It all starts with a pistoletazo of confetti on the balcony of the Town Hall, in the Plaza Cervantes. Thousands of people throng the square, jamming the narrow streets, eating, drinking, buying and enjoying a great spectacle. The sense of melee adds to the thrill, with parents veering prams this way and that, strings of teenagers joining hands to stay together. And they are not the only ones; donkeys roped together wend their way around the square, carrying small children.
It is a fiesta of the senses. Drums and dulzaina flutes sound impertinently. The air is thick with spicy perfumes, beeswax candle smoke and the aroma of artisan chorizo sausages roasting. Sparks fly from chestnuts fired over hot coals and horseshoes struck by aproned blacksmiths. Piglets, goat kids and other farm animals, as well as llamas and vicuñas native to South America, camp out in roomy, hay-filled cages as leather-gloved displays of falconry take place above them. Acrobats whoop, piling up into impossible formations, and dancing girls, jesters, the one-man-band and the strongman - a yellow boa constrictor around his massive shoulders - pick their costumed way along the streets. The alcalaÃnos huddle up to sip sugary mint tea at brass tables in the Moroccan tent or to buy crafts of every kind from stall holders garbed in leather and linen. They crowd around the potter turning red clay and the corseted maid painting childrens´ faces.
It is great fun. But what is it? When this October phenomenon began a few years ago it was dubbed the Medieval Market. This later segued into the Three Cultures Market with a view to embracing the much-touted, though largely exaggerated, peaceful co-existence of Christians, Muslims and Jews in medieval Spain. This year it was renamed the Quixote Market and the character of Don Quijote himself, mounted on his old nag Rocinante, with Sancho Panza in tow on his donkey Rucio, made the rounds of the old streets.
This quixotic title might be the definitive one, as the writer, Miguel de Cervantes, who penned the famous tomes, was born and baptised in Alcalá, facts out of which savvy town councillors are determined to wring every ha´penny. The city is a World Heritage Site, in no small measure due to this giant literary figure and since he is the city´s best tourist draw it is logical the market should reflect this. Clearly the town fathers are trying to get it right for their bid to be European City of Culture in 2016. Petitions abounded during the Market which last year kicked off on the 9th of October, the anniversary of the baptism of the ubiquitous novelist, and a date referred to wryly by citizens as Saint Cervantes Day.
Yet, with this development, the term medieval becomes a misnomer as Cervantes is a shining example of the Renaissance, called the Golden Age, in Spain. This was a time informed and financed by the results of Christopher Columbus´s voyages of discovery. It was a time when the confines of the known world had burst apart before the evidence of vast territories, called the Americas, existing over the oceans. Spain became the greatest world power and common people came into contact with places, races and ideas until then undreamt of.
Although the first volume of Cervantes´ novel did not apear until 1605, a century after the Catholic Queen Isabel met with Columbus in Alcalá de Henares with a view to finding a new route to the Spice Islands (inadvertently stumbling on the continent that would become New Spain), the impact of these events had only increased. They must have been incredible times, offering as they did, many ordinary men and women a different, non-European vision of what the future could hold. There existed territories as vast as the ocean; there was, perhaps, land for all.
For me, Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier best captures this sense of possibility in his short story, El camino de Santiago. Here he shows how the erstwhile serf or soldier began to gain a sense of this opportunity, imagining prosperity and upward mobility overseas. Carpentier exposes the emotional tussle between the familiarity of the known, but uninspiring, and the frightening, intriguing lure of the barely imagined. He evokes the struggle for a glimpsed modernity, an abandonment of what has become known as the Dark Ages and the social limitations on the common man. He writes about expanding horizons, both physical and intellectual, for people becoming aware that a future with new options was bearing down on them.
In times when a person´s surname was often an adjectival afterthought describing their principal activity, the main character Juan is surnamed and re-surnamed a number of times, depending on his current employment. Yet despite - or perhaps because of - the ease with which he could shift his identity, Carpentier´s Juan fails to achieve his goals. His liking for wine, women and song as opposed to hard graft is clearly a factor. The author shows how the belief in prosperity, the dream of prosperity, of the immigrant does not signify its achievement. But Carpentier stresses how some are, in fact, able to make the most of the new opportunities and I associate Alcalá´s market with the positive feel of that story. It is a recreation of times past in which a bright, free future beckoned.
Alcalá is now home to thousands of immigrants from Poland, Romania and Morocco, and in an ironic twist, Latin America, mainly Ecuador, Colombia and Brazil. We know all too well what their dreams of Spain, of Europe, have brought them. There is both success and failure, though few are like the shiftless Juan. We have better human and civil rights in our times - we are the future sought by Juan - but we still have a long way to go for the spirit of the market to be fully meaningful. We all know that the ability of the market to provide is one-armed, like Cervantes himself.
Yet I love the noisy, thronging streets. Much of the the attraction of this market for me is that it is not yet totally "packaged", even though tourists can catch the Cervantes train from Madrid´s Atocha station, (which fell foul of terrorist attacks in 2004) and start the journey into the past from there. And ironically, what attracts the public is perhaps an aversion to the antiseptic uniformity of our modern lives. Stallholders in leather aprons offer ecological goods, and their long hair and beards, their animals sharing space with humans and their itinerant nature evoke so-called alternative, anti-globalization lifestyles. We suspend the knowledge that the city is surrounded by industrial complexes and hypermarkets and can imagine that outside Alcalá there are the ancient woods, with the animistic religions of pagan cultures.
If I compare this event with Zaragoza´s overblown, over-budgeted, overly ambitious Expo this small market has a warmer feel. Here we don´t feel like lambs and sheep to the capitalist slaughter - even if the prices are indeed steep. It costs nothing but a stroll to get in and if we don´t like it, we can simply leave.
Of course, it´s all an elaborate form of street theatre, a grand illusion, in which we collude. The fabulous Christy´s which is the fancy dress shop in town clearly did brisk business in the run-up to the market. I vow that for next year I will be clad in a cloak. But the performance works, and it reminds us that there was fulfilling human life before shopping malls and Internet.
In calendar terms, the market falls between the strength-draining heat of the summer and the glacial freeze of the winter, in pleasant temperatures, running for three or four days over a weekend. My favourite time to go is at dusk on the Saturday evening, as it is especially atmospheric. The pungent air is ripe with possibility - the oncoming darkness, the heart of the weekend, beautiful things to see and buy and beautiful people milling into the market and away and back again as they enjoy the busy cultural and leisure scene the town boasts, despite its modest size. Alcalá is a very safe town but the tight, sensual squeeze stirs the imagination, conjures up an edge, but of course the crush of the crowd acts as a great force of contention and so transgression is just beyond one´s fingertips.
But you´re invited to dream - and suddenly I see Cervantes himself meandering here, dreaming too, creating his characters. Those boys with the gelled up hair could almost be the rich but thieving Rinconete and Cortadillo and that girl with the apples in her cheeks looks just like the Illustrious Skivvy. The sweep of long hair there reminds me of the Little Gypsy.
Alcalá ´s market reminds me of the shifting horizons of promise. Spain itself is progressing, regaining some of its past clout, this time through democracy and European integration. Alcalá, one of the booming towns along the Corridor of the River Henares, is a perfect example of this. People dreaming of a better life choose it.
We who have come here want a good life in a place in which we were not born, but which took us in when we needed it. We want to feel that history, geography and literature have conspired to put us here and that here is where we belong. We hold onto the belief that natives and newcomers can integrate in measures far exceeding those of centuries ago. We want to blend in with the crowd.
When night comes and the livestock quieten, the stallholders pull down the flaps over their wares and small children sleep on their daddy´s shoulders, we begin to abandon the square with a sense of peace. We have bought some small item that will bring us satisfaction in mind or body, some pretty thing for our home. We have somewhere to be, somewhere called Alcalá, and we hope that the next day will bring our own small renaissance, our own small golden age, filled with a promising future. We hope to be Carpentier´s lucky few.
No comments:
Post a Comment