When the train slowed into Sevilla-Santa Justa, everything suddenly became real: the city and the climate, the faces and the escape. Rain was falling. Evening had already pushed aside dusk, yet he felt light, a little like how he had felt during all the roll calls. The suitcase rattled against the cobblestones, echoing like a gringo signal. He had intended to order a taxi, but the wait time in the app was so long that he took a few steps instead, and the next time he checked, the wait hadn't decreased, and so it went on until he found himself too close to his final destination for it to be decent to be transported that short stretch.

Eventually, he arrived panting and wet at the street corner in Macarena where he was to meet the landlord. His joints ached dully. Outside, a stocky bald man with uneven teeth was waiting. He was on time, unlike Elias.

Diego Banda, said the Spaniard, extending his fist.

He actually worked as a doctor, an orthopaedist, separated a year ago due to a few too many slip-ups and got this place to have a roof over his head, but had now met a woman at the hospital, also an orthopaedist, incidentally, and she owned a swanky city townhouse in the Jewish quarter, and a dog, a toy poodle, that drooled almost constantly and had a breath that stank of hangover, but it felt reasonable to keep the bachelor flat just in case, and one of the kids might stay here once they moved out.

Anyway, enough about me. What brings you to our city? asked Diego, placing an arm over Elias’s wet shoulder and adding:

Work, leisure, sherry, maybe love?

Elias flinched at the unexpected touch, as if shocked, and mumbled:

It’s my birthday.

The doctor studied the Scandinavian and his light luggage, nodded and said nothing more, as if he understood exactly. He unlocked the door and climbed the stairs to the studio. The inspection went quickly. A bed. A sofa. A TV mounted on the wall. No desk, but a French balcony facing the street.

Yes, it is what it is, but the location’s good. This area has become quite trendy. Capital flows in, ordinary people flow out, said Diego.

I must admit I barely know anything about your city, said Elias.

That’s just as it should be then. Everything left to discover. But you’re probably tired, I won’t keep you. You’ve got my number if you need anything. Just be careful with the gas, turn off the valve after use. And, right, there’s a crack in the bathroom tiles, avoid moisture there. That’s it, unless you want some tips?

Elias didn’t reply, so Diego continued:

Then I’ll just say one thing. The World Expo. The last one, I mean. Expo 1992. A very overlooked part of our history. The politicians’ fault, as usual. The rest you’ll find yourself. Flamenco bars, wine and tapas, the bullfighting arena. The city isn’t big, but it’s rich and deep. You’ll understand.

Elias had long claimed to want to live out of a suitcase and casually roam between flats, sofas and folding beds, because he didn’t really need possessions, preferred to minimise himself to just his body, if even that. Better to be free than to lug boxes to the recycling station, worry about holes in the parquet or vacuum sand out of a shag rug.

Maintenance devoured vital intellectual capacity and kept him from doing what he was meant to: create, analyse, love. Life had to be about more than that, he told fellow students, who hadn’t yet tired of becoming adults. They nodded and soaked up the wisdom. The true life was featherlight, Elias continued, referencing Aristotle (but omitting the slaves), where wisdom wasn’t obscured by routines and habits, but then someone had asked a follow-up question: What’s stopping you from doing this fully?

Nothing, really. He gave an answer about a strategy, without defining it, and when the thoughts had settled, he added that even the unplanned required planning to be sustainable. He sought a structure to avoid returning to the hamster wheel, and it sounded trustworthy and was perhaps even true.

That reasoning echoed in Elias like background chatter as he dozed on the long side of the post-divorce sofa, forming a second impression of the flat. He stared at the cracks running across the wall and was relieved to note they were someone else’s problem. A magazine rack with a stack of old free newspapers by the door. A plant on the windowsill: hibiscus, wasn’t it? Outside the window, orange trees, like everywhere else. A single picture above the dining area, a framed poster from the Picasso museum, showing faces distorted into a mid-point meeting. Perhaps it meant something. Or maybe it was just the kind of poster a divorced Spaniard puts up because his ex-wife kept the rest.

He felt at ease. There was a sense here of being able to blend into the street’s goings-on at any moment. To stand and stare with a glass of rioja in hand, end up in a conversation with a passer-by about something insignificant yet important.

He closed his eyes and sniffed for foreign odours, and nearly all of them were, even his own after the flight and then the train from Malaga. Damp and sweat, cumin-scented cooking through the vents, some kind of mould, unfiltered exhaust from outside and above all, the unmistakable smell of abroad, when particles mix and are released by scorching sun and sudden cold.

There were no radiators in the flat, only air conditioning. He turned the temperature up to 27 degrees. A rattling whir echoed from the old unit. Too noisy. He turned it off. Maybe there was a blanket somewhere. He turned on the TV and watched the news. Flooding all over Andalusia, apparently. Roads turned into rivers. Someone swam across a zebra crossing. What did an orthopaedist even do?

The next morning, Elias found himself in the middle of the Expo. His original plan had been to drift through the city, slipping in and out of bars and cafés, but the rain was even worse that day, a water table–raising kind of rain. Welcomed by most, certainly not by him. He hadn’t packed an umbrella, because he had travelled precisely to avoid having to pack one. Instead, he got wet. He wandered without direction and ended up outside the basilica, which was closed. Not that it mattered, he wasn’t particularly interested in churches. So he continued towards the Moorish wall, and once he’d seen that, he moved on to the river, found a bridge, crossed it and strolled into an industrial zone.

Cuboid buildings had been placed along long roads with names like Calle Albert Einstein and Calle Marie Curie. It worked as a signal to look around a bit more attentively, so he pulled out his phone and realised he’d ended up in the world exposition. He thought of Transformers, that the remaining buildings had been camouflaged as offices, stripped of all signs of extravagance in order to blend in. A thought he scribbled down in his notebook. Might be useful in Zenopolis.

What else he saw: a leaning globe, the EU obelisk (with the United Kingdom but without his own country), an unlaunched rocket, the ruins of the monorail’s final stop, but here there were no dancers or jugglers in sight. Hardly any pedestrians either. It had been a different story in the summer of 1992. The whole world had been here. Sweden had its own pavilion, but like most of the other constructions it was dismantled after the festivities. It now stood in Grythyttan, serving as a library for future sommeliers and chefs.

That summer had been unbearably hot. The organisers sprayed water in the street corners to make the stay more bearable. Among those misted was young Rosa Peláez Sigüenza, not yet anyone’s grandmother or mother, who at the time strolled alongside her own mum and complained about the long distances and the waste of taxpayers’ money, when they themselves had to walk to the pumping station because no one came to fix the pipes, and besides, they didn’t need to know what was going on in Morocco (ugh) or the United Kingdom or even less in Australia, since they had no intention of travelling anywhere anyway. Seville, with all its laziness interspersed with paradoxical hubris (which reached its climax a few years later when the authorities built an Olympic stadium without having been awarded the Games), wasn’t exactly perfect, but at least it was their own imperfection, and their ancestors’. Other cities, not to mention countries, offered endless combinations of foreignness and alienation, even if Rosa would have used different words, and were as appealing as a brain haemorrhage. Abroad wasn’t good at all, even if home wasn’t unconditionally the best either. And what use did they have, when all was said and done, for 3D cinemas or peacock feather decorations, when they didn’t even have running water?

During those forward-looking months, my mother did not exist. Nor did my father. Not even the thought of thinking the thought of reproducing had occurred to my grandmother, who at that point was planning to wait at least another five years before even approaching the idea. And up north, Elias’s parents hadn’t even met yet. Only a few months later would they bump into each other during a student reception at Östgöta Nation, and then things moved quickly.

This relevant background information never reached Elias in the rain. For him, the visit therefore lacked the depth that guided ruin tours rely on, so that the traces of humanity might be brought to life. Look here, the Monaco aquarium. And here, the pavilion of the future, with its replica of the Ariane 4 rocket. And take in Tadao Ando’s wooden masterpiece. And understand this: the need to rise again after many decades of dictatorship. To show the world that we can do it!

Instead: here walked Elias without an umbrella, looking at office buildings in which people spent their working days. They would soon be having lunch. Elias probably should too, but he didn’t know where to go, or why Diego had recommended this place, or why he had come to this end of Europe at all, when it just kept raining, and tomorrow he would turn thirty, and what was he supposed to do then? Drift around aimlessly like a half-hearted tourist? It turned out the person he had left the country to escape had come along. He shook his head without noticing, kept doing it for a quarter of an hour, muttering gloomily to himself.

It ended with a sandwich at CaixaForum, the shopping centre twenty minutes’ walk away, because it was possible to order using an English-language touchscreen. He sat outside under a roof, sandwich in one hand, entertaining himself with his phone in the other to appear occupied. Eating lunch alone outdoors while just staring blankly ahead was something he would need years of practice to master, especially in a culture like this, where success seemed to be measured by how many friends you could round up at fifteen minutes’ notice, or at least that’s how he’d interpreted it, walking along the streets and sensing that everyone knew everyone, which of course only reinforced his own sense of not belonging. It wasn’t as though anyone linked arms with him and invited him to sit down. Unless he happened to bump into Diego somewhere. Maybe if he wandered past the Jewish quarter, he might chance upon the orthopaedist and his beloved, be invited home. Then he could have mentioned his birthday, and they might have said something like: Oh, well we have to celebrate that, we’ll help you!

But just as he was thinking all of this, a waitress appeared and shooed away two pigeons trying to snatch the dressing-soaked sandwich wrapper in front of him.

Everything tastes good, he said in response to the question she never asked.

This idea, of escaping everything, reminded him a little of another plan he had had in a previous year, to travel between seasons in order to change the body’s perception of time. To visit autumn in winter, move on to summer in autumn, and so on. An experiment resembling a drawn-out all-nighter, and everyone knows that only lasts until it doesn’t, so the experiment was abandoned already at the second seasonal change, when he visited Svalbard during the warmest Swedish summer week and saw neither polar bears nor breaking ice, but instead all the homebound beach photos in his feeds. Still, the concept was interesting, since the seasons worked as an extended daily rhythm for him, where the awakening occurred around early May and the fading at the end of November, and in between only a long dreamless sleep, from which he had now been stirred, though only barely. He didn’t even register what had been on the sandwich. Had it been chicken he’d just eaten or was it tofu? Did they even have tofu here?

For a good idea, this one was so far lacking. But perhaps something unexpected would happen. A bit like on that cruise he had taken at the start of his statistics studies, when he met a girl in the corridor outside the cabin and she hadn’t been able to stop chattering about Hawaii. All he had needed to do was be in the corridor and resemble her imagined destination. She was too clever for him, but she wouldn’t realise that for several months. They hadn’t even reached sea-bathing temperatures, not even with wetsuits, by the time it would have been time to prove himself at surfing, so he had been able to keep up the act, leafing through folders of possible free-spirited tattoos. He had entertained the thought and searched for designs, at least for a henna tattoo across his forearm, but the thought was cut off when the relationship ended.

Once everything had been cleared away, he felt a need to communicate with someone and not just watch. But since he didn’t know anyone here, he had to settle for already-established contacts via his phone, for example by photographing himself in an appropriate pose and tagging the image with a location, perhaps adding a reinforcing Spanish word. No matter how he tried to find an angle, he realised the picture would only convey desolation, not to mention the dark sky that dulled the overall impression.

He stood up and went to the H&M store and leafed through a pile of swim shorts, sending sloppy snapshots to a few of his formerly closer acquaintances. Which ones should I pick? he wrote, and saw that the image had been viewed, but no swift reply arrived, as if he had become a nuisance to the old coursemates, not at all like in the beginning when they listened attentively to everything he had to say. He loathed that transition, which had repeated so many times that he was now fleeing his own birthday. In the end, he sent a picture to his older brother as well, the proper deputy CEO with a wife and two children and three bathrooms, and received the reply:

Go with the black ones. The flamingos are fun.

There was something both warming and sorrowful about the quick response, Elias felt. On the one hand, he had a brother with endless devotion, but on the other, he had failed to cultivate any connections outside the family with that same eagerness to please him. Then, in that same moment, he actually received a message from Vetlanda’s Wittgenstein, as the boy had been nicknamed for the unreadable pamphlet he used to hand out at parties in the Yellow Villa. But he surely wasn’t that young anymore, must be twenty-five or twenty-six by now and probably already post-doc. The message read:

Don’t know.

Elias had run out of people and sent out the message more or less at random just to provoke a reaction, and then Diego Banda’s name flashed on the screen: You can borrow a pair from me if you want, there are some in the drawer. A warm, fluid feeling rose in Elias when he read the sentence. He laughed out loud to himself, fully and noisily, now taking up his natural space at Caixa Forum just like everyone else there. Yes, of course, all he had to do was look in the drawer. Everything he needed was right in front of him.

At the same time, while father Elias wandered unpaternally and aimlessly in the rain in a half-hearted attempt at being active, my mother Luciana remained in the school library, quite a few stone’s throws from Caixa Forum, or more precisely ninety-eight if we stick to the medieval definition of half an ell, that is to say forty-five metres per throw. It was still a considerable distance, but in these twenty-seven years they had only been closer to one another on two occasions. The first time was the night before, when Elias arrived at the address in Macarena and Luciana prepared chamomile tea for her mother and read aloud to her from ABC de Sevilla.

The second time was when Luciana took a weekend trip to Stockholm with three friends and went searching for citrus-scented soaps in a shop on Götgatsbacken. Elias slipped past outside the window display, lost in the crowd of pedestrians, a quarter of a stone’s throw away, on his way to the metro. This trip would come to be decisive, even though they never met or even glimpsed each other, because Luciana appreciated September Sweden, the crisp air, the closeness of nature to the city, the feeling of safety when she walked back to her hostel late at night, not having to constantly adapt to men’s urges and whims. Whether that was truly the case we leave undescribed, but that was how she experienced her stay. From that point on she developed an unconditionally positive image of the country she had only sampled, and she had happened to get unusually lucky with the bites.

She and her friends had taken similar trips almost every month in those years: Dublin, Bratislava, Düsseldorf, Rome and quite a few other places with budget flights and direct connections, but those times she had been less fortunate with the weather. In Ireland it had been so windy that they barely made it to the Guinness factory, and what for? In Stockholm, they had chatted with the royal guards, seen the crown princess wave, and entrance to the museums was free. Plus the shaggy guy in the hostel reception had reminded her not a little of Jack Black, and over breakfast he had played Holding Out for a Hero by Bonnie Tyler at full volume, a song she would forever associate with that sense of clear air and independence.

Far from that state of mind, Luciana now glanced at the clock on the wall in the library, placed in plain view to encourage the children to take responsibility for the time, but really she was the only one truly keeping track.

One hour and fourteen minutes remained of the workday and she had already completed all her tasks. She now had time to begin reading one of the books surrounding her on the shelves, at least The Da Vinci Code or Gone Girl (she did like the film), but her brain was too sluggish to start either. Instead, she turned to her phone and scrolled through her feed. Otters holding hands, pregnant Chilean women giving makeup tips, rakes across puddles of paint, and soon the hour had passed. She went to the toilet, cleaned her face, washed the perfume from her neck, removed the hair clips and tousled her hairstyle. Then she wandered back home again, past the Buddhist centre, promised herself she would start meditating and forgot about it after a street corner, and the taverna where the same group of men always gathered, lorry drivers and other irregular workers. She unlocked the front door and walked up the stairs, took off her coat, placed the umbrella in the basket and called out:

I’m home now, Mum.

To which the reply came quickly:

At last. Can you help me with the remote? I think there’s something wrong with the battery.

You haven’t prepared any dinner?

No, it hasn’t been that kind of day. Stop complaining. I’m doing the best I can.

Yes, Mum, I understand, Mum. I’ll see what I can throw together.

Meanwhile, at Plaza de la Alfalfa, Elias wandered the narrow alleys looking for a more deserted restaurant, and with every step his ability to decide wore down until he could imagine eating just about anything but chose nothing, and suddenly he was at the tourist street Calle San Fernando with Starbucks and Hard Rock Café and it was impossible to find a free table.

The restaurant Cappuccino seemed made for someone in his situation, someone in need of buying a moment of neutrality, with its marble tables and soft Parisian coffee cups. In return, he had to pay twice as much for everything. He found a seat in one corner, pulled out his notebook and began writing a story about a space station above Zenopolis. The confessions and reflections of a lone astronaut. That was exactly how he felt right then. He wrote with an intensity bordering on fury, a flow so intense it felt close to rage. It was wonderful to transfer all those feelings like this and be emptied out.

The woman at the neighbouring table looked at him with interest. Elias smiled at her when he finally looked up and mumbled something about working on a project, and she replied in English that it sounded interesting. A kind of prelude to an invitation, and half a minute later she began talking again.

She said:

I’m from Estonia, Tartu. I’m here for a week to get away from the darkness. You can imagine how worried I was when I saw the forecast. But it’s supposed to get better soon. I like travelling alone, even though I have both a partner and children at home.

That latter point clearly needed emphasising, which irritated Elias slightly, a feeling that was soon replaced by a growing calm as she kept talking. The itchy craving that had occupied his body settled down and eventually faded away. She healed him, with her voice, or by listening to his later.

The waiter placed a giant cabbage salad in front of the Estonian, and Elias got his fish soup, which they ate their way through while continuing to talk.

Her eyes lit up when Elias confirmed that the orange trees adorning the entire city were real. That you only ever tasted the bitter fruit once. That the trees had leaves. Not like the trees back home. The woman said:

I send photos of them to my husband and he sends me pictures of ice skates.

Which apparently connected to her next sentence:

It’s so sad when the children move out. Wandering through a house that used to echo with feet and laughter. It’s hard. That much is clear.

And the next:

I rented a flat. Four hundred and fifty euros for a week. Not too bad, right? Quite central. I walk everywhere. I’m not getting a bus card. I’m not staying that long either. What do you do for a living?

The real answer, between degrees, sounded so silly that he said:

I work remotely.

Oh, she said. I’ve worked in psychiatry my whole life and I don’t even know what one does with a laptop, let alone how people make a living using one.

The waiter came to collect the cabbage salad. Half was still on the plate. The woman looked at the receipt and concluded with a tight-lipped expression: expensive.

Elias said it might not be so strange that they’d ended up at a tourist place when they were the target group. That it kind of came with the territory.

She asked:

Are you here with someone?

He shook his head sheepishly, as if it were something to be ashamed of, even though he wasn’t, but something in the situation made him realise he was lacking something.

You young people usually use the internet for that sort of thing. My daughter met her husband that way. He’s a real cabinetmaker, you know. You should see the trellises he’s built at their country place.

I want that sort of thing to happen naturally, Elias replied. Even though, as he said it, he could hear what it really meant: that he wanted someone else to take care of it for him.

Yes, I think that too. It’s all too much with those things anyway, she said, nodding at Elias’s phone, which had remained untouched on the table the entire conversation. Then she pushed back her chair, thanked him for the chat, and began shuffling towards the river. He would never learn her name. They were just two people who had needed each other for a while.

Elias ordered a large Estrella and downed it quickly. He had been left with a powerful rush brought on by human closeness. A rush now transforming into impulsive flashes, and he stared at his phone.

Maybe after all?

This novel is written by Jörgen Löwenfeldt 🌀

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