SpainStruck

Here we go again.  The Spanish Semana Santa is upon us and, as an atheist, I feel quite as jaundiced about it as I have for many a long year, at least since I freed myself from the shackles of my own Catholic upbringing at twenty-five.

I remember the very moment in Santa Barbara, California, at which I turned away from a bus-stop on a Sunday morning and went back to my rented accommodation with a Jewish family.  I was not going to hang around another minute for the few and far between bus that would take me – a solitary carless person in that gas-guzzling culture – to Mass.

As a child in Glasgow, Catholicism and poverty appeared to me to be socially-aligned.  In wealthy Santa Barbara, the true alliance of Vatican financial self-perpetuation and Republican religious hypocrisy hit me with the force of all those immense Cadillacs in the church carpark.

Walking away that day, I came into my own personhood.  And over time I´ve shed other nefarious influences that prevented me from thinking for myself.

So this is what I think about Semana Santa.  For the first time, and as a lone exception, I´m making public two first-draft excerpts from what I´d like to be a novel on expat life in Spain.

Feel free to comment!

Excerpt One

“Contrary to what non-Spaniards usually think, the Roman Catholic Semana Santa, leading up to Easter, was a time of fiesta in Spain, despite the masochistic, penitent gore of the torchlight religious processions, ostensibly to prepare sinners and believers for the resurrection of Christ.  For most people living in areas such as Greater Madrid, however, with cold or rainy winters, this resurrection meant one thing – sun.  And so cars, buses and planes were chock ablock with people from the top half of the country leaving for the bottom half, or indeed, abroad.  It was a time when conservative, Vatican Catholicism and Spanish paganism got along famously.  Indeed, now she thought about it, Maria decided that papal meddling in state affairs and popular idolatry worked hand in glove here, like mutual masturbation. Consistent with the slow, bloody dragging of crucifixes through city streets, the climax was completely physical.  Far from ecstasy, in any religious, non-corporeal, sense, the true jouissance of the processions was an all too earthy pleasure in the many aspects of the Virgin Mary, especially the Macarena in Seville.  Adjoining the chain-clanking and medieval garb was a Bacchanalia of sensual pleasure – food, wine, flirtation, ritual singing and dancing – from which no-one was excluded.  The Virgin paraded on high was heartily complimented by pater familias in tones usually reserved for the bedroom.  The beauty of pre-pubescent girls wearing polka dot dresses and flowers was ceaselessly praised by grandfathers, neighbours and strangers alike.  On sulked the drums and on swayed the idol bearers to a cadence of midnight sorrow.  On paraded the doyennes of bourgeois social strata, their hair coiffed tightly into high combs and black lace mantillas, ostensibly to impede lust. Yet they strode in black high heels and seamed stockings, their black skirts sometimes a tad too short, while a feverish body of Spaniards et al. crammed into bars and stood drinking cañas of beer or copas of wine.  They busied the hands not joined in prayer and the mouths not singing praises in fervent cycles of prawn-peeling consumption, only interrupted by the crushing of paper napkins.  Against the drum and dulcimer din they welcomed one another with open arms and hugged and laughed, argued and joked as they always did.

These contrasts perplexed Maria who had always felt that Spanish worship lacked reverence.  She had witnessed the epitome of this a decade before in Northern Spain as she stood waiting for the Popemobile of John Paul II, partly out of curiosity, partly to report it to her mother.  Police helicopters thundered overhead and marksmen on rooftops trained their sights on the crowds in the street.  As the people waited, the yellow-clad Opus Dei youth chanted their slogans in Latin.  In front of Maria, to kill time, a middle-aged woman was reading a magazine.  Peering over her shoulder, Maria could not believe her eyes.  In the most insouciant manner this woman was scrutinising a double page nude spread of an Italian pop star called Sabrina.  With the Pope himself just five minutes away!

In Spain, evidently, the chain of command between God and the “Thou Shalt Not” prohibition that Maria had suffered in Scotland was rusty to say the least.  Despite the damnation theatrics, hellfire was absent.  Yes, she reflected, Spaniards have a strange way of worshipping, though perhaps it depends on exactly what you worship.  Spaniards seemed to worship a good time.”

Excerpt Two

“And here, tonight, with the perfectly logical arrival of an April shower, the hitherto surprisingly functional procession of the Virgin of the Snows and the Crucified Christ degenerates into farce.  Whereas the lucky Virgin travels in a canopied assemble which protects her and her countless metres of carapaced train from the vagaries of the elements,  the poor, bleeding, crucified Christ on his float of red roses is not so blessed, exposed, as he is, in all his nakedness, to the driving rain.  When he is paused before the immense university entrance where a choir sheltering in the doorway rings out the Gaudeamos Igitur (all right for them, we think, frozen and soaked through, joy conspicuous by its absence), the conclusion that Christ is positively drookit, dawns on all present.  However, help is at hand.  A posse of beretta´d dignitaries have a Plan B.  A quiver of ten foot poles is conjured from thin, wet air and church and state conjoin to salvage the polychromed Christ from permanent warp and staining.

Maria is already smirking, but the treat is just beginning.  Joined by a couple of the wheelie guys – “I thought these things were always carried on the backs of the costaleros, not pushed around on wheels, oh, oh, look Rosie, one of the wheelie people  is a woman!  So what, Mami?” – several individuals in black, XXL, flowing robes haul themselves onto the float which obliges by shimmying furiously.  Maria, despite herself, holds her breath, as she imagines them to be Heroic Loggers Fighting for Equilibrium on the Tree-trunks Racing Down the Rapids of the Ebro.  Of course, there is nothing to grab except each other, each other´s tassels or, heaven forbid, the foot of the cross – in rather an original, off-beat take on that old Radio Clyde favourite, I will cling to the old rugged cross – and just like in the Generation Game, this is made more challenging by extra-long baggy sleeves resisting elbow position and extra-long hems tucking themselves under feet.   What ensues is a bonnie wee jig, enlivened by saucily swinging Rosary belts – Hip, hop, kick hem up. Hop, hip, trample train.  Grab sleeves, header tassle. Woo! Woo!  Nearly fell.  Step forward, squash rose.  Grab beretta, do a wee turn.  Wave to the crowd and start again! 

Maria, highly amused, half-takes a wee notion to start clapping along but the soldiers are all carrying assault rifles and she decides she´d better give it the body swerve.  Lino snorts at her in that way of his that means “incorrigible” and puts Rosie´s hood up again.   It´s raining very hard, but Maria just has to see this.

In a scene like a cross between Velázquez´s  Surrender of Breda and a Vlad the Impaler woodblock the Catholic Church Inc. getting itself into a right state, concerts its efforts on inventing what appears to be a new sport, though not one of the team variety.  It goes like this.  Four clerics, of the rank of Bishop or above, each armed with a ten-foot spike, on an uneven playing field strewn with squashed roses, aims to catch any bit whatsoever of a Common Sheet of Polythene (CSP),  available at any DIY store, garage, haberdashery or sex shop, and drag it, veronica-style (óle – Spaniards don´t actually say oléeeee), over the exasperated countenance of Our Lord Jesus Reich, I mean Christ, thus preventing said icon from hincurring henvironmental damage to hits four-hundred-year-hold hoakwood. 

“You´re pissed,” says Lino, faintly amused by Maria´s silly comments and voices.

“I am a bit, thankfully,” says Maria, laughing out loud as the not-yet-risen Christ is plastificado like a supermarket chicken and secured to the mast with forty feet of police red-and-white-striped Thou Shalt Not Pass tape.  So much for deity, mutters Maria.  No wonder He Wept, I´m about ready to weep myself.

The next morning someone wrote into El País wondering why, in this day and age, procession icons risk damage from inclement weather and suggested the use of a light-weight, transparent, shatter-proof polymer such as methacrylate, also known as acrylic glass, to preserve the wood and the dignity of all involved.  Patented in 1928.

Priceless, thought Maria.”