Andalusian Evenings: The Hour Before Dinner
On flamenco, orange trees, and the particular quality of light that hangs over Seville between seven and nine.
There is a specific hour in Seville — somewhere between seven and nine in the summer — when the city becomes something else entirely. The heat lifts. The stones begin to give back their warmth. The orange trees along the Alameda smell suddenly of the day they have just had.
I first wrote about this hour in Echoes in Andalusia, but I have been quietly writing about it ever since, in one form or another, in almost every book. It is the hour in which characters tell each other the truth. There is something about that light which does not tolerate a lie.
You do not eat yet. In Andalusia no one does. You walk. You find a bar with three tables outside. You order something small and cold. A guitar starts up somewhere down the street, and you cannot tell whether it is being played for tourists or for the guitarist himself.
By the time you sit down to dinner it is nearly midnight. This, too, is correct. The Andalusians understood, long before the rest of us, that the important part of the day is the part you spend arriving at it.
If you go once, you will find a reason to go again. That is not tourism. That is the city recognising you.
