Here in Spain, last week was Semana Santa, the Holy Week before Easter. I had heard that Granada was beautiful, and had heard that there were processions there, but this was about all I had bothered to learn before going.
As it turned out, they were something less and more than a parade. For several nights in a row, religious groups called cofradÃas were marching through town, often simultaneously, and with a lot of the same basic ingredients – brass bands, women in black dresses, and men in nazareno robes wearing the same pointed hood that the Ku Klux Klan appropriated. Probably most importantly, though, there were the pasos, which are elaborate regal floats depicting Jesus or Mary.
The pasos were carried, slowly, by groups of costaleros, who were hidden beneath the paso and moved it forward in stages, setting it down after a few minutes moving it forward. After a stop, they would all stand at the same time, and the paso would pop up and shudder forward, as if on its own. The musicians looked forward rather intently, playing songs that were mournful and foreboding, with the drums at their most threatening.
The first night I was in Granada, as the processions crawled through the city, I jumped into a bar that looked out onto a tight alley where a procession was about to pass. The pasos came by, barely fitting in the street, and as they passed the bar, I could only see a section of the paso framed by the bar doorway, making it seem even just a bit larger than it already was. I stepped into the street, and the women in their black dresses were stopped there, and the crowd watched. The atmosphere was charged with the moment.
As the women stood there, their long, thick candles burned and children tried to catch what was dripping off. Most of the women did not notice. They were looking off into the middle distance, and I saw that this was not a fiesta but a rite.
