"Seville in August runs on shade, siesta, clay water jugs, and centuries of knowing better"
Finn Sørensen is twenty-four, a junior climate-adaptation planner for the City of Copenhagen, and has never been anywhere properly hot. His ex-girlfriend dumped him for being 'like a fridge', so he has flown to Seville in August for a two-week summer school on urban heat, which is cancelled on his first afternoon because of the heat. He decides to stay anyway and do some 'informal fieldwork' on how the hottest city in Europe keeps its people alive. His bed is in La Fragua, the attic dorm of Hostal El Paraíso in Triana, named after a blacksmith's forge and the hottest room in the building. The cold tap runs at forty degrees.
Maca, on the desk, has a nurse's training, a black lacquered fan and no patience for the Germans. Paco the porter got locked on the roof in 46 °C the day before Finn arrived, by a door that told him it was for his safety. Yui from Osaka sells cooling towels at a markup and measures the dorm with a fridge thermometer. Grace Mbeki arrives from a very bad week in Venice and flinches every time the little white disc behind reception chirps. And in the dry fountain, on an inflatable flamingo called Flo, lounges Brandon Oakes, a Phoenix fitness influencer with 1.9 million followers who tells everyone, loudly and often, that it's a dry heat. The Wi-Fi password is ItsADryHeat.
The warnings pile up. The fans cut out on their own, and the disc's blue ring glows amber. The printer spits out a weather forecast climbing to forty-seven. A grey skull avatar reviews the hostel. Finn goes viral in Denmark as #DanishPastry after collapsing on the Triana bridge. Then the app announces its own event for the fifteenth of August, the hottest day of the heatwave: the #HotMessFest Siesta Survival Challenge. Nineteen people sign up, the system gives Maca the day off, and Finn takes a chair in the entrance hall with his notebook, writing down every reading.
Age: 24
Type: Copenhagen climate-adaptation planner
Fatal Flaw: Has never once in his life been the wrong temperature
Role: Protagonist
Age: About 28
Type: "It's a dry heat" fitness influencer from Phoenix
Fatal Flaw: Believes heat is just information his body is too tough to receive
Role: Victim
Age: Late 20s
Type: Receptionist with a nurse's training
Fatal Flaw: Speaks fluent fan, and none of it is polite
Role: Medic
Age: 64
Type: Hostel porter for thirty-one years
Fatal Flaw: Keeps everything, including grudges against German toasters
Role: Keeper of the building
Age: 28
Type: Tile conservator, fresh from Venice
Fatal Flaw: Chose Seville because nothing can grow at twelve percent humidity
Role: Ally
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "The Shade Moves"
At twelve minutes past five on a Sunday afternoon in August, Francisco Jiménez Ruiz, sixty-four years old, porter of the Hostal El Paraíso for thirty-one years and of the building's pigeons for longer, climbed the last flight of stairs to the roof and understood, on the top step, that he had made a mistake.
It was not a big mistake. Paco did not make big mistakes. Big mistakes were for people who came from somewhere else.
It was the kind of mistake a man makes when a machine chirps at him.
The machine lived in a white plastic disc screwed to the wall behind the reception desk, the size of the lid of a jar of olives, with a soft blue ring of light around its edge. The Germans had installed it the year before, when they bought the building from the Caballero family, and ever since then it had chirped. A little electronic tsst-tsst, the sound a text message would make if it were embarrassed. It chirped when the street door opened. It chirped when somebody's key card failed. It chirped at three in the morning for no reason at all, a lonely tsst, like a cicada that had lost the rest of the tree.
So Paco called it La Chicharra. The cicada. And Macarena on the desk had started calling it that too, and then the cleaners, and now even the tablet the Germans had given him said, when he opened the maintenance app, Hi Paco! La Chicharra has 1 new task for you!, because someone in Frankfurt had seen the word in a staff note and thought it was the device's name.
The task, at five o'clock, the hottest hour of the hottest day of the year so far, had been:
ROOF — Outdoor Unit 4 (La Fragua dorm): Fault E7. Please inspect. Thank you, Paco! 🌞
And he had gone, because La Fragua was the attic dorm under the roof, and on a day like this a dead air conditioner in La Fragua was not a comfort problem. It was a medical one.
He had put on his cap. He had taken the botijo, the fat clay jug with its little spout, full of water that had been sweating through the clay all morning and was cool to the lips in the way no fridge water ever is. He had even thought, on the third floor landing, Paco, you are an idiot, this can wait until nine, and kept climbing anyway, because the task on the tablet had turned from blue to orange, and he had been raised by a mother who did not like to be kept waiting either.
Now he stood on the top step with his hand on the roof door and felt the heat come through it like a hand pressed back against his.
Fictional reviews of the fictional Hostal El Paraíso, quoted from the book.
☠ "lovely courtyard. very sunny roof. the porter was resilient." — @HostelReaper
☠ "the courtyard is lovely this time of year." — @HostelReaper
☠ "a dry heat is still a heat." — @HostelReaper