La Mercè

Human Highlighter Suit Tally: 6

La Mercè is Barcelona’s biggest festival of the year, and today is its central day.  The schools are all closed, the shops are all closed, and no one works.  Last night there were fireworks at the beach, and today the festivities began at 8 am with a Pipers’ Morning Call (we missed that event).   Although the forecasts called for rain, the weather was beautiful and sunny—warm but not hot.  Cool in the shade.  Perfect for standing shoulder to smelly shoulder in a large crowd.

I do not like crowds.  I am a New Yorker and, like most of my city brethren, would not be caught dead in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.  Soon after we arrived in Barcelona and I saw that the kids had a long weekend—on what is also my birthday weekend—I immediately rented a little house for us in Cadaques, on the Costa Brava.  The sea would still be perfect for swimming, I thought.  This was before I knew what La Merce was all about—I figured it was just one of many holidays that buy one an extra day of vacation.

And then, at a birthday party for one of Milo’s classmates, a woman told us about how wonderful the festival was—we should really be here for it, she said, especially if we were only here for one year.  She went on excitedly, asking: “Have you ever been to the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade?  It’s fabulous—it’s sort of like that.”  In fact, I have been to the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade.  Sort of, and not by choice.  As it happens, my office in New York City is near the epicenter of that parade.  Inevitably, I have found myself in my office on Halloween and, even though I knew somewhere in my brain that it was Halloween, I would forget about the parade.  And then I would be trapped.  I’d step out from the quiet building into the chaos of the street and say, “Oh, shit!  It’s today!”  For the 10 years I lived on the upper west side this was a REAL problem, because my office is in 5^th Avenue, the parade goes up 6^th Avenue, and I would need to get to 7^th Avenue to get to the subway that would take me home.  Walk the block from 5^th to 6^th and it is not only wall-to-wall people, but swarming with cops.  You have a better chance of crossing 6^th avenue on Halloween night than winning the lottery.  So this woman’s argument did not make me want to change my plans; if anything, I felt relieved that I would be nowhere near this festival.

But then we spent some time with Catalans, people who had lived here for a long time.  And these conversations made me begin to wonder about whether we should, in fact, stick around.  We could go to Cadaques some other weekend, and the festival would be over by Sunday, my actual birthday, which would allow me time to recover and orchestrate a celebration that would be more in synch with my non-crowd loving self.  And then C.C.’s Spanish teacher taught her class one of the traditional Mercè songs, and had them coloring their own gegante puppets.  I knew Alec would be up for staying—he has no problem with crowds.  And so this is how I ended up deciding, of my own free will, to spend my birthday weekend jammed into various plazas like a circus clown in a Volkswagen.

A little history and context, courtesy of the official website of Barcelona (http://www.bcn.cat/merce/en/historia.shtml):  La Merce is the patron saint of Barcelona.  According to legend, on the night of 24 September 1218, the Virgin appeared simultaneously to King Jaume I, Saint Pere Nolasc and Saint Ramón de Penyafort. She asked all three to create an order of monks dedicated to saving Christians imprisoned by the Saracens. It was the time of the wars of religion.

Centuries later in 1687, Barcelona suffered a plague of locusts, and placed itself in the hands of the Virgin of La Mercè. Once the plague had been overcome, the Council of the City named her patron saint of Barcelona. The Pope did not ratify this decision until two centuries later, however, in 1868.

After Pope Pius IX declared the Virgin of La Mercè the patron saint of the city, Barcelona began to celebrate a festival in the month of September. La Mercè really took off in 1902, when under the impulse of Francesc Cambó, the festival became the model of those that are currently held all over Catalonia.

Myron and Raquel are here, and we had also arranged for a friend from C.C.’s class (Sylvia) and her parents to meet us at our place so that we could all travel to the Plaça Saint Jaume together.  I had braced myself for the worst, but the ride down in the train and the walk to the plaça were not terribly crowded.  As we approached, the crowd thickened but still seemed manageable.  The gegantes—enormous puppets the height of two or three people—lined the plaza.  Some are more than 100 years old, their faces frozen into a formal stiffness.  Music started from the stage, the mayor appeared, and soon the gegantes began to enter the plaza, in twos or fours, and dance to traditional music played by local bands.  Each set came from a particular neighborhood, accompanied by its own local band, and member of the crowd danced along, humming to the music.  The crowds had started to press in by this time, and the kids could see nothing.  So we each hoisted one on our shoulders.  Let me tell you, either these kids are getting too big for this, or I am getting too old.  I need a professional massage.

After a break, several groups of castelleras were introduced and marched into the plaça.  The castelleras are teams of people—also neighborhood based—who build human towers, sometimes seven high.  The largest, strongest people are on the bottom, and the towers are topped with small children who can’t be more than 4 years old.  Their costumes include a wide cloth wrapped around their waist like a cumberbund.  I assumed it was decorative until I watched them build the towers.  As a circle of men forms the wide base, the next highest level begins to climb up, digging their bare feet into the cumberbund thing to use as a sort of step.  As the castelleras go higher and higher, each person uses the other layers as stair steps, using the belt, then the shoulders as steps on one person before moving on to the person above.  We found ourselves in the middle of the plaza, with towers springing up on all sides.   Being that close enabled us to see the faces of the troops, especially those on the bottom, invariably burly men, who held up the entire column of people standing on their shoulders.  Their faces were a study in focus, teeth gritting, cheeks red.  As soon as the last child reached the top, she would immediately begin to climb down again, so as to relieve the burden of those beneath her.

The crowd roared and clapped.  Groups got eliminated and those remaining built more towers in order to stay in the competition.  At this point we had been in the plaza for several hours, and it was time to get the kids some food and our own shoulders a break.  We got some gelato, and then opted out of more festivities in order to recover at home.  Sylvia came with us and the kids made paper monsters, and played hide and seek.  It's late, and we are all tired now, and there will be more festivities tomorrow.