AUSTERITY MEASURES, part 4; or, PAGAN SPAIN, part 3; or, HOW (TO) CHRISTOPHER GOT HIS GROOVE BACK…ONCE AGAIN

no more eta violence. that was yesterday’s big official news, and today’s diario de sevilla ran a political cartoon that featured a hooded caricature of an eta representative on a small deserted island throwing his gun into the ocean and reflecting that his surrender of his weapon was better than suicide. and what sage, sage advice for all of us, although there’s still much work to be done for peace as all of the papers and television news programs have recognized. last night, at the party, the party to which, incidentally, we wouldn’t have been extended an invitation had it not been for an acquaintance from the basque country, there wasn’t any talk of terrorism, but had there been it would surely have been about the various sevillanos lost to the violence and not about its implications for the legitimacy of the central government’s control of the various autonomous communities of spain. or so we can assume if my conversation with maría, a high school friend of the host’s, was of any significance. maría was a native and had spent some time in japan, so i remarked to her what i’d been thinking for a while about the similarities between the dispositions of the people of sevilla and the ones of kyoto. she didn’t disagree when i said that i respected the strong prides that both peoples held for their cities, not the most cosmopolitan or contemporarily savvy in their respective countries, but both of them their historic capitals and undeniable centers of certain “native” cultural traditions. i didn’t go on to voice my suspicion that those strong senses of pride were what had made the peoples of both cities so stubbornly insular, but maría supplied that point for me and (probably just for gracious sake of the conversation) warned me that i might not be so enamored of the local color after it had had a chance to put me at its disadvantage. and then there was talk of the church, which, with the top of the basilica just a block away and easily visible from the roof of the house where the party was being held, was probably inevitable in a conversation about basic sevillian values. just a day earlier a friend had responded to my challenge that i had no interest in getting married but that if i were to make a play for marriage i would insist on doing so in front of the virgin by saying that she had no plans to be married but that if she were she too would insist on having her wedding in a church because she believed more in god than she did in zapatero. touché. maría, for her part, didn’t think much either way, but assured me that even if the church (as it were at large) hadn’t found many official parts to play for homosexuals that for the most part spain in general and sevilla in particular didn’t bother to make distinctions because the tenacity of the church on both scales was more a point of the stubbornness of a folkloric tradition than a matter of dogma. (the pope might have something to say, but as for the virgin, as far as she was concerned you were a friend.) and so, appropriately, i left the party for a flamenco show (if ever there were a more fitting metaphor for the pageantry of the andalucian church…) at which i finally made acquaintance with lakshmi, whose workshops i hadn’t been able to take in portland but who easily offered up that she was doing her best to go back to give more. and if i can be permitted the sidebar i’ll say that i learned last night that there are in fact people in the world so beautiful that you can recognize them by reputation. she introduced me to her friend, an angolan woman who lived in portugal and in town visiting for the weekend, and maybe it was my familiarity with the two of them that launched the cavalcade, but for the rest of the night i was the uncomfortable beneficiary of more than my share of the venue’s female attention. a miraculous attempt at evangelical conversion? if so, then the holy spirit’s cupid’s arrow went astray. i could have named it a dozen better marks. but i’ll take it nonetheless. it’s a funny kind of stubbornness, but I’m throwing down my arms. it’s better than suicide, and we do know, those of us who know her, that the virgin hates that. and if not the rest of them, at least i can be a friend of mary’s.