The Almadraba
ELENA PICKS me up from Santa Justa and we set off for Chipiona. Her car is grey and battered. I’m not sure how she has acquired the ride and, like most things with Elena, it seems to invite more questions than it answers. The backseat is covered in crumbs so plentiful only a small child could have scattered them, and when I go to search for the aux cable in the glove compartment I find a sheaf of unopened envelopes, the first of which is addressed to a Jorge Sanchez-Rueda of Calle Lepanto.
Elena is quieter than usual. Her legs shake as she switches gears and when we hit the motorway she throws a look over her shoulder as if to check we aren’t being followed.
“Can you get me some Advil?” she asks.
I go to her bag. Her phone is alight with messages from three numbers, the contents of which are hidden. Quickly, I find the pill pot, shake one out and hand it over.
“Two,” she says.
After the painkillers have done their work Elena brightens. We pull into Chipiona before sunset.
“Whose place is this again?” I ask.
“A friend’s,” she says.
“What friend?”
“Just someone I know.”
The building has an ugly façade. It takes Elena a few tries to jam the key round. Inside isn’t much better—duff corduroy sofa, dead spider plant, spit-colored light spinning with spokes of low-hanging dust, walls as thin and pale as mild Kraft singles. Where are we, I want to ask? I place my backpack on the bunkbed’s lower rung, pull through the closet—hangers, diapers, a stack of beach towels printed with Disney characters from decades past. Although there are signs of life in the apartment opposite—a lit lamp, a clothes-horse covered in swimwear—the town seems mostly empty. Swallows dip against the sky’s pink panorama, rise against the lighthouse and the stout villas balanced like sugar lumps on the rim of the cliff. We can’t see the ocean but that doesn’t matter: the week stretches out before us like one long, borderless, sunlit corridor. From behind, Elena puts her hands around my waist and sighs into my hair.
I’D MET Elena in
