Spring light

Last December, I took a photograph of the blue & white checked plaza I walked through on the way to the bus station every morning, talked about the quality of the light. I carried my camera through again in early April. By now the sun is so bright in Andalucía it’s become impossible to walk outside at midday without dark glasses, & the heat transforms the air, & the white buildings are made brilliant by it. It becomes impossible to imagine that it was ever any other way – as now, in Boston, it is becoming impossible to imagine that I was ever in Spain.

Election year

The elections for the European Union parliament are being held this summer; they’re apportioned nationally, so that Spain votes for its Spanish representatives, and there are apparently E.U.-wide coalitions of national parties, on the general lines of right-conservative & social democrat.

Forests of placards, banners & posters are sprouting on busstops and alongside major roads, sponsored by  the two major Spanish national parties, the PP (Partido Popular) and the PSOE (Partido Socialista Obreros de España) – I just got up to have my morning coffee & neapolitana at the school café & heard a PP spot on the radio.

From my perspective on the streets of Jaén, the PSOE is everywhere – they have a series of posters modeled on the one pictured above at every other bus stop on my way to school in the morning. Two picture the leading parliamentary candidates – the other one is tagged, Trabajar por la paz VS. Sembrar el miedo - one has Zapatero & Rajoy facing off (Vencer la crisis VS. Approvecharse la crisis), and the rest are words on colored backgrounds, red for the PSOE, light blue for the PP. I particularly liked: Trabajadores VS. Especuladores. (they have a flikr photostream here, for those of you interested in critiquing graphic design)

“Este Partido Se Juega En Europa” is, as far as I can tell, a kind of pun – both, “This game is played in Europe” and “this party plays in Europe.” PSOE has been in national power since 2004, headed by Zapatero (literally, “Shoemaker”), though they took a hit in last fall’s regional elections, and it seems to me that Zapatero has become generally unpopular.

The PP’s tag is, Ahora soluciones, & their talking points since I’ve been in Spain have centered around opposition to an expansion of autonomous governance in Catalonia & to negotiations with the ETA in Basque country – they’re formulating themselves as a Spanish national party with a focus on Spanishness that had previously been avoided, I think, since Franco. Their ads feature the Spanish flag. They’ve been the opposition party since Aznar’s unflagging support of Bush’s foray into Iraq got him kicked out of office in 2004 (after 8 years in power; he also privatized, among other companies, Télefonica). A whole raft of regional PP figures have been indicted over the last year in a huge corruption scandal revolving around skimming millions off of  public works contracts – the indictment comes from the same Spanish judge, Garzón, that took down Pinochet, & has recently tried to indict members of the Bush administration for their role in authorizing the torture of Spanish citizens in Guántanamo.

Nationally, Rajoy (PP opposition leader) blames Zapatero for la crisis and for Spain’s record-high unemployment; he also accuses him of stealing the PP’s ideas to solve the crisis (this gets propagated a lot on talk radio), and of not having any plan of his own. Their leading EU parliamentary candidate’s first photograph on his personal campaign website is a meeting with the Pope; the second, of the candidate with a baby.

[disclaimer: I don't pretend to know much about Spanish politics aside from what I've picked up from the environment over the last 8 months; errors, misrepresentations, etc. are mine. I just look at posters every day when I take the bus.]

Street life

Late spring, roses the size of cabbage heads blooming everywhere in Jaén. On Thursday, largely unannounced, you started to see strangely costumed people appear in the city center, mimes, red balloons, shabby fairy wings, juggler’s pants, living statues. There were dreadlocks & the faint, wafting smell of marijuana, & mangy dogs, & Jaén, which is usually buttoned-up & disapproving, felt briefly like a different city entirely.

I was taking a walk in the sun near the Plaza de Constitución & stumbled onto the program, which was being handed out by girls in black costumes (reproduced above; La arte toma la calle means Art takes to the streets!), & ended up in the late sunlight standing beneath the awning of the Bar del Pósito (plaza photographed here; the bar’s out of frame to the left) with a bottle of Cruzcampo in hand, where La Batukada played a Spanish-inflected mix of Afrobeat, reggae, salsa, etc. – lots of group singing, call & response, center stage filled with drum, a saxophonist & trombonist & electric guitar.

The plaza was full of hippies, old men, and, in the center, right in front of the small stage, around 30 little kids, who spent the entire show staring straight at the performers in a kind of wonder & dancing their hearts out – one girl in glasses & a red velvet dress kept doing sevillanas, while the band sang about marijuana – hierba buena – & street performers drank cheap red wine out of cardboard containers.

I’ve said it didn’t feel like the same city, and I’m having a hard time making clear what I mean – it felt like somewhere nearer the coast, sun-drenched, somewhere with tourists to gawk at the locals & itinerant musicians & the sorts of people who later would be dancing barefoot on a barstool at the Bódegon. Maybe the word I’m looking for is lively, which for all Jaén’s good points rarely applies.

At any rate, what I liked most about it was the kids – that typically Spanish juxtaposition of outdoor drinking, pleasure-loving youth, & families out on the town for the evening. You see the same kids playing in the marble-tiled alleys outside of the bars by the cathedral all of the time, invariably in jumpers or tiny boat shoes.

Of course, I didn’t have my camera with me – a 35mm with no flash doesn’t work at night, and it’d been close enough to sundown when I’d left home that I hadn’t brought anything with me. You’ll have to imagine the expression on their faces.

Winter light

Every day I come to school in the predawn I see the sky blue slowly, from pitch-black to something lighter, like a stain spreading, until finally out from behind the mountains the sky lightens and the color begins to spill out over the ice that caps the ridges, clean & every day just a little bit earlier, imperceptibly earlier every day.

Above is the plaza in the Peñemefecit I walk through on my way to the bus station, photographed in late December; I finally got around to developing a roll of film. This kind of clean, tired winter light – it’s finally starting to brighten, like watching a Polaroid develop in front of you over months. Even the colors are getting better. The dead clumps of growth you can see on the trellises – I don’t know the species – were bright scarlet for most of autumn, & soon they’ll be greenleafed for the rest of the year.

Bonfires & san antón

Yesterday was the festival of San Antón [Saint Anthony the Great], the 3rd C. Egyptian saint protector of animals, & founder of monasticism. In Jaén the feast day coincides with the end of the olive harvest, and in dozens of plazas in every barrio of the city, great mounds of olive branches are burned in bonfires, the green leaves firing brightly before being transformed into a rain of weightless ash.

I was in the plaza de la Mercéd, a small bare stone plaza in the old town, in front of a 17th C. palace & an unadorned plain stone church with three stained glass windows over the facade, a statue of the Virgen in the niche above the entrance, an iron cross against the front. The plaza was cut through by one small street, and another looped around the church and went down a shallow stairway, & there were orange trees in front of the palace. Everyone stood in crowds by the churchfront, or in front of the palace, or across the narrow street by the even smaller square where there was the busier of the two bars & apartments, and ancient stonefronted fountain with potable water for families & horses.

In the center: the bonfire, radiating heat, and a mound of big six or seven footlong olive branches, leaves on, fed in constantly by a couple of men wearing field clothes & using a firehardened wooden stick as a poker & flaring as the leaves caught. There was a temporary zinc-topped bar set up in front of the church & another in front of a small apartment, selling plastic cups of beer & tinto con limón & skewers of chicken and bread & chorizo & great bags of popcorn, which everyone had in hand; the bags came free with the drinks; you bought small paper tickets from the moneybox and then presented them to the two men pouring the cañas or the tintos.

Children would rush up from time to time, daring the heat, to throw their own smaller branches in. The smoke columned up, with the particular fragrant odor of burning olive wood, & ash peppered hair & jackets & floated inthe drinks, almost a baptism of ash, and when the fire began to die children began to run up from the tiny sidestreets with flammable objects – cardboard, staves of wood, a red leather armchair, a carseat – to feed it still, and near the end of the fire in la Mercéd a dozen or so older men & women, grandparents, began to sing & made arches with their hands, pairs of them, the last pair rushing under the arch to be the front of the tunnel of dancers, the whole unit moving around the dying fire & singing, what must have been a traditional dance, a rural dance, something done during the harvest, but now only the older folks were dancing, & one father & his little daughter, and fewer people knew the song.

On the Avenida de Barcelona, near the nightclubs & the newer part of town, the bonfire was in a bit vacant dirt lot with a chainlink fence around it, next to apartment buildings and across the street from a park, one big fire in the center, low when I got there, just embers, and a dozen small conflagrations of hot coals scattered around, and crowds, not just young people but everyone, some with plastic folding tables, engaging in the botellón.

At one small firepit, back in the corner, boys of 10 or 12 lined up to jump over the flames. I was drinking my vodka tonic out of a cardboard Don Simon container, because my plastic cup had broken, and so was reliving the youth of the Spaniards I was with, teachers in Jaén at the schools of American friends of mine. They’d done this, I was told, in secondary school & the university because cups were too expensive.

Soon four or five of us were lining up with the children, we twice their size, to jump the bonfire. I myself made it over the flames unscathed.

Flora & fauna, ii

Trellis in Victoria Park.

A house in the Peñamefécit, my barrio, the strip of houses between the Avenida de Barcelona & the Calle de Andalucía (Gran Eje) against the mountain, stretching west & north from the city center.

The newstand & florists’ are next to a handful of good tapas bars – Bar del Pósito, El Bodegón, Deán’s – & an old marble column, out of frame, & on the stairs is my favorite piece of graffiti in the city.

Flora & fauna

The leaves turn here, in patches, at the same time as the orange trees bear fruit & the olives begin to be harvested. Palm trees tremble in pale, weak sunlight. Oranges ripen fat & plump next to bare branches. Autumn.

In honor of Santa Catalina de Alejandría, 4th c. martyr & patron of philosophers & students, who is symbolized by the palm, the sword, & the rueda dentada, iced sardines are roasted whole, scales & heads, on flat griddletops with sea salt, & the entire city climbs to the summit of the mountain next to the castle to eat them on her feast day with their fingers. You eat them over bread to soak up the oil, boned & peeled.

To the east:  hills greening in the early winter rain, the pass that is called gap-tooth, the beginning of the Sierra Máginas. To the west: the city, all of Jaén huddled around the base of the single mountain, the hilly olived countryside like a rumpled bedsheet.

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.

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.

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.