Its Always Sunny In Seville

Fiesta Is Optional Here but Siesta Is a Necessity

- Saritha Rao Rayachoti

IN the fading light of a balmy Sunday in August, the San Pablo airport resembles an abandoned hangar from a Bond movie. We’ve just arrived by the last flight coming into Seville. We are the last passengers to exit, we’ve missed the last bus, and all the taxis have been taken by passengers not travelling with a flamenco guitar in a hard case with a ‘Fragile’ sticker on it.

Twenty minutes later, a taxi finally careens into the empty driveway. As it nears, the Bond movie analogy is complete— we will be driven to our rental apartment by Javier Bardem’s doppelgänger. The word for “menacing smile” is beyond my fledgling Spanish vocabulary. I brace myself for a ride with Raoul Silva, with only my husband’s well-filed flamenco-playing nails as protection.

My husband, not prone to flights of wild imagination involving Bond villains, attempts a question in Spanish. The taxi driver’s face first softens and then rearranges itself around a sweet smile of the kind that his abuela would have doted on. His delighted response skids over the familiar cadence, skips a few syllables, and slaps on a rasher of the Andalusian lisp. We barely grasp what he says, but outside the taxi window, night has fallen and with the flip of a switch, stone and brick, cement and glass, and cobbles and concrete, all acquire eloquence.

Perhaps some of the allure is also because the streets appear desolate. It’s a little past 10 in the night. Traffic is sparse and the trams seem to be running nearly empty. Shops, bars and restaurants are shut. In the Seville we know and love, one would find people sauntering out of a bullfight in the wee hours to stop for a nightcap with friends at a neighbourhood bar.

Where were the sevillanos?

SOUNDS OF SILENCE