Nobody talked to her because she was a tourist, and there are so many here in Córdoba.
Just because we live off of them doesn't mean they interest us. It's a factory performance with the same script day after day: Check them in, show them the Mezquita, feed them a paella, check them out. That's what I do, checking them in and out at the Hotel Los Patios on the morning shift because I study law at the university in the afternoon. So Elvina was just another tourist—from Holland, or so she said—who turned up sometime in April wheeling a suitcase and fumbling with a map. She was a big-boned, horsey blonde with distant grey eyes, and like hundreds who pass through here every day, we thought she'd go away once she'd seen the show.
But she didn't.
What caught my attention was she was traveling by herself, and here a woman traveling alone is still rare, and that she spoke fluent Spanish, lisping the z's just like someone from Madrid. Not many tourists bother to learn our language and think they can get by in English, which we're expected to know when the tels hire us but really don't.
Paco, the waiter who is all over me even though I have a fiancé, said she told him that she taught high-school Spanish in Holland. So we figured that's why she stayed a little longer, to brush up on her language. But after the first two weeks even that seemed odd, since she hardly spoke to anyone.
Elvina had the single with the balcony overlooking the main patio, now a restaurant.
And unlike most guests, who keep the shutters closed, she opened hers every morning dressed in a white silk kimono, as if she wanted to be seen. She would pull a chair out onto the balcony and sit there fanning herself like an Andalusian lady, reading yesterday's El mundo, before she came down for her café con leche and croissant. Everyday she had the same breakfast at the same table, still reading yesterday's newspaper. And even though English or Dutch-speaking people sat around her, she never said a word to them.
"She wants to believe she's really Spanish," I explained to Paco one afternoon after the lunch crowd had cleared out. We were killing time around the tiled fountain lined with pots of blue hydrangeas. "That this is her real life."
"The stupid cow. Look, Marisol, if I had the time and dough that dame has, right now I'd be on the nude beach in Ibiza with some dark little sexpot like you rubbing suntan lotion on my back, on my thighs, on my butt—"
"Shut up."
"I wouldn't be stuck in a dumb town like this, visiting the same tourist sites day after day, eating the same menu at El Patio de la Judería. My waiter friends say every day for lunch she orders gazpacho and chicken, and every night at the Cafetería Azahara a cheese sandwich and glass of Rioja. I'll bet she killed her husband, chopped him up in little pieces and put him in one of those boxes she mails to California. She's probably carrying his dick around in her purse. Believe me, she's running away from the law."
"I think she's here to forget a sad love affair. She was probably about to marry a man who she found out wasn't for her. Too boring."
"Like you and that nerd."
"Mind your own business." Our wedding was set for September, when I'd finish my final exams and José María would take me into his law firm. He wasn't a good-looker or particularly passionate, but was a sweet, loving man. We'd been planning our life together for six years, since I was twenty. The bridal registry was already set up at El Corte Inglés and other fancy stores.
"At least she's a real blonde, not a made-up one like you," Paco said, running his stubby, shrimpy-smelling fingers through my new hair-do.
I pushed my chair away from him.
"She only says 'good morning' and 'good afternoon' to me, but after I frosted my hair she complimented me on it. I didn't tell her that she inspired it." I piled my hair on top of my head and struck a pouty pose. "I can be a glamorous, in addition," I purred in English.
Paco growled and lunged at me, but I stuck out my leg to block him and, wiggling my painted toenails, finally let him kiss my foot. Then he grabbed his crotch like he meant business. He really makes me laugh sometimes, that Paco. Afterall, he's already married to that locomotive of a woman and has three darling brats.
Every afternoon at five, when Córdoba is shut down and baking in the intense white light, I'd pass the Mezquita and spot Elvina in the courtyard like some mirage shimmering under a pomegranate tree. She'd be reading a book and sometimes eating an apple. She wasn't pretty-pretty, like some people claim I am, but striking, like a statue in a plaza. I liked the feline way she sat wrapped around her long, lanky self, legs crossed, one foot tucked under the ankle of the other. She was usually wearing a white linen blouse and batik skirt, her corn-yellow hair scooped to one side around her jangly earrings. From one ear dangled a cresent moon, from the other a Star of David, and around her neck a silver cross, as if she understood the roots of our culture. And I happen to know just where she bought each piece.
Lately the shops in the old Jewish quarter around the Mezquita have started selling ceramic plates and enameled tiles with funny sayings and t-shirts and other junk. I mean, who would come to the eleventh-century capitol of Arabic Andalusia to buy a tank-top that says "Where's My Beer?" Only rich, educated foreigners used to visit here to study the
architecture of a cathedral built inside a mosque, but local people got greedy—I could name names, but I won't—so now the masses are shoveled in and out by the busload and everything has gotten cheap and tacky. And the rich, educated people stopped coming.
That's why someone like Elvina stood out.
A lot of shopowners are my Aunt Angela's friends, so I've heard that late every afternoon Elvina would make her rounds of the shops and spend hours picking out one small item. She has good taste, they claimed, and always pays with Visa. The souvenir then disappeared into the canvas bag she carried on her shoulder. And I always wondered what happened to all these plates and shawls and carvings until Paco's cousin at the post office told him that once a month, the blond Dutch lady mailed a box to San Diego, which is in the United States.
That's strange, I thought. The only place she ever called from her room phone was San Diego, California. That's where her rich, handsome lover named Brett must live, I told Paco, the one she took up with after she left the man she was supposed to marry. He's waiting for her anxiously while she sorts out her feelings here at Los Patios in Córdoba, and she'll never go back to dull Holland and get married and teach school but will soon fly straight to California, where her lover will be waiting at the airport in a red convertible with the top down then wisk her away to his beach chalet.
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