AT A QUARTER TO SEVEN, James locked up the darkroom, grabbed his camera and tripod, and went out to shoot the procession. There had been a light rain, and the air was perfumed with flowers and melting candlewax. A crowd was forming in the Plaza de la Primavera—no good vantage point for the camera—so he kept walking, tracing the route the celebrants would take along the cobbled street through the Sacromonte. Eventually the crowd began to thin, and the street dwindled to a footpath winding out through the valley toward the Vírgen de la Esperanza chapel. He found a spot that would have a good view of the procession—atop a stone wall at the base of a steep hillside planted with rows of olive trees—and set up the tripod.
To his left and right, and indeed all along the path, onlookers had built small pyres using scraps of cypress and olivewood, and at a precise moment just before dusk—by what pre-arranged signal, James could not guess—the pyres were lit, filling the valley with flickering orange light and a haze of fragrant smoke. The onlookers were subdued, only the occasional outcry of a child rising above the murmur of conversation and the hiss and crackle of the fires. A Spaniard standing on the wall next to James tapped him on the shoulder and held out a bota, but James shook his head. The man raised his eyebrows and offered the wineskin again; when James declined again, he shrugged and pointedly turned his back. The mood was not festive, as a stranger might expect, but solemn, almost grim.
Soon dissonant music came echoing down the valley, the out-of-tune horn march and steady drumbeat familiar from the bullfighting season. The murmur of the onlookers rose in volume, and James stepped behind the tripod to peer through the lens. He felt the tension within his chest dissipate somewhat as the role of photographer filled him with a sense of competence and directedness.
The music was louder now, and the first of the secret societies rounded into view, men dressed in white robes and high conical hoods, disturbingly reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan. “Cofradía de los chapineros,” the Spaniard who’d offered him the bota intoned. He’d turned to face James again, and was staring with a curious intensity.
James adjusted the shutter and aperture to compensate for the celebrants’ white robes, which were surprisingly bright in the smoky half-light. He already knew about the cofradías, which had their roots in the ancient trade guilds. That the city was home to a network of secret fraternities was a strange and faintly unsettling concept.
Several more cofradías filed by—red robes, black robes, one especially striking combination of royal blue and gold—and then came the procession’s centerpiece, a float or palanquin bearing the ancient wooden statue of the Vírgen de la Esperanza. The float appeared top-heavy and unbalanced, loaded with an array of tall candles, Easter lilies, silver chalices, and reliquaries, as if at any moment it might tumble off the suffering shoulders of the bearers and into the tangled ravine below the footpath.
Next came a few more floats, one bearing an enormous gilded reliquary in the shape of an ark, which James guessed housed the bones of a martyred saint. It was on this float, perched atop the swaying ark, that a small boy dressed in rags sat and seemed to wave at him. He zoomed the camera in on the urchin, who was thin and extremely pale. And yes, it was James the boy was waving at, or someone close behind him on the wall. He turned to look for the Spaniard who’d offered the bota, but the man was gone. James peered through the lens again, but the boy had left his perch and was nowhere to be seen. How strange, he thought, that the urchin had picked him out of the multitude lining the path; normally he felt all but invisible in a crowd of Spaniards. And the man with the bota—who had been staring at him so avidly just a moment before—where had he gone?
At the tail of the procession came the marching band, brass section silent now, as if vanquished by the mournful beat of the drums: doom, doom, doom. The whole valley shook with the sound, so regular and predictable that it seemed to have been hovering in the air for weeks. As the musicians passed, the crowd swelled and filled in behind them, choking the footpath and pressing up against the wall where James stood. Fearing that the human river would soon overflow the wall, he collapsed the tripod and dropped into the procession heading back to the city. Night was closing in. Everything blurred together in the flickering firelight: the crowd, the drumbeat, the treasure-laden floats bobbing ahead as if carried downstream on an undulating, slow-motion torrent. Nearing the Sacromonte the crowd pressed in closer, and James’s uneasiness slipped into a strange feeling of disembodiment—as if he were watching the procession through someone else’s eyes, or through the lens of the camera now slung over his shoulder. This, too, was a familiar sensation, and an unpleasant one, reminding him forcefully of his longstanding distaste for crowds.
By the time the procession reached the Plaza de la Primavera it was impossible to move in any direction not dictated by the press of murmuring bodies. He saw flashbulbs ahead and caught a glimpse of a group of tourists standing on benches at the south end of the plaza, by the riverbank—a quick vision of glistening white teeth hinting at the skulls behind the faces. Spurred by panic, he shouldered his way through the crowd in the opposite direction and ducked into a narrow alley opposite the northern end of the plaza.
The alley was dark and climbed at a steep angle, becoming a cobbled staircase that led up into the heart of the Albaicín, the old Arab quarter. He sat on one of the steps, panting dejectedly. Down in the plaza, the crowd continued to stream by. Beyond him, on a hillside visible through an opening between the buildings, the Alhambra loomed in all its glory, high walls and turrets lit by golden floodlights. It was what the tourists came for, and what James himself had originally come to see and to photograph: the largest Moorish palace in the world, a masterpiece of architecture commemorating seven centuries of Arab rule in Spain. He leaned back, with his elbows on the stairs, and closed his eyes. What was troubling him? Nagging at the edges of his consciousness was a simple fact, one that he thought would explain everything, if only he could remember what it was.
When he opened his eyes, there was a woman. She was supporting herself against one of the stone buildings at the alley entrance, breathing heavily as if she’d been running or dancing—or perhaps, like James, escaping her claustrophobia by fighting her way out of the crowd. She wore a black dress gathered tightly at the waist, with billowy, multi-flounced skirts like those of a flamenco dancer.
“Buenas noches,” he said, shyly curious.
“Buenas noches,” she repeated, in a teasing voice that was clearly intended to mock his American accent. He couldn’t see her eyes—her face was hidden, backlit by the Alhambra and the flickering torchlight from the plaza—but he thought he detected a note of warmth in her voice, perhaps even a hint of flirtatiousness.
“Do we know each other?” he asked in his rudimentary Spanish.
She laughed, took out a cigarette, and lit it. The alley filled with the pleasantly astringent scent of burning cloves.
“May I have one?” he asked in English.
“May I have one?” she repeated, mocking him again. Then she flicked the burning cigarette his way and was gone. Acting on a sudden instinct, he got to his feet and ran after her, but it was no good. She’d disappeared into the crowded plaza.
Shaking his head, he strode back up to his cobbled step. He found the smoldering cigarette and picked it up. He examined it for lipstick stains, then put it to his mouth and inhaled deeply. The clove tasted good, cool and numbing, and it kept the woman’s image fresh in his mind: the old-fashioned dress; the cascade of black hair; the impression, more felt than seen, of her scornful eyes watching him from the shadows. And yes, her body: the narrow waist, the suggestive swell of her bosom as she breathed. There had been something so bittersweet in the way she’d mocked him—a presumption of familiarity, as if she’d known very well who he was, and what it was that he wanted.
But perhaps that was only wishful thinking. What young Spanish woman would care to know anything about him, a solitary foreigner who spoke her language at a very basic level and lived in her city without a single friend or acquaintance—who existed, in other words, in a state of near invisibility?
James lived in a small apartment not far from the Plaza de la Primavera, in the heart of the warren-like Albaicín. He’d made a darkroom out of a converted storage closet on the rooftop terrace, and it was there that he spent most of his time. Early on in his stay, he’d made an effort to reach out to the Spaniards in his neighborhood. He still said “buenos días” or “buenas tardes” whenever he passed one of them on the street, but by and large they ignored him. He had no interest in Granada’s expatriate community, and the feeling was apparently mutual; the Americans had organized a dinner party for Thanksgiving to which he’d not been invited, and there had been various other functions, over the months, that he’d gone out of his way to ignore. He had no idea whether the other foreigners even knew his name, although he supposed they probably did. Still, there was no way of knowing for sure, because he’d never spoken to any of them. His solitude was nearly absolute. This allowed him to focus intensively on his work, but that too was problematic. He couldn’t seem to get beyond the hackneyed tourist shots. He had no interest in producing postcards, yet that was basically what he was doing.
Still, he kept at it. In a way, shooting photos was the only method he had to prove to himself that he was real—not a figment of someone’s half-remembered dream.
He spent the day after the procession cloistered in his darkroom. First he developed the shots of the floats, a few of which showed promise in a grainy, impressionistic way. The skinny boy atop the reliquary appeared in none of them, which was a surprise, because James remembered framing him several times, and the float he’d been sitting on had come through clearly enough.
He turned his attention to a series of shots he’d taken several days earlier, three rolls of a church façade carved playfully in the plateresque Renaissance style. He’d spent an entire morning shooting it, and the photos were remarkably clear, conveying the warm texture of the sandstone, the lyrical curves of the human forms, and the whimsically inventive shapes of the grotesques—dragons; mermaids; various half-beast, half-human composites.
One of these was especially interesting, a figure with the body of a winged serpent and the face of a man. He’d used up half a roll on that figure—from different angles, adjusting the aperture—and when he hung the photos up side by side he noticed something strange about them. A closer examination revealed the source of the problem: the expression on the figure’s face appeared to change from frame to frame. It was subtle; each of the changes took place over several shots. But in the end—James had to close his eyes and open them again and again—there was no mistaking it. The expression changed. The face was that of an elderly man, with stern brows and an imperious hawklike nose, a face like a Roman philosopher’s. The tight-lipped face gradually went from disapproving to sardonic; then bored; and finally, in the last few shots, it began to grin with dawning delight.
James stared at the photographs until they began to blur. Then he put away the chemicals, turned off the crimson overhead light, stepped out of the darkroom, and bolted the door behind him. He leaned his back against the door and massaged his eyes with his fingertips. Mystery solved. He was losing his mind.
Strange as it may seem, the new insight into his condition improved his mood. He slept unusually well that night, and the next morning he got up early and ascended the stairs to the rooftop terrace with his camera. It was early April. The air was warm, and suddenly the buds on the caper vines had burst into flower—little yellow stars cascading down the wall of an adjacent terrace. The sun threw long shadows over the roofed hillsides of the Albaicín, whose antique charm was only slightly marred by its spiny jumble of television antennae. The Alhambra sprawled along the high ridge across the valley, its massive square towers almost frighteningly medieval in the soft-hued morning light.
A pigeon fluttered down to rest on the terrace. It pecked around for a while on the chipped cement floor, then flapped up to the wall and cooed softly just behind James’s head. He scooted his chair around to keep the bird in view, but it grunted and flew off. He moved his chair back to its original position facing the Alhambra. A light gust of wind blew a leaf across the terrace. Following it with his eyes, he noticed a face peering at him over the terrace wall. He stood up quickly, his heart pounding.
The man nodded curtly. He had slicked-back white hair and alert aquiline features that were familiar from somewhere—the open-air market, James thought, or perhaps the small photography store in the new town where he bought his supplies. A neighbor, obviously, though he’d never seen the man out on the terrace before.
“Beautiful day, is it not?” The man spoke excellent English. His accent was upper-class: noticeably Spanish but educated, with more than a hint of Oxbridge.
“Yes, it is.” James struggled to regain his composure. “You spooked me a little there. Just showing up like that.”
The older man frowned. “So sorry. I should have announced myself. But you looked so . . . unhappy. I did not wish to intrude.”
“It’s no intrusion, really. Always good to meet a neighbor. James Levin.” He thrust his hand over the wall, and the man took it.
“Eusebio Romero de la O. Very pleased.” His grip was firm. They gazed at each other over the wall, James wracking his brain for small talk, feeling more awkward as the seconds passed. The old man appeared content merely to stare.
“So you live here?” James finally said. “In the building, I mean?”
“I worry about you, James,” the old man said. “Do you not know who I am?”
James shook his head, feeling embarrassed and inexplicably frightened. The old man’s gaze was intense and unrelenting, and he couldn’t for the life of him figure out where they might have met.
“I worry about you, James, because you insist on spending your time alone.
“Oh, I don’t mind that,” James explained. “Actually, I like being alone. It’s one of the professional hazards of being a photographer.”
“No, my friend.” The elderly man shook his head slowly, brows knit over the prominent arc of his nose in an expression of grave concern. “You’re not just a photographer. And you should not be alone so much, not now. There is an establishment I know. I’m going there tonight, in fact, and I have come to ask you to accompany me. Do you consent?”
James shrugged uncomfortably. It would be rude to turn down such a direct invitation, but he generally hated the idea of going out. He usually read a little, studied his Spanish, and went to bed early. It was a soothing routine.
And yet, if he thought about it, how could he say no? He had, in fact, been feeling guilty for not taking part in the famous Spanish nightlife. Often his slumber was interrupted at three or four in the morning by singing and drunken carousing under his window. Now, during Holy Week, the nighttime streets were alive with noise: guitar music, laughter, screams, young Spaniards roving the streets in gangs, clapping their hands in complex, inescapable rhythms that annoyed him and thrilled him and kept him awake until he had to cover his ears with his pillow.
“All right,” he said, letting out his breath. “What time should we meet?”
“I’ll come to your door at eleven,” the Spaniard said. His face broke into a broad grin and James’s stomach dropped, because suddenly he knew why the old man was so familiar. He bore an uncanny resemblance to the figure from the photographs now drying on their line in the darkroom. The figure with the expressive and subtly changing face that had been carved into golden sandstone more than four centuries before.
That evening he went out to witness another procession, this one known as “El Silencio,” because it took place in total silence. All the celebrants held candles, which lit up their faces so that their heads appeared to float freely, unattached to human bodies. The vision filled him with dread.
He went back to the apartment and tried to read, shivering on the couch under a heavy woolen blanket. He didn’t know whether Eusebio Romero de la O had been a real person or just some spectral vision concocted by his disturbed imagination. He hoped the old man was imaginary, because the truth was that he had little desire to go back out tonight.
Eusebio did come by, as promised, at exactly eleven o’clock. Together they walked down to the Plaza de la Primavera, and from there westward on the narrow street that followed the valley between the two steep hills that made up the old part of town, with the Albaicín above and to the right, and the spot-lit Alhambra looming up implacably on the hillside to the left. The air was cool, and by the time they arrived at the entrance to the establishment—a shadowed doorway three steps below street level in an unlit side alley—James was fully awake.
Eusebio gave him a companionable wink as he pushed open the riveted oak door, and a murmur of conversation and clinking glassware drifted out. It was an old wine tavern, a vaulted bodega lit by candles and torches bracketed to the brick walls. There were polished, antique mahogany tables and a hewn-oak bar. It was crowded with Spaniards of various ages chatting and laughing, their faces gleaming in the yellow light, their shadows dancing on the low brick vaults of the ceiling.
He turned to Eusebio, but the old man had melted into the crowd. James felt a wave of indignation that his neighbor would dump him so unceremoniously after having invited him out in the first place. He scanned the crowd for familiar faces from the photography shop or the open-air market, but he recognized no one. He found it striking, though. He could sense that the people in the bar were acutely aware of him—although no one would meet his eyes directly—whereas normally he felt invisible in a crowd. Here it was just the opposite, as if he was the most visible person in the room. Feeling conspicuous and painfully self-conscious, he crept through the crowd to the bar, where he sat on an antique-looking metal stool. Suspended from the ceiling behind the bar were a half-dozen sweating hocks of mountain ham. Beneath them was a broad cutting board stacked with baguettes, powdery links of dried sausage, and several bulky rounds of Manchego cheese. The barman put down a small tumbler, which he proceeded to fill with a clear yellowish liquid. James rarely drank alcohol, but with a newfound feeling of recklessness, he decided to take a sip. It was some kind of chilled sherry, and he found it uncommonly delicious: dry, refreshing, nearly bodiless. The barman watched him with an expectant smile.“¿Bueno?”
“Excelente,” James replied, raising the glass to toast the barman before taking another sip.
The barman winked companionably and returned to the cutting board. He came back a moment later with a small plate, which he laid on the bar in front of James. “Buen provecho.”
The plate held a crescent of green figs and several paper-thin slices of ham. James didn’t normally eat air-cured ham—it had a chewy consistency and a fleshy odor that he found disconcerting—but to please the barman he rolled one of the figs in a slice and popped it in his mouth. It was surprisingly tender, a delicate blend of flavors reminiscent of woodsmoke and mountain air. He closed his eyes, savoring the taste.
When he opened them, the barman was gone. A woman had taken the neighboring stool. She was facing away from him, and he took advantage of the moment to admire her shapely back, which was exposed to great advantage by a low-cut black dress. Her skin was of a warm olive complexion, and her raven-black hair fell down over her shoulders in loose curls. At the base of her left shoulder blade was a small diamond-shaped scar. James was gripped by a desire to touch it; to spin the woman around by her shoulders and kiss her on the lips.
She turned suddenly, and he just managed to look away in time. In his peripheral vision, he could see that she was now leaning against the bar, with both elbows resting upon it, gazing out at the crowd. It was the woman from the alley, he was sure of it—the one who’d made fun of his accent.
He agonized for a moment, and then slid the tapas plate down the bar for her. She shook her head and smiled sardonically, fixing him in her gaze. Her eyes were almond-shaped, green-flecked hazel, light as a cat’s eyes but warmer, and luminous in their intensity. Say something, he urged himself silently, wracking his brain for an intelligent line. The barman placed a glass of red wine on the bar behind her, and she turned to pick it up.
“Are you a friend of Eusebio’s?” he asked in Spanish. She gave him a scornful look. “Am I a friend of who?”
“Eusebio Romero de la O,” he replied sheepishly. “That’s who I came here with. I thought you might know him.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, still holding him immobile with the hypnotic intensity of her gaze. Her voice was slightly hoarse, simultaneously cultured and crude in the way of certain Spanish women. He caught a whiff of her scent: jasmine mixed with peppery clove. She was perhaps ten years younger than him, in her late twenties. He felt himself gripped by a sudden, powerful infatuation.
“May I kiss you?” he asked. He was shocked that he would come out with such a thing—the sherry was evidently impairing his judgment—but it was too late to take it back, and the truth was that he didn’t want to take it back. For the first time in recent memory, he was actually enjoying himself. Yet there was something dwelling beneath this new sense of abandon, an unspeakable terror that clutched at his throat. It took all his concentration to stamp it back down into the darkness. Not now, he begged it; not now.
She gazed evenly at him and there was a long, painful silence. Then she simply picked up her wineglass and walked away. He got up and tried to follow her, but his passage was blocked by an uncooperative thicket of tavern patrons. Several of them hissed as he tried to shoulder his way through, and twice he was elbowed roughly. Finally he made his way to the exit, pulled open the heavy door, and climbed the stairs into the street, where he found Eusebio in animated conversation with three other elderly men. As he approached, the discussion died. They all regarded him politely.
“I’m going home,” he declared. Eusebio gave a vaguely sympathetic nod, but did not urge him to stay.
When Eusebio knocked on his door the next night at eleven, James did not hesitate. In fact, he’d been dressed and ready to go for hours and was quite anxious to get back to the wine bar. They walked through the dark streets in silence, and when they came to the sunken doorway, James was neither surprised nor annoyed to find that the old man went in and left him alone without a backward glance. It was all part of the arrangement, apparently. James had concluded that the events of recent days were like real-time scenes in a play being put on for his benefit—a kind of vast street-theatre experiment of which he couldn’t yet see the point, but in which he was an ever more willing participant.
The woman wasn’t at the bar, so he sat and drank several of the exquisite finos while he waited. The barman gave him a tapa of deliciously cured hard sausage, sliced paper thin. After half an hour or so, as he’d expected, she did come, luminous in the black flamenco dress, with those extraordinary light-hued eyes, and the scent of jasmine and cloves. She sat next to him at the bar. They talked. She laughed at his Spanish. Occasionally her knee brushed against his thigh, and once, she reached out to squeeze his forearm, a surprisingly tender gesture that set his heart racing. After an indeterminate amount of time—it must have been several hours, though they flew by like minutes—she asked him to walk her home. Her name was Soledad. She lived deep within the Sacromonte, on a cobbled footpath where gypsies had dwelled for centuries in the hillside caves their ancestors had carved out of the soft volcanic rock. Conventional wisdom held that it was dangerous for a foreigner to walk in the Sacromonte at night, but when he mentioned that to Soledad, she said scornfully, “That’s just a rumor we spread to keep the tourists out.”
At her door she let him kiss her. Her lips were warm and dry. Her breath was cool and smoky, with a hint of clove.
The next night there was a Moroccan band playing at the wine bar. The music was strange and primal, complex percussion rhythms and high, trilling Arabic wails. One could hardly call it music at all in the sense to which James was accustomed, but it was strangely seductive. He’d never liked dancing—it made him feel exposed, as if he were naked in public—but with Soledad there, he got caught up in it. At first he danced tentatively, watching his feet to make sure he didn’t step on anyone’s toes, but soon the intricate rhythms possessed him, and he began to spin loose-limbed around the floor, an aimless marionette puppeted by the drums and the trilling voices. Soledad danced in front of him with graceful, flamenco-inspired moves, watching him the whole time with a serious, almost grave expression. Such prolonged scrutiny would normally have made him intensely self-conscious, but every so often the hint of a smile would come into her face, and he would speculate with rising exultation that this was the face of true love.
And then a wild feeling overtook him, a feeling utterly foreign to his experience. It was a floating up, a surrendering of self, a sense of joyous communion with the shadows whirling across the vaulted brick ceiling of the tavern. Soledad and the other dancers blurred and disappeared, replaced by flickering beams of pearly white light that spiraled and pulsated in synchrony with the complex drum rhythms. There was something terrible about this vision—a fearsome power—but it was also staggeringly beautiful, as if each dancer had taken on the concentrated essence of the aurora borealis.
The beat changed, and he lost sight of the vision. He stopped dancing and pressed his eyes shut, trying unsuccessfully to summon it back. When he opened his eyes he saw that he was standing alone. He made a full circuit around the dance floor looking for Soledad, and shoved his way through the crowd to the women’s aseo. He waited by the door, but several girls and women came and went, and it became obvious that she was not inside. Feeling increasingly claustrophobic and desperate, he found the exit and ascended the stairs to the darkness of the street. She was waiting for him there, her clove cigarette a glowing ember in the shadows by the wall of the tavern.
“I was afraid you’d left,” he said.
She flicked the cigarette onto the street. “No. I was waiting.”
“Do you want me to walk you home?”
“No. Not home.”
“Okay. Where to?”
She strode off into the darkness, and he hastened to follow. She led him down to the river, across the bridge toward the Alhambra, then uphill—he struggled to keep pace—into the vine-choked network of aqueducts and walkways that crisscrossed the hillside below the vast Moorish palace. It was a warm night, more summer than spring, and the uneven cobblestones still radiated the heat of the day’s sun. Gentle breezes wafted the distant smoke of burning olivewood, blending it with the more intimate scent of blossoming caper-vines.
They climbed until they came to a stone footbridge, an old Moorish arch spanning a deep-cut ravine. The only sound was the chatter of a streamlet from the shadows under the bridge. Soledad stopped halfway across and sat on the waist-high stone railing, flipping the skirts of her gypsy dress so that a fold of it draped playfully over the edge.
He sat beside her on the wall, his heart pounding, a cool rivulet of sweat running down his chest. They kissed. Her lips were soft and yielding, pleasantly spicy with clove, and when he lifted up the dress she did not protest, but giggled into his mouth, and then she began to moan softly as he made love to her against the railing.
Afterwards he held her close, one hand resting on her narrow waist and the other luxuriating behind her neck among the silken curls of her hair.
“Do you adore me?” she asked softly, the words just audible over the gurgle of the streamlet beneath the bridge.
“Of course I do,” he replied. “I practically worship you.”
She put her hands on his shoulders and shoved him back, then slapped him hard across the face. “What the hell?” he exclaimed in English. “Why did you do that?”
“What the hell? Why did you do that?” she mocked, the exaggerated syllables echoing up and down the ravine.
And in the next moment, she was gone.
In a state of shock and growing anger, he made his way back to the tavern. Eusebio was standing at the bar in conversation with three cronies. “Where is she?” James asked.
“Where is who?” Eusebio looked annoyed at the interruption. The other men stared calmly.
“You know very well who I mean. Soledad, the woman I’ve been spending so much time with for the last few nights.”
“I don’t remember you with a woman. Usually, you sit alone at the bar.” Eusebio glanced at one of the other elders, who smiled thinly and inclined his well-groomed, white-haired head.
“Come on. You must have noticed her. She has beautiful eyes, like a cat.”
Eusebio gestured dismissively and turned back to his companions. James was infuriated by this rude treatment; the old man seemed to have thrown aside even the pretense of friendship.
He caught the barman’s eye and signaled for his usual sherry, and when the drink was delivered, he asked if the barman had seen the woman he’d been talking to. The man gave him a funny look. “I don’t remember you with a woman. Usually, you sit alone.”
James quaffed the sherry. It was acrid. “So you’re in on it, too, then,” he said. “What’s it all about? Why me?”
The barman raised his brows and shrugged. James slammed the tumbler down and walked out, furious. He sensed all eyes on his back as he pulled open the heavy door and exited to the street. He wandered for hours through the filthy unlit alleyways of the Sacromonte, not returning to his apartment until well after dawn.
After sleeping into the late afternoon, he walked up to the Alhambra to shoot a few rolls of film. At the keyhole entry arch he hesitated; it seemed important to go in, but he felt shaky and nauseated, and in the end he just couldn’t make himself do it. It was as if a truth awaited him inside the palace, and it was a truth he wasn’t ready to confront; a truth that filled him with sickening fear. So he made his way downhill on the network of cobbled paths, hunting in vain for the footbridge where he’d made love to Soledad.
Back in his apartment, he waited until well past midnight for Eusebio, and when he was sure the old man wasn’t coming, he walked down to the wine bar by himself. Standing in the recessed stairwell, he stared at the riveted oak door for a moment, breathing in and out to calm his racing heart. When he pushed the door open, the tastefully lit interior was gone, replaced by shiny modern décor and harsh fluorescent lighting. Rows of video slot machines lined one wall, and a jukebox played American top-forty music. A scattering of customers sat on polished chrome barstools: there were no familiar faces. Even the barman was a stranger.
He fell into a numbing haze of despair. The days ground on in a colorless routine. He carried his camera wherever he went but it always remained zipped up in its case; the darkroom gathered dust. He went back to the wine bar several times, but the old décor never returned. There were no tapas, no suspended hams, and the new barman didn’t seem to know how to keep his sherry properly chilled. James came to believe that the whole thing had been an elaborate fantasy concocted by his tortured imagination, as a lonely child peoples his nursery with imaginary friends.
Above all, he yearned for Soledad. Every night, he wandered the narrow streets and steep alleyways of the Sacromonte—a dangerous practice, he knew, despite what she’d said—but he couldn’t help it. His only goal was to catch a glimpse of her.
One night in mid-May, he thought he spotted her ducking into a doorway near where he remembered—but, of course, had been unable to precisely locate—her cave. Inside, he found himself in the midst of a boisterous crowd of red-faced German tourists. They were all shouting and clapping at a middle-aged woman in a black flamenco dress who’d just stepped out onto a low stage at the back of the cave. Off to one side, a fat gypsy sat on a stool, plucking a twelve-string guitar and crooning in an ugly, high-pitched quaver. Reeling, James fled, cracking his forehead against the lintel as he hurried out the door.
He wandered aimlessly through the maze of cobbled alleyways, relying on the numbing rhythm of his stride to keep the dread that dwelled deep within him at bay. It was an increasing strain. How much longer could he fend it off?
At a certain point—it could have been moments or hours later—he became aware of footsteps echoing on the cobbles behind him. His scalp prickled and he quickened his pace, glancing nervously over his shoulder. As far as he could make out, there were four or five figures trailing him. They kept to the shadows, and seemed to hang back at a constant distance. He saw, or imagined that he saw, a flash of white teeth—a quick, feline grin. Ducking into a tight-walled side alley, he glanced back over his shoulder again. The shadowy figures had gathered at the alley mouth as if to block his exit. With a surge of panic, he broke into a run; behind him, a sudden clatter of footsteps rang out on the cobbles, and it became a full-fledged chase.
At the next alley he cornered right, uphill toward the ancient wall that marked the upper limits of the city. His heart raced with a strange mix of terror and exhilaration. Behind him his pursuers were fanning out, hooting and whistling to each other, commando-style. Beyond the wall, he knew there was an open hillside overgrown with yucca and prickly pear. If he could just make it over the wall, he thought, he might be able to lose them.
The alley narrowed and steepened to a staircase; James was amazed that his lungs weren’t bursting with the effort of running so fast, but he didn’t even feel tired. Ahead loomed the broad, black mass of the wall. He sprinted toward it, reaching out with his hands to feel in the darkness for a gap or a chink that would give him the leverage to climb up and over.
Almost there, he stumbled, and the next thing he knew, he was being hoisted roughly and shoved against the wall. His assailants were panting for breath, and there was a long pause before anyone spoke. The stone felt cool and abrasive against his back, and the texture of it was oddly soothing. If anything, he felt a sense of impending closure and relief.
One of the men—a gypsy with a quick feline grin, the shape of which James could now see was the result of a pronounced harelip—pulled a knife from his belt and held it up to James’s neck while one of the others turned his pockets inside out.
“Go ahead,” James said helpfully. “Take it all, please. Take everything I have.”
The gypsy scowled. His breath was spiced with clove.
“Did Soledad send you?” James asked.
One of the other gypsies barked out a short laugh. The harelip narrowed his eyes and pressed the knife harder against the skin of James’s throat. James held still. The blade was a cool bar of pressure against his Adam’s apple. He supposed that they were about to murder him. The thought should have filled him with panic, but it did not. The simple truth that had been lurking in the depths of his mind finally burst to the surface. “You can’t kill me,” he said. “I’m already dead.”
When the harelip drew the blade across his throat he could tell that it was only an illusion, an echo from a previous life that he could only remember in vague flashes, as in a dream, or a loop of an old film montage playing with the sound turned off. There had been a trip to Granada, maybe various trips. He had been a photographer, and he had shot a Holy Week procession, or maybe more than one. He’d also shot a wall of Renaissance grotesques, where one figure in particular had attracted his attention, a face that appeared again and again on the wall—a self-portrait of the sculptor himself, perhaps. He’d gone to a candlelit tapas bar; he’d lounged on a private terrace in the sun. He’d walked across a footbridge on the vine-choked hillside below the Alhambra. He retained the memory of a sunset hour within the palace itself, with a camera, shooting the fountains; the city view; the high, airy Moorish ceilings. There was a woman—not Soledad, but a blond stranger—and she was laughing at him, and her face became worried as he climbed through a lacy Moorish window to a narrow balcony with the city behind and far below him . . .
Back in the Sacromonte, his view of the late-night alley had locked up, as a stopped film frame becomes a still photo. The shadows in the photo were bleeding toward each other across the frame, gradually closing in to a uniform, black nothingness.
He shook his head, and the shadows froze. He stamped his feet, and the shadows receded, reopening his view of the night scene at the wall. The gypsies were still there, gathered around him in a menacing knot and pressing him up against the wall. “What do you want from me?” he asked.
The harelip’s face blurred and was replaced by that of Eusebio, with his slicked-back white hair and noble, hawklike nose. “My dear boy,” he said softly. “We only want you to see the truth.”
“But I do see the truth. It’s that I’m dead, right? I’ve been dead this whole time?”
The old man smiled sadly. “That’s part of the truth. But there’s more.”
James shook his head. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to know. He glanced around desperately, looking for a handhold, a crack, a protruding stone, anything he might use to escape, get over the wall, resume his flight. But it was no good.
“What about Soledad?” he asked, with a faint stirring of hope. “Isn’t she involved with this?”
“See for yourself, James.” The old man stepped back, and a hooded figure stepped forward from the group to replace him.
“Is that Soledad?” James asked. The figure was silent, and he hesitated, but then he stepped forward, grasped the top of the hood, and tore it off. He shrank back in horror. There was no face, only an escaping spiral of flickering light, and the robe collapsed on the ground.
“Damn you,” he said. He turned to Eusebio, but he and all the others were gone, their clothes crumpled like shadows on the ground. Bodies of diffuse light flickered around the wall for a few moments and then coalesced in a single, achingly bright column that pulsated, hummed, and began to move toward him. He pressed his back against the wall again, but it was no good. Finally, he understood. There could be no escape. The only thing left was to embrace it.