Heartbeat: A journey through the fiestas of Spain

Simon Prichard’s unique quest in search of ‘fiesta forever’ takes him to the soul of Spain: pious, arcane, profoundly odd and richly comic. Tim Adams, The Observer

Heartbeat

A journey through the fiestas of Spain

Simon Prichard

Text copyright © 2013 Simon Prichard

All rights reserved

Smashwords Edition

Cover design by Graham Taylor.

Cover photograph by John Wildgoose.

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To Yasmine

Table of contents

Prologue

Seduced by a Goat

A different view

I’ll have the usual

Grace and salt

Fire-fighting lessons from Joan the Mad

Do they know it’s Christmas?

Alcohol and civil engineering

The rhythm method

A flag to roll under

Dead dictators and soldiers in skirts

Into the valley

The eye of the beholder

Fireworks in the afternoon

Blood, sweat and hairspray

Rambling boys of pleasure

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Prologue

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February 2002

The next man in line was about fifty, red-faced and podgy. By the time he reached the front he was brandishing his staff so high that its skull handle was almost touching the folds of the Virgin’s robe. With every jolting step he flicked his legs behind him like a prancing horse. His eyes popped and the veins in his neck bulged alarmingly. The cowbells harnessed to his waist pounded into his kidneys, the plastic flowers on his fez dangled precariously and sweat began to seep through his floral pyjamas.

After several minutes’ fevered exertion, his knees finally buckled and his eyes dipped from Mary’s pale, serene face. Spent, he turned and stumbled back down the advancing column of bounding worshippers. Another man, dressed in an almost identical outfit, moved up one place and the cycle continued. We were in the middle of Spain, but this felt like a voodoo rite.

The men’s dance was a jag of violence in the steady normality of the rest of the scene. The statue of Our Lady moved slowly around the village on a farmyard trailer, pushed by stout women wearing fur coats and devotional medals. The priests, all in white, ambled behind, chatting to the Civil Guard. There was a drummer with an earring, teenage girls with castanets and a fat kid in combats carrying a standard. As the procession passed, the other villagers applauded and called out in admiration of a dress or a haircut. It was a beautiful February day: a cold edge, but sunny, clear and piercingly blue. And everywhere the clangour of bells.

This was the Endiablada, the main annual festival in Almonacid del Marquesado, a village of 600 souls in the middle of the flat, unforgiving country of La Mancha. For two days, the men and boys of the village would dance in tribute to the Virgin of Candlemas and St Blaise, as they have for hundreds of years.

When float and dancers had finally disappeared into the church to continue the ceremony, I headed back to the tiny tourist information office in the square for more details. None of the volunteers handing out leaflets knew the definitive history, although they agreed that the outlandish costumes and enormous bells were designed to scare the Devil away from Virgin and Saint. They were also eager to tell me what an attraction their festival had become.

These days people drive over from Cuenca, (the provincial capital, 80 kilometres to the east) said one woman.

Ah yes, Josefa, but Luís met someone who has come all the way from Valencia. Imagine!

I smiled and agreed that this was quite something. I did not confess that my home was even further away. Or that for me their fiesta was more than an unusual day out. It was another sign that maybe I had got everything wrong.

I had imagined this trip as a liberation, a casting off of responsibilities, a carefree waltz into the arms of an old flame. Yet while my life did seem to be changing, it wasn’t going the way I had expected.

1. Seduced by a Goat

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Cabra is an attractive, bustling, small town set among vines and olive trees in the province of Córdoba in Andalusia. It is also the Spanish word for goat.

I first went there in 1981 with my brother David. We were in the middle of our A- and O-levels respectively and Mr Smith, our Spanish teacher, had suggested we got some speaking and listening practice to help us through our oral exams. Our friend Brian had done an exchange the previous Easter with a boy from Cabra; the boy had a friend who wanted to improve his English; and by July the friend had arrived in Lincoln to spend a fortnight with us.

Pepe Osuna was a couple of years older than me and had just finished his first year at university in Córdoba. He was studying business, not languages, and his English was already pretty good, so at first we couldn’t understand why he wanted to spend two weeks of his precious summer holiday among strangers, in pursuit of slightly better grades.

Mum insisted that we took him immediately to the cathedral and the castle, which he politely enjoyed. Over the next few mealtimes she offered outings to art galleries, folk museums and nature reserves, to which Pepe smiled, shrugged and said, It’s the same. Rather than expanding his knowledge of Lincolnshire artists and wildlife, he preferred to spend the mornings in bed and the afternoons following our normal holiday routine. So it was two weeks of listening to records and drinking Nescafe at friends’ houses, going swimming at Yarborough pool and systematically patrolling the High Street in the hope of accidentally bumping into girls we knew.

Our evenings were just as predictable. After tea at 6.30, we would walk to Bailgate and do a leisurely circuit of the Wig & Mitre, the Victoria and the Duke William. We introduced Pepe to our mates, who spluttered on his deadly Ducados cigarettes and made him try pints of Tim Taylor’s bitter. And when drinking-up time ended at 11.10 precisely, we would bundle him towards the Newport Fish Bar in the hope that they would still sell us a tray of chips and curry sauce.

It wasn’t exciting, but it was our summer regime – and he seemed so happy to go along with it that we began to suspect that he was just glad of the change of scenery.

* * * * *

Soon it was our turn and Dad drove us to East Midlands for a flight to Málaga. It was to be our first unpackaged experience of Spain and the contrast was stark. Greeted by Mrs Osuna’s crushing embrace at the airport, we were scooped into the bosom of the family with a warmth and intensity that would have been awkward at home.

For the whole of our stay she nattered away in a mystifying southern accent, making no allowance for our schoolboy Spanish and simply shouting louder if we didn’t understand immediately. Despite our bewilderment, we were included in everything from the arrangements for cousins’ weddings to heated arguments about whose turn it was to work in the family draper’s shop. We were encouraged to sleep in and cajoled into second helpings of lunch. We were kissed for clearing the table and scolded for not phoning our mother every day. We were spoiled by Pepe’s older sister and fell in love with his younger one, who was luscious and stroppy and smelled of apples. It was as if life’s volume control had been turned up.

When we left the house around noon for our daily round of aperitifs we found colour and brightness were also at a higher level than usual. The dazzling, sultry streets were a catwalk of Spanish stereotypes. There were stout widows in black fussily sweeping their front step, immaculately coiffed housewives fluttering fans in noisy butchers’ queues, middle-aged men in dark glasses and open-necked shirts, hair slicked back over their ears, smoking and arguing in tree-lined squares.

The sounds and smells of coffee machines spilled from countless cafés, car horns sounded constantly and rickety mopeds ridden by bare-headed adolescents slalomed through the traffic. Beautiful girls with long dark hair walked languidly in twos and threes, clutching books to their chests.

There were pairs of nuns, blind lottery sellers, little girls in gypsy dresses and even the occasional donkey cart, in from the country for the day. Every twenty yards Pepe would pause to introduce us to a cousin or a classmate or a friend of his father and from the second day onwards dozens of people greeted the two tall pale English boys with a cheery "¡Adió!" as they passed. The whole town was conspiring in this seduction.

But it was after dark that things really livened up in Cabra. We went out every night. Not necessarily to drink all that much, but just to be en la calle – in the street. We left the house at ten or eleven, when pubs in England would be calling time, and stayed out until nearly dawn, gathering companions as we wandered from bar to bar. There were always hundreds of people around: families, courting couples, good-humoured gangs of teenagers, tiny children in long shorts and ankle boots. Cabra was a third of the size of Lincoln, but it seemed to have thirty times more spirit. We threw ourselves into this new sociability: we drove in convoy to tiny villages with sprawling rustic discos; we sipped Cruzcampo beer in gardens adorned with fairy lights; we tried green cocktails and black tobacco; we laughed and joked and occasionally danced. Despite the unfamiliar surroundings, I had never felt more at home.

* * * * *

By the time I went to university, I had visited Cabra twice more and knew that Spanish was the subject for me. Spending the third year of my degree in Bilbao as a teaching assistant convinced me I was right. I did my duty in the classroom for a couple of hours a day, trying in vain to teach English to trainee motor mechanics, but I learned much more outside it. The decline of shipbuilding had turned Bilbao into an unkempt and occasionally threatening urban sprawl. In those pre-Guggenheim times there were practically no foreigners to talk to, so my Spanish improved beyond recognition. The Basques were also coming to terms with their allotment of autonomy following Franco’s death only ten years earlier. Politics was everywhere, the atmosphere in the streets was febrile and the mood of the people was optimistic and belligerent. My students went on strike in support of nationalist prisoners, we sheltered in bars on Plaza Nueva while the police fired rubber bullets at demonstrators and I heard countless heated lunchtime arguments among my colleagues about the renaissance of the Basque language and the prospects for self-government. I made firm friends and got to know a side of Spain that sees sherry and flamenco as symbols of a foreign country.

I returned to the UK for my last year at university, convinced that Spain was the perfect place to live and promising myself that I would go back for good once I had graduated. Meanwhile, the Cabra effect was clearly working on David, who was also studying for a Spanish degree: he made the same pledge after spending his year abroad in Granada. As planned, he raced back there even as the ink was drying on his last exam paper, but my attempt was much less successful.

With one eye on my escape, I had carefully avoided the milk round and had no job lined up in Britain. Naturally, neither did I have anything specific planned for Spain. It would have felt wrong to be too organised.

This was no problem – and I enjoyed watching my friends panic about whether they would get a job offer from the right accountancy firm – until, confounding my previous university form, I got talking to a graduate student at a fancy dress party and soon found that I had a girlfriend. I was so delighted at this unexpected turn that I overlooked the obvious flaws in our budding romance. After a few months of unwitting missteps and laborious recoveries, I was still desperate to make the relationship work and convinced myself that stability and commitment would smooth over the snags. She had already lined up a City job and a double room in a shared south London flat, so I put Spain to one side and timidly applied for a marketing vacancy in Twickenham.

Ten years later I was unhappily married and throat-deep in debt to pay for lavish home improvements and increasingly exotic holidays. To keep the peace at home I had withdrawn from my friends and avoided contact with David, whose active social life and newly-opened bookshop were a sharp reminder of my own failure to stick to my guns. Spain had become a distant memory of what might have been.

* * * * *

When I finally left my wife, I was recharged. I made awkward phone calls to revive priceless friendships long abandoned, took everyday decisions without looking over my shoulder and spent my time and money on things that made me happy. Within a few months I got a new job with an internet company that was riding the dotcom wave and a year or so later I met Yasmine, who made me feel loved and optimistic. Most miraculously, I started to rebuild my relationship with my brother. Life was transformed, but I still couldn’t escape a nagging regret.

One beautiful Monday afternoon in the middle of June, two decades after my first visit to Cabra, I was back at work following a trip to Granada’s annual Corpus Christi festival, where David and I had watched processions, drunk and danced in street marquees, gone to our very first bullfight and wandered through the enormous fairground that was busy 24 hours a day. Today I was in a conference room in Milton Keynes for an update on Abbey National’s new web project.

As shirt-sleeved executives arrived clutching corporate notepads and plastic cups of Kenco, I found my mind drifting back to the fiesta. I loved the way it had gripped the whole city; its glorious, wholehearted inclusiveness that seemed so natural in Spain and so unlikely in Britain.

Thanks for coming, everyone. I’ve got some great news.

I sat up straight. In the chair was an enthusiastic woman from Marketing called Dee and she started the meeting with an important announcement about mortgages. As my colleagues and collaborators billed and cooed convincingly, I finally understood that my new media specs and bachelor pad were not the answer.

* * * * *

Eight days later the dotcom bubble burst. At 10.00 one sunny morning we were called into a hastily convened company meeting; by midday we were standing outside a pub, swapping phone numbers and contemplating calls to recruitment consultants. Waiting at the bar a few hours later, a bit drunk, in the middle of the afternoon, I took out my redundancy cheque and did a quick calculation. It was nowhere near a deposit on a London flat, but it would buy me something rather nice in Spain. I reckoned about six months.

2. A different view

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It was five o’clock and David had just gone back to work for the afternoon shift. I opened the door gingerly so as not to dislodge the cracked pane of glass he had been meaning to fix for a couple of years and edged out on to the balcony. I placed my cup of coffee on the floor next to the empty plant pot and balanced the ashtray on the clothes airer.

I reached into my pocket and with unpractised fingers peeled the cellophane from a packet of Camel. The cigarette felt strange in my mouth, smaller than I remembered. I sparked up my new Bic lighter, inhaled tentatively and braced myself. Within seconds, my heart was racing and my head churning in the nicotine wave.

After a while I could concentrate again. Wherever my journey took me, this flat on the southern edge of Granada would be base camp for a while. I had finally done it. Encouraged by Yasmine, I had seen out the lease on my own flat and bought a one-way ticket from Luton Airport.

My plan was simple. I was here to make up for the lost years with a concentrated dose of fun and freedom. Inspired by the happiness I had felt at Corpus Christi a few months earlier, I was going to tour the fiestas of Spain until my savings ran out.

It wasn’t possible to visit every event in the country: that would require a private helicopter and a six-figure budget. I had also missed the summer festivals, including some with grand reputations. But there was still plenty to sustain me and I had sketched out an itinerary of large and small celebrations in different parts of Spain. I had come to have a party that would last until spring.

I took a sip of coffee and a more purposeful drag. Less nausea this time. I opened David’s copy of Ideal, Granada’s local newspaper. Among stories of political scandals and traffic problems, I learned that today, 28th October and officially the first day of my pilgrimage, was the feast of my namesake St Simon. This was a good omen. It surely trumped the other saint who shared the day: St Jude, patron of hopeless causes. After a final suck on the filter, I put down the paper, stubbed out the cigarette and considered my surroundings.

On the horizon, rising over the corrugated roof of the old bus station, the snow-covered peaks