FIESTA: Nightfall

I WOKE to the sound of shrieks. I opened my eyes abruptly and in the purple gold city lights I watched a young child and his father diverted by a bouncing rubber ball. Erik was still on the bench. He saw me as I tried to feign uninterrupted sleep and walked over to expose my charade. With the blanket now folded in the pack we made for the center again, to load up on small cups of hot black coffee before the scheduled rendezvous. We sat for a while in Café Ibiza neither of us saying very much, shedding the grog and quaffing our thrift with narrow slits of eyes watching grumbling old people watching boisterous young people watching televised football. I put the small spoon from Erik's saucer in my pocket and we paid and went out into the night.

FIESTA: Wine-induced Sensory Forfeiture Blues

Outside the cathedral, amid thousands of bodies moving in all directions or none at all, we found Paula and her two friends standing in the sun. Erik introduced and I passed the tinto. We stood for a while conversing in the usual chat and looking around at the people sea in which we were situated. A call was made and we began to move, heading toward a narrow outlet at the northwest corner of the plaza. The road had been neglected at points and it was clear along patched cobbles between pale stone buildings both vacant and occupied that the city had fallen to hard times before. This, however, was anything but. Music oscillated as we shuffled like a hundred penguins down the street past bars where light disappeared behind swaying walls of bodies holding clear plastic liter-sized cups.

FIESTA 3

According to our festival program, a large portion of the events were set to go down at the Ayuntamiento plaza. We walked eastward along the main thruway of the center, a narrow street paved with pale stone bricks that's walled in by archways and colonnades and is overshadowed by the outward jutting balconies of the old apartments above the street, enclosed with glass and painted wood here in the northern half of Spain. We passed the cathedral whose towers never stopped arresting me and then a cross street we'd walked down several times already in the dark, without ever seeing the vista it pointed to.

The brown and black mountains rising like waves in the impossible distance nearly drew us out of the town, like sirens calling to forget indulgence of the flesh and blood. Nearly.

FIESTA 2: Pre-storm Calm

OUTSIDE in the main plaza full of green trees, small soft grass lawns, and anchored in the center by one of Spain's ubiquitous horseman effigy-topped plinths surrounded by a gentle pool, the number of people had begun to rise. We headed to the western edge, where we came in much earlier in the morning, to check the opening time of the tourism office. Behind the bandshell where bundled bodies slept and were slowly waking in the morning light, the closed glass doors bore the hour 10:00 in small off-white stencil. So, down the stone ramp and back into the city to see what might have been missed in the dark.