A Love Story

I didn’t think I was writing a love story. I didn’t think I was writing a sad story. Nor one with uncomfortable truths.

I thought I was writing a sunny story set in a Spanish Sierra, and I started with someone very similar to Elena, the Tortilla Maker.

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A story intended to be life-affirming and light, an antidote to lockdown and disease. Something brief and digestible and, above all, achievable. An escape.

Instead, there is darkness and despair, and longing and loss, and I sense there is more to come. Elena shows her reassuring face for only a few pages before giving way to a man.

However, the writing is not making me miserable (I don’t think), and I am able to escape the sameness of 2020 days by scavenging old photos for prompts.

Like this one.

From the entrance of the Dolmen de Menga on the outskirts of Antequera is a perfect view of an ancient rock. At the Summer Solstice, the sun shines in a direct line from the rock (La Peña) to the Dolmen’s entrance. For the people who once lived here 5000 years ago, the precise position of this burial chamber must have held a prehistoric significance.

Take a closer look.

Perhaps people then told each other a similar story to the one locals tell now. A tragic love story that came to a head on a rock that resembles a profile.

Some call the Rock The Sleeping Giant; some call it El Indio; folk from Córdoba know it as Manolete after the city’s famous bullfighter, Manuel Laureano Rodríguez Sánchez, who died of fatal wounds sustained during a bullfight in 1947. He was 30 years old.

However, most know the Rock as La Peña de los Enamorados (The Lovers’ Rock), and the protagonists of its story are sometimes referred to as the Romeo and Juliet of Spain.

Christopher Columbus likened some mountains in Cuba to La Peña in his logbook of discovery of 1492-3, The writer, Washington Irving, noted the tale as he journeyed to Granada, and it has survived in various guises to this day. An English version by Goldilocks author, Robert Southey, gave the couple new names, but it is widely accepted that the doomed duo were called Tello and Tazgona.

Here is their story.

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Tragic romances are as old as the hills and universally popular, and they are reshaped with each telling. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was borrowed from Arthur Brooke who had translated Matteo Bandello’s story, which Matteo had adapted from Luigi da Porto (who reputedly took his tale from Masuccio Salernitano and mixed it up with his own).

Since time immemorial, it seems that we all love a (good) sad ending, and stories in which fate plays a part. Melancholic love stories, in particular, populate our music, our movies, our books and our art, in ever creative adaptations to suit our own needs. Nick Cave once said:

“The Love Song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain.”

But as I delve deeper, back to when storytelling began (there is evidence to suggest that Neanderthals were storytellers, too), I wonder if I should take a step away.

Perhaps a story is just a story – good or bad, happy or sad. So I should get on with mine and try not to overthink it, and wait for fate to decide a fitting finale.

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The Fateful Day Manolete Was Killed.