The Gathering Dark (23 page)

The hotel had been attached to some kind of church—an older building but without the grandeur of the religious edifices they expected to find here—and a U-shaped courtyard in front of the two buildings was all the parking that was available. The inside of the hotel was beautiful with tiled fresco walls and hanging plants, as well as smaller interior courtyard gardens whose flowers gave the whole place a wonderful, wildly aromatic bouquet.

After they had checked in, they walked deeper into the San Juan area of Seville and discovered the city’s heart, a sprawl of alleys lined with restaurants and shops and inconspicuous doorways where men promised live flamenco dancing later that evening. At the center of all of this they had come upon an enormous square that spread out from the most breathtakingly beautiful and massive structure either of them had ever seen.

In touring the Cathedral of Seville they learned that those who had built it had set out to construct a church so immense that anyone beholding it would take its architects for madmen. The Carling sisters had seen photographs before coming to Seville, of course, but they were nothing compared to the awesome reality.

This, then, was Spain.

That night when they sat down for a very late dinner—yet early by the standards of Spaniards. who rarely ate before 10
P.M
.—they were already examining their travel plans. They had struck up a conversation with an elderly couple from Scotland who sat at the next table in the otherwise empty restaurant. Only tourists ever ate this early. Stuart and Claire Vandal had done quite a bit of traveling and when the sisters explained their plans subsequent to their departure from Seville—a leisurely drive south to the coastal resort town of Torremelindos—the Vandals grew almost stern.

The aging Scottish couple had insisted that Nancy and Paula would be doing themselves a great disservice by taking the main highway. The Carling sisters must, the Vandals assured them, take the mountain road south out of Seville; a road that wound up into the mountainous region north of the Mediterranean and bring them, about halfway to the coast, to the town of Ronda.

Neither of the women had ever heard of Ronda but the effusive recommendation of the Vandals was too contagious to ignore. By the time they left Seville, they had mapped out their new route.

The dawn light through the curtains had roused them early and the sisters had found themselves excited to be breaking from their carefully laid plans. They were going off the path in a foreign country where they did not speak the language, with a few hundred words of high school Spanish and the fat guidebook to aid them. Nancy knew how silly it was to be so excited, that people did this sort of footloose travel all the time. But she and Paula had only been to Europe once before, and that had been to the U.K., where they spoke English. It was a bit of a thrill to them both.

They set off early after the meager continental breakfast provided by the hotel—snatching a couple of bananas for the road. They had gotten turned around several times just trying to find the secondary highway—the mountain road as the Vandals had called it—that led out of Seville, but eventually they managed and were soon rolling south.

The spring morning was chilly but Nancy had the window rolled down regardless, the wind whipping her strawberry blond hair across her face. In the passenger’s seat, Paula tied her chestnut hair back with a rubber band so that she could read from the travel guide without it getting in her way.

“Cool,” Paula said several times as Nancy drove. “This place sounds cool.”

Nancy had read the entry on Ronda two nights earlier, after they had first met the Vandals. It was brief, but unquestionably interesting. The region where it was located had been home to human beings since Paleolithic times. A broad, rocky plateau loomed high above the Guadalevin River valley. The rushing water had carved the plateau in half thousands of years ago and the city of Ronda sprawled on either side of the dizzyingly high, narrow canyon cut over the ages by the river.

“Did you know the ancient Romans built a castle there?” Paula asked, glancing over at her sister, even as Nancy tried to find a radio station without static.

“I read that,” Nancy reminded her.

The Romans had been just the beginning, actually. The height of the plateau and its daunting cliffs made it a perfect natural fortress. When the Moors had taken control of southern Spain, Ronda had become the capital of an independent Moslem sovereign, and remained a Moorish city for several centuries. For a city with such a grand history, Nancy had found it amazing that she had never heard of Ronda before, but she was intrigued.

She drove through the hills amid groves of olive trees and Paula took over trying to find something worth listening to on the radio. They talked about friends new and old, about the odd people at Nancy’s office and the new museum job Paula had secured. The sisters had had their share of squabbles growing up, as close siblings always did, but since Paula had moved from their hometown of Baltimore to Los Angeles, they had been planning this very trip as a kind of reunion. It had been a long time in coming. The same dynamic that had always existed between them lingered, however. Paula asserted herself as leader of their expedition by virtue of her status as the elder sister while Nancy tried not to lose her temper.

Right now, however, all of those tensions had slipped away. The winding, leisurely drive through the picturesque hills eased them both into a rare feeling of well-being, so that they did little more than chat and laugh together. When at last they gave up trying to find a radio station, the Carling sisters began to sing, challenging one another to name the television series to which a particular theme was attached, or match a product to its advertising jingle, or name the band responsible for some horrid one-hit wonder.

In this way they soon found themselves at the turnoff that led up a long road into Ronda, past the high ramparts that had been built on the two far ends of the city where the plateau sloped down to the valley floor.

“Here we are,” Nancy said as she drove up the steep hill into Ronda.

Paula leaned forward to peer through the windshield. “It doesn’t look like much,” she sniffed. “The guide made it sound amazing.”

Nancy punched her leg. Her sister let out a satisfying cry of protest and she smiled. “Give it a chance. It’s an adventure, remember?”

“Okay, but
ow
!” Paula replied, glaring at her.

The moment passed quickly, however. They wove their way through streets lined with offices and hotels, gas stations and apartment buildings, following signs that announced that the
Centro de Ciudad
was ahead. A public parking garage loomed up on the right and they managed to squeeze the rental car down inside of it, though making any of the corners in the underground complex was quite a trick. This sort of thing was exactly why Nancy would not let Paula drive.

Their travel guide had a brief write-up about the city, but no map. Fortunately they were able to buy one very cheaply at the hotel above the garage. With her camera on its strap around her neck, Nancy slid the thick travel guide into the pocket of the light spring jacket she wore. She was a diminutive woman and seemed nearly always to be chilly, and so she found it made sense to always have a jacket along, even if she did not need it. In early May, the temperatures in Spain could vary greatly, particularly when they passed from bright sunshine onto shadowed sidewalks.

The sisters followed the
Centro de Ciudad
signs on foot for several blocks, examining the various structures for age and Moorish influence. The Moors had controlled this part of Spain for ages and built mosques and palaces unrivaled elsewhere in the West. Yet Ronda, despite the travel guide’s description of it as a former Moorish stronghold, seemed devoid of such influences.

They had been in the city less than fifteen minutes and passed by dozens of gift shops selling masks and clothes and souvenirs, but Nancy had seen nothing of the marvel that the Vandals had led them to believe they would find.

“Give me the map for a second.”

Paula frowned at her. “You’re supposed to be taking pictures. I can read the map.”

“The guide says there’s a new city and an old city. This must be the new city. You have to cross the ravine or whatever to get to the old.”

Paula stopped short on the sidewalk outside a restaurant with a bullfighter on the sign. “Hello? I know that. I have the map?” She brandished it like a trophy.

They stared at one another for a long moment and then began to laugh.

“All right, map-lady,” Nancy relented. “Where do we go from here?”

“Turn around.” Paula raised an eyebrow at her.

Nancy turned and found herself looking at a large circular, whitewashed building surrounded by a high wall and fronted by an arch and black wrought-iron gate.

“The bullring?” she asked.

“The bullring,” Paula confirmed.

Their attention had been diverted from reaching the old city for a moment. They paid to enter the empty building, which the guide identified as the oldest bullring in all of Spain, dating back to the late eighteenth century. The inside was impressive, with a two-story gallery supported by Tuscan arches and a stone barrier surrounding the ring itself. The sisters toured the ring, and though Paula lamented that they could not witness an actual bullfight, Nancy was glad there were no events that day. She did not want to watch such a spectacle.

Back on the sidewalk in front of the bullring, she glanced at her sister and smiled. “Where to?”

Paula smiled back, consulted the map, and set off along the street. They had their share of squabbles and always had, but they had promised each other that there was no way they were going to let themselves get mired in silly arguments that would spoil their vacation. Sometimes it wasn’t easy to keep that promise, but at the moment, they were a team.

Nancy gazed around her, enjoying the way the sun caught the edges of the whitewashed buildings. The light seemed to have an almost unearthly quality here, and she did not know if it was the elevation of the city or simply her pleasure in viewing it. The smells from the restaurants were enticing but she wanted to make sure they explored more before stopping for lunch. They had left early and still had a couple of hours before they would be nearing starvation.

The breeze was even cooler than she had expected and she zipped her jacket, taking care to leave the camera accessible. She had taken some wonderful pictures of the bullring and only hoped that they communicated half of the structure’s majesty. The travel guide jutted from the outside pocket of her jacket, but she needed to make sure it was accessible.

The Carling sisters had walked only a short way when the old city came into sight. Paula gestured to Nancy with the map in triumph, but they were both smiling and began to walk a little faster.

When they reached the bridge, they stopped.

Nancy discovered she was holding her breath but found she could not help it. Across the bridge was the old city of Ronda, parts of which dated from the Moorish occupancy, as far back as the twelfth century. The road on the other side of the bridge rose up to the peak of the plateau and so the buildings seemed stacked one upon the other. To the right they had a perfect view of the craggy cliff face that fell away from the edge of the old city in a breathtakingly steep, sheer drop to the valley floor, which spread out below, dotted with ancient ruins and a village of whitewashed houses.

The bridge itself was one of the most incredible things Nancy had ever seen. With Paula beside her, she walked to the edge of the new city and stared down into the ravine—what she now remembered that the travel guide had referred to as the “Cleft of Ronda.”

“It must be a thousand feet,” Paula said.

Nancy stared down at the rocky gap, at the walls from which trees and shrubs grew against all odds, at the tiny mouths of caves, at the river far, far below. “I think it’s deeper,” she said.

The bridge was a series of arches constructed upon other arches. At its center was the highest of them, and in the body of the bridge a tiny barred window. The guidebook had noted that this segment of the bridge had once been used as a prison.

“And this is the new bridge,” Paula said, grinning at her sister.

“What do you mean new? What were the dates again?”

“I don’t remember exactly, but this one was late seventeen hundreds.”

“And that’s new?” Nancy asked.

“For this place? Yeah. There are a couple of other bridges across the gap that date back to the Moors.”

Nancy smiled and gazed out at the panorama again. This was the reason they had come to Spain, the magical quality of places like this, where you could almost hear the ringing of clashing swords still echoing off the buildings or feel the rumble of passing wagons in the cobblestones beneath your feet. With very few exceptions, America was a land of make-believe, where the only magic kingdom came with a giant mouse that wore pants and talked in a high squeaky voice.

The camera hung around her neck and she raised it now, clicked it on, and snapped a photograph of the Cleft, trying to get some perspective on its height by including part of the valley in the background. She took several more photos of the old city from this side of the bridge. Then, at last, with Paula leading the way, she stepped onto the bridge itself. The sun was warm there in the open above the Cleft of Ronda and the air seemed to sparkle.

Nancy raised the camera again. There was a high barrier on either side of the bridge for the safety of people walking across, but a kind of high ledge ran along the inside of it. She had to get a better view over the side of the bridge. Though she recognized with a kind of sadness the fact that she would never be able to take a photograph that would accurately communicate the majesty of this place, she was determined to try.

“Careful,” Paula warned.

“Always,” Nancy replied.

With her left hand on the barrier wall and her right hand clutching the camera, she stepped up onto the ledge where the view was dizzying and spectacular. As she did so, her right knee pushed up the bottom of her jacket and the travel guide popped out, slipped over the top of the barrier wall, and fell into the Cleft.