Picture this. I’m leaning against one of the stone pillars holding up the second floor of the Antigua Municipal Government building, on the north side of the central plaza. These pillars are in a state of historical decay. They’ve been here for hundreds of years; the building was originally a colonial palace.
Filling the plaza, walking along the passage behind me, crossing and cris-crossing in a myriad of impossible patterns is the crowd. The multitude. The city is swollen with the spectators, participants, and religious devotees of Holy Week, Semana Santa. Here in Antigua, the processions start at dawn on Thursday and continue until Sunday. Streets will be blocked by cucuruchos, by throngs of incense-swinging kids, families building alfombras, tourists with cameras. I’m one of the latter.
As I lean against the stone, I try to take it all in. Moving colors come first. There are balloon venders standing on the corners, or crossing the wide cobbled streets into the crowded shade of the park. Each carries a fist-full of strings, preventing the escape of a hundred or more multicolored, helium-filled orbs. Different colors, most with balloon animals tied just below the knot, or with a smaller, different shaded balloon rattling around inside the first, or confetti, or all of the above. You can always find a balloon if you need it: the vendors’ style is to trail behind the processions, feeding on the collective elation and catering especially to the multitude of kids still perched on parents’ shoulders in wake of the main event.
There are guys carrying large formless nets full of homemade rubber balls, painted brightly in rainbow stripes. On closer inspection, these balls really are great, incredibly sincere. They have no uniform size, most are actually a little lopsided, and there is no way to maintain their pressure. Kind of a one-time deal. These vendors hunch like Santas under their loads when they’re moving, but their favorite style is to lay three or four smaller bags out in the middle of the plaza’s pathways, stand back, and just watch for interested eyes in passers-by. I’m sure it works great for small children as well, right at their level. Funny thing with kids and colors.
There are guys selling orchids. I don’t know where they get them, but I’m willing to bet they’re plucked straight from the nature. Walking slow and bent in the street before me is an ancient old man, with a bright orange orchid in a small wooden crate hanging around his neck, cradled at his chest with gnarled hands. And suspended from a strap carried across his forehead, three more rest against his back. I haven’t really figured out these guys patterns yet; they are less common than the other vendors, and their product is less regular. I’ve seen at least a dozen species of orchids; usually each guy has two or three on him at once. There’s usually one in the gas-station parking lot in the north-east corner of town, and often one walking the busy commercial street that runs east to west in the north side of central park, the road at my toes right now.
The ice-cream hawkers straddle categories. Their tiny refrigerated carts on wheels are always painted brightly, usually with hand-made takes on popular cartoon characters or the like. But their real strategy involves sound, not color. Constantly, no matter where or when you are during Semana Santa, you can pick out the sound of the small but efficient metal cowbells that the vendors strap to their carts. Usually the jarring roll of the cobbled streets is sufficient to keep that clatter going, but in case the crowd is more permanent, for example on a busy corner, the savvy ice-cream boy will lean against his kit and jiggle a bell with one busy finger. I say the sound is efficient: one time, sitting against a palm tree in the Plaza del Tánque de Unión eating a plate of meat and guacamole with tortillas, I suddenly realized that I was surrounded by at least five or six stationary ice-cream guys, all within thirty feet. The sound was incredible. I know now what people mean when they say it’s so loud they can’t think. I had to leave. Sometimes, thankfully, the ever-present metallic rattle sinks into the subconscious. I just wonder how many of those guys are actively destroying their hearing at their own hand for the sake of helado.
As for the sound scene in front of me, horse hooves are next. There are always a few horse-drawn buggies cruising around the center of Antigua, but for this week they come out of the woodworks. Or the rural fields, more likely. Offering a unique way to view the city for tourists Guatemalan and foreign alike, the carriage-drivers definitely take advantage of the crowds this week. Actually, I’ve been told that the majority of most businesses’ income is made during Semana Santa. And since Antigua’s biggest industry is tourism, this is a hefty statement. The familiar clop-clop-clop of a horse trotting on cobble stones is a rather nice addition to the chaos in my opinion.
As far as smells go, there is one that rules over all during Semana Santa: incense. The traditional, catholic-style incense that is sold everywhere here in black plastic bags, and spun in metal cauldrons on chains by kids in the processions. With each procession, there is a long double line of cloaked devotees who walk in silent reverence ahead of the group carrying the wooden Anda. Often times the cloaked are in a deep purple, but some churches use black or white. There are also men who dress up like the Roman soldiers that were responsible for Christ’s death, in full red capes and mock golden armor, with spears, shields, and red-plumed helms. I even saw one procession with a group of members dressed head to toe in solid black, with only eyes exposed, and tall pointed hoods, uncomfortably similar to a color inversion of the Ku Klux Klan.
And the people. You’ve got the indigenous Mayan populations, dressed in traditional, brightly colored, hand made cloth. Most are noticeably shorter than the average. The traditional women all carry a piece of folded cloth with special significance: single girls carry it on one shoulder as a signal of their availability to prospective men, and those who are married carry it balanced on top of their heads. Many also use a similar cloth like a sling to carry a child on their back. Some carry large cloth bundles, containing food or handmade textiles or jewelry to sell in the street.
The tourists are from within Guatemala and from without. Usually the only difference is skin tone. All carry cameras, buy food in the street, make up the majority of the crowds that follow the processions. Occasionally there are aberrations: just as often as I see a white, barefooted hippie wandering the streets in all local clothing, I see a Guatemalan adolescent girl wearing a tee-shirt smeared with a snide, bitchy message in English or a sexual innuendo. Either way, I doubt she knows what the shirt says, and I doubt the hippie spots all the poop and glass in the sidewalk before it’s too late.
Drawing my attention back away from the swirling details of the scene in front of me, I focus instead on the whole. There is a cloud of incense smoke drifting slowly across the backside of the plaza, hidden for the most part by the jacarandas and manicured shade trees. Iridescent black grackles swoop noisily from perch to perch, cawing raucously and swelling with mating dances. Several soap bubbles strain to gain altitude over the heads of the crowd: there is a kid somewhere nearby blowing them into existence.
An escaped red balloon passes over some ruins on the east side of the plaza, probably two hundred feet off the ground and gaining more quick. A squadron of adolescents on motocross bikes zoom by, revving their engines for the ladies and dodging pedestrians at high speed. The street dogs maintain their secret social hierarchy, meeting and greeting just like the crowd, occasionally wrestling or scoring a dropped enchilada.
Tall grasses growing forgotten in the gutters of buildings around the square wave in the wind. In the distant south, a colossal show of force is in play, as the western winds push a cloudbank up the skirts of Volcan Agua to the top, where it doubles back over itself, curling like a wave from the crosswinds at the peak.
