Holy Week Shriek

Splendid in bright red or deep black uniforms, banners embroidered and shoes shined, each bearing up under yards of braid and tassel, they are the Confraternity Bands. They played in the name of the Sweet Name of Jesus the Nazarene, the Most Precious Blood of Our Savior Jesus Christ, the Seven Words of Jesus on the Cross, and the Concord of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. 

Floorboards and flags vibrated, children screamed, ladies and men alike wept into their handkerchiefs. It was Sunday night in the heart of Castilla, and the drum-and-brass corps were in town, from Valladolid, and Bilbao, and all over Leon. I have seen many typical things in my years here, but I think I have never heard anything more Spanish. It´s the start of Holy Week in Sahagún -- the VII Certamen Nacional de Musica Procesional marched up Calle Constitucion and packed out the auditorium. I went with Julia and Paco and Fran to hear the street music of Holy Week.

There were five bands, each part of a confraternity, a Catholic devotional group. Sahagun has at least four that I know of, a couple of them dating back to the 16th century. 

But these bands were Big Time, from big cities. Their confraternities have hundreds of members, and date back 500 years or more. It´s the confraternities that put on the massive, solemn Holy Week parades, with their life-size statues of weeping Virgins and beaten Christs, snarling Jews and creeping Moors. It´s the confraternities that put on creepy robes and pointy hats for their Holy Week penitential marches through the streets, carrying the massive statues on their shoulders from church to church.

By watching which holy image is marching past, you can mark out the events of Jesus´ final days: Palm Sunday has Jesus on a donkey. The Last Supper and Agony in the Garden appear on Thursday, and Good Friday brings them all out, in chronological order:  Christ Tied to a Post and Beaten, Christ Carrying the Cross, Veronica Wiping Jesus´ Face, the Crucifixion, the Descent from the Cross, (featuring a gruesome dead Jesus with articulated shoulders). Each has its accompanying Blessed Virgin, dressed in splendid, ever-changing array. And in bigger cities, each statue combination has its sponsoring Confraternity.   

Way back when, the confraternities marched in deep and awe-ful silence. A few still do.
But Spaniards love passion and guilt, blood and tears, uniforms, crowds and parties and group activity. Mix these all up and you get a Good Friday procession (Or maybe a bullfight). It is hard to have all these melodramatic portrayals without some suitably dramatic music.

And so was born the Confraternity band: dry, deep drumbeats, swirling, shrieking trumpets. Pour on some militaristic costumes, shining with epaulettes and fringe, and a surplus of talented amateur musicians, in a country where every town has a music school and community chorus, band, and orchestra. The 40 or so members of each group are not professionals, but three of the four bands were obviously very disciplined, precise musicians, well-led and dedicated to their craft. They are men and women of all ages and sizes, electricians and beauticians, Moms, doctors, and farmers. I marvelled at the practicing they must do, and the patience that must demand of their neighbors. I wondered how they could play this stuff while marching. In the rain. With hoods on their heads. Penance indeed.  

Patience. The Spaniards are patient. Each of the bands played four selections, while a videotape of a Sahagun Semana Santa played on the giant screen behind them. Over and over, five times at least, the pasos passed through the streets, while the Sweetest Name of Jesus guys from Leon shook the dust from the rafters with their drumming, and the Most Precious Blood boys from Valladolid blew bugles, trumpets, and cornets into a climactic blast that stopped dead -- and left a single silver horn note screaming off a single dry drumbeat. It takes guts to play this music. It´s music for crucifixions, garrottes, autos de fe.
   
The Seven Words had the fat, lush sound of saxes and trombones and clarinets, a big band I almost expected to shift into "Sing Sing Sing." A class act all around.   

They saved the best for last. The Sacred Heart Band of Cornets and Drums drove down from Bilbao in their severe black uniforms, and waited for hours while the others did their nut. They stepped onto the stage and kicked into a flashy modern arrangement called "Silencio," and just kept at it, turning up the volume, the pitch, til the poor peregrinos sleeping in the albergue upstairs shouted for mercy. Not even the cornets hit a flat note. They played without music-sheets, from memory -- two small men bent at the knees, backward from their waists, and threw all their breath into their fussy little horns as the big drums bashed behind them. Bilbao brought down the house. Three hours later we escaped, wrung-out and red-eyed.

And Palm Sunday´s not for another week.

The Glory that is Torre

We were still in our road clothes, under-dressed.  Three concrete Graces stood in the geraniums, simpering across the patio. James Dean leered back in black and white from the facing wall. All four of them glowed pink, lit from below by hidden lights. We went inside.

This might have been a villa once, but now it´s "Los Años 50," a cushy hotel bar in the hilly El Pinar neighborhood on the edge of Torremolinos, a town not noted for taste. "The 50´s Bar," I thought -- sock hops, poodle skirts, Whisky Sours -- this would be a weird Spanish take on American pop culture. But I was wrong. The 50s this bar refers to is a mix of flocked foil wallpaper and chrome-and-crystal trim, with Brigitte Bardot posters and overstuffed chairs in the bathrooms. We tucked ourselves into a corner of a 7-foot velvet-striped sofa, ordered G & Ts from the sparkling Swarovski-studded bar, and watched the evening unfold.

It was splendid, deluxe, absolutely fabulous. We were just in time for the music, a little electronic combo set up in a corner by the bar. A big woman dressed for a wedding wailed love songs while a gray little man tapped out bongo beats on a drum machine. From across the room a sun-tanned, double-breasted wise guy watched from deep in his chair, his fancy watch poised just so beneath his starched cuffs, his ankle crossed over the opposite knee. He was, obviously, the boss, and he was lovin´ those sentimental boom-chaka ballads.

The women clattered in, teetering dangerously on their high heels, every one spectacularly plucked, powdered, sprayed-down and patted into place. Not all were pretty, but each was utterly groomed. The men, too, wore suits cut sharp and shiny, their hair coifed, nails and shoes buffed. Some were tall and cool. Others were toad-like in tight Armani, their fingers too fat for their many rings. Two black men shimmered into the place in white Adidas tracksuits, Gabbana sunshades perched on the brims of their ballcaps. They sipped Martel and jangled their ice cubes, chillin.´ Everyone seemed to know one another. Everyone had something fascinating to say to someone else. All of them chattered excitedly and laughed out loud, hoping to be heard above the bongos, hoping to be noticed. A couple of people danced a complicated merengue. The bartender shook a cocktail shaker, and poured out something pink from a great height.  

Then She sashayed in the door, a 40-something blonde bombshell, a sloe-eyed woman straight out of a Mickey Spillane potboiler. She wore a tiny knit dress and high-heel sparkly sandals, she smiled a porcelain smile, she worked the room. Everybody greeted her with joy and kisses. Her figure was amazingly impossible, her bottom and bosom round as fruit and perfectly cantilevered over a tiny waist. She was an exotic bird in a chromium cage, sparkling in the pink lights. We were dazzled.

It had been a long day´s drive. We decided against a second drink and took ourselves next door to our own villa-turned-hostel, and went to bed. It was only the next day we realized the Años 50 might be a fancy brothel. (I was glad we did not reserve our weekend rooms there -- it was an option on the booking website, but I shy away from places with jacuzzis in the bedrooms.) The Años 50 is too hot not to cool down. I don´t expect that place to be open when I go back again to Torre. 

The following day we went down the hill to join the big O´Gara clan gathering, a 70th birthday party starring many of Patrick´s family members and old friends. Drink was taken, the 5-year-old grandson was chased round the garden by a succession of volunteer monsters. We picked lemons and oranges from the trees out back, cooked up meals, dreamed dreams and reminisced. Paddy and I had driven all the way down to the Meditteranean coast. Two of his sons had flown from England, along with a cousins and aunties and friends. None of us saw the beach.

But we saw one another, something that doesn´t happen so often. We saw a Tottenham Hotspur football game in a pub called Auld Dublin. We shopped for Marmite and Heinz Baked Beans, Basmati rice and Branston Pickle. We had a barbecue out in the yard, with grilled fresh sardines and bream, roast pork loin and watercress salad. It may have been the best barbecue food I ever had.

No hamburgers or hotdogs. I brought the things to make S´Mores, but after the meal no one was much interested in gooey sweet things.

It was three generations of a working-class English family, at play in a down-at-the-heels Spanish beach resort. Someone or other of Paddy´s family has lived there since the 1960´s, and I joined the story only 10 years ago -- and in that time I have witnessed the courtships and weddings and births, jobs worked, quit, lost, won; retirement, illness, death. The family in Torremolinos reminds me of how temporary we are. Health is so fragile, jobs and property so easily lost. Each time we meet there could be the last time. It is precious that way.

Paddy, Sam, Dan, Matt, & Tom -- O´Garas all

I don´t want to liken a hoochie bar to Paddy´s fine family, but there are a couple of things to learn from them both. We have to enjoy the show while it´s going on, marvel at the marvellous wonders, taste the tang of the gin in the glass. We can go back over and over, but we can never hope for things to stay the same.    
   

An Orientation Upward

I am thinking about prayers. Not because I am particularly devout, but just because people keep bringing them up, sending them out, asking me for prayers.

It is hard to write about your own prayer habits without appearing sanctimonious. That is not my intent, OK? I live on a pilgrimage path. Prayer is part of the scene.  

I am not uncomfortable with praying. I grew up in a family that´s on first-name terms with the Almighty, and I still say "grace" before dinner a lot of the time. But as I have grown older, my definition of prayer has gotten a lot wider. It does not occupy a discrete portion of the day. I don´t keep a "sweet hour of prayer." It  happens, in and around the daily doings. It is not hard. It is utterly simple. It is a habit.

I walked out alone this morning to catch up to Patrick and the dogs. I prayed my mindless rosary-type morning prayers, Scriptures worn smooth by years of use, they fit sweetly into the rhythm of a human stride. I walked through town, and thought about the people who live in the houses. I imagined them all out in the plaza in August, playing cards and laughing under the trees. It made me smile. It blessed me. It blessed the town, too, I think.

(Pilgrims pray, and we see many pilgrims passing, more every day. Faraway friends call me up when they´re suffering. They don´t ask for my prayers. They ask me to have a pilgrim pray for them, out there while they walk. No pilgrim, even a total stranger, has ever refused to carry their prayers when I asked. I think this is wonderful.)

Out among the fields and I prayed for rain. The fields are like talcum powder, drought-stricken. They ought to be very green by now, but they are far from it. It is worrying. "Please make it rain," is all I said. "If my lettuces and onions can´t be as nice as Edu´s, at least let them not die overnight."

the "salad patch," spinach planted in November!

Today I prayed for Bob the Canary, too. He is a silent puff of feathers, obviously not feeling well, and heaven only knows what might be wrong with him. He is too young for his battery to expire. I hope it is only Spring Fever, that he will soon again deafen us with his jazz stylings. I love that little guy. "Please let Bob get better," I said. "Fix whatever´s wrong."

When Patrick is out of sorts I tell God to fix him, but I don´t tell Patrick I´m doing it. And when I am out of sorts I grumble at God to fix that, too. I suppose that is a dark kind of prayer. 

Perhaps praying is a healthy inner dialog, a way of ordering the voices in my head.  Maybe it is a coping mechanism in a life that still feels isolated, unstable, and lonesome, even though I chose it myself.  Maybe it´s my inner child, keeping to what she was brought up on, slipping into the comfortable old shoe called "Our Father Who Art in Heaven." Often I am sure it´s a selfish plea for a magic solution to whatever is not going my way. 

It is good for me. I like it. It may even be helpful. It certainly cannot hurt.

Yes, I believe I am heard. And I don´t often forget to say "thank you."

That´s the fun part. 

The Center´s Shifted

I get caught up in things here inside the walls of the Peaceable. I finished the novel, and am now considering my options, wondering where I can get a book-cover design that doesn´t make the story look like a lurid murder tale or soft-core pornography or do-it-yourself project. I need to negotiate with the publisher of another book, and get the spiders off the ceiling beams without meeting them personally or gassing myself. All that kind of stuff.

And then the bell rings at the front gate, and somebody brings me back to earth. Some bodies.

My office looks over the patio and a slice of street. I can see when someone is coming.

These days, with the Italian albergue closed for a while and the weather clear and warm, we see plenty of pilgrims – more than our average numbers. They come at the end of the afternoon, windblown, windburned, and smiling, mostly young, all of them very hungry.

Paddy and I came here to retire, not to write books. We wanted to help out pilgrims now and then. The pilgrims we see these days are reminders of the blessing the camino continues to be, and the direction, perhaps, we are heading into. We have had 14 pilgrims stay here with us since the turn of the year. They are what´s real about here. They keep me from drifting into full-blown hermit-hood.

Spanish men who do not leave their names. Koreans whose names we cannot decipher from the record book, as they are written in elegant script. Miguel, who claims his tendinitis was healed here, overnight. A worldly, handsome Dane, three apple-cheeked Italians from Bologne with a smart dog called “Porky,” and Camilo, a French boy from Brest walking backwards from Sevilla, on his way to Lourdes. They brought richness to our house, and sweetness and light and sometimes hassle, and all was swept away with them the following day.

Three of the 14 were hospitaleros, other hosts at other pilgrim hostels. Some were honored guests: a hospitalero trainer from British Columbia came for the weekend, and hiked with me up into the peaks of the Camino San Salvador, where we checked the snow conditions for some pilgrims on their way up there. We ate and drank and shmoozed, in English!

Others were more like boarders: a silent German girl, parting from a hospitalera gig of several months, unhappy and insular and traumatized, facing a winter on the road. She kept to herself. We left her alone. It was not a happy time for any of us. But I know she will be back. She lives on the camino, lives for it. We don´t do that. Not any more. We love our camino and our pilgrims, but we are not centered there. Our lives are rich and varied and rooted not on The Way, but in this extraordinary little town.

I have not been out and about much, Moratinos-wise, in the last weeks, I lost touch with the local gossip, the English lessons curtailed by work schedules and family feuds. I curled up inside our walls and just worked on books, traveled a bit to visit friends. 

At church this Sunday Milagros handed me a three-page flyer called “El Veladero,” a monthly newsletter from the Escuelas Campesinas program that she and Modesto and Raquel are part of – I have written about their meetings in blogs past. This month´s edition is a special one: it is all about Moratinos. Moratinos in the past six years, and how it is exceptional in the district, because it is so wide-open, progressive, and growing. Not just because of we foreigners coming in and starting things, but because the Milagros Boys are building a restaurant in the bodegas, and because Don Santiago and several local families have resurrected the Corpus Christi celebrations, November retirement dinners, the after-Mass vermut gathering. Because so many of the people here get along, and work together, set aside their differences and actually enjoy living in what might otherwise be a “nowhere” place.

It all is true, and now it is not just me and this blog saying so. It´s official!

And now I must get up and go outside these walls and ask Julia why she sent us over a bottle of cider this morning, and see if maybe she wants to take a paseo, hear what song Fran is singing today.

Ghosts

I went to Galicia, to the Costa da Morte, to a spit of land sticking out into the Atlantic, with waves smashing against rocks and gulls wheeling in the stiff wind. A church stood there on the point looking west, with waves splashing its face.

I went to a lighthouse on another spit of land, beyond the new lambs grazing in mazes of ancient dry-stone walls. The wind tried to knock me down, tried to tear my coat off my back. It whooped and whistled in my earrings. It blew all the clouds right out of the sky.

I went to a castro, the leavings of a tiny town built thousands of years ago out of stones on a hill. Circles made of stones, hardly houses, once with pointy raffia roofs, once with fire and water and iron tools, (seeing as it was the Iron Age), circles standing in a circle inside a tall wall, once full of some kind of people, lives lived, histories, stories, love and birth and fear and death, and now completely silent. But for the road passing by below, and the lowing eucalyptus woods, and the water in the stream, all is silent, all dead and gone and forgotten. Time has all but wiped them all away.

I saw a Dolmen, a megalith, a big half-buried booth of stone slabs that made a tomb about 3,700 BC. Somebody barely human painted the walls inside with what we´d term "grafitti," red and black and white. And over time the earth grew up around it, made it look like it erupted to us from somewhere lower down. There are dozens of dolmens and standing stones in this region, but this one is the biggest. So this one´s been dug out and charted, scrubbed, landscaped, roofed-over and Disneyfied. It´s got a turnstile and a security guard and charts and graphs. It ought to be humming with ghosts, but now it is truly dead. It needs the sky and wind to make it breathe again.

I saw a medieval church hunkered into a hillside, its door-jambs carved with crude Last Suppers, the edges worn fuzzy green and gray. A white rabbit stood and watched. It is very green there, daffodils bloom, farmers fill ox-carts with fragrant grass, fields are full of fuzzy donkeys and foals. It is beautiful, damp, and ancient.

I did not bring a camera. I have gone off cameras, they get in the way of seeing and being. But this place, these places, are all around Muxia. You can, I hope, go there yourself someday, take a long walk, see them yourself, hear the funeral bells ringing from way up the valley, smell violets underfoot, scratch the donkey´s gray face, walk among the tombs in the little graveyards, peek into the salon of the old rectory, a room now full of blackberry canes, its roof and floorboards long collapsed, its last occupant buried years ago under the stones there in the churchyard.    

Ghosts are everywhere in Galicia, quiet and benign. You´d expect that in a place called "the Coast of Death," but it´s not just the great amount of historic shipwrecks. I think it´s the sheer number of humans who´ve spent their lives on that land, for many thousands of years. Solitary as the big sky and crashing waves and abandoned beaches might feel, the map is peppered with villages and towns. Every other field has an old woman in it, swinging a hoe or examining some object on the ground. Every open barn or garage door has its man inside, pitching hay or shooting the breeze or mixing concrete. Every bit of land is planted, or harrowed, or built-on or grazed or forested. It is a lonely place, but it is not lonesome.

It is intensely human there.
I am glad I saw it, and felt it.
I am glad now to be home, too. It is not so historic here. Man has not left so many fascinating tracks out on the Meseta.
There are no stones. Our monuments are made of mud and sticks, they fade away with the rain. 
So our space is wider. Our ghosts have names, and their stories will die when we die.
We are not so civilized.   

Lazarus Dog

An update on the last post:
Today is a lovely resurrection-type day. Patrick walked our dogs this morning past the Milagros house, and up jumped Roldan AND Toby, yapping and barking their fool heads off, chasing Tim along the fence. (Tim hates Roldan.) I recall now that Jeffrey, a beloved dog from my past, was rolled under a car in New Brighton, Pennsylvania, and survived with just a bit of his fur scraped off. So this is not a miracle.
It´s just damn lucky.
I am thanking God anyway. And St. Francis, and whomever else keeps an eye on dogs, and heard my prayers yesterday. And maybe some of yours?

Paddy is in a great mood. I don´t feel so bad myself.
Thank you, whosoever you be.
From now on, Toby will be known to us as "Lazarus."

Struck Down

I´m driving up the dirt road from Fuente de San Martin, going into Moratinos the back way cause sometimes I see cool wildlife out there -- migratory geese, avutarda, hawks, and stupid quail that run up the road in front of me for a while before they realize flying might be a good idea.

I´m listening to Cameron singing "Volando Voy," always a wonderful thing. The sun is high, the sky is blue, I got what we needed in Palencia, and I got something I wanted, too -- an early lunch, a guilty pleasure, a döner kebap at the Café Istambul. Up at the Milagros farm I see the gate sliding open, one of the boys has been plowing, he´s pulling the tractor up into the yard. Must be lunchtime. They´re all out there, Milagros and Esteban, Estevinas and José, all in their work duds. I wave and smile, all of them wave and smile back, I see Roldan the bad-tempered, terminally-ill German Shepherd making a lunge for the open gate, I see José stepping toward the gate to shut it before the dog gets there, I see Toby, the yappy lap dog make a break for the gap, and then the car flies past the scene and the wheels hit the proper smooth pavement and I´m on Calle Ontanon, in Moratinos proper.

And in the rear-view mirror something is not right, José is shouting, dust is rising, I see him bending over something in the middle of the road outside the gate, and I realize...

Toby made it through the gate, just as I passed. He went under the car. I ran him over.

I don´t want to believe this. I think I will just keep driving and pretend I don´t know.
Then I think that would be awful, because I do know, and what if the dog needs to get to the veterinarian right away?
I stop the music, stop the car. I get out.

I hear Milagros voice, "Is he dead?"

Esteban shouts, "Dead?" 

And José picks up the furry body and strides to the gate, saying, "I think, yes. I think he´s dead."

Horrible, horrible. The last person they want to see just then is me, the person who made their little dog dead. But there I am. My hands are curved over my mouth. I have no idea what to say or do. "Go on. Go on home," José shouts up the street, his voice choked. "It´s just an accident. A dog."

Edu comes out his gate to see what´s happening. Roque, one of Toby´s many offspring, yaps at me from the patio. I tell Edu I just ran over José´s dog. Edu shrugs. "What a shame," he says. "It´s that way with animals."

I go home. I unload groceries from the car. I tell Paddy what just happened. I start to cry.

Not so much for Toby, whose muzzle had gone grey from lounging around town, scrounging scraps from pilgrims, chasing after bitches, fathering most of the lapdogs in the district. He´s had a good run. And he apparently did not suffer long.

I cried for José, though, and the Estebans. And Milagros. I know they are there with that little dog body, crying. You don´t see these people cuddling their yard dogs, but they enjoy canine company. Toby liked to tag along with his people. He wandered loose in the streets and slept on the pavement in summer, followed the tractors to the grain-scales, and somehow lived for years without getting under their many wheels. He was not a very friendly dog, but in the past couple of years he´s let me scratch him between the ears a time or two.

It would not have been so hard, accidentally killing our neighbors´ dog, if the neighbors had not been our friends, too. And if the entire family had not been standing right there when it happened. I cried some more, at the horror they must have felt. And for the way I would feel if that was me, watching my dog run under a car.

And then our doorbell rings, and our (very alive) dogs go ballistic. And there is José, smiling. No sign of sentimentality. He sees I have been crying, and it´s kinda embarrassing. I should calm myself, he says.

Because Toby isn´t dead. Not yet. "He was out cold, but now he´s awake. He´s moving all his legs, wagging his tail. Maybe in some pain. We´ll watch him. If he doesn´t get up by this evening, we´ll take him to the veterinarian. But we want you to be calm. Tranquilo. It´s a dog, an animal."

"Please, take him to the veterinarian. You must. Just to be sure he´s alright," Paddy says. "We will pay the bills." We gave them some dog anti-inflammatory medicine, with all the dosages written-out, from when Rosie was fixed. Same size dog. In case they decide to pass on the vet.

"He is up. He´s walking. He´s swollen-up, but he´s not dead," José said. "It´s nothing."

And maybe it is nothing. Nothing but a dog.

Sometimes I know I am not tough enough for this hard country.

I am just too damn soft.