A violin, a lute, and a set of drums stacked around their feet like allsorts dogs brought home from the shelter. The fourth-storey rooftop of the old, tired Hammam off Calle Beatas. And 25 shabby chic music-lovers and a waft of ethnic print shawls, waiting to be wowed.
A British couple with the tiredest and kindest faces I have ever seen play old Al-Andaluz tunes. They look as if they spend a lot of time living the inner life. I want to love their music and catch their spirit.
The drums I could listen to all night, if they'd been playing one floor below me and I'd had the twilight rooftop to myself with a gin and tonic and a bowl of nuts. But the violin and lute....they make sounds full of woe. Woeful sounds. Tune follows tune, like an endlessly unravelling tapestry thread, all the same colour.
The two musicians gaze at each other, rapt in the gathering shadows. They nod and smile gently, lost in the world they have entered, but forgotten to take me to. Their instruments talk to each other, the way long-married couples do, the weary ritual exchange of suggestions and petitions. "Could you take the dog out?" "I took him out last night." Time becomes an elderly person on stately progress down the middle of a narrow street.
I gaze over the sharpening silhouette of rooftops to the tower of the Cathedral. Swallows swoop and soar, free in the big purple. There is distant thunder and the smell of rain but the players carry on playing, dauntless, indefatigable.
Surely lightning will soon rend the sky. Surely God will send hailstones.
At last, nature speaks. Rain falls. The rooftop clears.
I turn and flee into the night.
