On this chilly gray Alicante day, Carnaval Saturday, when directions are easily confused, I see a woman across the street walking her two beagles.
She is the very image of normality. Even her dogs, usually rambunctious, seem calm, as if the reduced light has softened their energy.
Yet my screen is filled with the after effects of the White House bullying of Ukraine. Both the US President and Vice President are shameful and should not lift up their heads in polite company.
I shall not jump even more aggressively on to the pile castigating them, nor much less support these wannabe vipers and real life bullies.
Instead, I shall relate a question from the server at a small and charming cafe where I had breakfast.
After telling me she chose soft jazz to set the tone for what might become a raucous day, she wondered if carnaval would even take place this late afternoon due to the forecast of rain.
I do not know about Alicante, but in Peru and Bolivia, water is very much part of Carnaval. Youths roam with water balloons, buckets, and water uzis in hand. They soak the unsuspecting or those who would get them first.
Cans of foam have replaced some of this but water is still a major symbol in this festival of fertility.
Spring is shortly to come in Spain, despite today’s cold. In some ways, Carnaval is about the bacchanalian confusion of a warming earth readying to open and throw up sprouts.
(In the Andes it is about high summer and the need for water for the crops to ripen, all the while the earth prepares to close down for winter’s cold and wind).
The costumes and movement take place here tonight, on the Rambla—a former gully now canalized and covered with the former stones of the city’s walls. The street then goes around one edge of the hill Benalcantil where the Moorish and Christian town remains, and where the castle of Santa Barbara (she of lightning) still stands. At its end, the street now opens onto the Esplanade, the tiled, Pedestrian avenue along the sea’s edge.
Furthermore, the Rambla starts at the city’s public market where a road named for the Castilian King Alfonso X, el Sabio who took the city from the moors, meets a road that continues to the other side of Benalcantil.
It is named for the King of Aragon, Jaume II who removed Alicante from the Castilians in favor of the Catalan and Aragonés speaking peoples who, joined by the Murcians with their own language and the more highland Castilians form the bulk of the provinces population. They give it linguistic complexity.
One should not forget the often ignored Moors. They did not pass simply into history. Many left, some converted, and over the centuries since, many others have come in the back and forth between Alicante and North Africa.
Many people will spend today inside with their families. Yet, it is fitting that others fill the Rambla—that Avenue into the past and the present—in masks and costumes.
After all, on Monday Lent begins and I wish the threatening war on Europe’s edge and the political destruction in the US capital were as easily finalized and contained in words as this Feast.
