Baños árabes

In Al-Andalus, the Arab baths served the same type of social function as the Roman thermae, or the Greek gymnasia, or the Turkish hamam: public, communal, with rooms & pools of different temperatures, to be used over the course of hours, anointings of oil, scraping of sweat & dirt with bronze instruments, leisure.

I visited the resorted ruins of Jaén’s baños árabes, beneath a 16th century palace & museum, last Sunday – woke up early, took my café down the street, & got lost in the old town west of the cathedrál, whose streets are so narrow that at times I could not have put both arms out, and which process straight uphill, so that even lost I knew I was going in the more or less the right direction, and after I little while I found myself quite suddenly in a sunlit plaza in front of a palacio- de Villardompardo, as it turned out, all white stucco & dark hardwood frames, with a sunlit marble-tiled atrium inside. The atrium was enclosed by glass & was a kind of arcade, five stories high, with abundant darkleafed greenery & easily confused hallways leading this way & that.

The baths are below it all – they were closed when the Christians retook the city, running water & communal bathing being a despised quality of the Moorish enemy, and at one point used as a tannery. You descend stone basement stairways, walk over a long hallway floored with glass, over hermetically sealed Roman ruins – worn stones, foundations of buildings, with green moss growing on them, kept at a constant temperature by fans & humidifiers, your feet suspended above it all – an odd feeling – and descend further, into absolute quiet, cold stone. The ceilings are vaulted & domed in brick & have starshaped holes at regular intervals to let daylight in. I wonder briefly what the baths must have been like in rainstorms. They are mosaicced and tiled, although most of the decorative elements have been stripped. There is a quiet stillness, rooms of five different temperatures (now a uniform & unchanging chill), the ubiquitous horseshoe arches, the vaulting, spacious feeling Moorish architecture gives you. Very little remains.

Above is the real attraction – the baths being lovely and all, but the work of twenty minutes at most: the Museo de Artes y Costumbres Populares, housed inside the body of the palace above the ruins of the baths.

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The museum (of popular [folk] art & culture) is nothing less than a history via artifact of the whole of preindustrial Andalucía. It’s as though somebody filled a room with the objective correlatives to Fernand Braudel’s The Stucture of Everyday Life. Rooms of the old palace, beautiful spaces in their own right, with ruddy tiling on the floor, potted plants, good light, are dedicated to Water, Grain, Olives, Textiles, the Home, Childhood. There are worn millstones engraved withwheat or ears of corn, unglazed clay jars for water, leather chests riveted with brass tacks, shovels & rakes made out of wood, brooms that are a bundle of twigs tied together, breadmolds, wire screens for sifting chaff, warped iron shears, a long series of implements & wood & metal machinery used to transform raw wool into yarn.

Everything is unique, worn down, repaired & re-repaired, mismatched, illfitting, made with a lack of precision completely foreign – to my eyes, to machine-made things. There are carts with wooden wheels, iron sheathing the rims. Saddles, bits, & bridles. Old classroom benches, painted green. Schoolbooks & picturebooks & a century’s worth of old dolls & tin or lead soldiers painted different colors & a metal cannon like the one my father played with as a child, that still is in my grandparent’s house and probably dates to the forties, an array of red or blue toy rifles & popguns, halfsize, with wood stocks. A set of 19th century handpainted playing cards, with different suits: Cups, Stars, Swords, & Clubs. There is no queen; the face cards progress from an unmounted man-at-arms, weapon in hand, to a mounted knight or cabellero, to the king himself.

There is an old mantlepiece icon: the Virgen de las Angustias, patron of Granada, the picture blackened by the soot of countless fires, the frame elaborate & engraved with words, the Virgen herself almost obscured completely, looming out of shadow, wearing a crown & hugely pregnant, on her womb a map of the world.

Everything is presented together, ahistorically, without dates – it could be three hundred years old, it could be eighty.

In a room with textiles & fabric are traditional clothes hung on mannequins. There is a traje de fiesta – an elaborate fiesta dress from Úbeda, worn for the paseo, for féria, rarely otherwise. Men wore linen shirts with collars, & a kind of rough brown wool cape, embroidered with thread. There is a sewing machine, black, inlaid with gold – the best machines here, the old handcrafted bourgeois machines, are works of art. One very long hall with a black & white checker tile floor and blue & yellow & white painted tiles on the facing of the fireplace is stuffed with lit glass cabinets of fine china, from floor to ceiling, notable & a little breathtaking just because of the length of the room and the accumulation.

Outside, there is a hallway witha series of old, sepia photographs – turn of the century. Andalucía at first looks like nothing more than a Sergio Leone western. I don’t know another way to put it. The similarity is striking. There is the interior of a one-room house, floored with unmortared tile, soot stains on the plastered walls, herbs hanging from the ceiling, the woman cooking in the fireplace. Men wear widebrimmed hats & ponchos. Women are all in headscarves. The floors are dirt, or rough woodplanks over dirt, or tile laid on top of dirt. A photograph of a town plaza during siesta shows about thirty men, and a few laden mules, lying in the shadow of one big tree. In the sunlight, nothing moves. Another one shows women carrying those ceramic jugs I saw lining up at the village fountain (pool?) for water, and men next to them watering their horses. One titled “La Féria” looks like Coney Island in 1905. Clothes are washed in midwinter in snowcovered streams. “Hombres Comiendo Migas” has seven or eight, half sitting, gathered expectantly around a sloping iron pan over a small fire in the middle of a terraced plaza.

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After couple of hours I leave and go out into the plaza and sit down and think for a while. The palace has been built & rebuilt. You can see the foundations of different buildings, the differences in the brick, the patchwork. The plaza is planted with palms & with lime trees. In the fountain, a swan is strangled by a bronze snake, water spouting from its arched neck & gaping beak. The sun is out in full. In the center of town, in front of the Cathedral, thirteen-year-olds are getting confirmed, and afterwords, wearing bright red robes & little portraits on gold chains around their necks, they walk through the plazas with their parents.

I think, wordlessly, and I don’t really know how to describe it, of our alienation, our profound alienation, from traditional ways of life & from the past, especially as Americans. Braudel, whose book I wasn’t able to carry with me, writes, summing up his own point:

”It is quite easy to imagine being transported to, say, Voltaire’s house at Ferney, and talking to him for a long time without being too surprised. In the world of ideas, the men of the 18th century are our contemporaries: their habits of mind and their feelings are sufficiently close to ours for us not to feel we are in a foreign country. But if the patriarch of Ferney invited us to stay with him for a few days, the details of his everyday life, even the way he looked after himself, would greatly shock us.”

That the words survive, the ideas coincide, but that the very room in which he wrote, what he would have eaten or done after writing, is inaccessable to us. Lacking the book, all I can do for illustration is turn to John Leonard’s review in the New York Times:

Here is more than we may think we need to know about the hoe and the stove, pack animals and locusts, cod-fishing and iron-forging, white bread and Persian daggers, pepper and beards. Montaigne, for instance, didn’t use a fork. The Chinese word for “chair” is “barbarian bed.” Islamic scissors have hollow blades. After 1600, “State revenue from pulque in New Spain was equal to half the revenue from the silver mines.” Not all windmills turn vertically. The idea of privacy wasn’t invented until the 18th century. Tea is only popular in those countries innocent of vines that yield wine. As European “civilization” evolved toward what we now know as “capitalism,” it was distinguished by its inordinate consumption of meat and whisky, and its consummate sailing of the high seas.

There is nothing random in Mr. Braudel’s catalogue. [...] But general readers, perhaps inclined to a romantic view of the ages, will want to know why they should go through so many chapters on olives, wigs, table manners, gunpowder, mail delivery, water engines, soap and underwear. The reasons are various.

And for me, one of these is that, through catalogue, it becomes harder and harder to fool yourself into thinking that the past was like anything like postmodern American life. That in important ways, it is almost unimaginable.

Nick Tosches writes, in his elaborate headfake of a biography, King of the Jews,

We seek truth and meaning from the lost or shadowy precincts of the past. An absurd pursuit, as we cannot even find these things in the present, which lies – in both sense of the verb – clearly before us. In this search we feel more comfortable with set pieces of fable than with fragments of fact, for fragments can cut and gash and present themselves in isolation from the other, lost fragments of the unknowable whole.

We are drawn to the neatly wrapped sweet that can be grasped by the child’s clutch of our understanding. And we call it history. The fragment can tear and bloody that small, soft clutch.

But a fragment of real history – and thus, by nature, real mystery – is tool as well as weapon: a tool with which we can dig our way to the moment of the present.

For me, so much of the endless distraction, consumption, preoccupation that characterizes our daily life is predicated on forgetting, as often as possible, that the world was not always like this. Films transform the way we picture history front & back, the news cycle revises our eternal present up until the day before yesterday. It becomes impossible to imagine the world without digital media. Without cars whose workings are incomprehensible, driven by computers, the machinery encased in black plastic. Without fruit delivered by airplane. An object in a case doesn’t change any of that. But maybe it can tear & bloody that soft, small clutch.

I got up from where I’d been sitting, on a stone bench next to the fountain, & watched the kids playing in the plaza, and turned towards the cathedral & started to walk down another street I’d never seen before, to try and get lost again.

One month, un més

As of today I’ve been in Spain for a full month. Every day is the longest I’ve ever lived outside the country.

So it seems appropriate today to transcribe here my first day of school, on Monday, 5 October, that is scrawled right now in blue pen inside my notebook, artifact of the notes I took on the bus. As of that morning, I don’t know what classes I will be teaching, where my school is, what the countryside looks like, or where anything is. I haven’t changed a word.

8:15 a.m. My first day. Walked for almost an hour in the predawn, the sky blue & orange. A man clapped the birds out of the trees – in the morning they sing incessantly from the branches lining the Gran Eje. Writing in English might be a way to survive all of this.

So – first day. Walked a mile, two, sweating by the end, worried I wouldn’t make my bus. Spilled coffee all over the stainless steel counter of the bus station diner, & forgot to order chocolate for dipping with my churros. An old lady at the diner apologized for me: La mala mañana, she said, & shook her head as I gulped down hot the second consolation cup poured for me wordlessly by the sighing man in spectacles who worked the espresso machine. The churros were dry & fried & without chocolate they left me feeling queasy; I couldn’t finish them.

Next to me an old man came in for a morning glass of anis liquor & drank it in two sips & then took a glass of water.

I asked the bus driver twice to make sure it was the right one for Bédmar, walked out, checked the sign on the front, walked back in. The second time he gave me a look and said, “I took your ticket, right? I wouldn’t have let you on if this wasn’t the bus for Bédmar!”

Remember these moments. They don’t come again. This is a good thing.

8:41. The aútobus is playing “Bleeding Love” on the radio. A muddy, drought-emptied riverbed. Burning brush between the olive trees. Open fire in daylight always looks out of place. Geometric rows of olive trees, perfectly straight, stippling the hills. They cut right through the stone ruins of one ancient farmhouse, I cannot tell from which century. The walls here have been built & rebuilt. Corrugated iron on the roof of one, laid over ancient stone. They harvest olives between November & February largely by hand, laying out tarps underneath and beating the branches with sticks.

8:47. Olive trees & cut traverse roads only. The landscape is almost entirely given over.

8:56. I am the only one left on the bus. (Wait – two abuelas just boarded.)

[After the first stop, at Mancha Real - retrospect].

8:58. Broken glass bottles inset on the top of the concrete walls backing these houses.

9:07. From the ridge, looking down below, a dozen small brush fires dotting the olive wilderness, smoke pluming. Low hazy fog.

9:08. The ayuntamiento labels the centro & other sights of even the smallest pueblo. (Jímena, in this case). Cliffside pueblos blancos. There is another ancient castle, a tiny one, ruined, right up against the church, which abuts the fortifications, at the highest point. What a god-damned lookout. The entire valley is spread out below like a rumpled bedsheet.

- Cliffside garden paths.

- Bédmar a valley town, I think? I still don’t see it. The road winds. It is hidden behind hills.

- THERE it is. 9:18 a.m. Low elevation, but built into the side of the biggest mountain around. The castle is a little up the side of the slope – Scratch low elevation. It’s higher than I thought.

- Bédmar: Municipio de Olivio. So says a painted tile sign at the park at the foot of the hill. The driver honks and waves at a man in blue coveralls filling water in a bucket.

Después. Asked directions in succession, as in a fairytale, of a shambling pensioner, a man with a glass eye, & three grandmothers, who mumbled Buenos días together; each replied in an incomprehensible local dialect. The village is indifferently windswept & dilapidated & kind of beautiful. I eventually find my school. The chemistry teacher jokes heartily with me – I don’t understand him – & wears constantly a white labcoat.

First class: 1º de ESO. Sixteen students, mostly 11-12 yr. olds, with two repeating & disruptive 13s. Colors, numbers, “How are you?”, “What is your name?”, & lots, lots of Spanish. Helped two teachers in the lounge with music & natural sciences, which apparently are my bilingual classes. Was given the tour. Drove back with a teacher & talked Spanish for perhaps half an hour.

James Sligh, day one: Teacher of English, music, & natural sciences, & sometime auxiliar de communicación. What on earth have I gotten myself into?

Idioms

I was sitting up last night trying to read my Raymond Chandler, but I ended up paging through my 4th edition University of Chicago English-Spanish dictionary instead, last updated in 1987, which has a directory of colloquial sayings. I was looking for le eché la vista encima (for reasons I’ve gone on about at length), but as soon as I read this one I got distracted:

Cada muerte de obispo.

Literally, Every death of a bishop; the dictionary lists it next to “Once in a blue moon,” though I like the invocation of apostolic governance better. I imagine gilded coffins & lillies & red velvet presiding over every rare event now.

My other favorites: Dar calabazas, “to give pumpkins,” – to give the brush-off, to avoid, to spurn.

Hacer buenas migas – to make good migas, or “to go well together”.  Migas being (I was described the method at length one day in my 1º de ESO A section) a catch-all rainy day food you make  with stale breadcrumbs dampened & dabbed with salt & paprika, left to soak under a wet towel and then fried up in a pan with olive oil, chorizo, eggs, peppers, garlic, & anything else you have left in the pantry.

Your spouse, your better half, is a media naranja – half an orange. To shoot someone point-blank? A quemarropa – to the point of leaving powder burns from the gun-barrel on clothing.

Almost better than the Spanish colloquialisms, though, were the English equivalents I had never heard before:

To be between the devil and the deep blue sea.
To be all talk & no cider.
To give one the mitten.

And (most enigmatically):

(To say one is) from Missouri.

Tapeo

In Jaén, as in Granada, they still practice tapeo as it should be practiced: the little plates come free of charge with each caña or glass of wine, in a preset order, primero, segundo, tercero, and you do not know what is coming until it is brought to you, though you can get an idea by paying attention to what the other people at the bar are eating.

In Spain I have been given little plates that range from small pieces of bread with olives, cured cheese & loops of breadstick, or a small sampler of jámon ibérico, to albóndigas (meatballs), chunks of pork in a sauce with peas & red peppers, & pincho of tortilla español, which is a kind of omelette made with potato & cheese.

I have had uninspiring plates of oily chicken, fried croquettes, & red-hot little sausages in a bun. I have had prawns in sea salt, & olive tapanade served warm on a little baguette, & chicken in coconut milk with sweet cooked onions, & many iterations of ensalada rusa, often with peas & tomatoes or white asparagus, always with potatoes, & mayonnaise.

The beer is a light, pale lager called rubio (blonde), and each city has its own mark, although in Jaén as in Sevilla & Córdoba, Cruzcampo (today an owned subsidiary of Heineken) dominates. There is indifferent red wine, often served over ice with fanta, & sherry from Jerez, & a type of sweet, super-concentrated alcoholic wine made from dried grapes whose name starts with an “M” but which I can’t remember.

Tapa, I’m told, means “cover”, and was originally a plater or a piece of stale bread put over the glass to keep the flies away, &, eventually, to keep the punters upright. More lists of tapas to come.

Diferencias, iii

In Sevilla, capital of the autonomous region of Andalucía, built upon the ruins of the Roman city of Hispalis, birthplace of flamenco, taxi drivers at the bus station get out and push their cars along by the front doors to save gas. There are bikes on every block, city bikes, red-plated, on racks, for rent at a small electric kiosk that you take out and put away at another rack in the city, without having to worry about locks or theft, and technicians whose job is to go from rack to rack changing innumerable flats. Horse-drawn carriages leave the cathedral area just next to the tramtracks on which rides the sevillano metro.

Sidewalks, paved in marble or white- and rose-colored checked local stone, are dotted with flattened dogshit, & at the margins with trash & spittle, cleaned nightly but ignored otherwise, and the highways too are littered with trash at the side. At night, deliverymen on red motorbikes use the sidewalks, and the mail is delivered by young women wearing green boots & riding bright yellow Vespas with the royal crest & Correos across the side in dark blue.

The bigger the street, the more likely it is to be unsigned. All of the names changed after Franco died – in Jaén, la Avenida del Generalissimo is now Paseo de la Estación. Everyone still calls the Calle de Andalucía the Gran Eje.

Global capitalism

All of Spanish youth is obsessed with The Simpsons, a name almost impossible to pronounce intelligibly in andalús – even now that I know to expect it, it still takes a while to register the name of the patriarch, “Hu-maer Theem-thoe“. There is a Moe’s Bar on the Gran Eje, & a lot of my kids play el saxo, like Lisa.

Popeye’s Hambuergers promises all-beef patties. Ertsatz Mickey Mouse balloons are held in giant bunches & sold during féria. My television features episodes of “Dirty Sexy Money”, which is oddly compelling in dubbed Spanish, and near-constant reruns of a supernatural Jennifer Love Hewitt series I’ve never heard of.

In a bus, driving down a carreterra in the middle of the Sierra Magínas, a carpet of fog roiling in the valley below, winding through the cliffside village of Jímena, where the trees grow sideways out of the side of the mountain & hang above the abyss, on the morning of my first day of school, two old women arguing in Spanish in front of me, the first song I heard on the radio in this wilderness of olive groves, in this first day, was “Bleeding Love”.

Féria de san lucas, ii

San Lucas, the physician-iconographer whose day is 18 October, commemorated in Jaén by féria, & in Granada by the ritual hazing by gauntlet of first-year graduate medical students (of whom he is their patron saint), is said to have written two books of the Bible & to have lived in the ruins of Troy, escaping martyrdom to die a peaceful old age in Thebes.

In his honor, in the eight days leading up to his feast day, men wear flatbrimmed sombreros of the kind worn to correos del toro, women pin red carnations in their hair, & women & little girls both can be seen in the plazas wearing brightly colored festival dresses, elaborately ruffled at the edges, suited to dancing the flamenco & more familiar to an American via the fiestas of México. Fireworks are lit off, carnival barkers call out, neon lights installed over thoroughfares, & litre bottles of locally brewed Alcázar are put on sale in supermarkets throughout the province in preparation for the inevitable botellón.

III. Los Deliqüentes

On the sixth day of féria, after I’d slept my way through puente, nursing a bronchial cough, my roommate & his friend filled a glass pitcher with ice, rum & fanta and took me to a part of the city I had never seen before, through the ruins of an immense 15th century stone gate, through a park lit at night by white electric lamps & filled with jiennenses engaging in the botollón. We’re taking you, I was told, to a concert. “Real Spanish music.”

People streamed past us, there were more ahead & more coming up behind. I hadn’t known there were this many people in Jaén. I’d been taking hour long walks every night, even when I was sick, & I hadn’t seen this many people anywhere.

This is the way it was: A sea of faces in an open-air venue covered by a tent, a type of ampithetre (concrete steps sloping down towards the stage). Spaniards pushing past each other in their familiar & direct way, the physical contact as no-nonsense as the language, dancing. flamenco clapping, cherried cigarettes glowing in the darkness, the smell of marijuana smoke, wrists twisting in the air, large plastic cups of cuba libre or cerveza, everybody singing to every song, a line-up of between two and twenty people on stage at any given time, all part of the same band, announced wordlessly behind by a sign that read, LOS DELINQÜENTES. Everyone knew the words.

Sometimes it was flamenco. Sometimes there was just a man playing the guitar with his fingers, three people clapping into microphones behind him in the characteristic flamenco rhythm, flat-palmed, emphasis on the fourth beat. Things veered wildly into a Bob Marley cover, a version of “Come Together” that was almost English, a half hour reggaeton jam, some serviceable punk rock, more flamenco, a sung version of “Feliz cumpleaños” to one of the band members, songs that were clearly old traditional numbers, songs that everybody knew, children’s songs. There were maybe six encores, the first of which was enacted by ten minutes of applause, chanting, an entire audience of five hundred people singing in unison a song that began, “¡Encore! ¡Encore! Encore y encore, . . .” & includes more words that I do not know, & shouting ¡OLÉ, OLÉ OLÉ, OLÉ, OLÉ! & cheering madly before the band finally re-emerged.

Lighters were hoisted into the air, open flame by the hundreds, the concert continuing for what seemed like a night & a day, there was a giant pirate flag.

By the end the band was sitting on stools near the front of the stage while the roadies cleaned up behind them, singing to each other in a circle, the air hazed over with herbed smoke, fire, lights. I thought to myself that I was maybe beginning, just beginning to start really experiencing Spain.

Afterwards, we went to the fairgrounds outside the city, to have a look around.

IV. La Virgen

At the top of the mountain that anchors the old city of Jaén, in the south, near the ruined castle, is a giant cross lit up at night. I didn’t see the procession of the Virgen on Sunday night, the evening after the saint’s day. My roommate waved his hand & kept eating cured ham & watching television when I asked him around time it would happen, the dueña was cooking dinner for the four of us; it didn’t seem worth it to go outside again. It’d been raining all day. I decided to stay in, eat, talk Spanish instead.

Two weeks before, another Sunday: I was homeless, living in a hotel a mile outside the city, next to an abandoned gas station, a freeway, & a brewery. I hadn’t started yet at school. I had walked for six or seven hours that day taking down postings for apartments, & called the numbers & stumbled through Spanish & found almost all of them were rented out. It was close to nine, after dark. I had gotten hopelessly lost in the alleys of the old city looking for the name of a street I’d probably misheard, to try and meet a man with a daughter who had a room to rent, and I hadn’t found him, and I’d missed the meeting, and I was still homeless, and it didn’t look like I would ever find somewhere to live, and I can’t really communicate how infinite & timeless that anxiety felt, that rootlessness, that dispossession.

I sat myself down on a bench in a plaza, blind with frustration, to read my García Marquez. That was when I heard the music – drums, somewhere in the distance – and I figured I’d get up and have a look and see what was going on.

I walked through iron benches & cobbles & small trees in the stonepaved plaza behind Jaén’s cathedrál, towards the rear facade, the older one, the smaller back entrance. There was a kind of alley behind the church, walled in, and I couldn’t see much at first. Incense wafted in clouds. I got up on tiptoe to peer past the small crowd that had gathered in this little space, and the drums got louder – they were moving closer, I didn’t know then quite where I was, didn’t even know that this was the cathedral – and then the trumpets, the brass, the clarinets began. It was a slow, triumphal march, but mournful – I don’t quite have the vocabulary to describe it, the closest referent I can think of, lacking all else, might be Ennio Morricone – the sound rose and fell like a wave, people crowded the alley, the drums continued. I looked closer: men in black suits with silver medallions hung around their necks; enormous, white candles set atop wrought holders & carried by alter boys; three priests in navy blue silk vestments embroidered with gold: – and finally I saw her. They were processing the Virgen.

Surrounded by white flowers & open flame, swaying back and forth in time with the music, advancing in minor key with the hopelessly sad & rising discourse of trumpets, set atop a platform and adorned, the Virgen listed this way & that as she moved forward, the platform draped in cloth, turning slowly, very slowly, rounding the corner of this small stone alley behind a church. You couldn’t even hear the noise from the street anymore. After a bit I saw that she was being held on the shoulders of a small multitude, a set of feet, I could not count how many, they were shuffling in a kind of march, in time with the music. Sometimes people on their way to their apartments or back from work pushed their way through the watching crowd, matter-of-factly, and stepped around the Virgen & through the incense.

After the longest time she came to a stop, and was put down. The priests stood stock-still, the incense burning in censers hung by small-linked silver chains, & swung them back & forth, frankincense, red sandalwood, herbs & gum arabic transfigured into smoke, a billowing perimeter, and after a moment the music stopped & there was clapping & the men who had been carrying her on their heads and shoulders came out, sweating, grinning, clapping each other on the backs, dressed alike in what looked like maroon soccer jerseys. Some were wearing thick support belts for their backs; they cracked necks & rolled shoulders & grimaced.

Slowly, things broke up. The incense hung around for a while. I walked back out into the world- Spanish hip-hop blasting out of car windows, old people & children & teenagers filling the plazas, the city continuing on indifferently. I still don’t know what I stumbled onto, though I can guess – rehearsal for the férial procession, the one I missed.

And right then I felt – I don’t know. I worried practicality, I was still homeless, I had not yet begun to teach, but there was beginning to be something marvelous about how impossibly out of place I was. San Lucas, the féria – all of this was yet to come.

Féria de san lucas, i

Try to summarize féria in Andalucía & it’s a struggle even to begin. Everything to do with what makes a city – religion, art, local politics, civic life – convluses for an entire week. The féria y fiesta de San Lucas in Jaén closes out a summer of fairs & saints’ days that flare up in every city & even ever little pueblo, & ends the bullfighting season in Andalucía altogether. You can feel the city, that massive organism, doing something as one. The air ferments; the cobbles shake.

I. Parade

I find myself on the first day of the féria in center of the old city, just outside the cathédral, without having planned to be, not knowing exactly what’s going to happen. Teenage boys in purple church robes, half-untucked, smoke cigarettes under the eves of buildings. A troop of knights in maroon livery wander the streets. In twos & threes appear bandmembers in suits & green sashes, carrying their instruments under one arm; costumed Moors with crescent spears; knots of gossipy high schoolers; ladies in waiting; boys in grey uniforms; Catholic schoolchildren. Old men in cardigans roost on park benches. There are traffic cops in neon green vests & special police holding dog leashes & automatic weapons. A catapult is rolled through a back alley. Two horses are teathered near the cathedral. Everyone is half out of costume. A living statue painted silver over his entire body & top hat is drinking a beer with his gloves off. There are unlit floodlights, colored lights hanging over main streets in intricate arabesques. I find a corner near a concrete mixer & some green construction screening to watch; at some point a woman comes up and asks me in Spanish if I’m a journalist, because I’m writing in a blackbound notebook.

The parade, when it begins, proceeds like all civic festivities. Officials speechify; a man (the mayor? I can’t see him from where I’m standing) proclaims from a balcony that it is la féria de la crisis. There are invocations to Jaén, to ¡jienenses! that I barely understand. Families, children on shoulders, young girls holding their infant siblings on their hips, strollers, old people – everyone floods the plaza in big groups of extended family, friends from the pueblos. I feel like a German in Cleveland during the Fourth of July.

The parade, when it begins, is a mishmash of suggestive historical gracenotes & fantasy: There are inflatable dragons and dryads on stilts alongside painted medieval tumblers, men blowing fire, marching bands, Christian knights, little people dressed up as gypsies robbing market stalls, Moorish armies playing Islamic music, a group of belly dancers brought out on harem pillows, the knights shoulder to shoulder and doing an odd, halting march – step-slide-step-slide-step – as the drums play. The music is rhythmic, insistent, vaguely North African or Seraphic – certainly not central Europe, nothing close to Wagner, or the uncomplicated, cheery pomp of an American university marching band. In Jaén, city overseen at night by an Islamic fortress sacked & made a Christian castle & by a giant cross lit from below, the reminders of reconquista are constant.

It gets darker, the parade winds through the center of the city, I duck into a side street & get lost for a while in the old part of the city north of the cathedral, stumble onto plaza fronting la Iglesia de San Ildefenso, where a shrine commemorates the apparition of the patron of the city, la Virgen de la Capilla. The music still in the distance, rising & falling. I walk past little public courtyards I hadn’t known existed, small fountains, the sound of running water in darkness, greenleafed trees lit from behind, tiled atriums. Eventually I find my way back to an avenue, where the crowds are beginning to break up. I go to a tapas bar in an alley behind the cathedral paved with marble & lit by a string of paper lanterns & have two cañas & what comes with them & by now I am feeling lonely, the children are playing on the steps outside the bar, nobody is out here by themselves. I walk home – I’m coming down with a cold, and spend the rest of the weekend in bed coughing.

II. Féria

The fairgrounds are on the outskirts of town, near the train station: squared-off lots of hardpacked dirt, concrete, & brick roadways left vacant all year until fiesta comes, at which point the space is transfigured & becomes a city of white tents, noise & innumerable neon lights.

There is a cacophony of amusement park rides – roller coasters, whirling teacups, bumper cars – & smaller fairground stands with flashing barometers next to punching bags or targets where giant stuffed bears can be won. A line of market stalls run by North Africans selling leather handbags, scarves, watches displayed on ersatz red velvet, beach towels, robot dogs, jewelery. Tented halls devoted to cured hanks of Iberian pork, to whole roasted chickens on spits, to giant iron pans of day-old paella, home for flies.

All of this next to a district of chuerrerías and stands selling Belgian waffles covered in chocolate sauce or kiwi & whipped cream, and banks of soft-serve machines like dairy cows, and banks too of televisions broadcasting horse odds & lottery numbers & raffles, the ground in front littered with a wet plaster of spent tickets, a man yelling the winning numbers into a bullhorn. Underneath incandescent naked lightbulbs, bright-whites, pieces of fresh coconut are displayed underneath running water & sold next to sugared almonds, piles of chocolate bars, trays of candied apples.

Animatronic pirates tromp pretend grapes above giant casks of wine sold at booths in little slender glasses with pastry straws, speakers behind the pirates’ feet blaring flamenco music. There are beer halls in the tents, & brightly lit countertops selling bottles of champagne & paper coca-cola cups full of alcohol, & an entire nightclub district, the music here a constant warring between venues separated by canvas, the speakers so loud you can feel the song in your molars, the dirt between tents a beery, fizzing mud, people dancing on tables & bartops, broken bottles & spent cups on the margins, well-stocked bars pouring nothing but tall glasses of cuba libres & wine over ice with fanta.

Other tents feature live music, flamenco singers, there are tents sponsored by banks & cajas, by the government, by cultural nonprofits, telephone companies, manufacturers. There are gypsy women carrying roses & cartons of cigarettes. The entire fair loops over itself, built on a hillside, so that the nightclub district overlooks the neon-lit expanse of the amusement park, the colored lights hanging over the street, the incandescent bulbs, the smoke rising & the smell of sulfur from the firecrackers that young boys are throwing to the ground and that burst with a sound like gunshots.

People are dancing flamenco in the middle of the streets. The crowds outside the tent bars are singing. By midnight, there are so many people in the mud & tumult of the streets that it becomes difficult to move, a sea of typically Spanish casual physical contact, jostling, copas hoisted, joints being rolled right out in the open air & smoked as though they were nothing more than the omnipresent cigarettes.

I go to the féria twice, alone at first, and then with my roommate, who meets a half dozen friends from the pueblo of Jódar, where he grew up, & before I can speak I’m being handed a big paper cup full of whiskey & orange & puffing on an open-air marijuana cigarette, which I’m beginning to realize is the common habit of all of Jaén province, & being asked more or less constantly, “¿Comó te pasa?” by Spaniards concerned that I’m not having a good time because I’m not dancing enough.

Outside the fairgrounds, at least a thousand teenagers & university students flood the Parque Nuevo and the streets at the edge of the city in one immense botollón, lines thirty people deep in front of locutorios to buy bottles of soda, ice, & snacks, knots of people carrying plastic bags & litres of Alcázar & passing their féria in the time-honored manner of Andalucían youth.

We take the bus back at 6:30 in the morning on the last night of féria - when we leave, everything is still in full swing. Anywhere else, it’d be daybreak, but the sun rises late here, & likely the crowds are waiting for dawn & breakfast to head home.

La memória del fuego

“In the United States, you are never too hot or too cold. Here, you will be hot. You will be cold.”

So said one of the speakers during my oddly corporate-training orientation seminars, four days jetlagged in Sevilla with no coffee breaks, cooped up in grey basement rooms with wine glasses full of bottled water & pads of hotel stationary while outside sevillanos whizzed past on city bicycles.

Taken as a metaphor, even truer as far as things go. The grapes here have seeds; the olives, pits. There are impediments to be chewed around & spat out & left on the side of the saucer. Everyday tasks take a certain amount of effort, where in America they are unconscious, automatic, prechewed.

All of which is a long way of saying that it took me four full days to figure out how to use the gas heater that must be lit underneath the water pipes each morning & then dialed up in order to have a hot shower. The primer would not prime. There was a dial, & a button, & I cannot explain without showing you exactly why it was so complicated, but imagine me couching in front of its copper pipes & gaskets like an ape supplicant at the foot of an obelisk, grunting & waiting for the miraculous appearance of flame.

The morning when I figured out the precise ritual gesture, the push inwards and the two second hold before the lit primer, & then afterwards the pull out and the turn to the full setting, at quarter after six o’ clock a.m., pitch dark outside, the moon hanging full & high, birdsong beginning to issue out from the shadows of trees lining the Paseo de la Estación, having previously taken two cold showers, shivering & hopping in rage in & out of the water, trying to shake the suds off – that is to say, the moment when the blue flame appeared & continued, steady, the whooshing sound of gas burning, was one of the purest triumph & pleasure.

That early in the morning, after that much effort, a hot shower becomes an experience religious in its intensity, a miracle, a transubstantiation. I felt myself linked to a thousand years of shivering humanity trying to stay warm in darkness, I imagined myself struggling with flint, wrapping myself in furs, baking on stones like a lizard.

I now know how to operate a gas heater. Small victories like this – turning on the water heater, succesfully recharging a cellphone, knowing how much a cup of coffee costs & having exact change – become vitally important here. I am unable to understand half of anything that is said. The workings of the world are opaque & sometimes bewildering. The bar of difficulty for everything – opening a bank account, applying for a residency permit, taking the right bus to school – is raised. I feel like nothing will ever seem difficult again when I come back to the States.

Things I miss in october

Raisin bread – autumn – pumpkin pie – sam adams’ octoberfest – apple cider – print editions of the new york times – bagels with lox, capers & cream cheese – my french press – music at home – french toast – burritos, salsa, plaintains, hot sauce, rice in coconut milk, yuca – cherries – undubbed films – walking the esplanade – brownstones – bookstores – used bookstores – libraries – the bars & coffeehouses & juke joints I have made home – the pushmower for my front yard – fallen leaves – free admission to the ica – regular internet access – being able to make jokes.