HOLIDAYS IN SEVILLE
Taking a leap in my selective memory of those years, I remembered the Blue Moon, a jazz joint located in a basement in the secluded Plaza de la Contratación. Semi hidden between the Puerta de Jerez and the Reales Alcázares, half a step from the Jewish Quarter, the Archivo de Indias and the Plaza del Triunfo.
At that time -and after an unstable season in cheap aparthotels such as Resitur and Luz Sevilla, propitious to adultery and putiferio- he was already enjoying the luxury and comfort of a rather filthy apartment near Nervión. Shared with a future poet hyperlaureado in the same tessitura-stiffness as me, consisting of making bobbin lace with a thousand pesetas and two hours of sleep.
With the bloody poet at the back of my Vespa 200, and those nights of inspecting Seville's most infamous slums - from San Román to Los Remedios, from Heliopolis to Torneo - we looked like a crappy remake of Ozores on vacation in Rome.
And so we ended up, almost every night, at Pitito's Blue Moon "drink and smoke" with some unsuspecting woman picked up along the way, who would not be frightened by the smell of humanity or the tobacco fog. Not that German pianist of dubious origin who shared the payroll of a musician on duty with La Carbonería. May the devil reserve other hells like those for us.
Rafael Benitez Toledano
