EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNALMarch 29, 1999
Calle Conde de Barajas, Seville
The Passion According to Seville: Holy Monday
The day is overexposed. Sweat is a meandering stream on the jaw of a
trumpet player. He stands in full regalia, resting while the costaleros, or
carriers slowly lower the paso. The procession stops every fifty or so metres. This
is when the band members smoke, and the costaleros, exhausted in their penitence
beneath the velvet curtain of the float, may receive a cup of water. The hooded nazarenos
wait barefoot, dripping candlewax onto the cobblestone. A child in the crowd holds out her
hand, "Quiero caramello, por favor," and a candy is placed there.
La Campana, in the heart of the shopping district, is invisible
beneath the crowd. The street, usually humming with taxis, is a bed of hot stone for the
penitents. The curbs are ringside, where believers wait to run their hands along the
gilded edge of the paso, and when it passes, cross themselves in the pathos of its
lilting paces. A mother approaches her tiny boy, flushed and moist in his velvet robe. He
is three, maybe, and walks along with the other nazarenos, his face-covering hood
rolled back so that he may take a drink from his mother’s water bottle. His sister
watches from the curb.
Today is Holy Monday, a day for families and their parishes to
participate, with a popular sense of religion and heritage, in Seville’s Passion
Play. At the beginning of the week the people are full of excitement and
anticipation. It is the celebration of Spring, it is the collective gathering of aesthetic
and religious sentiment, it is the upholding of tradition and the passing of knowledge.
They offer the result of the year’s efforts and organization by celebrating the
annual rite in a drama on the streets.
There are six to ten processions on each day of Holy Week. Each parish
makes their procession with two pasos, one depicting a scene from Christ’s
Passion, and a second interpreting a grieving Mary, always canopied, surrounded by candles
and flowers. Purple irises symbolize suffering. Each procession beings at the church,
chapel, monastery or convent of that particular brotherhood and makes its way through the
city streets to circle Seville's Cathedral—the third largest in the world—and
then walks back again. This can take up to twelve hours, depending on where the procession
is coming from. Some cross the river from Triana. Some come from several kilometres north
of the centre.
The sun rakes patient faces. Christ is shackled and led by a Roman
guard, brought before a snarling Herod. The robes shake like a bullfighter’s cape,
teasing. Their tassels swing like pendulums. The figures appear to be "walking"
as the carriers beneath step in unison to the marching band. When the paso brushes
past, Christ’s expression is visibly tragic, foreshadowing. The face evokes something
strikingly real. The band is wailing a distressed, funereal melody, with trumpets high and
crying, and then muted, echoing the desperate statement. All the while a league of
drummers thump---, thump---, thump, thump, thump. They step and glide, like pallbearers.
This rocking of the paso, and the minor chords, never resolved,
only working in pathetic progressions and rising in octaves, then petering out after the
muted solo—is enough for an outsider to examine the ancient, carved, sooty face of
Christ and honour his achievement of friends. To believe in the injustice of the
punishment. I am standing in the helix of the people’s participation, the group
sensitivity, the collection of eyes focussed on one point in the street, the unanimous
hush when the paso is lifted and the bands starts up again.
It’s as if the play is a pledge of allegiance—allegiance to
the brotherhood, the images, and the Parish’s district. It is an allegiance to the
family, to the city, and to the legacy that continues in the little, flushed,
velvet-encased faces. The drama paces, and stops, and plays the instruments
inherently—knowing what to feel at every street corner. The miracle of this story is
celebrated, and venerated and worked every year in the heightened sensuality that is
Seville’s collective personality. Spanish essayist R. Reyes Cano wrote, "The
Sevillano does not work wonders for others to gaze on but to gaze on them himself, so sure
is he of what is true".
Sevillanos live with the reputation for unadulterated hedonism, for
enjoying life and rearranging others aspects, such as work, around social engagements and
celebration. Passion discloses itself in the foot-shuffles and the crying trumpets, and in
the leaking, ambient orange blossoms that perfume the streets and fall to rest at the
curb, where children gather them. At the post-office, which is closed, a man sways in
mid-morning drunkenness. "It is a holiday all week, you see," he says
with a firm grip on my arm. Across the street a doorway-bar is spilling over with
holidaymakers. "It’s a holiday because of Semana Santa…(and in
English) take it easy!"
