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Barrio Santa Cruz

On stimulating posts in the centre of the road banners vibrate, with a sketch of a bull tumbling over, a blood-red arrow stabbing its hind: "Toros, Sevilla 2008." The bus position is new, the shelter outside with a row of eight or ten buses pulled up built all things considered twenty or thirty years ago; its fresh coat of draw is restrained, its white and yellow just like the milk-white and yellow of the houses on the neighbourhood streets that our bus passed. Like the billet in the fields this morning, the side of the station building has four spheroid arches; behind the buses, a single tended palm tree. I part my backpack in a sparsely-filled luggage lodgings with an old man smoking a cigarette (he talks enthusiastically for a second or two, like many I encounter here undeterred that I do not appear to keep abreast of what he is saying). I am unencumbered by only a small rucksack of essentials, it is a vivacious ten in the morning, the street outside the bus station is lined with orange trees.

Its leaves and fruits persist over parked cars. A few old men trudge along the pavement beside it. The fruits hanging down from the branches are copious, tens and tens of them, full, sage for the picking. They are not very high up, probably ten or twelve feet above the argument; these men who walk along the pavement underneath, why are they not reaching out to bottle them? Will it seem strange if I do?

The bus station is surrounded by these small dormant streets with pavements lined by orange trees, buildings anaemic or a pale shade of yellow, here and there an arched doorway to a mignonne shop selling cold drinks and bocadillos. Across the fundamental road there is a garden. At its centre is a compound whose walls are the flush of sandalwood. There are castle-like crenellations on its loaded walls, and tall palm trees unmistakable inside. Vines grow along one wall. Around a skimpy fountain nearby the benches are tiled with ceramic, cursive low-spirited patterns on a white background. One or two old men sit reading a newspaper,...

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