A Woman of Seville Read Free

dressed in a chemise and temporarily reprieved, I escape the heat to my rooftop balcony. Ours is a city of rooftop gardens. I sit behind my jungle-screen of potted plants and scan the skyline of Seville. Rooftops join to each other like people join when they sit up close to watch a pantomime. I could walk across the city’s rooftops if I wanted. A few leaps and slides would take me to the other side of Triana. I’ve seen cats follow similar routes across the balconies. I’ve seen my own ginger cat Maio sunninghimself on a balcony down by the river and I know he only made it there by rooftop stalking and stealth. You might think burglars would use our night terraces to get away quickly, but I’ve not seen a fleeing burglar while musing on the deepening colours of the sky. Besides, there’s naught to steal but heavy plants and chairs, and if you did carry away such things the moonlight would find you out. It would.
    A dozen pigeons alight from a rooftop terrace a few blocks from me and a man appears beneath the flock (almost as if he’s conjured the pigeons from his hat). The man is waving a long pronged object about. I smile, recognising my ‘ladder-man’ whom I’ve been watching for some months now. He uses his ladder to climb from roof to roof, zigzagging his way across Triana. At first I thought he must be a roof-tiler or a chimney stacker. I know he isn’t a burglar because he stops to talk to people reclining on their balconies. No-one seems to mind when he jumps down in their midst; they welcome him as an acquaintance. Sometimes he does funny things with the ladder. I’ve seen him stand on it without backing support. He balances on the ladder like a clown balances on stilts. He’s an entertainer of sorts or a man at a loose end. He chats to the balcony residents and wanders around attentively. Then he moves to the next terrace. He places the ladder down flat and bridges the space between buildings.
    The ladder-man only ever appears in the evenings, when the sky is murky and the horizons tinged blood-orange. I expect that one day his roamings will bring him closer to my own balcony (if he came near me today I would disappear because of my skimpy attire) but just now he seems to be moving further away, and soon I will need a magnifying glass to check his wanderings. (I haven’t bought a telescope, though it’s quite the fashion to do so in our town.) Part of me doesn’t want to look at the ladder-man too closely. I’d prefer the reason for his gad-abouting to stay a mystery.
    When I don’t see the ladder-man for a few nights, I sip my lemon tea, curl back in my iron chair and wonder what has become of him.
    One evening, after a headier sunset than most, in fact after a sunset when the flaming colours burst the horizon’s banks and spread out across the sky like spattered paint, the ladder-man popped up on a balcony very close to mine. I heard him before I saw him, because his ladder has a tinkling bell tied to one end that is obviously intended to warn people of his approach. He came so close I could see his narrow hairpin shape and the glow of a youthful cheek. He couldn’t see me, hunched behind my potted palms. But I could see him. And then I could see my neighbourSeñora Salamanca. She handed the scrawny intruder a coin for some service rendered, but I’m not sure what the service was.
    The ladder-man isn’t dressed like an artisan or a clown. He has the look of a shepherd about him, wearing a rustic shift, his ladder a kind of crook with no sheep in sight.
    That evening I cowered behind my plants in case the ladder-man came over to me, but he moved off in another direction, as did my hungry eyes after him.
    Tonight the ladder-man is swallowed up by the shadows between buildings. I wait to see if he will resurface and when he doesn’t I return indoors; follow the wheaten yeasty smell of bread downstairs to the kitchen where my maid and black slave are preparing the evening meal. I join them for