It Takes a Village

By Kate MacVean

I remember the first time I went to some of the typical town fiestas here in Spain. They were in honor of Santiago (St. James), patron saint of Matabuena, the village where my husband’s father had grown up. It was also the night before our wedding, which was to be held in another village nearby, and a lot of my husband Santi’s friends had come in to attend.

“They’ll want to go to the fiestas,“ Santi told me, and as hosts we had to be there, too. “The music starts at midnight, but it won’t really get going until about 1am or so.”

So much for getting my beauty sleep.

Sure enough, at midnight they were still doing sound checks in the tiny plaza in front of the medieval church. As the huge loudspeakers and flashing lights started up, the storks in their nests among the church towers slumbered on, barely disturbed.

The storks were the only ones sleeping, though: the rest of the village was ready to rock. Three- and four-year-olds danced with their parents, while older kids roamed in bands amidst the carnival games lining the street up to the church. Teenagers clustered together in matching T-shirts and colored overalls with the name of their peña, groups that hang out together during the fiestas. The older generations were out, too—couples in their eighties swirling elegantly to the beat of a pasodoble, groups of women in their seventies gamely swinging to a more modern rock song. I don’t remember what time we finally got to bed that night, though I did manage to get two or three hours of sleep before it was time to get up and ready for the big day.

Since then, I’ve been to many more fiestas, mostly in Arcones, where Santi’s mother grew up. In the lean years following the Spanish Civil War, she and many others of her generation left the village to look for work in the big cities, eventually settling there to raise their families. In the summers, they returned to visit those who stayed behind, and to help with the work in the fields. My husband has many fond memories of those days, running wild from dawn to dusk with all the other kids who, like him, were there for the summer. The parents never worried because they knew the kids would be safe in the network of neighbors. If someone didn’t know who you were, they would just ask, and Santi’s mantra of “nieto de la Florentina,” Florentina’s grandson, was all they needed to know.

Things are different in Arcones now. The last census count indicated 280 residents, though only the most hardy souls actually spend the winters there. Not only have cars replaced most of the livestock, the houses have been modernized, and some are even rented out for the newly-fashionable “rustic tourism.” Nowadays people have more money, and more options: instead of spending all summer in the village, they come back on weekends, or a week here and there, saving their real vacation time for the beach or a package tour.

Still, the feeling of family remains, not only because so many of the people we see are related to my mother-in-law in obscure ways that somehow still matter. When we go back, everyone remarks on how much the boys have grown since the last time, and how our youngest looks like his grandmother. And during the fiestas, the streets are alive once again. Everyone comes back to celebrate, see friends and family, and perhaps to reclaim a time when things were simpler, to breathe that fresh mountain air, take off their watches, turn off the cell phones and get away from the stress and noise of the big cities.

The fiestas usually center around a religious holiday. The people of Arcones celebrate theirs in honor of the Virgin of la Lastra, the second weekend in September, and there is a mass both Saturday and Sunday. On those days the 13th century church fills to capacity, and for the most part, the congregants still observe the custom of segregating by sex, the women in the front pews, and the men in the back. After Mass is a procession, and people bid on the privilege of carrying one of the four posts that hold up the carved wooden figure of the Virgin. A group of young people, grandchildren or great-grandchildren of those who had grown up in the village, dress in local costumes and perform the traditional dances, clacking the wooden sticks together and twirling in their skirts—black and red wool for the girls, white linen for the boys.

Then comes one of my favorite activities of village life: the Sunday vermouth. We meet up with friends in the early afternoon and go to the bar with a big grassy courtyard where we can watch the kids play from our tables. We order our drinks-- vermouth, beer, coca-cola-- which come with tapas, little plates heaped with homemade croquettes or fat morcilla sausages with hunks of bread, or something called the tigre, a mussel on the half shell, which is then filled with béchamel sauce and breaded and fried, served with little spoons to scoop it out. Not for the diet-conscious, these affairs—but it’s summer, it’s the fiestas, and regular rules are suspended for awhile. After a couple of rounds we slowly make our way back up the hill for lunch with the family, a large midday meal served at 3pm, followed by coffee and dessert.

After all of this eating, a siesta would be just the thing, but the kids don’t want to nap, so we head out again to one of the many activities planned for them: a puppet show put on by a traveling company; those inflatable bouncy castles to jump around on; traditional games like sack races and bobbing for treasures in a bowl full of flour; and the “foam festival,” where they cordon off an area of the plaza and bring in a machine to fill it with dense soapsuds for wading through, waist deep.

As for the live music late at night, we haven’t been up for that recently. Although there is a costume contest for kids at the first intermission, our boys are steadfast in their sleeping habits and would never last that long. Since Santi’s mother is around to babysit, the two of us could sneak out after hours if we wanted to, but this year we just didn’t manage it. Staying out late doesn’t have quite the same appeal when you have two little alarm clocks set for seven a.m. sleeping in the next room! Someday soon, though, I imagine we will all be there, dancing away.

When I think about some of my favorite childhood activities back in the States that our kids are missing out on (county fairs, apple picking in the fall, sledding in winter), I just remember that they do have something I never did while growing up. They have the fiestas. They have a village.

Kate MacVean lives in Spain with her husband Santi and their two boys. She is a former columnist for Literary Mama. You can find the archives of her column, Mothering Abroad, here: www.literarymama.com/columns/motheringabroad/archives.html.

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