A Year in the World (6 page)

BOOK: A Year in the World

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“Of course. Everyone in Sevilla is born knowing how to dance.”

We sit back, looking out the windows. We’d expected a commercialized folkloric experience, all flash and polish. The waiter sent us to the right place. We felt and witnessed a layer of protection stripped away, leaving the dancers and audience, singer and guitarist engaged together in a blood ritual. This is a glimpse into the heart of Andalucía. I wonder if we will reach the core.

Days
in Sevilla. Days of sweet air like early spring, sky the same blue as the
azulejos
. I’m drawn to the Convent of San Leandro in Plaza San Idelfonso because the afternoon I happen to visit is Saint Rita’s Day, patron saint of lost causes. The church is filled with flowers and praying women, some clutching photographs. “Suffering mothers all,” I say to Ed. They kneel and weep and visit and hold each other up. In my life, I have never experienced the comfort of laying down my burden, down at the foot of someone to whom I say
I give up, help me
. And I can only wonder at the succor such an act provides. Do they hear God talking? Do they dance with God? At another door, we place our money on a carved wheel that spins into the convent. Out comes a wooden box of sweets from the cloistered nun on the other side.

In the plaza and along the streets, men in yellow slickers harvest oranges into big burlap sacks. Our shoes on the sidewalks and curbs stick and slide in juice and pulp. I ask a worker if they will make juice concentrate or the famous local marmalade. “Neither,” he says, “they’re too close to car exhaust. They will go into soaps and perfumes.” Oh great, perfume with a hint of toxic fumes.
Azahar
, Arabic for “orange,” and then into Spanish,
la naranja
. Here, they drink orange juice like water, sweetening it with a spoon of sugar. In the cathedral orange garden, where the Arabs made their ritual ablutions at the fountain before entering the mosque, the orange trees are intoxicated with birdsong, dripping and heavy on the air. Even the pigeons look holy. There are many in the plazas, but often they’re white, not like urban rats aloft but, instead, reminders of the holy spirit honing in on the Annunciation. A young mother in a fitted red jacket calls,
“Venga, caro! Alejandro, venga.”
Come here, darling! Alejandro, come. And little Alejandro beams and keeps running away. The children are dressed like children in photographs of the 1940s. Alejandro wears navy short pants buttoned to his crisp white shirt with ruffled collar. His hair is a Byronic toss of ringlets, and his cheeks look like tiny burnished pomegranates. I look carefully at all small children. There is one in our future. My daughter is expecting a baby in March.
Venga, caro
. Perhaps we shall one day be foolish enough to buy him one of the miniature matador’s “suits of light” displayed in shops, along with little admiral and sailor suits for small boys.

Sevilla is full of lived life, surprises, and secret loveliness. We locate La Venera, the Venus, a marble scallop shell on a house that once was the center of the city. In steps and in leagues, legal measurements once were made from here. Two well-fed nuns hoist a stuffed garbage can between them, struggling to keep the can away from their long gray habits. From birdcages perched on balconies or hanging in windows, trills and chirps light the steps of the people below. Ah, Love of God Street. Bells start the dogs barking.

We dip in and out of churches, admiring the little Arab windows, which look as if they’re formed by big star-and-moon cookie cutters, and the whitewashed arches in San Marcos, and the plaza behind it laden with oranges. In Santa Catalina we spot an Arab arch behind the Christian arch. The air clouds with the cinnamon smell of incense. By the altar to Santa Lucia, hundreds of pairs of eyes and even sunglasses adorn four panels. I exist visually. If I ever laid down a votive in a church, it would be to Santa Lucia.

To place such a votive, as we see in the archaeological museum, is an ancient instinct. Some of the first found objects shaped in bronze were ex-votos, just as we’ve observed in the Cortona museum. The Etruscans left thousands of these little animals and figures. Farmers turn them up when they plow.
Please, bless my girl. Please, cure my liver. Thank you for tipping me clear of the cart. Please, let me cross the swollen river. Thank you for sparing me when I had fever.
The instinct to offer a gift to the gods seems deeply human. The archaeological museum also has a wall of marble squares, each with a footprint. These are ex-votos to Isis and Nemesis. The names of the ancient devotees are carved with each footprint. Oddly moving, these surviving gestures toward the holy. They remind me of the thirty-thousand-year-old handprints on the cave wall at Pech Merle. Here, too, we see little heads of bulls thought to have been offered as sacrifice.

The bull! How he charges through Mediterranean history, how he survives as an icon! Spain itself is the shape of a stretched bull hide, Lorca says. Where did the bull symbol start? We’ve seen them as we’ve hunched and crawled through prehistoric caves in France. Early painters adorned Altamira’s walls with mighty bulls. In the great hall of the bulls at Lascaux, one bull is eighteen feet long, a most potent cultural symbol. Ed tells me that Europa was a Phoenician princess seduced by Zeus while she bathed in the sea with friends. In the form of a bull, he charmed the girls, and when Europa playfully mounted him for a ride, he charged into the sea and swam to Crete. This may be a sun myth, he speculates, since the Semitic origin of
Europa
probably means “west,” to which she was brought from the east, the place of sunrise. In almost all the paintings of Europa and the bull, she wears a filmy, flowing dress with at least one breast exposed. The white bull is crowned with flowers as he plows through the waves. At the Villa Giulia in Rome, a 520
B.C.
panel shows Europa and the bull accompanied by fish, seabirds, dolphins, and an angel holding rings to clash in each hand. How many artists since have picked up their brushes in the service of this myth: Tintoretto, Raphael, Boucher, Guido Reni, Veronese, Moreau, Picasso, Klee, Ernst, et cetera. On ancient, thumb-worn coins, on Greek vases, and in the paintings, she always holds on to the bull’s horns. Since Zeus chose the bull form, obviously the power of this symbol in Crete predated the myth.

How the bull’s horns spread throughout Europe as a magical symbol fascinates me. Far into fable and scripture and history, the slaying of a bull, and the trophy of its horn, enabled the warrior to marry the princess or assume the kingship. In Hebrew scripture, the messiah was to accomplish this same feat. In the scriptures, a
reem
, a large bull, gives the root to the name
Abraham
. The twists and turns of the bull legend reach from the horned headdresses of Abyssinian Astarte worship, to Minerva, to Mary, standing on a crescent moon, which is also the bull’s horn symbol. According to
Plutarch’s Lives
, Theseus, spoiling for action, went off to fight a bull in Marathon. He’d then take the conquered live bull to sacrifice at Delphi. Even today a common gesture in our town is the raised two fingers—the
corno
, or horn—showing the sign of a cuckold. Turning the two fingers toward the ground means “Let it not happen here.” Newborn babies are given gold bracelets or necklaces with a coral dangle made in the shape of a horn—protection against the evil eye. That legendary half-bull, half-man who lived in the labyrinth at Knossos, and the bull-leaping games acrobats played—these are deep inside our collective Western psyches. I, too, wear an ivory horn and several amulets against the evil eye under my shirt.

In
the Plaza Alfalfa (I never thought of this as a Spanish word) the pet market is in full swing when we pass through—green and patterned parrots, exotic shrimp-colored birds, canaries, turquoise and yellow songbirds, and some that look as if they’ve been netted from the nearest tree. Fish, puppies, kittens, and crowds of people, many of whom are under ten and begging for a hamster. I hate the crush and the smell of feathers and bird lime. Disgusting. We focus on a clutch of nuns, following them out of the mob, their voluminous gray habits moving in front of us like a rain cloud.

The
list of tapas we’ve tasted has grown. In my notebook I’ve listed in mixed English and Spanish:

Spinach with bacon and walnuts