EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNALMarch 20, 1999
Calle Conde de Barajas, Seville
Sierra Nirvana
Aracena’s Saturday market is like a department store. Never mind
the Alameda’s antiques and bric-a-brac, Aracena is still a country town and on
Saturdays its people gather at the centre for new shoes, children’s clothes, olives
and houseware. The market is proper, with merchandise displayed in a kind of professional
order, like a store that has been moved to the street for spell. These merchants travel
through the smaller Andalusian towns with pristine merchandise, and today is
Aracena’s day for shopping.
This isn’t to say that Aracena doesn’t have its own shops and
groceries. It does, but there is an excitement today as the women and girls scan the
tables of dress shoes and more stylish fashions brought from somewhere else. Men stand in
huddles. It’s anthropology. It takes a great effort to unload the boxes and lay the
objects out for display. The people come down from their hilltops, from the washing lines,
from the dark holes where steam is pressed through coffee grinds. A man stands behind a
series of stacked plexiglass boxes. There must be fifty or so. Stacked in rows. Each box
is a museum case, filled with coloured candies, dried fruit and nuts, fried corn, pork
rinds, potato chips, licorice. Groupie children gather, eye-level to the bottom row.
Impossible customers without a peseta.
Javier is pleased with the orchid. I’m trying to explain about the
birth control pill. A friend of my mother's once told me that if you place the tiny pink
pill in the soil with the orchid, the plant will double its blossoms and thrive on the
hormones. Like Georgia O’Keeffe—flowers as the body. The delicate, ornate
blossom and its connection to estrogen.
Javier wraps a sardine in a newspaper and squishes it between the hinge
of the heavy door. Unwrap the paper and the perfect, silver fish is dented along its
ribcage. Now Javier peels the fish, removes some of the loosened bones, and breaks it up
into pieces, mixing it into the ensalada pimiento.
Diego is the youngest son. He studies jardineria in Malaga. He
is the artist behind the greenhouse, behind the thousands of cacti, and the terrier with
the underbite, Chucha. Diego takes his March break in the greenhouse. A mass of curly hair
shrouds softness. A new species climaxes with a bubblegum flower larger than its green,
prickly stalk. What is its scent? Chocolate.
Diego and Javier follow the long way to Galaroza. Stephanie, Rich and I
follow them. Chucha follows her nose. This is the three-hour paseo of my
father’s Sierra Nirvana. Javier points to a perfect canopy at the summit of
the farthest hill. La Pina Vigia—The Lookout Pine. This tree stands alone at
the top of the hill. This tree has a perfect view of the Sierra.
We follow the river, stand among the chestnuts, visit with the pata
negra, who approach as innocently as piglets. On this hot day one understands a
Sevillian’s delight at the perfect, cool Sierra shade. Beyond the dusty path, the
violets bleeding with the smell of candy, olive leaves, mint and edible vinegar leaves, is
the forest of naked branches, ready for bloom, but first, another madras shadow on the
scorched linen orchard floor. The tiniest hairs of branches at the tip of the wood-network
glow silver and gold in the gloss of the afternoon. The river rises, babbles and beckons a
faceful.
