EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNALFebruary 28, 1999
Calle Conde de Barajas, Seville
Market Day
There’s a market every Sunday at the Alameda de Hercules, a
dusty, tree-lined boulevard just steps from our apartment. The plaza is named for the
marbled columns capped with statues of Hercules and Caesar, brought to Seville from a
Roman temple, when Seville was part of the Roman Empire. Laid out in 1574, the Alameda
was first used as a fashionable promenade for Sevillanos in the 16th
Century--Seville’s Golden Age--when Spain was the most powerful nation in Europe. The
return of treasure fleets from the New World brought astonishing wealth to Seville, making
it one of Europe’s richest ports. Today the Alameda stands as the centre of
one of the city’s seedier districts, and on Sundays it is converted to a exposition
of bric-a brac, scattered on blankets and tables in the form of a market.
There are rusty farming tools, antique lamps and mirrors, old horse
handcuffs, ancient pistols, brass ornaments, paintings and photographs. There are also
shoes, crumpled Feria dresses, suspicious computer parts including motherboards and old
Atari systems, dismantled kitchens, piles of records and stuff that looks like it fell
from the back of a delivery truck, like packaged dollar-store toys, paint brushes and
pocket radios. I find a stack of discarded lithographic blocks with technical diagrams of
airplanes.
Over at the Plaza del Alfalfa, in the Santa Cruz district, the
weekly Los Pajaros Pet Market is thick with a slow-moving crowd. There are plenty
of children here. It’s a menagerie of caged birds. Turtles, rabbits, mice, and
goldfish. There are dozens of cardboard boxes, stuffed with puppies. The dogs are too
young to have stopped nursing, asleep in piles, or groggy in a merchant’s arms. We
move through the displays—a life sacrificed so a child may learn responsibility. We
keep an emotional distance, reminding ourselves that this is how animals and all other
goods have been traded and sold for centuries. We still manage however, to connect with
some innocent, soulful eyes.
At Thursday’s Antique market some vendors surface with treasures.
There is no logic here; Baroque armoires and sideboards display beside a bum curled beside
a tent, selling used cans of aerosol hairspray. The Sunday bric-a-brac finds another
opportunity for customers, and so the Antique Market, having grown in volume and loosened
in definition, has been moved from Calle Feria to the Alameda. The trees are
shedding. Everyone and everything is covered with snow-pods. Micro dust storms stir in the
aisles. At 11 o’clock the place is bustling with lookey-loos, home decorators and
serious collectors. The riff-raff permanent residents of the Alameda hang about and
socialize. At one o’clock everyone packs up and gets drunk. At 3pm the place resumes
its dust-bowl vacancy, littered with bottles and spit.
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