On the Shores of the Mediterranean (52 page)

The main body of the procession had been waiting in the street and now the first part of it formed behind La Muerte. This was composed of hooded Nazarenos from twenty-seven of the fifty-two Cofradias and Hermandados which had already passed through the Cathedral in Holy Week, each in the costume of his Brotherhood, the youngest of these being the Brotherhood of Nuestro Padre Jésus Despojado de Sus Vestiduras, Christ despoiled of his Clothing, which was only 13 years old. The oldest, Los Negritos, was 584 years old.

The Nazarenos were dressed in white and purple for Christ, white and blue for the Virgin, white and crimson, cream with black face-pieces, purple with the cord belt of the Franciscans, white with woven belts of gold cord, and in the black of the Nazarenos of the Gran Poder and Santa Cruz.

I never saw the procession. I was in the worst place to see any procession, in it and at the front of it. I never even saw La Urna or El Duelo leave the Convent, so I do not know what sort of welcome they got from the crowd, whether cheers or silence, for by that time I was already far away, beginning the Carrera Oficial, moving ghostlike through the Calle Sierpes which in places is so narrow that, with chairs placed on either side for spectators, each of which costs 220 pesetas, it fits the processions closely round the hips.

I didn’t see the members of the Council or General of Hermandados and Cofradias, the representative of the Comendador of the Order of Mercy, Padre Luis Cid, the Censor of the Order, or the President of the Council of Cofradias, José Sanchez Dubé, or the Municipal Band, directed by Maestro José Albero Frances, although I certainly did hear it when it entered La Campana, the big square before the Sierpes, when it struck up the march
Cristo Yacente
, from its position behind La Urna con El Cristo Yacente, when it practically took the tiles off the roofs.

Neither did I see the acolytes dressed in eighteenth-century clothing who were carrying a black canopy raised on silver poles in respect for the dead Christ in La Urna. Neither did I see the troop of Roman soldiers with plumed helmets who preceded it; nor the representatives of the Real Maestanza (whatever that is); the Delegate of the Government of Andalucia (Leocadio Marin); the Second in Command of the Military Government (General Juan Ollero); the President of the Sala de lo Contencioso, Fernando Rubiales, representing the Audencia Territorial; the Chief Inspector of Taxes, Hipolito Hernández; nor the Rector of the University, Guillermo Jimenez Sanchez. Nor did I see Fernando de Queral Müller, Captain-General of the Second Air Region nor his Band and Guard of Honour; he was taking part in the procession as representative of King Juan Carlos. (By a rule of the Brotherhood promulgated in 1805, future kings of Spain would automatically assume the title of Hermano Mayor. In 1940 General Franco took part in the procession, having interpreted the rule of the Brotherhood perhaps too literally.) Nor did I see that indefatigable figure, the Archbishop of Seville, Monseñor Carlos Amigo Vallejo, or the Mayor of Seville, Luis Urfiuela Fernandez, or the members of the Council of the Brotherhood, although I had already seen them, the men at the top of the ladder, in the church before we left. Nor did I see the officials of the Municipal and Provincial Governments of Seville, but I didn’t feel any the worse off for that.

Well, what did I see as a pseudo-Nazareno, now one of the supporters of this Real Hermandad Sacramental del Santo Entierro, this Brotherhood with its massive display of temporal and spiritual power which had kindly provided me with their
laissez-passer
, as I walked, one of the front-runners of the procession? I saw a sea of people in front of me which I now knew would open up to let me through without the aid of policemen or the Guardia Civil, would part like the waters of the Red Sea
before the Children of Israel, in the circumstances perhaps an unfortunate simile, as I drew near them.

What did they feel, what were they thinking about, these thousands of people, the adventurous people up trees and lampposts, the ladies in mantillas and tall combs on the balconies, some of whom would have been well advised to forgo this way of dressing in which success and failure is measured by a hair’s breadth, the bourgeoisie sitting in the seats in the Sierpes, those members of the Establishment not taking part in the processions who were sitting in the boxes faced with red velvet, outside the Casa del Ayuntamiento, the City Hall? What were they thinking about, I wondered, making the most of this heaven-sent gift of anonymity, seeing the Sevillans crossing themselves, drinking beers and manzanillas, picking at their
tapas
, the snacks that come with the drinks, picking their noses, flirting – all in the beautiful Sevillan gloaming? What are
you
all thinking about, I wondered, looking in through what would normally have been an expanse of plate glass, now opened up for the occasion, into a fashionable men’s club in the Sierpes, face to face with its assembled members gazing incuriously out at me and the procession, a band of grumpy-looking General Francos, elegantly swathed in dark grey flannel and Harris tweed. Was this the same dub referred to as ‘Les Laboureurs’, the Labaradori, I wondered, that Nancy George, writing in French, looked into through a similar open window in Holy Week, 1931? ‘The Labourers have one thing in common,’ she wrote. ‘They do not labour. It is the best known of all the clubs, the most aristocratic, its members follow the Christ of the Gran Poder barefooted and their wives, filled with ennui, leave them at this hour to run around in their sumptuous automobiles.’ Well, if this was what they were still up to, no wonder their husbands looked grumpy.

Such a procession as this was very restful to take part in, at
least for the hooded Nazarenos, much less so for the barefooted Penitentes lugging their heavy crosses, but nothing like as heavy as the Cross Christ carried, and much much less for the wretched Costaleros. Hooded, a unique anonymity is conferred on the wearer. Forbidden to speak, a merciful prohibition, the only external distractions are the small boys and girls who continually demand wax from your candle to add to what by now at the end of Holy Week amounts to a large ball of the stuff, and occasionally a girl comes very close who is either brazen or genuinely attempting to identify a friend or relation. The only other obligation a Nazareno has, an unofficial one, is to distribute sweets, of which he should have laid in a large store before leaving on his journey, to children or anyone else who takes his fancy. For the rest of the time he is a privileged voyeur, a ghost arrayed in ghostly clothing.

Halts were frequent. This was because the Costaleros were only able to carry their
pasos
for a comparatively short distance before being allowed to sink down on the road for an obligatory rest. Then they were brought water by an
aguador
, a water carrier, who would lift up the velvet hangings which concealed them from view and give them a drink from an earthenware pitcher. Sometimes during one of these halts one or two of them would rush off to a bar to drink a couple of beers in quick succession and relieve themselves, while others, either overcome by heat or worn down by the enormous weights they were called on to carry, were replaced by reservists.

Our procession was held up because the procession in front of ours, La Esperanza de la Trinidad, was behind time, having been on the road three hours longer than ours. This was because they could not leapfrog over the procession in front of them, that of Los Servitas, which was also running late. These were the two Brotherhoods whose bands we had heard trumpeting away up on the roof in the afternoon. And because of all this
we of the Santo Entierro were impeding the progress of the fifty-sixth and last procession, the Papal and Royal Sacramental Brotherhood of Our Lady of Rocamadour, Blessed Souls and Ancient Brotherhood of Nazarenes of Our Lady of Loneliness, La Soledad, which had nothing behind it to hold up. For this was the last procession of Holy Week. There is, in fact, another procession on the morning of Resurrection Sunday, El Resucitado, but it is a new procession, its first appearance was in 1982, and it is not really part of Holy Week.

Now we paced solemnly through the Plaza San Francisco, otherwise Plaza de la Falange, where the top brass were sitting in stands draped in red and no one was going exactly crazy about our austere procession, and on into the Avenida José Antonio and the Avenida Queipo de Llano, otherwise Avenida de la Constitucion (where it got the same reception), wishing that the administration would decide once and for all what they are going to call their streets. The vast bulk of the Cathedral was beginning to loom ahead on the port bow, and the sun was sinking swiftly, for it was now long after eight. It illuminated the float ahead already lit by innumerable candles, which was carrying the beautiful Virgin of Esperanza, the masterpiece of Juan de Astorga, as it halted at the junction of the Alemanes, on the north side of the Cathedral, with Calle Garcia de Vinuesa, the way down to the bullring and the Guadalquivir, evoking enthusiastic cries and applause as its Costaleros executed a sort of side step, making the slender silver poles supporting her green and gold embroidered velvet canopy shiver like aspens in a breeze. How would they have looked at me and any companions I might have had, these people of Seville, if we had been Jews or Moors, the Jews symbols of wealth, the Moors of skill in agriculture, on our way to the Quemadero, the burning place of the heretics in the Prado de San Sebastiano, the flat plain beyond the southern walls where the
auto-da-fé
, the execution of
the sentence of the Inquisition, was carried out not by the Dominican inquisitors, the instruments of the Holy Office who would have wrung the confessions from us in the Moorish citadel at Triana beyond the bridge, but by the civil power?

Would they have done what they had done today as El Santo Entierro went by, crossed themselves, shed a tear, applauded, picked at their noses or at their
tapas
, continued to sip their manzanillas, climbed trees to see us, put on their best clothes for the event, while we passed in procession dressed in the
san benite
, the yellow fool’s caps and tunics of the condemned heretics, the colour of Judas Iscariot, the colour in those days of the dress of the common criminal on his way to execution?

What I was taking part in here in Seville – and I was impressed by what I was taking part in – is something far older than the processions of the Christian Church. The processions of Holy Week are not only an echo of pagan antiquity. They are a direct continuation, thinly disguised, of the processions of images of gods and goddesses, carried on the shoulders of common men in the ancient world. In ancient times this perhaps was Tarshish, the furthest known habitation in Europe, at the western end of the Mediterranean, the uttermost part of the known world in Europe, as was Morocco in Africa, a place which the Phoenicians wished and tried to keep secret to themselves.

Here, in Spain, these processions continued as a Christian ritual under the Visigoths until they were interrupted by the Moors, but they started up again long before the Muslims left the peninsula for ever.

For us, watching them take place, and at the same time reading accounts of similar processions in the ancient world, time was annihilated. One might have been witnessing the procession of the Phoenician Astarte, otherwise the Egyptian Ashtaroth, goddess of the heavens, the Roman Juno Coelestis, her name everywhere
signifying star, imported here in Seville from the eastern Mediterranean to comfort those Phoenician traders who were so far from home. Just as she was worshipped and carried through the streets crowned with stars, as are the Virgins today, in Babylon, Tyre, Sidon, Memphis, Carthage, Rome, in the same way as was the Sacred Boat of Osiris, the Shrine of Isis, the Ark of the Covenant of the Jews, wherever their temples were to be found, so she was here as late as the third century AD.

With a truly dramatic flourish the last of the two
pasos
of La Esperanza de la Trinidad was made to perform a ninety-degree turn by her Costaleros and the Virgin of Hope of the Trinity went swaying up the ramp into the Cathedral through the Puerto San Miguel at the south-west end to the accompaniment of drums and bugles and trumpets and the applause of what here was a vast assembled multitude. We followed her in shortly afterwards with La Muerte, but again it was very noticeable that Death did not have the box office appeal of Virgins, especially Virgins of the calibre of Our Lady of Hope of the Trinity.

The Cathedral was built on the site of the mosque of the Almohad Sultan, Abu Yousef Mansur. He started to build it in 1163 and completed it fifteen years later, in 1178. In 1248 Seville was reconquered by the Christians, and for the next 153 years it was a Christian place of worship. Then, in 1401, it was pulled down and the present building constructed. Nothing was left of the mosque of Abu Yousef to remind the Christian worshipper of the place where his apostatized forefathers had worshipped, suitably circumcised, except for the Patio de los Naranjos, the rather sad-looking Court of Oranges, in which they had carried out their ritual ablutions at what was a fountain originally built by the Visigoths, and the Giralda, the great minaret, soaring more than 300 feet into the heavens, now part of Captain-General Müller’s airspace.

Here in Seville a clean sweep was made, and the unknown French architect who built the Cathedral (the influence is said to be that of St Ouen at Rouen, one of the most beautiful Gothic churches ever built) carried out the resolution made by the Chapter at its first conference, ‘to construct a church such and as good that it never should have its equal. Let Posterity,’ said its members, ‘when it admires it complete, say that those who dared to devise such a work must have been mad.’

And indeed, standing in it before La Muerte among the guttering red candles borne by the Nazarenos of El Santo Entierro, all of whose
pasos
were now stationed in it, and those members of all the other Cofradias who accompanied them, awaiting the Blessing at the Station of the Holy Sacrament, hearing the murmurings of what was a vast congregation within its great choir and its chapels, all largely invisible in the ever-increasing murk – for it was now nine o’clock – it would have been difficult not to agree that they had triumphantly succeeded.