Sacred Sierra

by Jason Webster

  *

  A whirling, wailing mass of animal cries filled the little square as we stepped out from an adjacent alleyway to watch the start of the festivities.

  ‘Mis gatitos,’ Marina purred as she carried a cat in each arm and headed towards the front steps outside the subdued Baroque church. By the large wooden front doors stood the village priest, all heavy glasses and dog collar, a serious expression on his face as an unorderly queue of locals trailed and heaved towards him across the flagstones. Each one was accompanied by at least one – and in several cases four or five – animal. Dogs on leashes, cats in people’s arms or in plastic-grilled boxes, half a dozen parrots and budgerigars in cages draped in cloth, two pigs, also on leashes, a grey horse, four donkeys, two white mules and a rabbit. The word going around the square was that one of the villagers was also going to bring along his python, but was waiting for the others to go first so as not to frighten their pets.

  Above this raucous mass of man and beast, the priest was waving his hands and speaking in low tones as each person brought their animals to be blessed. Some lingered for a while, as though asking for special prayers – perhaps for a specific ailment or malady to be healed. Others just looked as though they wanted to gossip. The priest tried to maintain his dignity as best he could, back straight and stiff, a kindly if distant look in his eye. He seemed uncomfortable with the task, and I wondered if he had any animals of his own. He allowed himself to pat the odd dog on the head, but as for the rest he simply made the sign of the cross in their general direction, muttering some incantation under his breath, and then tried to dispatch the owner as quickly as he could. There were several dozen beasts to get through this afternoon: it might go on for a long time.

  ‘Of course,’ Concha said over the din and chatter, her breath heavy with wine and cigarettes, ‘the traditions of Sant Antoni date way back – long before Christianity arrived. This is an ancient rite of cleansing and to pray for a good year for farmers.’

  St Anthony’s Day was a big event in this part of Spain: in many villages it was far more important than Christmas and had become the main midwinter festival. I enjoyed this: Christmas, that overworked and overvalued festival, had barely passed with the ringing of a church bell here. Just another fiesta, a minor one, in a string of many that were dotted throughout the year. Sant Antoni was the big one, the one you waited for and looked forward to. No presents, no Santa Claus, no fake snow sprayed on the inside of shop windows. No Brussels sprouts. It was bliss.

  Officially Sant Antoni was held on 17 January, but with so many towns competing to hold the biggest and most important fiesta in the area they tended to stagger them so that people from one village could celebrate in the next, and then the next, and so on, thus extending the whole thing over a week or more. For a few days at least, during the season of the Sanantoná, you were unlikely to come across anyone sober, not even the local police.

  St Anthony the Great – el abad, the abbot, as he was usually referred to here – had been an Egyptian hermit of the third and fourth centuries, and was regarded, much like St Francis of Assisi, as having a special gift with animals. The legend said he had once cured a group of piglets of blindness, and that henceforth the mother sow (or wild boar, in some versions) had protected him during his lonely existence in the desert. For this reason he was also known as Sant Antoni del porquet – ‘he of the pig’. Often regarded as the founder of Christian monasticism, he was also said to have been serially tempted by the Devil – trials which, needless to say, he was always able to overcome. This part of his story, like his connection with animals, had entered popular imagination, and as well as scores of pets and beasts of burden, characters dressed up in wildly demoniac costumes wandered around the square, beating drums and pulling faces at laughing, frightened children. They wore white tunics painted with black, red and green designs, hoods pulled over their faces and small flaps dangling over their noses, like beaks, almost like fantasy birds. They reminded me in some ways of harlequins; some, I noticed, were carrying short sticks which they used playfully to beat people in the crowd, particularly the girls.

  ‘Those are the botargues,’ Concha said. ‘Look at that one over there.’ She pointed and I saw a broad-shouldered man wearing a skirt and blouse, a headscarf tied over his head. ‘That’s the filoseta. Always played by a man, but representing the sexual temptations of San Antoni in the desert.’

  He must have been in a pretty bad way, you couldn’t help reflecting, to have found anything tempting in what was on offer that evening.

  The ‘devils’ were dragging a couple of other characters around by a rope. These, Concha told us, were St Anthony himself and a St Paul who was also renowned as a hermit: the two seemed to do a kind of double act.

  ‘They get dragged around the village, entering people’s houses and fooling around,’ she said.

  A sound of wind instruments blasted out from one of the side streets and the drums started beating more intensely. A thin, reedy sound circled in the darkening sky as four musicians emerged into the square playing dolçainers – an instrument similar to a shortened oboe or clarinet – with bursts of sharp, catchy folk melodies. The crowd parted to let them through, the drummers falling in behind. Shouts and cheers went up as the ‘devils’ then ran into the square, spreading mayhem as they launched themselves into the crowd, groping at the women, great shrieks of fear and laughter searing the cold night air as people shouted and pushed, slipped and fell over. Soon after they set off in a procession around the village, cameras flashing as the pageant of misrule surged into a higher gear. Puddles of wine and beer formed underfoot as people spilled their drinks.

  The central point of the festivities was an enormous conical bonfire sitting proudly in the middle of the square, over twenty feet high, a central pole with subsidiaries radiating out from it, much like a tepee. It had been covered in branches and leaves, while at the bottom a tunnel ran through the middle, just big enough for a person to walk through. There was, I realised, an obvious resemblance to the Christmas trees of northern European tradition: green, conical, built of pine (or spruce). Even the lighting of it later on would bear echoes of the candles – and later, fairy lights – used to adorn Christmas trees. Perhaps both shared a common heritage with ancient tree religions, combined with a celebration of ‘light’ at this darkest time of the year. I remembered the stories of Percival and the tree of a thousand candles, which the nineteenth-century writer J.H. Philpot mentioned in her classic study of tree lore. ‘The Christmas tree may be said to recapitulate the whole story of tree worship,’ she wrote in The Sacred Tree in Religion and Myth. ‘The tree as the symbol and embodiment of deity, and last but not least, the universal-tree, bearing the lights of heaven for its fruit and covering the world with its branches.’

  El Clossa, Pau and Africa now joined us. Africa was showing a marked bump and she smiled as Salud and I looked down in surprise at her belly.

  ‘Five months,’ she whispered with a smile.

  ‘A few more minutes now,’ El Clossa said, ‘and they’ll light the barraca.’ He nodded at the bonfire. ‘They chop down the biggest pine tree in the forest to make that.’

  The main pole, he told me, was called the maio – the may – although no one knew exactly why it was given this name. Childhood memories of dancing around maypoles in an English playground came flooding back: coloured ribbons weaving in and out to form a tight-knit pattern. We’d only performed the maypole dance one year – I think I was about six or seven; perhaps for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. It had been lost after that: no need, it was felt, to continue such archaic traditions.

  El Clossa explained to us how several days before the fiesta a group of men went out into the forest to find the tallest pine tree, which they cut down, stripped of its branches and then brought to the square.

  ‘The tunnel in the middle represents the barraca – the hut – of the hermit saint,’ he said. ‘Or at least that’s the theory. Quite what a pine-branch tunnel’s g
ot to do with a bloke living in the Egyptian desert is beyond me. They have to tell everyone it’s all Christian, see? But obviously all this stuff’s much, much older.’

  What exactly were the origins of this curious rite, I wondered, and how had they been morphed under this veneer of Catholic respectability.

  ‘Look!’ said Salud, grabbing my arm and pointing. A group of men carrying flaming torches had entered the square and had dispersed around the edge of the bonfire. Bending down, they lit the branches poking out at the bottom, and flickers of light began to dance underneath as tiny plumes of smoke were lifted up into the night air. Explosions shook the ground as the devils pulled out large firecrackers and started letting them off, their bangs and whistles momentarily silencing the crowd as the two saints ran towards the leafy tunnel. As the flames started rising and licking the sides, they dashed through and out the other side before turning round and repeating their run back the other way. More firecrackers went off, the devils jeering at them and dancing manically and menacingly towards them. Members of the crowd began imitating the hermits’ daredevil feat, chasing through the fiery hole and out the other side, covering their heads with their arms for protection from the heat as the blaze now started to take hold. Young men cheered victoriously as they came out unharmed, the girls behind them squealing with nervousness and excitement. One lad kept darting in and out, checking the flames each time before risking it again and again. A gasp went up from the crowd as he made to go in for a last time, removing his T-shirt and running as fast as he could, fire almost consuming the entire cone of the bonfire. He made it, just, but seconds later the first small burning branches of the structure began to break away and fall to the ground. Within a minute no one could stand closer than a dozen paces from the tower of fire lighting up the entire square.

  El Clossa approached from behind as we stood open-mouthed, captivated by the sight of this dangerous inferno.

  ‘Come and have a drink,’ he said, a bottle in his hand.

  Pau and Africa were sitting at a table near one of the makeshift bars set up for the fiesta around the edge of the square. Marina, presumably having put her cats back in the van, was with them. Plastic plates of burnt black sausage and chorizo dotted the table, puddles of red and dark brown fat congealing in the cold. El Clossa greedily picked up a basket of bread from a neighbouring stand and started dipping morsels into the gravy.

  ‘The best bit,’ he said. ‘Want some?’

  Africa was staring angrily at Concha. We sat down, forming a loose circle around the table. The fiesta going on around us seemed to fade. It appeared we had caught them in the middle of an argument.

  ‘You can’t go through with this,’ Africa said. Her eyes were protruding alarmingly.

  ‘They’re going to dig this whole area up and turn it into clay quarries for the ceramics factories. It’s in the paper. The proposal’s with the regional government right now. And you know they’ve all been bought. It’s just a formality. First the wind farms, now this.’

  ‘We need to think things through,’ said Concha.

  There was a crash as Pau’s fist struck the table.

  ‘We need action, direct action.’

  He stood up.

  ‘What these people need, Concha,’ he said, ‘is not more talk, more politics. That’s all you’re offering. Do you think standing in the elections is going to make the blindest bit of difference?’

  ‘It’s the only way!’ Concha cried. ‘You and I may feel the same about what they’re doing to this land of ours, Pau,’ she said. ‘But it’s clear we have very different ideas about how to save it.

  ‘And what’s more …’

  She tailed off, mouth open, her eyes almost popping out of her head.

  ‘What … what are you doing?’ she said, shocked but at the same time trying to stifle a laugh.

  Pau had quickly taken off first his coat, then his jumper and his shoes, and was now pulling his trousers off in front of us.

  ‘Really, Pau,’ El Clossa said as the rest of us watched in stunned silence, ‘I didn’t know you cared.’

  Pau ignored him. It was freezing, but for some reason he had got it into his head to strip down to his underpants. Africa, sitting at his side, didn’t bat an eyelid.

  ‘No more talking,’ Pau said almost under his breath as he stood there virtually naked in front of us. He was skinny and pale, his navel protruding like a raspberry. His head, however, was still covered by a woollen cap that was rarely removed from his balding scalp. Around us, some of the villagers were beginning to notice him and had started to point and laugh.

  ‘These people need to be shocked! They need to be woken up!’ Pau said. ‘It’s the only way we’ll ever get them to listen.’

  There was a pause as he seemed to expect us all to react in some way, but we were still too bemused to say anything. Not getting any response, he whipped off his underpants in defiance and ran out towards the bonfire, where the rest of the village was watching the slowly dying fire, warming themselves from its heat. I closed my eyes, hardly wanting to watch.

  ‘And he thinks that he’ll get people to listen by running around en bolas on Sant Antoni?’ Concha was laughing incredulously. Shrieks were coming from the direction of the bonfire as some of the local women caught their first sight of the naked Pau.

  ‘He’s not the only one!’

  Marina had got up as well and was unbuttoning her coat.

  ‘Not you as well, please!’ Concha implored. ‘If you get those out you’ll give half the men in the village a heart attack.’

  Shouts of abuse were coming from the area of the bonfire. Almost everyone around us had moved away from the bar and surged over to get a glimpse of the madman dancing and running in circles around the flames. Marina suddenly decided to join him and pulled off her top, launching herself through the crowd and towards the fire, and Pau. I could only think of his feet: they would be cut to shreds out there on the glass from the broken bottles.

  The villagers were getting upset: some of the shouts were turning ugly and aggressive. They didn’t want this outsider ruining their fiesta. But once Marina appeared, her white flesh bouncing uncontrollably in the light of the fire, the mood changed and the hint of violence dissipated. Now the two of them were just a laughing stock, people smiling, pointing, and shaking their heads.

  Sometimes, I thought to myself, life in Spain could be almost unbearably surreal.

  Salud had had enough. She leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  Concha was holding her head in her hands, while Africa just sat there, a knowing smile playing on her lips.

  El Clossa caught up with us as we walked back to the car. The streets seemed to be densely dark after the brightness of the bonfire and I wondered if we would be able to find our way.

  ‘Concha’s standing in the local elections,’ he said, standing in a pale pool of light cast by a bare bulb hanging over a door.

  ‘Pau’s taken his clothes off because Concha’s standing in the elections?’ I said. It seemed odd that someone wanting to become a village councillor could invoke such passions. But this was Spain: they took their politics seriously here.

  ‘Pau has … other ideas,’ he said. ‘For defending the land. Concha thinks she can protect it by working from the inside.’

  While Pau, it seemed, favoured ‘direct action’.

  ‘What do you think?’ Salud asked.

  El Clossa looked down at the floor for a moment, and then turned, as if to go, uncomfortable with the question.

  ‘They’re both playing with fire,’ he mumbled over his shoulder. ‘The land looks after itself.’ Then he trotted away back into the blackness, his crutches clattering rhythmically against the stone floor.

  We felt our way to the car, the cries and shouts from the bonfire and the fiesta behind us muffled by the stone houses and windy streets.

  The Story of the Knight Templar and the Moorish Girl

  SOON AFTER IT was co
nquered by the Christians from the Moors, the little town of Benassal, which lies at the heart of the Maestrat area north of Penyagolosa, was handed over to be ruled by the Knights Templar. There, these fierce, monastic warriors established themselves, living side by side with the many Moors who had stayed behind and who continued to live as they always had. One of the new knights in the town was called Cristòfol, a brave and handsome young man. Every morning he would ride out on some task or other, and it wasn’t long before his eye fell on the loveliest Moorish girl in the village. He noticed she used to break away from the other women and spend time alone at the spring at the bottom of the Montcàtil mountain, where she would fill her water jugs before heading home once more.

  Again and again Cristòfol found himself watching out for her. He quickly discovered her name – Oras – and found any excuse he could to ride to the spring when he knew she would be there. Finally, one day, unable to contain himself any longer, he approached her and declared his love for her.

  But when she heard his words, Oras covered her face and wept.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ she said. ‘I too love you, and have watched and waited for you all this time. Yet the rules of your order are very strict – you have taken a vow of chastity. While if my father hears of my love for a Christian he will certainly kill me. We are doomed.’

  ‘The truth of my love for you is stronger than any vow,’ Cristòfol told her. ‘And your love for me stronger than any fear.’ And he reached towards her and gently touched her face.

  Oras threw herself into his arms and swore that she would love him forever. And from that day onwards they used to meet by the spring every afternoon to spend a few moments together, alone and in secret.