FROM DIFFERENT SIDES OF BEAUTY

Andrés Indaburu

She must have been into her late forties. She was every man´s dream.

And she was walking towards me.

But when you work in a tourist information booth that is what people tend to do.

Eight whole years of my life had been spent watching the world come and go from a fixed spot. One summer after the other taking care of tourists like most locals do when you live in one of the most visited cities in the world.

Most of them were too similar among themselves. They all spent their vacations with one eye shut and a finger in the shutter. But there was always a Japanese grandpa wrapped in solemn silence, a Nordic air hostess who had been everywhere and nowhere in the world or a heavily muscled man with the face of his dead mother tattooed on his forearm who stayed in my mind for one reason or another.

She walked up, smiled and asked if it was possible to buy tickets to La Sagrada Familia, and whether it was possible to walk up the staircase as before.

-Not anymore, ma´am. – I said.- The towers are full of scaffoldings now.

-Too bad- she said with the tiniest trace of a Southern drawl. - I was here on my honeymoon forty-two years ago. I was looking forward to watch the eclipse from the tower balconies.

-Wedding anniversary? - I asked bluntly, expecting to see the husband show up. Calm and happy, mature and elegant. Successful but endearing, ultra cool and sincerely happy. Thirty-two perfect teeth glistening in the Mediterranean breeze, cotton shirt, linen pants, maybe a pair of really classy Moroccan babouches bought in Marrakesh. Look up on internet for “magnificent-companion-of-forty-two-years-of-glorious-marriage” and he might pop up as a thumbnail.

-Oh no!- Said she grimacing as if she found the whole idea absurd – I´m not married anymore. Actually I found this place by accident.

-Well, that´s a new one. –I said Sometimes it feels as if Barcelona was just the city that comes with La Sagrada Familia and not the other way around.

-Not for him!- said she- He took me to a bullring not far from here. He loved everything about bullfighting, but I couldn´t stand it. So I left. And found this place instead.

She smiled, said goodbye and disappeared into the crowd as the air began to change. Everybody had been talking about the coming eclipse as if it was just another tourist attraction, but there was something ominous about it. And the sight of a young wife running away from a bullring and running into a magnificent temple started playing in my mind.

At first the image I couldn´t help but smile. The image reminded me of the cover of one of those romance paperbacks bored housewives read at Laundromats. Unsatisfied Anglo bride meets ardent Mediterranean kindred soul, embarks on volcanic doomed romance and returns home wiser, braver and soon to be divorced.

Besides, forty two years ago meant those awful eighties. A terrible hair decade for everyone and don´t even get me started on the clothes. But awful hairdos and shoulder pads aside, the image held a strange power as time stood still, like those summer mornings when it is about to rain or when a solar eclipse is about to happen.

Did she leave enraged and hurt? Was it a slight disagreement or an open argument? Was she repulsed by what she saw or simply didn´t care to watch? It was too easy to picture the guy as some brutal cigar-chomping Hemingway who enjoyed watching an animal tortured to death. But it could have been just a wife whose man´s passions brought her less tears than yawns. There is a difference between saying: “I can´t stand this. I am leaving and you and I are not made for each other.” and saying: “Stay and enjoy the show, I will see you at the hotel.”

I have noticed that when in love, everyone seems willing to fly past red flags and ignore bad omens until it is too late to do anything about them. You become a master in self-denial until it all collapses around you. But one of the worst signs for a couple who are just beginning their journey around the sun is when neither appreciates or understands what the other thinks of as beautiful or important. There are bad signs and worst signs, but having your significant other walk out on you in front of everybody on your honeymoon trip must be the top bad sign of them all.

I don´t like bullfights, never did, but I don´t think every person who defends them is a heartless subhuman. Besides, political correctness had not been invented in the eighties, and too many things we think now as awful were considered cool. I mean, people even thought Don Johnson looked sexy on Miami Vice.

So why didn´t he run after her? ( I am talking about the ex husband here of course, not about Don Johnson.) Was he too scared to do what any guy with some sense would have done in a heartbeat? Perhaps he always dreamt of a bullfight in Barcelona with his pretty señorita by his side. Perhaps that was his idea of something romantic and beautiful. But if you want to last with your significant other, it is advisable to share at least one dream or the whole thing will collapse and fall once the thrill is gone and I only wish I was not talking out of experience on this one.

For a moment the air was cold in mid-July. The birds stopped singing and the chatter in the street halted. Everybody looked at the sky as if the world was ending and the stars appeared from the other side of the sky as darkness briefly embraced us. We were nothing. Just a speck of dust in the eternal dance of the universe.

And the last thought in my mind before the sun was erased from the sky for a few moments before shinning again was not the image of a beautiful woman with shoulder pads and a bad hairdo in front of La Sagrada Familia, but that of a man alone in a crowded bullfighting arena, both realizing, one second to late, that happiness can end before it actually starts when you are bent on seeing life from different sides of beauty.

Andres

@Markos

Barcelona

Andres has not written a story.