Perhaps this trip had been a big mistake. I clearly wasn’t the intrepid traveler I had imagined myself to be. Maybe the most crushing part of what we call “growing up” is seeing the gap between the people we think we are and the people we actually are. In my case it wasn’t just a gap, it was a yawning chasm.
When I’d pictured myself in Seville, I’d imagined drinking red wine and dancing flamenco in little bars until dawn. But now, as I walked along the narrow streets of the center of Seville and passed those little bars, I was too scared to even go in.
Even though there was a cold wind that made me pull my jacket tightly around myself, the bars were so full that people were spilling out onto the street. Beautiful, dark-eyed Spanish people, all laughing and shouting and every now and again breaking into a flamenco song. Just do it, I told myself as I came to another bar. Just walk in and order a glass of wine. But I was too shy, so I walked on.
I’d been in Seville for a whole weekend by now and hadn’t even managed to get myself a meal. When I’d tried to go out for dinner on Saturday night, I’d been told at each restaurant that the kitchen was closed until nine. Until nine? I wanted to protest; at nine I’d be passed out with jet lag! But I didn’t have the Spanish to say more than “gracias,” so I went back to the apartment, hungry and dejected.
Of course, I’d woken up starving on Sunday morning. And the cold water that dribbled from the showerhead didn’t make me feel any better. Inés had warned me that Seville had a very temperamental water supply and that it was often cut off altogether. “Then we drink wine,” she’d said with a grin.
After a quick shower, I wrapped myself in a thin towel and imagined the breakfast I would have at the first café I came across. It would be just like the ones I’d seen in my guidebook: hot coffee, thick slabs of toast slathered in rich green olive oil…a vegan’s dream.
But it seemed that nothing in Seville was going to be that easy. First of all, it took me an hour to find a café that was open. I was up early, but even so—is nine thirty in the morning really too early for coffee? In Sydney you can always get a coffee at seven a.m. And a vegan bruffin, in the right part of town.
I finally found an open café, but as I walked in I was engulfed in a cloud of cigarette smoke. There were no tables, just bar stools on which perched a group of old men drinking red wine. But there were also two women having coffee, so I ordered myself a café solo, which is just as sad as it sounds—a lonesome coffee with no milk. I didn’t know how to ask for soy milk in Spanish, and from the autographed pictures of bullfighters that covered the walls and the mounted bull’s head above the register, I gathered that this place wasn’t particularly vegan-friendly.
I tried to ask for some food, but with my nonexistent Spanish, that wasn’t so easy. The waiter just stared at me as I mimed putting food into my mouth and rubbing my tummy. One of the ladies next to me pointed at a doughnut that she was eating with a knife and fork; I smiled at her politely and asked if there was anything else to choose from.
Eventually, the waiter scooped some chips out of a bag and put them on a plate for me. They looked like Japanese rice chips but had a strange taste that I couldn’t quite place, almost like deep-fried sweat. What was I eating?
“Corteza,” the waiter told me.
“Qué?” I asked.
One of the doughnut ladies smiled kindly and said in heavily accented English, “Corteza is skin from a pig.”
Skin…from a pig. I was eating skin from a pig.
There was an odd smell in the air, and as I looked around, I noticed a tray of skinned rabbits by the coffee machine. Was that where the stink was coming from? As my eyes strayed farther, I saw a bucket full of live snails, looking like one writhing mass.
The waiter opened up a container and pulled out a heap of yellow things I couldn’t identify. He chopped them up with a huge knife and arranged them on a platter, which he put on the counter for me.
“What is that?” I asked the lady next to me.
“This is very good,” she said. “It is ear of a pig.”
It was all too much. The smoke, the taste of pig sweat, the coffee I tried to wash it down with, which was somehow both burnt and watery at the same time. The skinned rabbits, the clicking of the shells as the snails slithered over each other, the glassy stares of the mounted bulls’ heads on the wall, the women delicately cutting up their doughnuts with knives and forks. It was like I’d stumbled into some kind of surrealist horror film.
Walking through the city streets that evening, I shuddered at the memory and pulled my jacket tighter around myself as a cold wind whistled up the narrow alleyway. I wished that I was tucked up in bed, as unflamenco as that might sound. But instead I was on my way to see my first ever flamenco show, in a tablao in the old part of Seville.
Tablao is the Spanish name for a flamenco theater. These generally have a little stage for one or sometimes two dancers and a couple of musicians. Tablaos are often found in bars or restaurants, but the one I was going to was called Casa de la Memoria, and it was in an old Moorish palace.
Inés had insisted I go that night to see the dancer who was performing, Carmen Mesa. She’d told me it would be an experience I’d never forget, and though I was groggy with jet lag and still starving, I couldn’t pass up a recommendation like that.
I took my seat in the interior patio of the palace, where the tablao was set up. The floor was paved with delicately painted tiles in shades of blue and green, and the walls were hung with vines and ferns. When the lights went down, I looked up and saw the stars twinkling in the sky overhead.
A flamenco guitar began to play in the darkness, and I felt that same thrill I’d experienced the first time I heard the flamenco guitar in the dance studio in Sydney. The notes seemed to form a net that tightened around me and pulled me into the moment.
Then a light appeared in the darkness. Holding a lantern, the dancer walked slowly out across the tiled floor toward the stage. She placed the lamp at the foot of the stage, illuminating the singer and the guitarist who sat behind her. The dancer lifted one foot ever so slowly, and with her chest puffed out like a bullfighter, she stepped onto the stage.
She raised her arms up above her head, then with a clap of her hands, jumped onto the balls of her feet and began to dance. She turned, one, two, three, four, five times. I watched her spin, wondering how it was possible that she could move so fast without toppling off the tiny stage. She let out a hoarse cry and landed on both feet, arms still raised above her head. The singer lifted up her head and shouted, “Olé!”
I sat in the audience with my body craned forward, my mouth hanging open and my eyes like saucers. The dancer was so sharp, so precise, so present, yet it was as if she was in another world. She’d been taken over by the energy that electrifies an artist and makes her capable of creating something that has never existed before and will never exist again. Yes, she was dancing on a stage, but she wasn’t dancing for the crowd. She was dancing for herself.
And you know how in life you have those moments, those little revelations or epiphanies or whatever you want to call them, when life just suddenly makes sense? Right then, as I gazed at the dancer, all I wanted was to be like her. I wanted to experience what she was experiencing. I wanted to feel what she felt. Everything just clicked into place inside my head and I realized that this was what I’d been searching for. This was what I’d traveled to Spain to find. And yet it was something that was so far from the world I’d come from, and so different from what my future was supposed to contain.
After years of feeling lost, I suddenly knew what it was that I wanted out of life. At the time, it was too soon for me to put it into words, I was just overtaken by excitement. And it wasn’t even about flamenco anymore. I just knew that I wanted to live the way that dancer danced on the stage. I wanted to attack my life with that passion, to live with her joy and her devotion to her art. I wanted to take risks like the quintuple turn, knowing that I could all too easily spin out of control. I wanted to feel my feet on the very edge of the stage and sway like I was about to topple over, then wink at the audience and let them laugh in relief. I wanted to live without being afraid of life, of passion, or of falling off the stage.
And I realized I had been right to hold on to the idea that there was a life out there for me waiting to be lived. I’d been right saying no to a plan B, because if I’d pursued a plan B, I would have missed this moment, right here among the small crowd of a tiny tablao.
All those years I’d been searching for something I craved, who would have thought that I would find it in a leafy patio, behind an old wooden door, down a narrow alleyway in the backstreets of Seville?