By the time you read this I'll be back in the UK and working on the revise of the new edition of the book that first came out as <em>Semana Santa</em> thirteen years ago. So I suppose the obvious thing to do is give you a taste of the original, not least since it's been out of print for a good few years after my move to my present publisher.

Among the things that will change in the new edition are the title, the shift of the location to 'real' Seville, some local detail and 'factual' information, names, characters and a fair amount of plot. But I don't envisage the opening changing very much at all. It still seems to work fine, setting up the story that follows.

So, it's April, Easter 1995. An old woman is waking up in her dilapidated mansion in the heart of Seville. As she does so she's aware something around her has changed, and that she is surrounded by ghosts, memories of another time in this house, when she was a young girl and there was a tragedy that will now awake to face the modern world. This is pre-revise -- please excuse any typos.

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<em>La Soledad</em>.

The words echoed around the old woman's head as she woke slowly, fitfully, from fast-fading dreams. Outside, through the arch and pillars of the keyhole arch, the noise of the city rumbled like the low growl of an unseen animal. The scent of oleander mingled with the fumes of diesels and cigarettes. From her wicker chair, its points and cracks now biting into her bones, she could see across the garden to the courtyard. A handful of orange and lemon trees dotted with wrinkled fruit, dusty in the afternoon sunlight, waxy red seed husks on a lone pomegranate, the sudden drift of cat's urine on the unseasonably hot late-afternoon air.

Caterina Lucena watched the ghosts reassemble and populate another place: bright, gay noisy. Laughter rang from wall to gleaming wall as the tiles sparkled in the sun. She could see the figures straying from group to group as they had done more than sixty years ago when, as a young girl, she had watched, filled with awe and admiration, from this very room. All of the great people of the day had visited in their time. Even, once, Lorca himself. She had seen them sip fino and manzanilla beneath the orange blossom, heard them talk about things she could not comprehend. She had watched their faces change over the space of two seasons, shift from bright, optimistic good humour to, first, a muted concern, as faint as gossamer, then to visible anxiety. And finally to fear, simple, naked, brutal. All the time the trees blossomed and bore fruit. It stood on the branch unpicked, gathering dust from the carriages and cars she could hear beyond the wall.

##

One day she came down from her small, sunny room, woken by something she did not recognise. The ground was littered with rotten fruit. It was as if a sudden earthquake had shaken them from the tree. They lay on the dry brown earth misshapen and decaying. Flesh and pulp peeped out from beneath their torn orange and yellow skins. There was something obscene, something frightening about the sight.

A lifetime on she floated above herself as she was then, following the young girl in her white and pink cotton dress, loose and cool in the heat, as she stood outside the courtyard's gold-and-blue-tiled door, looking down at this bitter harvest in shock and foreboding.

She waited. It would come. It always came.

From beyond the courtyard wall an explosion erupted, a noise so huge, so violent that it seemed to tear apart the world. The air, the sky shook with the sound. She screamed and time to leave of its senses, the seconds turned to hours, as if to extend the pain they promised.

The trees became electric. Their branches snapped, as if to attention, as if a fibrous thread of muscle, tight as steel, ran throughout the sap and suddenly tautened in fury or fear. They clenched like fists then released themselves and the air filled with leaves and twigs and the sweet, cloying aroma of rotten fruit. The blast of the cannon came to her, bringing with it a new odour, the sharp smell of cordite and burning.

Overhead, the sound of wings, the frantic cry of birds, flapping, flapping, flapping.

A shape forms before her line of vision, floating down from the sky, tears of blood against pure white,, close enough to touch. It falls with the speed of a single, descending feather, slowly, almost gracefully. She can see the red, deep and real, on its feathers, she can see the bloody gore around its neck where the blast removed the head. At the back of her skull she can feel herself screaming. But there is no noise, there is no pain, no sensation at all. The world has become nothing but this single occurrence: a headless dove falls to the earth in front of her so slowly it seems beyond the power of gravity, the ties of the physical world.

She watches its neck twitch frantically from side to side. She sees the blood pump and spill from its still-beating heart. The drops arch through the air, perfect scarlet pearls, half frozen in their motion. They spatter her dress, her skin. As she screams she can feel the light red rain on her tongue, and she cannot stop herself <em>tasting</em> it, fresh and warm and salty, licking the roof of her mouth in an automatic reaction the thought of which starts to overturn her stomach long before the physical sensation becomes real.

Time pauses. There is a moment when the dove is held by invisible fingers in front of her as if to say: <em>this</em> is the point.. And then the seconds move again. The stricken bird falls to the ground with a sudden, brutal force. As she begins to retch she knows that this event, though only the precursor to other, worse happenings, is one which will mark her for the rest of her life. In another time a young girl vomits dryly in the courtyard of her ancestral home, the tiny, shattered carcass of a dove at her feet.

Outside the sound of arms, the smell of blood.

<em>La Soledad.</em>