I don’t know what time the drumming started. I woke up in the early hours of the morning and heard it through my window, then went back to sleep and the drum merged with my dreams. It was a slow and steady beat: dum…dum…dum…
When I woke up again later in the morning, I could still hear the distant drumbeat coming in my open window. At first I didn’t pay much attention to it; by now I’d gotten used to the unusual sounds from the streets. There was the man who would walk past my window playing panpipes; when the local people heard him coming, they all went down to the street with their knives for him to sharpen. Then there was the butanero, who came past calling out, “Butano!” He sold the big orange gas canisters that powered the houses of Seville.
The sounds of the knife man and the butanero had become part of the soundscape of Seville that I loved. Music seemed to be in the air, and even the cry of the butanero reminded me of the voice of a flamenco singer. So now I didn’t think twice about the drums; I knew it would be another Spanish ritual that I had yet to discover.
I was meeting Zahra for coffee that morning, and as I left the apartment, I heard the sound of wailing music. It sounded like a marching band tune being played backward. I turned a corner to find that the road was blocked by hundreds of people. They all stood watching as a procession made its way down the street, a crowd of hooded men carrying a statue of Jesus. Leading the procession were two men in white robes swinging incense burners, followed by another two robed men beating big drums, and a brass band playing the slow, mournful music.
This was Semana Santa, Holy Week, the Spanish Easter celebrations that go on for seven days and finish with Easter Sunday. The crowd surged toward the statue of Jesus, crying out prayers and reaching out to touch it. Then the drumming stopped and the procession halted in the middle of the road. The crowd fell silent; everyone seemed to be holding their breath. When the Jesus statue started to move, slowly, from side to side, the crowd erupted into rapturous cheers: “Olé, Olé! Jesús, olé, Olé!” What was going on? I couldn’t understand it. Why were they shaking the statue, and why did this make the crowd go wild?
I asked an old man next to me and he said, “Jesús está bailando!”
“Jesus is dancing?” I repeated it back to him, thinking I’d heard him wrong, but he confirmed with a radiant smile, “Sí, sí! Jesús está bailando!” I looked up at the Jesus statue. He wasn’t looking so good. His face was contorted in agony and streaked with blood from the crown of thorns on his head. His body was wasted and his bones were protruding…and they were making him dance? I guess in Seville there’s no excuse not to toma que toma.
This was certainly going to be more colorful than Easter back home, which consisted of Sunday lunch with the family (me picking the goat’s cheese out of the goat’s cheese salad and eating some of the roast veggies that hadn’t touched the lamb) and coming up with ingenious reasons why I should break my diet to eat chocolate.
The Spanish certainly seemed to take Easter seriously. The street was completely blocked, and every attempt I made to move through the crowd was met with angry shouts and hisses from the people around me. How on earth was I going to get to the café?
At the rate the procession was going I figured it would take me at least an hour to cross the road, so I turned around to see if I could find a way through the backstreets. But as I walked back toward the apartment, I heard the sound of another brass band playing a funeral march.
Coming up the street toward me was a different procession. These men carried a giant doll in a lavish purple gown with a massive crown on her head and one pert tear glistening on her cheek. I guessed she was the Virgin of something or other. Were they going to make her dance, too? She was certainly dressed for it.
Just then I got a text message from Zahra telling me she was trapped in a café on a corner near her apartment. The message ended: They are eating something wonderful. Come here!
The siren song of a mysterious and culturally specific delicacy! After only three weeks in Seville, I was beyond trying to resist. I knew that whatever it was they were eating in that café would not be made of tofu, but I didn’t care. I was already planning my route to the corner café like a guerrilla tactician.
It took me half an hour to cover what was on a normal day a two-minute walk, and the incense wafting through the streets was starting to make me cough, but I got there. Zahra was standing in the doorway of a café that was packed with Sevillians eating coils of yellow pastry. The smell of deep-fried dough was even stronger than the incense.
Pushing our way through a crowd of women draped in black lace, we somehow got to the bar. Behind the counter, a man in a white uniform was cranking a machine that turned out a thin coil of yellow paste into a vat of bubbling oil. Whatever this new delicacy was, it had to be wonderful: anything that involves that amount of bubbling oil must be good. The dough was fried until it was crispy then placed on paper to dry for all of about five seconds before it was chopped up and served to the customers, who tore off pieces and dunked them into cups of coffee or thick hot chocolate.
From the signs up around the bar that said CHURROS €1.50, I guessed that these were churros. I wondered briefly what the macrobiotic take would be on deep-fried yellow stuff and liquid chocolate. The yellow stuff looked very yang, and the chocolate was clearly very yin, so I supposed that about evened it out.
We ordered a plate of churros and two cups of hot chocolate, which appeared before us at lightning speed. I tore off a piece of that yellow dough; just touching it covered my fingers in grease. Then I dipped it into my cup of chocolate as the other people were doing and bit into it.
Outside on the street, thousands of people were having a religious experience, but sitting at the bar of the café, I had one of my own. That mouthful of crispy featherlight dough covered in grease and dipped in thick hot chocolate was so divine I had to close my eyes for a minute. Zahra was trying to talk to me, but I held up my hand to say, I can’t eat this and listen to you at the same time. She understood.
• • •
The drumbeat went on day and night for the entire week. I could hear it when I lay in bed at night, and it was the first sound I heard when I woke up in the morning. It beat while I brushed my hair and cleaned my teeth and while I was getting dressed to go to class.
Out on the street I used the sound to navigate the quickest way around. When it got louder, I knew there was a procession somewhere nearby, so I’d take a side street to avoid getting caught again among a thousand pious Spaniards. This didn’t always work; sometimes there was no avoiding the processions, and by the end of the week my jacket was streaked with wax from ducking under the giant tapers that the hooded men carried, and my clothes and hair stank of incense. Although the processions were streets away, we could even hear the drums in the studio, and the smoky incense wafted in through the windows. Sometimes I thought that the drumming had stopped, but it was just that I had gotten so used to the sound that I stopped hearing it.
On Saturday night Zahra and I went out without a plan. We wandered through the little archways and down the cobblestoned streets, going from bar to bar around the bullring in the center of town. We heard singing and followed the sound until we found ourselves in a tiny bar where a man was singing copla, traditional Spanish songs.
After a glass of wine we went back out onto the streets and wandered again until we heard a guitar. We followed the melody to a tiny bar where a guitarist was beating out a bulería and a girl in ripped jeans twirled around him with castanets between her fingers.
After that we wandered down to the river that runs through Seville, Río Guadalquivir. We crossed an old stone bridge and walked slowly through the streets, stopping to gaze into the brightly lit shop windows at spectacular flamenco dresses. Next year, we promised, we’d both come back and buy one.
We kept walking until we heard more live music and saw a crowd of people outside an old bar. They were standing by the door, all pushing, trying to get in. We joined them, pushing our way in just far enough to catch a glimpse of what was going on inside.
A woman in a black dress with heavily painted eyes and a bright red mouth stood in front of the crowd. She balled up her fists and belted out a love song. But she was not singing for any man. She was singing for her beloved Seville. When you fall in love in Seville, she sang, you fall in love with Seville.
A man came through the bar handing out cards with pictures of one of the Jesus statues on them. Underneath was written El Jesús del Gran Poder, the Jesus of the Great Power. I didn’t understand; how was the Jesus of the Great Power different from the Jesus of the Sacred Heart or the Jesus of the Wasted Flesh or the Jesus of the Pained Facial Expressions? How many Jesuses were there? And what about the Virgins? Everywhere I looked in Seville there seemed to be a Virgin, but they all had different names. There was the Virgin of Pains, the Virgin of Miracles, the Virgin of Eternal Sorrows. Surely there was only one Jesus and one Mary, but the Virgin painted on the tiles above the entrance to Inés’s building was different from the picture of the Virgin in the frame that hung above the radio at my favorite fruit stall in the market, and the Virgin that was paraded down Calle Feria was different from the other Virgins carried down different streets.
And everyone seemed to be particularly attached to their own version. The man with the card explained to me passionately that El Jesús del Gran Poder was very important and I should keep him with me always. Looking at the card, I didn’t feel much of a connection to the statue’s wooden features, though I did like his floor-length purple velvet cloak with gold brocade. The Sevillians certainly like their gods to be well dressed.
Just then, the lights went out in the bar. The only light came from the candles around a small framed picture of a Virgin that hung on the wall. The musicians began to play and the singer gazed up reverently at the illuminated figure and sang to her.
Zahra and I extracted ourselves from the crowd and went back onto the street. We turned a corner into a little lane and stopped, both struck by the scene before us. The moon was hanging so low in the sky that I felt if I reached up on my tiptoes I could touch it, and the stars looked like the twinkling fairy lights on the ceiling of Santa’s Cave on Level Six of the department store back home.
I knew that my stay in Seville would soon come to an end. I could feel time speeding up: every day seemed to go faster and faster, like it was moving to the rhythm of bulerías. The day would come when I would have to pack up my suitcase and get on a plane back home.
But how could I possibly go back to that world I had run away from? How could I go back to eating lunch at twelve and dinner at six? I’d learned to take my coffee with a dollop of brown sugar in the warm midmorning sun; how could I go back to coffee in paper cups on the run? And how could I go back to breathing in air conditioning after the incense of Semana Santa, or squirting perfume on my wrists when I’d gotten used to crushing orange blossoms and rubbing them on my neck?
How could I live without flamenco? Here flamenco was part of daily life, not just restricted to an hour and a half once a week. And there weren’t any sevillanas bars in Sydney where I could pick up new moves and dance until dawn.
In any case, I knew I had to dance. My body had gotten used to the daily training, and I was living on endorphins and compás. When I caught sight of myself in the mirror in the studio, I found it hard to believe that the girl dancing confidently in red shoes was the same one who had tried to hide at the back of the class just weeks before.
I didn’t know what I was going to do when the time came to say good-bye. The very thought filled me with dread. In Spain I was living on cloud nine, and I didn’t want to go back down to earth.
We walked back across the old stone bridge over the river. “This is a magic night,” Zahra said. “Anything we wish for tonight will have to come true.” And so I closed my eyes and made a wish. I wished that I could live in Spain forever.