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The Sacred and Profane
In modern-minded Spain, there is
one vestige of the ancient, the mystical, the pagan—four
days and nights of Carnaval.
The Los Angeles Times Magazine
April 11, 1993
The room is a tiny cell in a family compound enclosed
by unmortared slate walls more than a thousand years
old. Precisely how much more, the four women and two
men squeezed into this windowless space don't know,
any more than they understand exactly why they will
spend the forthcoming hours engaged in feverish ritual.
What they do know, they insist, is that like their fathers
and grandmothers and forebears beyond them, they were
born to this moment.
By the calendar, it is late February, 1993, three days
before Ash Wednesday and the Lenten season that precedes
Easter. By the map, this is northwestern Spain, a country
now free from a dictatorship that, for the best part
of this century, crushed traditions such as the one
they are about to honor. By some standards, the young
women here especially epitomize their modernizing nation:
Their dark-eyed charms notwithstanding, they have become
not wives but single professionals—a doctor, an
archeologist, a chess champion, a historian. But tonight,
neither career nor country crosses their minds.
As they expect to do throughout their lives, they have
returned this week, like dozens of others, to the vineyards,
cobbled paths and turnip fields of Laza, their ancestral
hamlet. The region is Galicia, continental Europe's
furthest western shore, whose misty seacoast, bagpipes
and Celtic legacy are kindred more to Brittany, Wales,
Scotland and Ireland than to Madrid, and whose language,
galego, tips away from Spanish toward the melodious
tongue of neighboring Portugal. As the four women attend
to the magical business of transforming two young men
into fantastic beings, they re-enter a collective memory
far older than the pastiche of kingdoms forged in 1492
by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella
of Castile.
"More," orders Nieves Amado Rolan, the archeologist.
The men, Paco and Dopa, stand straighter and tighten
their lean bellies as the women wrap yards of wide linen
sash around their midriffs. Before the men can relax,
Nieves and her companions sew the material onto the
men's suspenders, locking them into postures erect as
a matador's. The rest of their costume, every centimeter
hand-crafted, has required hundreds of hours of local
artisans' labor: crocheted lace stockings, embroidered
layers of ruffled pants, a brocaded waist jacket, a
belt of huge, protruding cowbells, weighing more than
12 pounds. And, leaning darkly against the shadowed
wall, are the leather whips and huge masks of painted
birch and pelica—animal skins—that for three
days will render them peliqueiros, the silent, nameless
masters of this ancient Galician village.
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From the cities where they now live and work, these people
have returned for
one of the Old World's
most authentic vestiges
of a rite that once
solemnized the passing
of winter into the
potent fertility of
spring. In Laza, the
event is known by
its Galician name,
entroido: introduction,
entry. Elsewhere in
Spain and Europe where
it is still observed,
and in Latin America,
where it has been
transplanted, it is
called carnaval. Centuries
ago, when Christianity
superimposed its holy
calendar on the cycles
of nature, the formerly
pagan celebration
became a brief, sanctioned
burst of scheduled
excess before 40 somber
days of Lenten abstinence
and repentance. (One
theory holds that
the word carnaval
derives from "carne
va"—"there
goes the meat.")
Lent concludes with
Easter, the celebration
of Christ's Resurrection,
coinciding handily
with the spring equinox—resurrection
of the pagan sun god.
In modern times, humanity's growing urban inclinations
have led carnaval even further from its agrarian origins,
distorting it into the street orgies of Rio de Janeiro,
Tenerife and New Orleans, whose most profound inspiration
now seems to be the lucre of tourism. Perhaps as a result,
Laza lately has found itself subject to a mounting onslaught
of cultural voyeurism, as television crews, non-Galician
Spaniards and even Germans and Italians are showing
up for their entroido. It is, by all accounts, one of
the purest carnavals that still exists. "As long
as we do this, our souls remain full," says Nieves.
Yet sometimes, now that her generation no longer makes
its living from this land, Nieves wonders if spiritual
decline will reach them as well—or their children.
Dopa and Paco are ready. The women hand them their
peliqueiro masks. The flesh-pink faces are identical:
reddened cheeks, slinking mustaches, fur beards and
sinister grins, backed by lynx hides and topped by parabolic
miters depicting a bull's head and a wolf, respectively.
While Generalissimo Francisco Franco was dictator, his
Falange guard outlawed the wearing of these masks, claiming
that disguises invited easy crime. "Peliqueiro
is not a disguise," Dopa declares. "It is
a necessity." He is echoing the sentiments of his
father's generation, whose members secretly took their
tradition deep into the forest during those dangerous
years. But now, with Spain rushing away from its rural
heritage toward the promise of industrial fulfillment
in the European Community, there is a new peril: Will
so-called social progress reduce carnaval in Laza merely
to nostalgia and entertainment—void of meaning
beyond what can be exploited by commercial enterprise
and anthropologists?
There is only one worthwhile response to the prospect
of such a barren future. Dopa and Paco don their masks
and rush into the night. From other doorways, more peliqueiros
pour into the narrow street, running at full speed.
Without breaking stride, they form a line and streak
away, their cowbells resounding off the slate walls.
The women watch them go, then grab bottles of homemade
aguardiente and head for the plaza. The peliqueiros
will be back. Entroido has begun.
***
When the Romans arrived in Galicia two centuries before
the birth of Christ, they were convinced they had reached
the end of the earth. This impression was heightened
by the other-worldly fog that swirls through Galicia's
river valleys, filling its craggy estuaries like legions
of ghosts pouring off the land and vanishing into the
sea. The settlers of the empire's furthest outpost called
this the Coast of the Dead. The name still persists,
even though Galicia, courtesy of a caravel named La
Pinta that sailed one momentous day into one of its
fiords, was the first place in Europe to learn that
life and the world resumed again across the ocean.
Earlier pagan legends also held that this was where
souls made their final pilgrimage. Long before the Romans,
the Celts built stone rings at the shoreline's furthest
promontories; even today, Galicians believe that at
certain times during the year, the dead here renew contact
with the living. During November, food from the recent
harvest is set out for them. Their presence is sensed
again at Christmas, as solstice marks the plunge into
winter. At least one anthropologist has written that
the various masked beings that surface in Galician villages
during carnaval, such as Laza's peliqueiros, represent
disembodied spirits making another of their cosmic rounds.
In Laza's central Plaza of the Picota, Juanjo Amado,
who has heard his archeologist sister Nieves mention
this theory, rolls his eyes. "Traditions aren't
defined by what anthropologists think," he declares.
To Juanjo, a theater technician in the city of Santiago
de Compostela, 120 miles to the north, a pedantic analysis
of vibrant social passions is akin to dissecting songbirds
to discover what inspires them to sing. "The people
can't explain what entroido means. They just have to
do it. It's what they do."
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Juanjo, a husky man in his early thirties, is wearing
a shimmering pink dress, black mesh stockings, a polka-dot
silk scarf, a henna wig and a quarter-inch of rouge.
Sitting on the plaza steps on this second night of carnaval,
he shares a bottle of white wine recently fermented
from his parents' grapes with a friend, 78-year-old
Luis Villalobos, and greets the other prodigals who've
made it home for entroido. He and Luis toast the old
women seated on the second-story iron balconies that
ring the plaza, awaiting the evening's bedlam. Nearby,
the town's old picota —pillory—stands idle,
as it has for centuries during carnaval, when almost
any behavior short of manslaughter is not merely permitted,
but encouraged.
Juanjo is not the only one who has cross-dressed for
the occasion. Under the brightening stars, men in green
satin gowns waltz to an arrhythmic band of gray-haired
musicians playing tubas, clarinets, a snare drum and
bagpipes. Women wearing the coarse woolen robes of Franciscan
monks alternately drag on Lucky Strikes and neck with
boyfriends swaddled in nuns' habits. A leering bishop
appears in mini-cassock, silver lame tights and suede
heels. Hundreds of others who jam this tiny triangular
plaza are attired more secularly, but equally adroitly:
as Tarot cards, as mimosa trees, as Day-Glo caricatures
of Basque terrorists.
A galego Moses plops down on the steps next to Luis,
shivering in his toga and sandals. While he attacks
the chill with a few long pulls on Juanjo's fiery young
wine, the sloppy faithful gather to receive his Ten
Commandments: "Thou Shalt Love Women Above All
Creatures; Thou Shalt Covet Thy Neighbor's Breasts;
Let No Act Be Considered Impure; Thou Shalt Take It
Off; Thou Shalt (explicit expletive) Whenever and Wherever
Possible." "Amen," intones the crowd.
It isn't that Galicians are unusually lecherous or blasphemous;
during carnaval, people are simply relieved, temporarily,
of life's chronic pressure to be moral and respectful.
Suddenly, all voices, music and thoughts are overwhelmed
by the din of enormous cowbells, as a column of 20 peliqueiros
flashes by, their painted faces mute and macabre under
the street lamps, their leather whips punishing whoever
fails to leap out of the way. The authority they exude
bores through the revelry like a hot iron, but as they
streak away, carnaval resumes instantly behind them.
Watching them go, Luis and Juanjo debate two opposing,
locally held hypotheses about the peliqueiros ' origins.
One, Juanjo says, claims that they derive from Celtic
times or earlier, when priests donned the skins of wild
animals to absorb their power, then brandished whips
to encourage, symbolically if not literally, a fertile
reception. Luis prefers the second version. "A
duke once owned everything in this valley," he
explains. "The serfs had to pay tribute to his
tax collectors. Anyone who didn't pay got whipped."
South of town, the old crenelated castle belonging
to the Duke of Monterrey, who ruled here during the
Middle Ages, still towers over the land. According to
legend, after America was discovered, he brought back
Indian masks from Mexico or Peru to conceal the identity
of his tax collectors from the resentful populace. Laza,
poised near an ancient trade route connecting Spain,
Portugal and France, also was dunned by two lesser dukes,
whose crumbling coats of arms still adorn a plaza wall.
Today, to be a peliqueiro in Laza is an honor accorded
to those young men most adept at emotionally re-creating,
through posture and agility with their whips, the chilling
qualities of those mythic, bygone oppressors. As they
keep returning throughout the evening, multiplying like
alien cells that have begun to divide spontaneously,
the image of being surrounded by tax collectors imbued
with the authority of priests recurs like a Dark Ages
nightmare. "Death and taxes," Luis says, his
remaining teeth flashing within his grin. "Nothing
changes, ever."
Except during carnaval. This is when, for a few moments
each year, the people reign. Power is concentrated in
the masks thundering by, borne by the sons of the village
itself, lashing the crowd ever harder. Priest and politician
alike must hide or be pummeled with insult and ridicule;
the world is turned upside-down and shaken until the
established order cracks loose. Anything is possible,
everything is allowed: Humans transform themselves into
animals; males become females; peons strut like kings.
Social station is scorned, decorum is debunked, blasphemy
goes unblamed. In neighboring villages, normally sober
citizens drench each other with buckets of water; in
Laza, they sling rags soaked in mud until everyone is
reduced to muck. Bags appear containing ashes, flour,
and—most prized of all—fertilizer crawling
with red and black ants. A frenzy erupts; the air fills
with stinging, fragrant grime, coating everyone with
the earth's sheer essence. Men and women throw each
other to the ground and roll in the street. With any
luck, the heavens will be shocked and the new season
jarred awake. Then, once again, day can steal hours
back from the night, vegetation will arouse from hibernation,
spring will heave aside winter, and what was dead can
live again.
***
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The craving to overthrow the months of dark, cold stagnation
is the birthright of any human who evolved away from
the tropics. When Christianity swept across ancient
Europe, the imposition of Lenten restraint just when
blood was beginning to soar with intimations of spring
was surely the young Catholic Church's frontal crusade
against instincts of the flesh. Previously, the rites
of spring in Galicia had been recast with each new culture
whose rule spread to the world's known edge. The fertility
exhortations of animal-skinned Celtic priests were stretched
to encompass a pantheon of Roman winter festivals: Saturnalia,
which accompanied the December sowing season; January's
Bacchanalia, toasting the god of wine; and the February
Lupercalia, invoking the god of flocks and fecundity.
By the Middle Ages these rituals had contracted again,
confined by a nearly omnipotent church to four days
preceding Ash Wednesday, but impossible to abolish.
Even the Duke of Monterrey understood that his subjects
required this moment of release, now not just from winter,
but from the domination of religion over their ancient
animal stirrings. Joining the masquerade, he traded
places with his vassals, until Lent began and submission
was restored.
On Tuesday, the final day of carnaval in Laza, Nieves,
Juanjo and Irene, their chess champion sister, present
themselves at their parents' house for lunch. Until
last night's desperate need to wash ants from their
hair drove them in search of a bath and clean clothes,
none has made it home for days. Throughout carnaval,
everyone has wandered randomly into houses for meals:
by rule, peliqueiros exhausted from their repeated circuits
can demand food and drink anywhere, and enough is prepared
to accommodate whoever else might appear. Earlier, they'd
visited the home of a friend renowned for her bica,
the traditional entroido cake, who calculated that she
had used nearly 1,500 eggs and a full-grown oak's worth
of stove kindling in preparing mass quantities of her
specialty.
Now, their mother rounds out custom with a table-sagging
spread of the pre-Lenten basic ingredient: pork. Pork
raised, slaughtered, dressed, cured and cooked at home—pork
shoulder, pork sausage, pork sliced, pork stewed, pork
snout; and tail, served with turnip tops, three different
home-grown wines and more bica. The feasting lasts nearly
three hours. Two other brothers are yet unaccounted
for, but their absence is compensated for by the presence
of Esther, the doctor; Rosa, the recent history graduate;
Juan Luis, the ersatz Moses; and a television crew from
Santiago de Compostela.
Groaning slightly, all convene afterward on a balcony
that faces the waning sun. Before them, spreading toward
the mountains of Portugal, is a pastoral landscape of
tiny fields delineated by a maze of low stone walls—landscape
that is both Galicia's pride and biggest problem. Remote
enough to protect its traditions, Galicia was also the
last place in Spain to become acquainted with the notion
of mechanized farming. After centuries of continually
dividing each family's lands, their farms were eventually
no bigger than subsistence plots, tillable only by ox
and plow. As a result, in recent generations the majority
of Galicians found themselves forced to migrate or starve.
Nearly all of this family's kin now live in Argentina,
a country reputed to have more galegos than Galicia
itself. Another option was for men to labor much of
the year elsewhere in Europe while women tended the
fields at home. Now, with the European Community removing
visa barriers, entire Galician families have left for
factories in Germany, Holland and Switzerland. And,
as cheaper vegetables and cheeses from EC countries
like France and Holland, with modern production methods,
further undercut traditional Galician agriculture, entire
villages have emptied of all but retired men and black-stockinged
widows.
The TV camera from Santiago is rolling; the reporter
asks Nieves about the significance of entroido, but
she's distracted, thinking about all the fine old stone
houses that are now abandoned, whose red tile roofs
she can see from this balcony. Juanjo has fallen asleep
in the sun, and Moses' commandments, while appropriately
sacrilegious for carnaval, are a bit intense for Santiago,
the resting place of the Apostle James and one of the
Catholic world's most holy sites. "Come to the
reading of the Testament tonight," Nieves tells
the crew. "That says it all."
The Testament, the climax of Laza's carnival, begins
at dusk under a new crescent moon. The Praza da Picota
is packed to capacity. Sons and daughters of Laza have
journeyed across Spain, Europe, and even across the
Atlantic to witness this. They cluster and embrace,
then press together even tighter as 85 peliqueiros descend
simultaneously at full velocity, their bells deafening
and whips snapping. They are joined by 15 small boys
wearing miniatures of their fathers' venerable masks—the
next heirs to the tradition. Finally they withdraw,
then return moments later, marching in two lines with
the junior peliqueiros clearing a path down the middle
for the official Testamentero, mounted on a donkey.
This year, it is Dopa, who has traded his mask for a
tunic of animal skins. As he reaches the microphone,
the peliqueiros lift their masks, and everyone hushes.
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The Testament of Laza, read here for centuries, is
an annual report delivered as an epic poem. In rhyming
couplets, Dopa reduces the politics, sacrileges, vanities,
deceptions and indiscretions of another year in the
life of his village to the essence of carnaval: a parody
of life's sorrows and weaknesses. Around the plaza,
faces redden and then relax with laughter, as no one
is spared: the local matriarchs who lobbied for the
town's latest improvement—cable TV—who were
then caught enjoying its X-rated movies; the hunter
discovered in intimate pursuit of not a boar, but his
best friend's wife; the entire village council, guilty
of producing little during the previous year beyond
their own flatulence. Lopa's performance, incisive yet
good-natured, is received with cheers for the entroido,
which has once again eased a year's accumulated pain
and opened a way into spring.
***
Because the Feast Day of St. James falls on a Sunday
this year, 1993 marks a Holy Year in Spain. At least
2 million pilgrims will visit Santiago de Compostela's
masterpiece cathedral, where a silver urn holds the
Apostle's remains. Some cynics doubt that the beheaded
body of James, who supposedly brought the Gospel to
Galicia before his martyrdom, was actually returned
here by his disciples. They note that in the 9th Century,
when his relics were miraculously discovered, Christianity
was struggling with Islam over Spain's soul and needed
a good, strategically placed shrine. Santiago conveniently
lay in the path of an ancient pilgrimage that once followed
the Milky Way across Europe to Galicia's Coast of the
Dead, the end of the earth. Many believe this was yet
one more appropriation of another religion's useful
customs.
With the legacy of brutal civil war finally buried,
thousands of villages elsewhere across Spain are resurrecting
another spiritual heritage. From attics and cellars
emerge fabulous carnaval masks hidden away for a generation;
their meaning, and details of the rituals that once
accompanied them, spill from the memories of elderly
survivors into their university-educated grandchildren's
tape recorders. In cities, far from the soil that spawned
it, carnaval has appropriately slickened: Municipal
governments—not rebellious citizens—run
the proceedings, and testaments have grown from public
confessions in the town square to choreographed satires
with musical accompaniment, sung by competing groups
in lustrous costumes, who sell compact discs of their
efforts from passing parade floats.
Yet the concerns that surface in the lyrics aren't
too distant from those in Laza. Their country is scrambling
for its place in a new economic landscape unmindful
of the cycles of nature. Spain, tuning its rusty economic
apparatus to the European Community's smooth pitch,
suddenly must simultaneously balance 20% unemployment
against its highest tax rates in history. But even if
such contradictions are someday, somehow, resolved,
questions remain that don't appear on ledgers. What
will tradition mean in a world whose guiding spirit
is a central bank in Brussels? In the interest of ending
tribal warfare, such as that which now ravages Eastern
Europe, is it time to move beyond old regional identities
that divide us, even if homogenized life leaves us groping
for something we sense our ancestors had?
A week after carnaval, in Irene Amado's apartment in
Santiago de Compostela, she, Nieves and Juanjo gather
around a VCR. Sipping coffee, they watch their village
and entroido, reduced to a 13-inch image. On the screen,
Laza is recognizable but contained, like a caged swallow.
And the smells are gone: the turnips, the vineyards.
Friends, people they know are interviewed. Dutifully,
they identify themselves. The TV reporter bends to a
6-year-old boy, struggling with his mask. "And
who are you?" he asks. The reply from the next
generation is what finally makes everyone in this room
smile. "I am," the boy tells the camera, "a
peliqueiro."
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|
Selected Works
Books
The World Without Us
An Echo in My Blood: The Search for a Family's Hidden Past
Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World
La Frontera: The United States Border With Mexico
Articles
University of Arizona Spring Commencement Speech
May 15, 2009
Three Planetary Futures Vanity Fair, April 2008
Earth Without People
Cartoon Op-ed
Mining the Imagination for New Energy
The
Cocaine Connection
Diamonds in the Wild
Power Trip
The Sacred and Profane
Vanishing Forests, Endangered People
Radio
 Chiloé: A Bridge Too Far?
Resurrecting the Zápara
Laguna Madre
Straw Bale Homes in Mexico |
