Dancing With the Past

SEVILLA, SPAIN

One of the differences about Europe is the age. There are old things here, really old and really impressive. In the U.S., Boston is considered a cradle of history, but as you wander the city you are unlikely to find anything much older than Harvard, dating all the way back to 1636. Wow, huh?

But walking down the main street of Sevilla, choked with orange city buses and white taxis, you suddenly come upon the cathedral, rising with ancient majesty over the Irish pubs and Heladerias (ice cream shops) around it. Its construction spanned a century (I forget which, though I did take the tour) in the Middle Ages, and beside it stands the Giralda, a Moorish tower that is even older. Its flying buttresses arch against the blue sky like a tangible dream of medieval times, the proverbial Spanish castle, its grey stone begrimed with the sweat of 20th century traffic.

Inside, the cathedral is a monument to enormity, befitting the religious ecstasies of Gothic architecture. It is both a functioning church, a crypt--the remains of Christopher Columbus, who died more than 100 years before Harvard was founded, are said to lie here--and a treasure house of art and reliquaries.

The courtyard, now filled with orange trees, was hundreds of years ago a patio of ablutions where Muslims purified their bodies before entering the mosque that once stood on the site.

But if the monuments of long ago still loom over Sevilla, so do the events of today. Two weeks ago, a politician roughly the equivalent of a deputy mayor and his wife were killed in the early morning hours in a street not far from the cathedral. The Basque terrorist group ETA (don't ask me what it stands for--I'm still a foreigner here) claimed responsibility for the assassination. While terrorism is, unfortunately, not unknown in the U.S., we are still accustomed to pinning it on a psychopath or a small group of fanatics. The idea of a terrorist group established enough to openly admit to the crime is chilling and strange.

Sevilla responded to the tragedy with shock and outrage. There were demonstrations in the street, long marches with banners and posters asking for peace. Children and old people, as well as torrents of students, sang stirring or mocking songs and chanted as they walked down the central avenue in front of the cathedral.

In the Sevillana bar where I found myself that night, there was a long moment of silence before the singing of the salve, a traditional song offered at midnight every night to an imagen, a doll-like, elaborately dressed statue ensconced in glass on one side of the bar. With guitar and castanets, two men wailed the chant in praise of and prayer to the Virgin, their voices mixing in harmony and discord, an aching sound similar to flamenco song.

After the salve, the lights were turned on and the candles, for the most part, extinguished. The men strummed their guitars to a faster pace, and one by one, couples took the floor to dance the Sevillana, a traditional dance punctuated by sharp stomps and flowery hand motions that tells a love story in four parts, while the crowd sang and clapped in time.

When my friends and I left around 3:30 a.m., the dancing was still as jubilant and the voices as loud, the drink flowing and the room still crowded and bright. Not only with walls of stone does Sevilla remember its history.