I just arrived in Toledo…and it’s holier than ever: Dark El Greco clouds overhead with bright clear horizons, and hail pelting huge masses clogging the streets awaiting the Good Friday procession.
(Eight days in, and I’ve researched Granada, Nerja, Ronda, and Córdoba. My trip is nine parts, thirds broken into thirds: Andalucía, Madrid/Toledo, Basque Country/Galicia; Rome, Tuscany, Florence; and three TV shows in the former Yugoslavia.)
Holy week clogs the streets in Spain. Every city south of Madrid seems to have a Semana Santaschedule booklet listing each of the processions: its home church, where it starts, and where it ends. In Córdoba, they were staggered, leaving every hour or so through the afternoon and lasting many hours each — some into the wee hours.
People lined the streets in anticipation. Cameras on long booms were poised in front of neighborhood churches. In bars, all eyes were fixed on the TVs watching not soccer or bullfighting…but live coverage of their town’s Holy Week procession.
Streets are speckled with dribbled candle wax and sunflower seeds from last night’s procession. Spaniards seem to be voracious sunflower seed-munchers at parades.
In my earlier days, I would have been in hog heaven with all this commotion. On this trip, I have a mission — to review restaurants each night. Last night in Córdoba, I physically couldn’t get through the crowds to the restaurants on my list. So, I joined the scene.
Paraders in their purple-and-white KKK-style cone hats, Crusader swords, and four-foot candles shuffle endlessly. Like American kids scramble for candies at a parade, Spanish kids collect dripping wax from religious coneheads, attempting to amass the biggest ball on a stick for their 2009 Easter souvenir.
Even in our fast-paced and secular world, the rich traditions are strong. While it seems half the population is caught up in the action, I’ve yet to meet anyone really thinking about what Easter is all about. Maybe faith is a private matter. Maybe it’s dead. Maybe I’m talking to the wrong people. Maybe it’s inertia from centuries of moms making you go. Or maybe people just like an excuse for a parade.
The procession squeezes down narrow alleys, legions of drums crack eardrums in the confined space, the local press jostles with tourists for the best photos, kids sit wide-eyed on paternal shoulders, and finally the float itself rumbles slowly by: gilded, candlelit, and crushing bystanders against rustic ancient walls. Parade officials — like holy bodyguards — make sure progress is unimpeded. I look up, and high in the sky is what Good Friday is all about: an extremely Baroque Jesus lurching forward under the weight of that cruel cross symbolically climbing to his crucifixion.
Later, back at my hotel, it occurred to me that the float floated not on wheels but on boys. Unseen and unheralded, bent under all that tradition, a team of boys was trudging for hours through the throngs.
