(C) Copyright, All Rights Reserved, Paul Heidelberg
contact: paulheidelberg@yahoo.com
(Note 1: Written in Spain.)
(Note 2: This work includes the proper pronunication of an often used Andalusian expression of exultation; it is not pronounced, as many non-Spaniards have sung, "Ay, Ay" as in Popeye the Sailor Man.)
FIESTA DE SAN SEBASTIAN Y SAN ANTON
(The author has been inducted, as a writer,
into the non-vanity press
Marquis Who's Who In America
and
Marquis Who's Who In The World)
(Photograph (C) Copyright Paul Heidelberg
Mi amigo Manolo told me that the first night of the four-day fiesta would be a tame one.
"Manana es grande fiesta," Manolo said. "Esta noche es muy tranquilla."
I had been in Espana less than two months, in my little village at 4,000 feet in Las Alpujarras, twenty miles from Granada, as the eagles and hawks fly over the Sierra Nevada mountains, but I had already had a dream fulfilled: I had met Leila, a flamenco dancer with beautiful legs and an unbelievably small waist that didn’t look a bit over twenty inches, who also happened to love the fact that I was a foreigner from the Estados Unidos.
At first I thought her name was Layla, as in the Eric Clapton song, but I found out from Jose – he owned the club where she danced nearly every Saturday night that summer – that it was much more historic, and was spelled Leila, which means night in Arabic.
You know about the Moorish influence in Spain, I hope. Well, here I was in the home province of the great flamenco music and dance lover and great poet Federico Garcia Lorca – he was born and died on the outskirts of Granada, less than 20 miles from my village of Bubion, over those highest mountains in mainland Spain – and I had a kiss from the past, a touch from the times of the Arabian nights, a dance with a dancer for all ages: for all the centuries of human song and love and bailar.
"Bailar, bailar, bailar (Dance, dance, dance)" she used to scream to me from a distance, or whisper in my ear, rubbing a leg against me.
The Fiesta de San Sebastian and San Anton was held in honor of Bubion’s patron saints; "San Anton is for the animals, and San Sebastian is for the rest of us," a villager had told me.
Just about every time I thought about San Sebastian during the fiesta , I thought about the drawing of the saint – pierced with the arrows of martyrdom – that Lorca had created and had sent to his good friend at the time, Salvador Dali.
Guess when the music ended that first night, which Manolo had told me was the peaceful night, and for every other night of the fiesta? Guess what time the loudly electrified bands – and I mean rock concert loud – stopped playing in the Plaza Iglesia by the church, as they shook the church walls and the walls of dozens of houses that surrounded the plaza and the church?
The answer is they did not.
They did not stop playing: they played the entire night, toda la noche, blaring guitar, organ and sultry, deep-voiced female flamenco vocals into the night continuously until at least seven o’clock in the morning.
Only then was it time for a little rest.
About five o’clock in the morning after that first night, I opened the green French doors to my patio that overlooked the Poqueira Ravine about a mile away, and heard the music about the time I had my first whiff of smoke from the fireworks and rockets from the night before.
The fiesta had started about 10:30 on Thursday morning, with rockets that shot at least a third of the mile in the air, before exploding with a monstrous sound that rattled the ravine.
Pepe, Bubion’s fireworks expert, carefully lit each rocket with a cigarette he kept dangling from his mouth for that purpose; his rocket launcher resembled a metal shield, and he very carefully slid each rocket into the metal loop on the launcher that held the rocket before he pushed the launcher as from his body as he could after he lit each rocket’s fuse, and waited for it to soar far into the sky, leaving a thin trail of smoke behind before it exploded with the ravine-rattling BOOM – for days after the last day and night of the fiesta, there were pieces of wood from the rockets laying in streets and yards all over town, and there were also pieces of paper from each rocket’s explosive device left as a reminder of the all-night partying and excitement.
Leila had beautiful dark eyes and long dark hair she always kept clean and neat. When I had first met her, her only detracting feature was her teeth; her teeth must have been much like the teeth of the "poule" in that other story about a Spanish fiesta. But Leila had a dentist in Orgiva work on her teeth, and over time they began to look very different, so that she had no detracting feature.
She was simply beautiful.
She always caught mens’ eyes.
Juan was a good friend of Leila’s. Juan proved to be my salvation, in a way, after the only internet café for miles and miles closed unexpectantly, after four years in business.
Juan, a 23 year-old computer expert, came to the rescue when he saw the village’s need and installed a computer in the Estanco he operated with his grandfather Don Jose, one of Bubion’s most respected elders, a man of 80 who was the town mayor for many years. Before Juan saved us internet-dependent foreigners and locals, one had to journey down the mountain to Orgiva, where Leila had her dental work done, about twenty miles away, and about 2,000 feet down into the flatlands, reachable only by a dangerous, very twisty and tight two-lane blacktop.
(I did not hear a siren for five months – perfect silence for a writer – until an impatient local tired of the slow-driving turistas ahead of him, and began to pass in wild fashion, until he launched his small auto off the high road between Bubion and the village of Pampaneira below, hurling himself into the sky to the location the rockets had journeyed to from their launchings from Pampaneira earlier in the year for that village’s annual summer festival; the driver sailed through the air for more than 300 feet before crashing to his death on the winding mountain road below.)
The accident was the chief topic of conversation in my village for weeks, and I spoke with a very shocked man who happened to be standing with a friend admiring the always-beautiful view from Bubion to the valleys below, and the balmy evening weather, when he actually saw the vehicle leave the road, and watched it as it flew off into space, and also watched it smash to the earth below.
The Estanco is Bubion’s tobacco shop but fills much more than the needs of nicotine-addicted locals and foreigners: it is also the place for postcards, envelopes, stamps, various forms of adhesive tape, shoes, shawls, and, of course Internet access.
I entered the Estanco one afternoon to buy stamps and noticed a typically-stupid looking tourist couple using the computer. For more than forty years, I have appreciated the difference between traveler and tourist and am greatly saddened by the fact that I see far fewer travelers than I used to – their numbers are being superceded by dumbfounded-looking tourists who stumble through my village as if they had no sight, stepping in front of you at every opportunity. Also, sadly, these idiot-turistas are of all nationalities: American, French, British, even Spanish, from such places as Madrid, Sevilla and Cordoba (although the Spanish do seem to share less of the idiot-turista traits of the foreigners).
Stepping off the bus from Orgiva to Bubion one day, I was almost run over by a typically idiot-turista couple driving a large Peugeot with French license plates.
I later saw them in the mercado where my friend Manolo works – the Manolo who told me the first night of the fiesta would be tame; there is another Manolo who runs a local taberna who I will tell you about later.
When I recognized the French idiot-turistas I said to them loudly in Spanish: "WHEN YOU SEE A BUS, BE CAREFUL," twice.
So I am in the Estanco and notice Don Jose offers a calendar to the idiot-turista looking couple – there is just that look that says "idiot-turista" just like most American G.I.’s have that stuck-in-the-military appearance I tried to avoid at all costs when I was stuck in the Air Force for four years.
After Don Jose offers the idiot-turistas a free calendar, the idiot-turista woman says, in the most rude fashion possible, "No, I don’t want that. That’s in Spanish."
It was only after I had left the Estanco that I really became angry when I thought about this idiot-turista’s rudeness to Don Jose.
I had returned to my house, but left in a hurry and searched the streets for the idiot couple.
I found them near the four-tap fountain with the freshest water for miles, and did not pause before I said: "Do you know who you were speaking to, you rude bitch? You were speaking to the former mayor of this village. And what country do you think you are in? France, Italy, England, or could it possibly be Spain, you rude bitch? When I lived in Greece decades ago, if someone offered you ouzo or raki at nine in the morning, you accepted it so that you would not offend them.
"If you would have pulled that little act in Greece 35 years ago, they wouldn’t have done anything to you, they would have taken that idiot-turista husband of yours, castrated him, and stuck what he has for balls down his throat."
"Well, I never," she said.
"Have some respect for the people who live in the country you visit, or else you will be what you are – a stupid f...ing tourist."
They looked around like stupid f...ing tourists, wide-eyed to the world, and said nothing.
"Stupid f...ing tourists," I repeated. "Get out of my sight. Now."
They did.
Quickly.
The moral of that part of my story is simple: when you are visiting a country, attempt to learn some of the language, treat the locals with respect, and don’t act like an idiot-turista.
The anthithesis in my village of those idiot-turistas and others like them – unbelievably rude and stupid – was the beautiful nature everywhere: in the views from my patio that overlooked miles of mountains and valleys, and walks in those valleys and on those mountains, and the beautiful plants and birds everywhere.
I never had watched pigeons in flight before I had come to Bubion – never watched them carefully, anyway: they soar beautifully, and pull in their wings to achieve great speed; when they fly off, flapping their wings, they look like hawks or eagles.
But the bird that has really got my attention was the sparrow. Shortly after arriving in Spain I wrote a poem about coming here to these mountains expecting hawks and eagles, and what do I get? Sparrows. Small, delicate creatures.
Sparrows.
I began feeding the sparrows I shared my patio with during my first morning in the village, when I gave them a taste of the freshly-baked bread that is sold in the plaza in front of my house by a vendor in a white van from a bakery in Capileira, the village above Bubion, and the last village in this part of Las Alpujarras before one can climb to the highest mountains in mainland Spain, Veleta and Mulhacen.
Two young men and a young woman alternate selling baguette-type loaves and other fresh breads from the van, but one of the three is always there at the same spot at the Placeta Del Sol from 11:15 to 11:30 every morning, including Sundays.
So I began by sharing my Capileira-baked white bread with the sparrows, and then moved on to pan integral, which is a whole wheat type bread, sold from the van on particular days of the week only, in large and small loaves, and then moved onto Maria cookies and Maria Oro (Gold) cookies.
I had been feeding the sparrows for months before a stranger appeared: a one-legged sparrow I named Low Rider, as she sat low to the ground while dining (my Spanish friend Jose The Professor, an Andalucian poet, explained to me that the males of the species are distinguished by the black marking on their throats.)
Low Rider had no mark and was definitely a female, and seemed to manage all right. When other birds tried to grab her bread or cookie, she gave them a good peck as to say, out of the way, buddy.
She was one of the sparrows large enough to grab a big piece of bread and take it off with her far into the distance – I watched sparrows coming and going from my patio for hundreds of yards.
The sparrows, pigeons and other birds had a strong reaction to the fiesta: like cats and dogs, the constant explosion from fireworks had them nervous, and on the move.
My friend Manolo from the market was right about the fireworks and the first night of the fiesta; the music was blaring all night that first night, but the real fireworks came on Saturday night, coinciding with a procession through the streets of the village that informed me well in the ways of Spanish fiestas.
Manolo, in his fifties, had come to Bubion only two months before I had; he had moved from Barcelona, to help him deal with his asthma. I could always count on a good joke from Manolo, or for him to break into song – some soulful number that was not flamenco cante jondo, but a Catalonian number that also conveyed much emotion.
Manolo was the first person in the village to call me amigo, and he said it like he had really meant it; that had happened during my first week in the village.
The weather for the fiesta was ideal – if you like it hot. Bubion is like a village I read about in the South of France: normally, during the hottest days of the summer, only turistas and other non-locals are out in the heat between about two and eight o’clock in the afternoon.
During the fiesta, it is different, but most of the action takes place at night. After surviving the coldest cold spell in Bubion in more than 20 years – water pipes were frozen for days throughout the village – I began to appreciate why the locals appreciated the warmth of August that bathed the summer fiesta, and began to understand why the warmth and the music, food and drink of the fiesta were reason to stay up all the night for some, and most of the night for most.
About seven thirty on Saturday night, the second night of the fiesta, I headed to the Plaza Iglesia where most of the action was centered.
A long, portable metal Cruzcampo bar was set up and bartenders sold tubo drafts of beer and long drinks of ice and red wine and soda – Tinto de Verano, Red of Summer, very popular in Andalucia in the summer months, and other mixed drinks.
Once the priest and the fiesta’s band – they were all young and I guessed they were the high school band from nearby Pitres, where Bubion’s high schoolers go to school – geared up to start the procession, I decided to join in the promenade through the village streets, just on a lark.
I joined villagers behind the village priest and a majestic golden Icon of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus: mother and child. The icon was carried on the shoulders of six Bubion men, and was lit with beautiful lights that made the gold shimmer (a 12-volt automobile battery rested behind the seated Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus, providing the power for the lights).
I had not given one serious thought to my joining in the procession, but we had not been marching for more than two seconds to the most dirgeful music I have ever heard, when I felt as though I had been smashed in the stomach with a blow by Muhammad Ali in his prime.
I began to think about my mother, who had passed away five years earlier. Perhaps it was because my mother had been Catholic and had raised my brother, sister and I in that religion – my father was Protestant, but a tenet of Roman Catholicism when I was growing up was if either of the parents were Catholic, all the children would be Catholic, too.
For whatever reason – a combination of the Catholicism, the Icon of mother and child, the mournful music – I had to work hard to fight off tears and at times I was not successful.
About two minutes into the procession I told myself I had to get the hell away and fled up a side street. But within another two minutes, I realized I had walked to another spot in the procession, saw the marchers coming, and I told myself I had to rejoin them.
The entire time – for at least a half hour – the band played the most solemn music I have ever heard, and that includes many performances of Mozart’s great Requiem, recorded, and in person.
During a visit to Cologne, Germany, I had waited with hundreds outside an ancient church for a chance to hear a performance of Mozart’s Requiem. I spoke with a German woman I was standing next to as we waited in line before we learned that so many Mozart admirers had shown up, standing room only remained.
The woman and I stood in the back of the church, in a black-barred room that housed the crypt of a saint, and as we stood next to the saint in silence, the orchestra and chorus began a performance that was truly beyond words – about halfway through the Requiem, I turned to the woman and both her cheeks were soaking wet: tears were streaming from both eyes down her cheeks.
The fiesta’s procession hit me in the gut more than that experience.
When the procession paused for the longest time by the village cemetery and the music grew even more somber, I thought, "Yeah, that’s it all right. That is what this procession is for. It is not for us living, it is for remembrance of departed loved ones."
I had a great sense of relief when we had finally returned to the Plaza Iglesia after we had journeyed through the streets of Bubion, marching ever so slowly in time to that solemn music.
As soon as we stopped in front of the church, the biggest fireworks of the night began – Pepe was hard at work – and a village regular, Fernando, who is well known by everyone in Bubion and is as ubiquitous as Juan the computer expert, first began to respond, very loudly in shouts, to the village priest’s pronouncements.
It reminded me of recitations one did in Latin in the old version of Roman Catholic mass, but there was something more distant sounding to it: it had a hint of pagan ritual, of vocalizations that had been going on for thousands of years in those Sierra Nevada mountains, chanting that predated Christianity.
After the procession, I knew I needed something stronger than Tinto de Verano, and switched to Anis Secco con hielo, on the rocks; I felt as if I really needed to get away, and decided to take a walk to one of my favorite spots outside Bubion, a place I had written a poem about on my father’s birthday in July, and had dedicated to him: the sendero con flores y estrellas, the path of flowers and stars.
I usually never encountered anyone on the sendero – local or foreigner – and was very surprised to meet a British woman I had first seen earlier that day while we were both getting water from the four-tap fuente near my home.
What happened was one of those very strange things in life. I don’t know what was on her mind, but I had plenty on mine after that funereal procession, and with all the wine and anis I had drunk, I was in some sort of altered state of consciousness.
Well, to be succinct, the Randy British Woman, as I now think of her always, and I, hit it off immediately: I mean right there and then, on the path in the fiesta-soaked night; we had very passionate sex with the bass and drums from the electrified flamenco band, and the loud, erotic voice of the female singer, providing background music.
The Randy British Woman was more of a traveler than a turista, a traveler from the old days; it was something of a one-night stand, but actually was a two-night stand, for about the time the paella – that had been cooked over an open fire in a huge paella pan nine feet across – was gone, so was the Randy British Woman, off to the flatlands on the evening 6:30 bus to Granada, down the mountain and out of my life.
Remembering the fiesta, I always recall the Randy British Woman, of course, but the most salient memory, always, is that somber procession I took part in hours before I encountered her out on the sendero on the outskirts of Bubion.
The summer warmth is also a vivid memory, as is Fernando – he stood about five-foot 5, was about 50 years old, and always seemed to need a shave – and his recitation of that special religious incantation one hears at the annual fiesta.
I just realized I have not told you more about Leila the flamenco dancer, or about the other Manolo – the Manolo who co-owned a taberna in Bubion, not mi amigo Manolo at the mercado who had misinformed me about the tranquility of the first night of the fiesta.
Manolo, like Ubiquitous Juan, was 23 that summer (to show you how ubiquitous Ubiquitous Juan was when I lived in that Andalucian village, when I had a emergency visit to the town dentist one afternoon, and waited outside the heavy wooden door typical of Bubion – some are hundreds of years old – I was surprised to see the opener of the door and greeter of clients was none other than Juanito; it turned out his uncle was the town dentist, and Juan was helping him out that day).
So Manolo, like Juan, was born and grew up in Granada. They both had parents who were born in or near Bubion – that was their initial connection to the village. I have often thought that they had brought new blood into the old village – good blood.
That summer in Bubion, Manolo and a friend opened a new bar called La Taberna Del Culpable – The Tavern Of The Guilty (Tapas – Comidas – Café – Copas the brightly painted sign hanging out front read). My Spanish friend Jose The Professor and I both loved that name.
In addition to a good name, and great ambience that included a bar constructed of huge pine beams more than two feet in circumference, the taberna had a large assortment of drinks, including JD Black, Torres 10 Brandy, Anis, the Alpujarran wine Costa, wines from Rioja, Guinness and Paulaner Weissbeer, in the half-liter bottle – all at about one fourth the cost one would pay in Paris.
Manolo was one of the most gregarious and efficient bartenders I have ever met, and that includes the bartenders at the Closerie des Lilas in Paris, back when that bar was perhaps the best bar in the world, back before its ambience, and prices, began to change.
And, Leila. Leila was Leila.
Leila was something like the Randy British Woman, but I will be a gentleman, like Lorca speaking about The Faithless Wife, and not go into details.
You have an imagination, don’t you?
Just imagine the Randy British Woman during wild fiesta-ing, but imagine someone, and experiences, exponentially greater.
Before I had met Leila, I had never imagined one could communicate so much by simply shifting a dress – a simple piece of fabric.
Our relationship got very serious when the Summer was still scorching Southern Spain – when that hot sun and air kept you inside for much of the day, or under a shade tree, or in the shade, somewhere.
Back to that dress: when you think of flamenco dancers, you might think of the foot movement, or the hand movements, with or without castanets.
Leila never used castanets – she had no need to.
What she communicated with the way she shifted her floor-length dress back and forth was a combination of skills you are born with, and skills you learn.
It is very hard to describe what it looked like: trying to explain what was involved with the way she moved her dress is the same as trying to explain, or understand love itself, I suppose…
The lovemaking was just as indescribable: she was my Faithless Wife, but she was not attached to someone else, so we didn’t have any worries dealing with that sort of thing.
Let me just say that Leila taught me this: she taught me the "Ay, Ay" in flamenco cante jondo, deep song, is not pronounced "I, I."
No, it doesn’t sound like that at all.
It is much more animalistic. Much more heartfelt. Much more soulful.
It is a scream. A loud scream.
It is Ah-eeeeeee, Ah-eeeeeee.
THE END
