EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNALApril 17, 1999
Calle Conde de Barajas, Seville
The Feria Dancers
A stroll along Calle Sierpes during Saturday comidas is like
roaming through a ghost town. Sierpes is Seville’s busiest and most renowned
thoroughfare for shopping, with boutiques of Andalusian fans, shawls, ceramics and hats,
and designer clothes and shoes, cafes, pastry shops, ice cream parlours and department
stores. It’s a place for pedestrians.
Comidas means that everyone but the tourists is at home eating
and drinking and digesting. Foreigners stand at the corners with maps, or peer into the
shop windows. Everything is cerrado until 5pm, when shops will reopen and stay that
way until 8 or 9 o’clock.
An old woman stands with her patchy, brown legs like a wishbone. Like
she has been sitting on a horse for a lifetime. Her clothes hang in drapes of dingy, grey
flowers. She wears a hat that’s been sat on. She holds a plastic bowl, shallow, with pesetas
dotting like a sad clown’s disheveled costume.
Beside her, her old husband plays a trumpet one-handed. It’s more
about the one-handedness than the trumpetness. And in his other hand he holds two leather
leads, and they are attached to two small dogs, who stand on their hind legs and dance in
miniature feria dresses.
A feria dress is a ruffled, polka-dotted dress made of colourful
fabric. This week, thousands of Sevillano women will put them on and parade through the
streets to the fairgrounds in celebration of Seville’s annual April Fair. The dresses
make a rainbow of colours, and twirl endlessly when the people dance the flamenco-like Sevillanas.
Feria upholds the traditions of a city that takes every opportunity for costume and
revelry.
As the pedestrians approach, the old husband lifts his trumpet and the
dogs jump to their hind legs and turn in circles. One of the dogs appears tired and
sluggish. He stands on all fours in his small red dress, looking at his master, and turns
only when he wants to unwind himself.
All the while she holds the box lid in front of the performance,
collecting from onlookers and muttering things to her husband. .
It’s not uncommon for buskers in Spain to include animals in their
performances. I saw a man once, who had trained his handsome, majestic Doberman Pincer to
sit with his hind legs, hips and bottom through his parted forelegs, like a gymnast. The
dog balanced there with his weight on his front feet, all day, while the man stood over
him and collected charity.
After comidas, the Sevillanos return to work or errands, and
congest Calle Sierpes at 7 o’clock when they take a communal paseo through the
shopping district. The entertainers are swallowed up by the noise and numbers. The trumpet
screeches above the chatter and the traffic, squealing to get attention, but as the people
pass in crowds, they haven’t the time or space to look down and see the pushed-in,
bitter little faces of the feria dancers.
