Spanish Surrender, page 12
“We’ll get there,” Loreto said in a tone completely devoid of urgency.
The silk store had been a nice little diversion, or maybe part of the lessons. Apparently silk had been produced in Andalucía for centuries, though it hardly seemed to create a thriving economy at present. The only economy in the area now appeared to be primarily tourist based, and she’d just substantially contributed to it. Though try as she might to justify the purchase through some cultural lens, nothing they’d done or discussed today fell solidly under the heading of work.
And yet, she hadn’t exactly been on vacation, either. She hadn’t spent any time by the pool. She hadn’t eaten a single dinner since she’d been here. She hadn’t even had any of the churros Loreto seemed fond of. And while she had purchased some silk products, if she clung to her rules about not mixing business with pleasure, she didn’t suppose she’d have an occasion to wear her favorite of those items anytime soon.
The thought ratcheted up her frustration another level. She was getting nowhere on any front. Back home she worked hard, she played hard. She could excel at either, but she couldn’t thrive in this liminal space. She had no frame of reference for the pace and duality that seemed so pervasively annoying here.
She glanced at her watch to see it approaching 10:00. She would have felt better about the semblance of a schedule, except their tour started in five minutes and they still hadn’t checked in. And she hated to be late.
“Is the mosque nearby?” she asked after another minute or two of walking. Or strolling. Or ambling. Or whatever word described the way Loreto moved without any sense of urgency through streets that had all started to look alike. Or maybe they were the same streets and they were walking in circles. She didn’t know how she’d tell. The buildings they passed were all white with yellow or blue trim, and all the storefronts showcased the same racks of postcards and decorative hand fans.
“You see all the kitsch they’re selling?” Loreto asked, as if reading her mind. “That’s how you know you’re getting close to a major tourist attraction.”
She nodded. The comment was so logical, she wondered why she hadn’t made the connection. At least now if she got lost, she’d follow the shops until she came to a major hub, then fall on the mercy of an English speaker, who also seemed more prevalent the closer she got to international tour stops. Not that she intended to get lost. Loreto, for all her faults, had more than proved herself capable as a guide and navigator, but Simone hated being dependent on anyone.
“There.” Loreto pointed up at a towering wall with a more reddish-orange hue.
Simone glanced at her watch again. One minute to tour time. Not technically late, but too close for her comfort level.
“Now we just need to walk around the outer walls to the other side and enter through the courtyard.”
“The other side? How big is this place?”
“Big.” Loreto didn’t sound concerned. “I mean the inside alone is the size of a couple football fields. Then you add on the courtyards and the outer walls. Oh, and there’s the minaret over there, though I suppose if you’re a Christian, it’s a bell tower, but—”
“Loreto?” Simone cut her off, no longer trying to hide the tension in her voice. “We’re late.”
“We’re fine.” Loreto waved her off and pointed to a spire rising up above the rest of the walls. “Originally there weren’t any bells. The Muslim muezzin would climb a winding set of stairs to the top and call the city to prayer five times a day.”
Simone wasn’t really listening. “I don’t really like to be late.”
“I told you, we’re fine.” Loreto dismissed her again. “As I was saying, the muezzin had access to the highest point in the city, which dictated the person holding the position be blind.”
“And I told you,” Simone asserted more fully, “I’m not comfortable blowing off commitments and schedules. You told me we’d start our tour at ten, and I prefer you maintain a professional adherence to what few plans you make when in my employ.”
Loreto whirled around. “And I’d prefer you give me the professional courtesy of letting me do the job you’ve actually employed me to do.”
“The tour started—”
“When I decided it did.”
“You said at ten.”
“Which is exactly when we arrived at the outer walls and I began to speak about the scope of the building, followed by pointing out the most distinctive feature of the mosque visible from the outside and trying to explain its various uses under different owners.”
“But—”
“But you keep shooting off your mouth about what’s not happening instead of paying attention to what’s right in front of you, you stuck . . .” Loreto’s voice trailed off as she apparently realized she’d lost her cool and, in doing so, stepped outside of the professional arena.
Perhaps Simone’s tightly clenched jaw and the heat rising in her cheeks had helped foster Loreto’s awareness, because she was currently fighting hard to bite back the two words she most wanted to say in that moment. It took physical restraint not to utter the phrase that would send Loreto and her insubordinate attitude packing.
You’re fired.
She’d said it a fair number of times on her rise up the career ladder. Most of the time, she hadn’t relished the task. Occasionally, she’d taken pleasure in uttering the words, but she’d never done so on a whim.
“I’m sorry.” The words left Loreto’s lips far more quickly and seemingly effortlessly than they’d ever left Simone’s, and that fact took some of the steam out of her boiling anger.
“I guess I could’ve let you know the official tour started the minute we saw the walls around La Mezquita. I thought I was making myself clear when I tried to tell my story about the minaret,” Loreto continued.
Simone gritted her teeth. Had she been clear? Had Simone even given her the chance? She shook her head slowly.
“No?” Loreto asked. “Shall I start over?”
Simone shook her head again, swallowing a knot of anger. She didn’t quite know who the emotion was directed at anymore. At Loreto, for certain, for her maddening sense of informality and her insubordinate tone, and the flash of temper that seemed so discordant with her general nonchalance. But also at herself, which bothered her more. She hated being wrong. She hated missing cues. She hated having to second-guess. She hated having to control herself when she didn’t have control of a situation. “Continue.”
Loreto eyed her for a moment, her gaze suspicious and curious all at once. “Okay, so the, um, muezzin who would climb the tower, he’d have to be blind.”
Simone struggled to focus on the words over the blood still pounding in her ears. “Why?”
“Because, well, normally I make the students guess why, but I get the feeling you’re not really up for guessing games at the moment, so let’s just look at how tall the minaret is and say the ladies of Granada would often bathe in their courtyards or rooftop terraces.”
“Seriously?” Simone asked, the absurdity of the solution overcoming some of her frustration. “They blinded people so they wouldn’t be Peeping Toms at prayer time?”
Loreto smiled. “I think they probably found them already blind, but now that you mention it, I’ve never researched that process.”
Simone glanced up at the tower high overhead, noticing for the first time the large bells nestled under the pyramid cap. “I think the bells might be a better option.”
Loreto shrugged. “I guess it depends on what you’re into.”
Loreto was still mildly shaken half an hour into the tour. She’d recovered her professional stride well enough by the time they’d finished touring the courtyard. Dates of construction and conquest weren’t ever hard for her to recall, and her spiels about the mosque’s elaborate infinity forests of marble and basalt columns didn’t challenge her anymore. She’d given the speech enough times to recite the figures in her sleep. No, nothing about this rote delivery of very basic tourist trivia should’ve bothered her.
And yet, her heart still beat with an abnormal speed, and her breath still felt too shallow, and her fingers still twitched and tingled every time she met Simone’s electric eyes inadvertently. She didn’t know what had come over her and why it hadn’t passed by now.
“Why didn’t the Christians build their own church?”
“Why create a masterpiece of your own when you can appropriate someone else’s?” Loreto asked rhetorically, then hearing the slight edge in her voice, she forced a smile. “I think the best word is ‘domination.’ They’d just pillaged one of the last crowns in Andalucía. They wanted to show they could do whatever they wanted with it.”
“Well, you have to admit,” Simone said, standing in the doorway where the mosque’s low ceilings ended and the gothic cathedral arches shot high into a cavernous space above them, “the Christians were no architectural slouches, either.”
She nodded reluctantly, though once again she didn’t understand that emotion. She had no personal ties to either religion or style of building. And Simone wasn’t wrong. As much as she preferred the algebraic elegance of Moorish arches, she had no reason not to acknowledge the marvels of the soaring Christian ceilings.
“They took something powerful and important and made it their own,” Simone continued.
“Sure, if you’re a fan of blasphemy and gouging your half of history out of someone else’s accomplishments,” Loreto said with as much casualness as she could manage. “You can see where Columbus took his cues from, though.”
Simone turned from the doorway to look back at her. “How so?”
Loreto fought the urge to flip her sunglasses down and instead stared up at the sculpted image of St. Peter with his keys overhead. “You know, barge into someone else’s civilization, vandalize the hell out of it, and then claim it was always meant to be yours from the beginning.”
Simone snorted softly.
“You think I’m wrong?”
“Not at all. I was just trying to figure out how all the high school students and teachers like your militant little outbursts in the middle of their art and architecture tours.”
“I . . . well, I guess I don’t give them the same tour.”
“Hmm,” Simone hummed as she stepped fully through the doorway into the church. “Probably for the best.”
Of course it was. Loreto knew better than to bring politics into her work. Hell, she didn’t even bring politics into her life. She hadn’t so much as breathed a contentious opinion to any of her clients in years. They were just that, opinions. She didn’t care if Simone, or anyone else, shared them. She certainly didn’t expend any energy trying to change anyone’s mind.
But it did annoy her how much Simone moved with such self-assuredness, the way she viewed everything through such a cold lens, the way she managed to wave away the destruction of an entire civilization and yet completely blow her top at the thought of being two minutes late.
Loreto squeezed her fist so tightly several of her knuckles popped. Damn it, there she was, doing it again, letting Simone get under her skin. Why did she let Simone get her so riled up? So what if she didn’t understand? So what if she didn’t respect her? Those things were true of seventy percent of the tourists she worked with on a daily basis. Not one of them had ever made her lose her cool.
“You were saying about Columbus?” Simone asked, her voice so close and so cool the hair on Loreto’s neck stood up.
“Uh, I forget.”
“Something about this place and the way it inspired the voyage to the Americas?”
She shook her head, more in an effort to scramble her previous thoughts than to indicate disagreement. “It’s not a direct correlation so much as a pervasive mindset. It’s the idea that if you’re stronger, you can take what you want and make it what you want it to be without considering what or who happened to be there first.”
“Right, but in this case, the Muslims weren’t even here first. You said the mosque was built on the site of a Visigoth church,” Simone said, running the tips of her fingers along the smoothly polished wood of a church pew.
“And the Visigoth church had likely been built on some sort of pagan ground,” Loreto admitted, trailing slowly behind her, “but the Moors are believed to have paid for land, and they allowed Jews and Christians to live among them, even at the height of their empire. It’s that coexistence that allowed cities like Granada and Cordoba and Málaga to thrive.”
“So what? I’m not sure what you’re advocating for.”
“I’m not advocating for anything,” Loreto said quickly, maybe too quickly. “I’m just relaying what happened here.”
“You don’t sound neutral. You seem to side with the Moors coming in and taking Spain because they made the place better in your opinion, but you get worked up about the Christians doing the same thing.”
“It’s not the same thing.” Loreto fought to keep her voice low in the hushed sanctuary. “The Moors took over, yes, and they did so with force if needed, but they welcomed immigrants, dissenters, different ideas, and cultures.”
“And then they used them all to the advantage of their rule, which they maintained for almost eight centuries. It sounds like you’re calling for a kinder, gentler Columbusing.”
“No,” she snapped, “that guy can fu—”
Simone’s eyebrows shot up, and several people turned to stare as Loreto barely bit back the profanity. It didn’t matter, none of the surprise on their faces could match the shock she felt at her own outburst.
“No,” she said, with a pathetic attempt at approximating calm. “I wouldn’t advocate for any brand of Columbusing. None.”
Simone’s smile flickered, then faded. “I’m not sure you should go quite that far. If not for Columbus, neither one of us would be here right now.”
Loreto stopped short as the fire burned from her cheeks all the way up to her brain. She couldn’t form a complete thought, much less give it coherent voice, so instead, she stood rooted to the stone floor, a rage she hadn’t felt in years boiling up inside her chest.
Simone took several more steps into the choir stalls before seeming to realize Loreto wasn’t following her anymore. Turning slowly, her eyes skimmed over Loreto from head to toe, then back up again. This time Loreto didn’t shrink from the scrutiny.
“Is there a problem?”
“Do you have any concept of the privilege you have to be steeped in to make a statement like that?”
“Excuse me?”
“You. Not ‘we.’ You wouldn’t be here without Columbus, or whatever impossibly blond ancestor sailed over to subjugate mine.”
“Subjugate?” Simone’s eyes narrowed. “Where are you from?”
“Nowhere.” Loreto turned and started to walk back toward the door. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Which is it?” Simone pushed. “‘Nowhere,’ or ‘it doesn’t matter?’”
“Both, but that’s beside the point. You’re not paying for my past. You don’t have any right to assume where I’ve come from or where I’d be without you or your people.”
“I don’t see how this tour became about our pasts or my people.”
“And that’s why you’re not going to ink the publishing deal,” Loreto snapped.
“What?”
“You don’t get it. Maybe you can’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“The world doesn’t revolve around you and your platinum card. We don’t all think like you. We don’t all view the world through your blue eyes. We don’t all owe our ancestry to guys named Chris or Eric or John.”
“I understand that.”
“You don’t,” Loreto shot back, then she sighed at the futility of it all. “You can’t.”
“I can do whatever I damn well please.”
Loreto laughed at the sickening truth of that blunt statement.
“You doubt me?”
Loreto shook her head and turned to go. “No, Rubia. You’re absolutely right.”
“Then why are you walking away from me?”
Loreto shrugged and kept strolling toward the exit. “Tour’s finished. Stay as long as you like. I’ll meet you out front when you’re done.”
She didn’t look back, not at the sound of Simone’s footsteps, or her sigh of frustration, or the silence that eventually fell behind her. She didn’t even draw a full breath until she stepped back into the sun-filled courtyard.
Making a beeline for the scattered shade of a small orange tree, she dropped to the ground below, leaning her back against the solid trunk and drawing one knee to her chest. She stared at the mulch under her foot, the Rorschach pattern of light the leaves cast around her, the back of her own eyelids. She poured every bit of focus she had left into examining any detail she could to keep herself from homing in on the one question she didn’t want to answer.
Why had she let Simone drag her back there?
Chapter Six
Simone stayed in the dim confines of the mosque for several minutes after Loreto left. She wished she were trying to use the cool air to soothe her anger, but despite her frustration with Loreto’s outburst, annoyance never flared that far. Instead, the feelings plaguing her now felt entirely more elusive. She couldn’t shake the sense that she’d been close to something, something Loreto instinctively knew, something she felt sure would cost Simone her business deal. She didn’t take that kind of knowledge lightly, yet she hadn’t been able to push for more in the moment when it seemed to matter most. She’d let Loreto walk away.
Simone placed a palm flat against a nearby marble column. One in a forest of hundreds, they stretched out in every direction, and still she couldn’t see them all from where she stood. The church in the middle of the mosque, beautiful and blasphemous, rose up defiantly to tower over them all. There was something in that contrast she couldn’t comprehend, or maybe she simply made sense of it in a way vastly different than Loreto did. The difference shouldn’t have been surprising. Art and beauty, and even history, all lay in the eye of the beholder, but the fire flashing in Loreto’s normally dark eyes had spoken to something more than mere artistic interpretation. She generally wouldn’t care if someone else’s opinion differed from her own, but it wasn’t just Loreto’s wide, angry eyes that stirred her. She had a job to do, a job that seemed increasingly dependent on the woman who’d just stormed out on her.
