats ordered ‘dos cervezas grandes por favor’, but ended up with small bottles of Heineken, a beer despised by the both of us. Luke smiled and commented how when everything has been so perfect a bad beer can seem a catastrophe, we both laughed and I joked ‘give me half a minute and I think I’ll be over it’. But there wasn’t even half a minute to wait, for Luke’s eyes had wandered from our beer conversation, and for Luke in those days that was quite something. I felt the gravity of something soon to come, but did not yet know why. Luke looked like he was trying to remember something, in a puzzled way, as if he’d seen an old face in the Sevillan crowd at the bar. I began scanning the same Andalusian faces, and it took me a wordless minute to realise, until Luke and I were both grinning wryly.
As I lifted the old poster from my bag under our wooden table and admired the face, then once more at the face Luke had spotted in the crowd, I could hardly believe my senses, for the one seemed the other with no difference at all. She stood at the bar, as elegant and beautiful as in the picture, yet all the more radiant in the flesh. Luke grabbed the print from my grasp and then began chuckling madly like I now was; laughing at coincidence, laughing at travel’s random moments which can suddenly seem so perfectly scripted, laughing at the small beers which were not coming close to quenching our epic thirsts, and laughing at our arrival in Andalucia, so perfect a welcome it had been.
posted by Michael Quin at 10:17 AM
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