Seville, Spain, Saturday December 6th

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We didn’t set out until 12.30, because we were busy ringing our children and having a fine old catch up. The streets were absolutely choked with well dressed families who seemed to be out on special treats. We stood out in our shabby clothes. The Town Hall Belén (Nativity Scene) had crowds surging around it, so we waited our turn to see the real running water in the stream and the familiar figures all set out in a whole village scene.

The season of Belén s is a very important one. Different organisations set up nativity scenes and families make the rounds of them. There were many stalls set up behind the Town Hall selling items and equipment for home nativity scenes, and they were doing a brisk trade with parents, children and lots of men in suits. The figures came in various sizes, with some hand painted and others mass produced. The prices varied accordingly, with a medium sized hand painted figure of about 15 cm being around 60 Euros ($A125).

You could easily spend a fortune, with not only the basic scene but little bales of hay, fires that looked as if they were lit, grottos, animals, attendants for your wise men, figures that moved, with one that was Mary wiping Baby Jesus’ bottom with a nappy, and every kind of vegetation and terrain. We had not seen a sign of Father Christmas anywhere in the shops, and the religious message of Christmas was everywhere. We were told that presents are given after Christmas, when there is another festa and a parade on January 5^th, the day that the Wise Men arrived bearing gifts.

It was fascinating to see all the families; fathers, mothers and many grandparents with their children, with many dressed as if they were going to a party. Little boys, under about nine, were wearing shorts with long socks, although tiny boys wore tights under their shorts. Lots of girls were wearing dresses, often with short cardigans, but mostly with tailored coats over them. Many of the children could have been lifted out of 1930 – 1960 fashion magazines. We know that Spanish children do wear casual clothes, but the couple of children in raggy play clothes looked as if they hadn’t read the dress code for this day. The parents were dressed in a more modern style, but even so it was generally up market. For the over fifties a bouffant hair style was all the rage, with a tailored coat and a silk scarf. There was a great lack of teenagers, so perhaps the Belén day is not so special for them anymore. A person in a Tigger outfit was giving away cleverly tied balloon animals and working hard to spread good cheer.

We were on our way to the Museum of Fine Arts, which we expected to be open for the whole afternoon with no siesta break. It started to drizzle as we passed a beggar, sitting in the street with his shirt off to reveal his bodily deformities and his need, freezing in the cold. We flowed on with the crowd, lifting and lowering our umbrellas as needed to avoid contact as we passed those threading back the other way.

The Museum of Fine Arts was in an enormous building, formerly the convent of La Merced Calzada which was founded in 1248. Much of its original collection came from disentailed convents and monasteries. Between 1820 and 1835 many religious buildings were put on the market and their art treasures were confiscated, due to legislation that suppressed religious organisations with less that twelve members. Historically there were many monasteries and convents after the Christian conquest, and in the 17^th Century there were over forty monasteries and convents in Seville. There are still nineteen convents remaining. Other items in the museum’s collection were donated, and some were purchased.

The first gallery we entered was a superb. The former chapel, it was a high ceilinged room with painted domes and barrel vaults that took our breath away.

It was an appropriately large and formal room for the enormous examples of religious art, many of which had once graced churches. The paintings were from the in the Sevillian Baroque style and were very finely painted. St Bernado was receiving breast milk squirted from the Virgin’s breast in a moment if intense mysticism, in a painting that used to be in the Archbishop’s Palace in Seville. Another painting was an allegory for the Immaculate Conception of Mary, supporting the ‘yes’ case.

The room was full of paintings that presented theological viewpoints and we were beginning to realise that painting was not just for aesthetic, or even educational purposes, but could be for propaganda, for increasing popularity, as in promoting the celebrity of some saints and clergy, for demonstrating wealth and power and for controlling the masses. Throughout this museum, we were conscious of the symbols and the identifiers that would have been a common language for viewers in the past, and maybe for Catholics today. Of course, everything that I have observed here is true for graphic communication today. We could imagine the painters taking in studies of their proposed painting of a saint with the Virgin, and being told that his hair was too long for current taste, or that he usually flagellated himself with a rock, or hadn’t that saint had any visions of a more sensational nature, or that Mary did not look great in hot pink and leopard skin, even if it gave her more appeal to the pagans. What we were really learning about was ourselves, and how, cynical and alert as we like to think we are, we had assumed and believed in some innocent past that was not pushed along by people’s agendas.

The peak of achievement in the Sevillian Baroque school was the work of Murillo, and we could only agree, looking at his paintings here. His altarpiece, taken from the Convent of the Capuchins, includes a painting of Mary, where she looks like a heroine for once. Meek, mild and suffering are her usual presentations, but she must have been a remarkable woman.

We were admiring a little patio, when a gallery guard told us that it was closing time, early today because of the festa (festival). It was the festa of the conception of Mary, which explained why everyone was out and about and the shops were closed. All the museums had only opened for the morning and the churches were fully occupied with services and not open to tourists, including the Cathedral. We walked back through the now clearer streets, lined with overflowing restaurants. A tiny girl in a red coat stood apart from her family, holding a white helium balloon rigidly aloft and gazing in amazement about her. In the blink of an eye she would herself be indoctrinating her grandchildren into the ways and beliefs of the family.

While we were eating our lunch, sitting on the steps opposite the cathedral, we observed a gang of women plying their trade of fortune telling on the passing crowd. They carried sprigs of herbs which they would try to force on to someone, occasionally by offering them but occasionally by grabbing an arm or hand. Pretending that the herbs were a gift, they would then start stage two. This was possible because even if the ‘customer’ didn’t want the sprig and tried to give it back, they were trapped listening while they did so. These women were ghastly.

They picked their teeth with the ends of their sprigs, they smoked, they chewed something that included the spitting out of white bits that ended up all over their clothes, they spat, they looked like the sort of women you would run from in an alley. Nothing about them would have encouraged anyone to want them to touch them. However, their strange sales pitch and forcing people to alter their direction to avoid walking into them had about three successes in the hour that we watched. Each time they took the palm of the person, told them something, told them to stamp three times, kissed them on both cheeks, and then asked for money. One girl just walked off, another gave some coins and the third looked entranced and gave a note. Tourist suckers, I thought.

We had donated some money for the building of an international deaf and dumb centre in Seville, as we returned from the gallery. Now I reflected that the approach in that case had not been dissimilar. We would have had to change direction to avoid the two girls who planted themselves in our path with their clipboards in hand. They only wanted a signature on a petition, and of course it was fine if we were tourists, the centre would be international. We read the blurb, it seemed reasonable, and we signed. Now the hands were out for the money, and Keith gave some coins. Suddenly the girls were able to speak, and they argued that I had not given any money. Keith said that he had donated for us both. Tourist suckers? I wonder.

Keith has a different version of the above incident, and was aware all along that to sign would be to pay. The girl he was dealing with spoke from the beginning. He did comment that the girls had no identification.

The crowd had changed, with a more casual group emerging to enjoy the buskers. One busker had a fabulous but physically very challenging act. There appeared to be two human sized puppets dancing together, doing the most amazing aerial swings. We assumed that there was a person in one of the puppets, but the second puppet tapped her shoes on the ground and was not just being dragged around. The mystery was solved when the dance ended and a man emerged from under the skirt of the female puppet. Both puppets were joined together and on his back, and he danced doubled over, with his hands in the female puppet’s shoes. The crowd loved him and he raked in the cash.

We passed a delightful sculpture of a little girl reading, with other little items special to the child around her. It had been erected by the City of Seville in memory of Clara Campoavor, in recognition of her invaluable contribution to the freedom of women, and her fight that helped to form the present laws. Our stroll was slow going, with interesting distractions everywhere while we were still in the centre. The bells from the Cathedral square clanged as they turned over, loud and raucous and lacking in the musicality that even sheep and goat bells have.

We just followed our noses as we headed out of the tile and wrought iron encrusted old heart and into the suburbs. There we found a more modern Spain of apartment blocks, open shops with many staffed by Asian people, graffiti that no-one had laboriously scrubbed off, wide roads, traffic, and loiterers who did not look like they would be spending 80 euros on a new angel for the home Belén . It could have been anywhere in Europe, with even the orange trees missing from the foot paths.

We walked and I talked – on and on endlessly about my school situation. Every time I reached a conclusion about what I should do next, I would argue the other case and be convinced by that. It was almost impossible not to be upset and not to wind myself up into a ball of stress. I needed a huge distraction or a good book. In a soulless street of no distinction, a young man stood outside a shop, loitering idly. It was his shop, a book shop, and yes, he sold books in English, but no, not in French. English would do. Here was the angel for my Belén ; a scruffy, very young man, bored by minding the books, and out on the street looking for more excitement. I read every one of his titles and only one told me to buy it. It is called ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ by Carlos Ruiz Zafon and is set in Barcelona during and after the Civil War. We also bought a book for Frey and Yonah, in Spanish, which has pictures and the words for them about the sorts of things that children meet at kindergarten. Frey will start kindergarten next year. I thought how much I would have loved such a book as a child, and how it changes your world to be able to name a thing in more than one language.

Of course, with a book in my hand I felt it was time to head for home, and with lots of blogging to do, Keith was keen as well. We passed a crowd of families lined up to go into a Belén , but we didn’t go in ourselves. However, we couldn’t resist at another one back in the city centre, where we joined the queue of people of all ages to see a carefully constructed scene of a village, culminating in the nativity scene in the stable. The music for the Belén was classical and serious in tone. The wait was over half an hour, but worth every minute of it in rich people-watching experiences.

We haven’t heard piped carols yet, and although I read that there are many choirs who go around singing carols, we haven’t seen any. We did see a Father Christmas like figure climbing up a building this evening, but he has been the only one so far.

On the walk back I looked in the windows of fabric shops with lace, satins, brocades and every kind of rich material. A little shop specialised in clothes for dolls, all of a religious nature and beautifully detailed. It was nearly dark and a haze of smoke from the chestnut roasters filled the square near the cathedral.

At home, the old man taking his turn on reception duty told us that the fiesta was for the Immaculate Conception, and assured us that nothing more would happen that night, only lots of people out and about on the streets. We settled into our room and I opened the first page of my new book.