Seville: A Christmas Tale
This seasonal story is something I wrote after a visit to Seville in 2023. While based on a real experience, it is a work of fiction. I'll leave it to you to decide exactly how much - or how little - of it is true.
It was quite possibly the worst breakfast I’d ever had: stewed coffee and a dry toasted sandwich filled with a substance more akin to melted rubber than the cheese I'd been fooled by the menu into thinking it might be. But the entertainment value of the scruffy little Sevillian bar was almost worth the culinary pain.
For a start, it could boast of having the saddest Christmas tree ever seen. Put up slightly on the slant, the miniature artificial tree was decorated, if that's not too grand a word, with just two ornaments, one of which had been unaccountably placed at the back, jammed against the wall. The other glittered inadequately on a branch at the front. Like the single tooth in the mouth of a person with serious dental problems, it would probably have been better if it hadn’t been there at all.
When we went to give our order, I started to see how this seasonal aberration might have occurred. We made a trip to the bar, but when the owner realised we were all going to want different food and different coffees, he shooed us away and said he’d come to our table. A few minutes later, he appeared: a big man with greying hair and a wide mouth, who spoke with a strong Sevillian accent - the almost impenetrable Spanish equivalent of Glaswegian. He arrived with notebook and pen, but almost immediately had to depart again to find a writing instrument that actually worked. Having resolved that little difficulty, he finally began to scribble down what we wanted.
We got through our order and he stumped off to the bar, only to return a few minutes later to check he’d written down the right coffees. He hadn’t. But by now my mind was wandering off to imagine the scene as he would have decorated the bar for Christmas. After the half-hearted paperchain had been pinned across the bar, that wonky little tree would have been banged down on its counter and left just the way it landed. “That’s it! Christmas done!” would have been the gruff but triumphant exclamation.
He brought the food. I suppose he must have been used to seeing faces fall as they realised the true awfulness of the gastronomic experience about to be visited on them. I looked, blanched, and resolved to make the best of it. After tasting the bitter coffee I had to redouble my resolve.
To distract myself, I looked around the other tables. To our left were a pair of old men talking animatedly over coffee about the previous weekend’s football matches. It seemed the bald, red-faced one of the pair was a supporter of Real Betis, while his taller, slimmer companion was a fan of their arch-rivals from across the city, Sevilla. If this conclusion wasn’t clear from their conversation, it could be drawn from their clothes. The shorter man had a green-and-white scarf draped across the back of his chair, while his friend sported a white-and-red badge in the lapel of his jacket.
They must have been good friends because the insults that flew across the table with the croissant crumbs would almost certainly otherwise have led to a fist-fight. But in a city where the football rivalry, although not so well known, is as fierce and bitter as in Glasgow or Manchester, Rome or Milan, all the scatalogical and downright blasphemous comments had to be considered as good-natured banter. From what I could make out, the green-and-white half of the city was currently a great deal happier than the white-and-red.
To our right, meanwhile, was a table of four ladies of a certain age loudly discussing health problems. All red lipstick, leopard prints and bedraggled fur coats, they were clearly enjoying their breakfast together, although considering the sorry condition of mine I wondered how.
Spanish people, particularly women, generally come with the standard human volume turned up about two notches too high. But in Andalusia, the southern region of the country, they have no volume control at all, perhaps because of the imperative need to shout to be heard amid the uproar of so many crowded tapas bars. So it was that we found out all about Paquita’s recent hospital stay, Dolores’ husband’s kidney stones and the time Conchi’s cousin’s wife’s best friend had a pair of forceps left inside her after an operation. I was already feeling somewhat queasy over the breakfast I was trying to force down and this was not helping at all.
I don’t like to waste food. My strategy when faced with something edible but unpalatable is always the same - eat it up as quickly as possible and get out. So that’s what I did, trying to blot out the medical conversation to my right, which had now moved on to comparing experiences of childbirth. When I’d downed the last drop of the eminently forgettable coffee, it was time to go to the bar and pay.
Spanish bars will let you go on ordering all day and all night without ever asking you for money. But before you leave, it’s incumbent on you to settle up. This system has its benefits and its disadvantages. On the plus side, there’s that warm, fuzzy feeling of being trusted, a sensation diametrically opposed to the “hand over your cash now or you’ll get nothing” impression you get in many establishments in other parts of the world. But the biggest drawback is that you have to remember exactly what you’ve ordered, because whoever is behind the bar almost certainly won’t. There had been three of us having breakfast and I had to dredge my memory for items I’d really rather have forgotten before reaching into my pocket for money.
And that’s when I saw him, or rather, literally bumped into him. He was a little shorter than me and clearly older. And it was him all right - I’ve never been more sure of recognising anyone! I mean, I’ve seen men with white beards before, but most of them have been embarrassingly false. This man’s was absolutely real, as was his mane of white hair. And my sense of recognition was even sharper precisely because the man was NOT wearing the red apparel we’ve come to expect from him - just jeans and a greyish brown shirt. There wasn’t a reindeer in sight, of course, although I did look out the window just to check. But, then again, if a man’s going to come to southern Spain for a few days in the sun before his busiest time of year, he’s hardly going to bring a menagerie with him.
He apologised in Spanish effusively and politely, as you might expect. Was I all right? He was so clumsy, his wife was always telling him so. Had I dropped anything? I was almost tongue-tied with the great man in front of me, but managed to stammer out a “No pasa nada”. I’d have liked to chat with him, and he was certainly keen to put me at my ease, but I never know what to say to famous people, and they hardly come more famous than the man who was going to bring joy and presents to millions of children in just a few days’ time. So I just mumbled Merry Christmas and started to move away. As I looked back, his face broke into the smile we all know from cards on mantelpieces around the world. “And a very Merry Christmas to you!” he said in perfectly unaccented English.
We don’t often think about Santa Claus’s nationality or command of languages. If he is, as many maintain, the immortal Saint Nicholas, then despite his origins in Turkey, his native language would have been Greek, considering that Turkish didn’t arrive in those parts until hundreds of years after his birth. But, of course, others say that his origins are in the English Father Christmas, or that his modern incarnation, including his traditional red costume, is as American as Coca- Cola. On top of that he’s supposed to have been living in northern Finland for centuries. In any case, considering the magic he is known to deploy on an annual basis, he probably speaks them all.
All this was going through my head as we walked out into bright sunshine on that crisp Seville morning. With a jolt, I suddenly remembered that, in the Spanish tradition, the Three Kings bring children their presents on the night of 5 January, while Santa is considered a foreign interloper. And just then, I realised that my right-hand trouser pocket was stomach-churningly light. In the back of my mind, I remembered something else about Saint Nicholas - as well as being the patron saint of sailors, brewers, merchants he also represented,... yes, that was it... thieves! I felt for my wallet. It was not there.