EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNALApril 3, 1999
Calle Conde de Barajas, Seville
A Miracle of Belonging: Holy Saturday
There was nothing to believe in. Eduardo remained curled in his chair,
without a friend, sinking deeper into his solitude and isolation. No one felt more alone.
No one came to help.
It could have happened to anybody, this eternal series of empty days.
At one time Eduardo felt a success—busy with his business and even thinking about
starting a family. Time slipped away with his circumstances, and at once he felt helpless
and without hope.
Eduardo stepped out to buy a lottery ticket. It wasn’t about the
money. He lived in the flat his mother had rented before the dictatorship of Franco,
during the reign of the Second Republic. Any agreement made before Spain’s current
constitution is binding and cannot be changed. Like many other widows, Eduardo’s
mother made a lifelong contract with the owner of the building. With his mother in a
nursing home, Eduardo lived there paying only a few pesetas in rent. He stepped out
to buy a lottery ticket because he wanted to be a winner. People loved winners. He stepped
out to give the world its final chance to make him happy.
He removed his slippers and stepped out into the stagnant heat of Holy
Saturday. These things were a nuisance, with the crowds and mess. These people treated the
street like a sewer, dropping paper and bottles where they stood—behavior they
wouldn’t dream of in their own homes. Their homes were immaculate. If the mess was
outside their door, it was invisible.
With all the energy he could muster he squeezed in and out of the
strollers and the kissing teenagers. The rippling sun blacked out his pupils. All at once
he collided with a hooded penitent, who was blind himself behind the anonymous mask, the
eye-slits drooping and useless. Eduardo tripped, sending the penitent over and on top of
him. A candle toppled too, and a waterfall of hot wax splashed and dribbled everywhere.
The other penitents were piling up, unable to stop because of the approaching paso.
Everyone was tripping now. The anxious crowds stepped into the street and blocked the
procession further.
He lay under those heavy bodies. The penitents yelped as people stepped
on their bare feet. Eduardo reached forward to find a crawling space. It was dark under
those scrambling, robed bodies. He looked up, searching for sky and balance. There before
him, looming, was the huge mass of the paso, velvet and gold, wobbling with
unsteadiness on the necks of the costaleros. At its summit gazed a sooty, agonized
face under a halo of gold and silver. From up there, she peered down at him, her eyes
weeping.
The paso stopped in time. Eduardo was cornered between the edge
of the velvet curtain and the recovering nazarenos, and the shoes of the onlookers,
inching ever forward toward the float. A voice rose above the chatter of the
spectators—a woman’s voice was crying and cooing a saeta of praise,
singing, "beloved, divine, everlasting love". Eduardo felt her gaze and looked
up again. Her tears, like silver beads on a drawn, sickly face, rested ageless there in
the shadow of the canopy. She was utterly beautiful in the embroidered robes and lace.
All at once, the paso jumped. It seemed the penitents had
regained their organization and the procession was on its way again. The costaleros
lilted towards Eduardo, who remained paralyzed on the cobblestone, all wax and blood from
his collision. He ducked when the paso came over him, and the costaleros,
holding a steady pace, shuffled around him like a Red Sea, until there was an alley for
his body beneath the float. There in the hot darkness, with the breathing, the huffing,
the grunting and the shuffling, Eduardo’s lips parted in a smile, thinking of the
golden robes above him. He thought of her, and her gaze, and her court—the thousands
who escorted her through the streets. He felt a place among the canvas shoes. He felt a
miracle of belonging.
When the sun shone again, Eduardo stood up and brushed away the sand
and litter. The robe gathered in a train at the back of the paso, rounding to a tip
at the centre where he stood. He fixed his eyes on it, and his arms were intertwined with
the others who stood behind her. They shuffled after the miracle-worker, Maria
Santisima de la Esperanza Macarena, shouting, "Guapo!" with every
step.
