Nobody talked to her because she was a tourist, and there are so many here in Córdoba.
Just because we live off of them doesn't mean they interest us. It's a factory performance with the same script day after day: Check them in, show them the Mezquita, feed them a paella, check them out. That's what I do, checking them in and out at the Hotel Los Patios on the morning shift because I study law at the university in the afternoon. So Elvina was just another tourist—from Holland, or so she said—who turned up sometime in April wheeling a suitcase and fumbling with a map. She was a big-boned, horsey blonde with distant grey eyes, and like hundreds who pass through here every day, we thought she'd go away once she'd seen the show.
James Nolan is a widely published poet, essayist, short-story writer, and translator. His collections of poetry are Why I Live in the Forest and What Moves Is Not the Wind, both from Wesleyan University Press. He has translated Pablo Neruda's Stones of the Sky (Copper Canyon Press) and Longing: Selected Poems of Jaime Gil de Biedma (City Lights Books).