WATCHING THE PROCESSION PASS

 

 

It was Holy Thursday and it was snowing in Segovia. The hood is a bit blind and there is cloth that covers the eyeball. The penitent has to know where he is going. Hence that look of the Easter hoods that scared me since I was a child and could be as intimidating as the Carnival drones. Uh.Uh! I scared you. Uh. ooh! The coconut. Then that ridiculous hood that was nothing but the old squeamishness of the collective soul of a people that trembled at the Inquisition and had to make a public show and profession of faith in my Segovia, and that there we have always been old Christians. Also, those relaxed to the secular arm of the Holy Office were dressed in a purple tunic, their faces were covered and they were put on a donkey.

To the bonfire one always went backwards. The processions are an enigmatic remembrance of that motley world. Catholicism had triumphed. Hardly anyone explains how such representations of popular fervor survive. For a few hours those fervent masses took God out of the hands of the priests and took him out into the streets under banners. It was also a guild world. Cities divided into neighborhoods. On the horizon the brotherhoods. The brotherhoods competed as in a mus championship to exhibit the best Christ and the most alive image of the Virgin. We were from Dolores de Santa Eulalia, by another name Our Lady of the Seven Knives. Formerly textile sector, mostly dyers and pears.

Through the streets of my town that snowy night (it was the action of the exhidra or favonian winds that for the Romans, announcing rain, brought spring) I carried my cross and walked barefoot and with chains on the frozen ground. Under the hood the prophets of the holy Prophet sounded in my ears determinedly sounded “I gave my body to those who hurt me and my cheeks to those who pulled my hair: I did not turn away my face from those who insulted me and spat on me. The Lord was my help” [Isaiah 50,5,10]. Throughout my life I have known what slander and the goop of purulent mouths are, but my loins were well tied. Sint lumbi vestri precinti(you have to tie the males) other words that I remembered when I gird myself with the girdle or the cofrade esparto rope No jeopardize my health despite that nonsense of walking barefoot and with a cross that weighed one hundred and twenty kilos to the rib You only feel sore for a couple of days but then as if nothing had happened. Miracle? I couldn't explain it but there is something.

 You feel guilty, you don't know for whom and with a guilt complex. The blame. Oh felix blame. Then I understood, they were people less fond of bullfighting than of autos de fe. There they always liked the processions and cavalcades. Steps. floats. The Blessed Sacrament. The Tarascan of Corpus. The Feasts of the Fourteenth. The Piety of Aniceto Mariñas. The novena of the Fuencisla. The rooster of San Pedro. The thorn of Santa Rita de Casia. I have seen giants, big heads and hustlers through San Juan de Junio ​​and even the incorrupt arm of San Antonio María Claret parade under the solemn and self-absorbed eyes of the aqueduct because all the processions of the Great Week and the others converged in the Plaza del Azoguejo .

There was no cinema, few theaters and a great desire to learn and see things. The faces of those grotesque carvings and those dying Christs, bloody, wounded and with the expression of agony, the straight hair, shaggy beards and those tormented virgins with sorrowful expressions silk lace, lace jerkins, and lace moqueros, being thus that the tears were made of glass, dragging a lot of peplum and a lot of jewels under the canopy of diamonds, they put my soul up. They were lasting sensations. That I have marked in the depths of my being.

 ▬Why do you release so many Latin words in your writings, Ejusmodi?

 ▬ Take it because it is going to be because it seems that the echoes of the passio song made in three voices by the singers of my cathedral -Dimas, Jerónimo and Don Bernardino, the bass Jesus, the contralto, the synagogue and the tenor, chronicler)

 And those voices, that melody, sound like an immortal cry in my memory. The field of processions was a de rigueur plastic. Sermons carved into papier mâché or Espirdo wood images. A theology that enters through the eyes and that throughout your days you will never be able to get rid of. The same as the distant sound of bugles, kettledrums and drums. Or the vibrant silence of Christ of the Gascons. They took us all. I remember one Palm Sunday that my brother Nano caught a dog because he wanted them to be put on Jesus' donkey at the passage where the Lord made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem.

      ▬I want to go there.

      ▬My son, this is not the wheelies. It is Jesus who passes on his way to Jerusalem; blow him a kiss

      ▬ I want to get on the donkey. Well yes, well yes and yes.

And the Naneras wallowed in the mud putting on his sailor suit