Among the many stories that circulate in the world of flamenco, there is a particularly beautiful one that places Manuel Torre in the custom of rocking or dancing the steps during Holy Week in Seville. The poet Ricardo Molina told it: the singer was preparing to perform a saeta when the foreman gave the order to continue marching. The costaleros, obedient, raised their pace on their shoulders, but instead of advancing, they began to move rhythmically until that fabulous and extravagant gypsy, the man “with the greatest culture in his blood,” in Lorca’s words, ended the sing.
On this rainy Palm Sunday morning, in front of the Plaza de la Bòbila de l’Hospitalet, the band of bugles and drums accompanies the departure of the La Borriquita procession and the world comes to a standstill. It is as if we were part of a perfect movie where we all breathe at the same time, and the music, pure feeling wrapped in flames, made us feel alive due to the quality of life housed in it. I could stay and live among those black sounds that Miles David extracted from his trumpet as if The Girl with the Combs had been locked inside; in the outbreak of the marches of the brotherhood world, like that marvel titled The love that C. Tangana walked through more dangerous streets in Too many women.
I like processions as much as I like stories you don’t expect to hear, those that seem invented until you recognize their truth. Those from l’Hospitalet were born in 1977 in Kiki, a bar on Severo Ochoa Avenue where a group of Andalusian immigrants watched on television the weekly river that ran through Seville. Touched by the virus of nostalgia, they drew the image of the Virgin on a tablecloth, placed it on a chair surrounded by beer bottles as candelabras and went out to walk around the neighborhood. Nobody laughed. As they walked, many neighbors stood behind them. This is how the Brotherhood 15 1 was born (by the fifteen who were in the bar plus the people who joined them), organizer of the first secular procession in Spain. No priest presides over it, its steps do not enter or leave a church, but rather a cultural center and, on Friday, the highlight of the pilgrimage is when it stops in front of the Red Cross hospital.
Until not so long ago it was believed that one could die of nostalgia and, in fact, nostalgia was born as a disease. The term was coined in the 17th century by a medical student, Johannes Hofer, from the Greek words nostos and algia, that is, return home and pain, to typify the evils suffered by Swiss mercenaries destined to battle in the Alps. . They became indifferent, emaciated and saw ghosts, and the only antidote to their ills was leeches and opium. They still didn’t know that a tablecloth can become a Virgin that can relieve us of the strange pang we feel when the past returns to us.
