After the main course Luis brought out a tray of Spanish desserts, a slab of hazelnut-studded nougat, sweet-filled pastries and the almond cake that Danny had baked for the occasion served warm with vanilla ice cream. His mother seized on a lull in the conversation to make an announcement, opening her bag and offering Luis a smartly printed leaflet about the guest house.
‘If you do decide to move to Spain, to make a life there, we’d love to host your wedding at our guest house.’
His father elaborated. ‘Luis, we appreciate you haven’t seen our place, which we feel bad about. To make amends we’ll set aside that weekend. The whole house would be for you and your guests. It would be our gift. We know you can’t say yes or no right now but we wanted the two of you to be aware of the option if it all works out. Which we hope it does. I told Danny at Christmas that the two of you have made a beautiful home here. I have no doubt you can do the same in Spain.’
Danny placed a finger on the photo of him on the beach in Bude being held aloft by his dad.
‘I don’t know if I can ever feel this happy again. But right now, I’m close.’
Luis reached over and took Danny’s hand. A revolutionary gesture.
Chapter Thirty-NineThe Story Luis Never Told
Danny and Luis arrived in Spain on Saturday, 22 March, the Iberia flight touching down at midday in the southern city of Sevilla. A light rain shower cleared by the time they reached their small hotel, a converted mansion once belonging to nineteenth-century spice traders. The façade was white, gleaming after the rain, with wrought-iron bars on the lower floor windows and wooden shutters on the upper floors. Wide-eyed at the beauty of this city, Danny reminded himself that he was not travelling as a tourist – he was asking whether this country could be home. Who he would be here, who Luis would be – who they might be together.
In the weeks before the departure Luis and Danny attended couples therapy for the first time in their relationship. They were recommended a Soho-based practice, a collectiveof counsellors whose private clients funded their charity work with teenagers kicked out of their homes for being gay. They requested sessions with the most experienced counsellor, a man born in Amman, Jordan, who moved to England to study psychology at University College London. He had written an acclaimed book about reconciling sexuality with faith. Luis read the book in a single Sunday before their first session. Seated side by side in a small room with a box of tissues between them Luis and Danny talked about the events of their engagement, their separation, and their lives preceding it. Danny described the absence of any physical intimacy in public and Luis described his dependency upon professional success. After both Danny and Luis depicted their relationship as being like a lifeboat in the early years, seeking refuge from the world, the therapist mentioned the Ship of Theseus paradox, a thought experiment. If, over time, a boat’s timbers are replaced one by one, does it remain the same boat? The parallel was clear: over time, their relationship had maintained the same shape yet the timbers of these two men had changed. The marriage proposal had been a way of asking them to abandon the lifeboat analogy and accept they were no longer in stormy oceans. Perhaps it was time for a sailboat – swift, elegant and visible.
Entering their hotel room Danny found a welcome card addressing them as ‘Mr & Mr’. It was presented beside a selection of miniature pastries under a glass cloche with anaccompanying bottle of Oloroso sherry from the nearby town of Jerez. Helping himself to a pestiño, an Easter delicacy, Danny stepped onto their small stone terrace to admire the vista of church towers, washing lines, television aerials and red roof tiles. When Luis joined him, Danny remarked, ‘You made a fuss.’
After having sex in the shower – ‘I can feel your heartbeat inside me,’ Danny had said – they left the hotel and strolled through Santa Cruz, the old Jewish Quarter where the streets were so narrow some houses on opposite sides were barely an arm’s length apart. They allowed themselves to become lost, turning right and left without checking their map, arriving at a high-walled botanical garden. The blossoms and buds were bright after the morning’s rain. The scent was strong. Like curious children they placed their hands on the massive trunks of two-hundred-year-old Moreton Bay fig trees which resembled dinosaur legs, their buttress roots splayed across the soil.
At the river Danny and Luis stopped at a café, enjoying a glass of dark vermouth served with a wedge of fresh orange. Luis described how Sevilla had always been a place of wonder to him. Light-headed from the alcohol and the excitement of their visit, Danny asked, ‘How did you ever leave this place behind?’
Luis looked at Danny, weighing whether to answer that question completely. This was why they had come toSpain – to tell truths. Speaking in a voice so soft it was as if he were talking to himself, he said, ‘After I left home, I fled to Madrid, and like you, stayed with friends, sleeping on sofas. I behaved as I’d never behaved before. Recklessly. Bars and clubs. Everything I had denied myself I allowed myself. That summer I met a man. He was somewhere between a friend and a boyfriend. We hung out. We slept together. One day he asked if I wanted to smoke heroin together. And I said okay.’
In all their years Luis had never even smoked pot. He had been emphatic from the beginning that he didn’t do drugs of any kind. Noticing Danny’s reaction Luis elaborated. ‘Heroin wasn’t as unthinkable as it sounds. There were no needles or spoons. We’d melt it on a sheet of tin foil and inhale the smoke with a rolled-up note.’
‘What was it like?’
‘It was like my troubles were made of ice. When I smoked, the ice cubes melted away – like I’d thrown them out into the midday sun. In a few minutes, I felt good in a way I thought was lost to me. I remember sitting on a patch of dry yellow grass outside a block of apartments in La Latina district, like a stray dog, yet I felt like a king. The whole world seemed to be a beautiful movie, the dead grass, the cracked paint, the blue sky. I was watching my life from the back row of an auditorium in the world’s most comfortable seat.’
The waiter returned asking if they wanted more vermouth and Danny, using his limited Spanish, made the effort to order two more. Neither of them spoke until the fresh glasses were returned.
Luis continued, ‘We would go to the Parque de Atracciones, the amusement park in Madrid, doped up, sitting in the front carriage of a rollercoaster. We didn’t make a sound while everyone behind us was screaming with their arms in the air. By the end of August, the heat was unbearable, so we caught a train to Valencia, where he had a friend, to hang out on the beach. The beach there is big, not pretty like the Costa Brava – more a motorway of sand. We smoked and sat under the shadow of a bent parasol we found discarded in a bin. I remember the sea was shallow and the water was warm. One day I waded out into the sea, holding my shorts up – I’d lost so much weight. The water was lapping at my knees. To my right there were the port’s industrial cranes. And I wondered about all the boats unloading their cargo. Where had they come from? What were they carrying? The kind of questions kids ask. When I turned towards the beach there was a lifeguard. I thought to myself – that man used to be me. It had been my summer job. And it dawned on me. I wasn’t making my life easier. I was making my life smaller. I pictured it as a circle. It had shrunk to the size of a speck – waking up, smoking, scoring, swimming, smoking, fucking, sleeping. When Ireturned to the beach I sat down on our dirty towel, under our bent parasol, and I said to my friend – let’s quit, today, right now, while we can. While we’re young and healthy. Let’s live again. He said no. I saw in his eyes he was afraid. I begged him, as I had begged Isabella, only I couldn’t cry anymore. He said he would find me after the summer. Of course, he never did.’
Luis took a sip of his vermouth.
‘When I returned to Spain this winter, I discovered that he had died many years ago. I should have dragged him from that beach, but I didn’t. I left him there, went back to Madrid and never touched drugs again. When I arrived in London, work was my addiction. I worked harder than I had ever worked before. Even with success there was a numbness inside of me. Until I met you. I had gone to that bar for a hook-up. Yet once we were together, I didn’t want you to leave. I was so worried you might find me needy, holding you tight in bed. You might see what a broken man I was. And how many broken people I had left in my wake. That’s why I never spoke about the past. Not because it was better. I almost didn’t survive it.’
Chapter FortyCommunion
Following a breakfast of fresh pastries and black coffee, Luis and Danny visited La Catedral de Santa María de la Sede. Inside Luis took a seat near the front facing the gilded altarpiece in the area designated for private prayer. Danny lingered in the aisle until Luis gestured for him to join him. Speaking in a hushed confessional tone Luis spoke about his first communion in Cádiz.
‘My priest was Father Rafael López. He could speak intelligently on almost any subject. He read eighty books a year. He advised me, educated me – adopted me, in a way. When I wanted to hide from my parents, I hid with him. For many years I imagined my future was to become a priest, an ambition he encouraged until I was engaged. When he discovered that I was gay, he never spoke to meagain, as if a shop’s shutters had been pulled down. He would walk past me on the street, I would say his name and he wouldn’t turn around. At the time many people were reacting this way, so I thought his disgust was the same. Years later I reconsidered his actions. It occurred to me that he might have been gay as well. With the scandals in the Catholic Church, he must have been terrified that people would presume he was involved with me sexually. I made him guilty by association. I wonder if he had always known the truth about me – that I was a man like him, which was why he was guiding me towards priesthood, celibacy being the only path he could offer. This winter I traced him. Father Lopez left Cádiz not long after I left and transferred to a church in Argentina where he lived out his life. I made exiles of both of us.’
Luis turned towards the altar as if this were now a silent conversation between him and his church.
As they left the nave and walked out into a courtyard of trimmed citrus trees Danny admitted, ‘I’ve always felt ashamed of how little I knew about your past, your family, your faith, but maybe that was part of my appeal? That I was so far from this world, this place, your people, that I never reminded you of everything you had lost? In the same way London was an escape, I was an escape.’
Luis accepted the point.
‘It might have been part of it.’
Danny asked, ‘If that was the attraction of me then, what draws you to me now when there’s nothing to hide?’
Luis looked up at the orange tree and placed his hand on one of the still-green fruits.
‘I don’t want to marry the man who doesn’t know me. I want to marry the man who knows me.’
