EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNALApril 1, 1999
Calle Conde de Barajas, Seville
Showing Up: Holy Thursday
Juan Ramon Jimenez wrote, "In universal spring Paradise comes down
to Seville", but Seville was never without milk and honey. Never not potent with
fragrances and colours and voices, only now these things are magnified in the perpetual
performance of a living play, where everyone has a line or two.
It’s snowing orange blossoms, soaking the plazas into
scratch-and-sniff boxes. Lanky boys in papal robes swing burning incense in silver cups.
The spicy smoke rises and mingles with the cigarette clouds, and the perfume of a million
freesias on the paso. A superior nazareno is in charge of lighting the
candles held by 750 brothers. He clasps a ball of wound wick, lighting the end and walking
among the penitents, touching the flame to each candle. A smell of burning wax completes
the pungent bath.
In 1992, in anticipation of welcoming the world for Expo, the Seville
government offered every household in the city the equivalent of $1000 to paint their
house. With aesthetic sensitivity, some Sevillanos went ahead and made small repairs to
their facades, and touched up the glowing white, amber and ochre of their walls and
balconies. Others kept things the way they were, peeling and sculptural like Tapies. Not
far from Seville on the road to Granada lies a small village called Alcala de Guadaira
where there is a unique sand called albero. It is golden and reflects the sunlight.
The Sevillanos like to mix the sand with paint. This is why when walking, the walls of
Seville appear to change colour depending on the time of day. At dawn the sand is pale
yellow, but turns copper at noon. At magic hour it appears amber and gold, and when dusk
settles the walls are pink. For dessert, the facades conjure the local colour of
terra-cotta tiles and the grey cobblestone, the cobalt sky-pockets and that mustard earth
that kicks up at the Alameda and at the edges of the green spaces. Seville’s
mother-colours blot cleanly against the ever-present white of walls and tiles, organic and
mottled by house painters with small, round brushes.
The effect is lived, and living, and sundry like a series of poems with
a similar theme. In these yellow alleyways, the people dressed for Holy Thursday move
above the cobbelstone like a school of sleek minnows. Women of all ages are dressed in
black, crowned with tall lace mantilla headdresses. Massive tortoiseshell combs
stand high on the top of the head. A large square of black lace is draped over the comb
and tucked with a small, ornate pin at the back. Thousands of women are dressed this way.
Participation in the play is not based upon social status. It’s sociology.
The students at Seville’s University stage a procession. The
workers at the cigar factory stage a procession. Los Gitanos, the gypsies’s
brotherhood was started in 1753. The Capilla de los Marineros, the brotherhood of
sailors, dates back to the 15th century and today it has 1200 members. Even the
unwashed, puppy-selling vagrants parade through the streets with rosemary bouquets and
piccolo duets.
At the mid-afternoon procession of the 1560 Capilla de Montesion
women in mantillas follow the paso, chatter with the penitents and stand in
groups, their faces turning orange in the late light. There is little formality. There is
little divide between those who are part of the official procession and those who
participate from beyond the doors of the chapel. The paso is an artwork, taken from
the museum and brought to its patrons in the streets. It isn’t even that people are
conscientious about making the whole event work. The participation is lifestyle, and the
lifestyle is congenital. The effort, the gathering and the socializing, right down to the
elegant, picturebook perfection of the mantilla—everything that is going on
here is about showing up.
