Free A Woman of Seville by Sallie Muirden

bones frail, crushable. My penetrator is not unclean, but he smells like someone who’s just died. Guido Rizi’s odour is curiously sexless. I bury my face in the feather bolster. Pretend I’m elsewhere. Back in the convento, scratching like a cat at the paling of the Cross.
    When it’s over, I leave Rizi’s side, and lie down on a pile of cushions on the floor. But tonight sleep escapes me even when I’m lying yards from his reach. If I concentrate hard I can levitate myself onto the rooftops. Soon I’m in the sweet, metal-clacking company of the ladder-man, wondering if he’s really mute or just pretending.
    ‘Having mastered the skill of falling into balance,’ I’m explaining to myself, ‘the ladder-man begins to teach me the art of expressing love without speaking.’
    I borrow the ladder-man’s chalk, draw a square and write the number four inside of it. He draws a square on top, using one of my lines as one of his, and inside his square he writes the number two. I know what I’m supposed to do. Write a ‘one’ above the two. We’re falling into a second childhood. That’s the nicest thing about romance, at least at the start when there are whole territories still to be discovered in each other, the mapping just beginning, just like Christopher Columbus setting out from Spain—the bright steel of childhood intensity returns.
    On the floor in my bedchamber, sleep tucks me in. But when I’m asleep I dream in black and white. Harmen is in my dream and he’s crying because his beautiful painting has been leached of colour. I grind awake like a ship coming into dock, lying on the floor with a dead hand caught under me. How I hate the feel of my dead hand, the cold, floppy horror of it. Then the sharp needles as the dead hand comes back to life.
    I roll onto my back and wait for the chatter of birds and the trundle of barrels along the street that signal a clean, new day. A clean new day will be happening across the river in San Vicente too. In the Mercedarian convento, timekeepers and sacristans will be scuttling through the darkness, feet crunching on snails. Priests do not remember their dreams, they do not: bells waken them in the fullness of sleep. Some priests though, dislike a rude awakening. Enrique Rastro would be one of these, I suppose. I picture him sliding gracefully out of bed, woken by his internal bell, neatly folding away his dreams beneath his pillow. Now he’s walking down to the latrines, a lantern in his hand exposing swollen ankles. Morning dew on his feet, a morning prayer at his lips a minnow ascending to Heaven.
    I imagine him filling a basin with water for shaving, and lathering his face and neck with slow measured strokes. His brush makes a half-ellipse around his face and his face isheld at the very centre of the oval mirror. First light filtering through the lattice patterns silver lace at his cheek and throat. He hasn’t cut himself for as long as he can remember. He puts down his razor and runs his hand over his chin, pink but for the blackheads of finest stubble. In silent contemplation Enrique Rastro would be deliberating his schedule for the day. It is his ruling quality. Careful deliberation. Strength of purpose.
    Yesterday I arrived at the convento a little early. I’d been running to get there, believing I was late. An orderly led me to the Major courtyard where I found the Mercedarian leader sitting on a bench reading the Holy Scriptures. Enrique inclined his head when he saw me coming. Stayed seated. Motivated not by rudeness, but by doubt or shyness. I’m guessing that Enrique is unversed in sexual affairs. That’s sad for a man of forty. Some priests in Seville do take their vows of chastity seriously. (But most, believe me, do not.)
    Eventually Enrique closed the book and rose from the bench. We had a brief conversation about nothing. We were interrupted by some raised voices. Two men were gesticulating in front of a lone plum tree on the other side of the