Spanish Portraits
A couple months ago, I was in the south of Spain and started thinking about writing portraits of things or people I saw. The portraits weren’t intended to be stories with plots and such. Rather, they were to be exercises in descriptions–painting vignettes with words. This first portrait is of a town I passed on the A-4 south from Seville. This is a relatively short portrait. Others will be forthcoming.
It sat atop a cone shaped hill. At the pinnacle, a massive church was entirely whitewashed and dominated the scene. Spilling away down the hill, as though flaked off the walls of the church, was a maze of hundreds of whitewashed stucco houses. They covered the hillside to the surrounding elevation where farm land took over. It was the sort of vista you’d expect Don Quixote and Poncho to witness on their way to the next great battle with a windmill.
A woman in her mid-60s dressed in a wool coat, long skirt and rubber soled shoes that accentuate her tendency to waddle, stepping out of the chapel holding her rosary. As she enters the playa, the string on her rosary unravels and black beads spray across the cobbles and start seeking low ground. The woman, in her rubber soled shoes starts chasing after the rolling beads. The appearance is of someone chasing a piece of paper being blown by the wind. The beads bounce and careen off cobbles and foundations constantly seeking lower ground while the woman shuffles and stoops, shuffles and stoops, occasionally catching one and shoving it into her skirt pocket for later assembly. She finally breathlessly captures the last bead as it crosses the town threshold at the bottom of the hill. She pauses, putting her hands on her knees and takes deep breaths. She looks at the bead in her hand and then up the hill toward the steeple at the pinnacle and says “I should have become a protestant.”
