This was incredibly hard to write. You’ll see why. The village I live in is in the process of celebrating a festival for their primary patron saint, San Sebastian. The festival lasts several weeks, with constant fireworks kabooming and bands tooting, echoing through the cinderblock walls of my house. I tend to cringe every time these loud January festivities come around, but I go along with it because I’m curious about the saint. I like to imagine what life in our village would look like to him, if he could only open his eyes this one time a year, a statue come to life like Pinocchio or Pygmalion’s wife.
During the festival, the saint is hauled out of his spot in the church, and for 9 days in a row, he is carted through the streets and into every house to bestow his blessings on the villagers. On his actual holy day, January 20, he repeats the entire parade route beginning at the strike of midnight and drags back to the church at dawn with a surprising number of tired cold devotees still trailing along behind him. That Sunday he is feted in every household with massive feasts of barbequed sheep and mole sauce. The town turns into a carnival with beer vendors and rickety rides squeezed into every square inch of street. Dogs dart between people's legs sniffing for dropped taco bits, and drunks prop themselves on the sticky edges of candy booths. The Santiagos pound their feet on high wooden platforms, dancing to the cacophonous music of banda and reenacting the Crusades in a 5 hour theatrical dance of Christians versus Moors. And late Sunday night, the saint himself is marched out to the dusty soccer field on the edge of town to watch the climax of the entertainment, the castillos. These are giant towers painstakingly rigged with wheels and spools and rockets of spinning fireworks – when lit, they spark like castles of light, colored fire looping in upon itself to form images of flowers and butterflies, Aztec warriors and Catholic saints, suns and moons, all rotating and flying and drawing a collective gasp from the thousands gathered in the smoky night.
So, what would it look like to the saint? If the saint is the living divine being all the villagers imagine to inhabit the rather anatomically-awkward carved and painted figure we see, and he got to leave the confines of the church just this one time a year, how would he see us? Like the poor humans he once tried to convert to his faith? Saint Sebastian was a martyr, a Roman soldier from the 3rd century who risked his life to convert “heathens” to Christianity, who was shot full of arrows in one effort by Roman officials to kill him, but survived to die a much less glamorous death by beating and tossing into the public sewer canal. For obvious reasons, he is always depicted full of arrows to show his martyrdom, since sewage doesn’t make for good aesthetics. He was brought, like all saints, to Mexico by the Spanish who seemingly applied random saint names to every place and person they came across in their own conversion frenzy. So this town became San Sebastian and he our patron, and the people have prayed to him ever since (more or less).
So imagine that this richly-garbed figure is loaded onto a litter once a year, decorated with an arch of colorful flowers, or claypots, or coins, and taken on a procession into everyone’s house. What does he see? All the cleaning and painting and tidying and making perfect of the houses? The glittery metallic garlands draped high over every block? The balloons taped to front gates, and the tables laid out with hundreds of Styrofoam cups of hot coffee, and big dishes of tamales or fritters to hand out following the procession? The crowd fighting over lollipops and cookies, young and old grabbing at them as if the treats were their last supper, everyone pushing and jostling to dig their hands into the basket? The bored coheteros, who always have a cigarette hanging from their lip so they can touch it to the wick of their booming rockets, sending them flying up on bamboo sticks, never looking back to see the sticks falling from the sky? Does he see people’s altars, every holy image hauled out of the house and set up on a white tablecloth in the front lawn, or the driveway? Do they talk to each other, saint to saint, as the families are dropping down on knees, crossing themselves, kissing Sebastian’s sash as they mutter their prayers? Can he hear their prayers over the clanking of cymbals and drums, squawk of clarinet and trumpet on the background banda soundtrack? Does San Sebastian see what nobody talks about? Does he do anything about it, or is he like those other deities and ascended masters who do not take sides, but instead constantly seek to bring balance to the seemingly inescapable duality of our human lives?
I began writing this before the novenarios kicked off this year, and now coming back to it, after the first procession on January 11, this seemingly significant date of 1-11-11, I am still at a loss for how to make sense of the day, how to find meaning in it for you, for me. The procession ended at the church as always, returning the saint to his home for mass. I arrived late, just in time to press through the gathered crowd and kneel down for the transmutation miracle of communion, with a tinkling bell and the staccato salute of firecrackers marking mid-mass. There are always hundreds of perspectives on any event, and so stories were as variable as there were people present, and even as it happened, I wondered about the saint’s perspective, the saint’s story. From my point of view, there was a sudden massive explosion that shook the whole church at its foundation. I was just outside the front door with some flower arrangements and my 3 year old huddled in my lap to cover his ears. Our ear drums throbbed from the impact. Fiery light and sparks showered over us as we all dashed to the far side of the church yard. Seconds seemed eternal in the time it took me to rise to my feet from kneeling, snatch the child by his armpits and run.
As quickly as the crowd had run away from the fire, they then ran back to the site of the explosion, imagining the damage, to check for wounded. My husband had been helping to fix a streetlamp at the corner of the church yard, a view point from which he could see everything, and he dashed down the street to be the first to reach the injured – two boys who had been passing on bicycles. They were scorched, with their skin seemingly dangling from their faces and bodies, smoke rising off them, and he later described the feeling of impotence, of not being able to do anything, of not remembering first-aid for burns, of just holding them, sitting them up, 4 minutes seeming like an eternity until an ambulance arrived. One of the boys asked to see his face in a mirror, and my husband looked up for the nearest side mirror on a van parked next them and the mirror wasn’t there – it had been blown off.
The same scene from another perspective: my older brother-in-law had helped to organize the event this year and had gone with his father to pick up the coffee and tamales they would hand out after mass. The police officer who was assigned as security for the event had lent them a hand by driving them over to pick it up, and they had just turned into the street behind the church, my brother-in-law, another volunteer, and the police officer in the cab of the pick-up truck, and my father-in-law riding in back with the pots of coffee. Three boys on bikes came looping by in the dark, laughing over the sloshing coffee, taunting, and a hand reached out with, what was it? A match, a lighter, a little firecracker? Right next to the rig of 800 fireworks already set in place for the post-mass grand finale. A massive explosion of fire and smoke washed over the police truck. Those in the cab embraced each other for what must have felt like the last moment of their lives. The doors had sealed shut somehow and they couldn’t get out. My father-in-law leapt down with his eyes burning and frantically tried to open the doors. When he finally got them open, he screamed “Run!” and he sprinted around the church looking for someone, his mother, or his youngest son, who less than 5 minutes beforehand had been chatting with the three boys out in the front plaza. The third boy had mysteriously disappeared (to show up wordlessly at school the next day as if he’d never been there). The other two were those who now laid like smoking guns with my husband.
The coheteros, who had been further up the road with the mid-mass fireworks, came running to check on the youngest member of their pyrotechnic troupe, a teenager left to watch their van, a heavy vehicle with metal panel siding, designed to protect against making such accidents worse, to prevent a stray explosion from striking the rest of the powder stash and turning it into an atomic bomb. The young man was bleeding from his eyeballs and his hair and eyelashes were gone. He cried, then went into shock. The side mirrors were blown off the van, and the metal paneling was warped and rippled like pork rind. But the panels held, at least, and there was no atomic bomb, no little pieces of people here and there like in 1955 when the stash was in the church’s side building and the whole thing blew to bits. There was just this one fierce explosion this time, that blew out all the windows and front wall of the house next to the church, with the elderly couple stunned in the middle of their evening telenovela, too scared to move for hours afterwards even as villagers swept up glass and rubble, and tried to make it clean enough for them to make it through the night.
I was by the front door of the church still, as the pale priest, usually rosy cheeked but made pale by his efforts to stay calm for his congregation, skipped past the now-moot communion as the sirens came down off the highway and blared into feeling-range. He skipped the “peace of the lord be with you” hand-shaking and the “pass the basket” tithing, went straight to praying to quickly wrap up the deal before more chunks of plaster dust puffed down from the ceiling. Congregants wrapped their shawls closer as they ventured out, shook off the sensation of the world falling in on their heads. Immediately speculation began – where, what, who, how … My father-in-law in this moment ran by, holding his face, eyes and nose red, looking for his mother. He was not burned but looked it, and I wondered if he wasn’t remembering back to his early childhood when he did burn himself horribly with fireworks, like those boys in the street, when his first thought would have been “Where is my mother?” The ambulance meanwhile scraped up those two boys, a mother howling disconsolate, a father listening to a boy’s apologies even as he moaned in pain, and everybody wondering … there are as many perspectives on any event as there are people present …
We all ran the event through our minds again and again, and even our own perspective changed. I insisted to many that I had a premonition, that as I knelt and helped my son cover his ears, I felt an odd heat rise from the direction of where the explosion would happen. I could feel it on my bare hand, as if I were holding it near an oven. My father-in-law insisted he had a premonition, that whenever he spills something on his shoes, like the sloshing coffee on the back of the truck, it always means something bad will happen. Mostly we marveled at the miracle that we were all alive. We marveled that my youngest brother-in-law, who is obsessed with fireworks and always with the coheteros, didn’t tag along in that moment with those boys as he ordinarily would have. We marveled that my father-in-law and older brother-in-law escaped traumatized but physically unscathed when the explosion happened mere meters in front of them. Most of all, we marveled that we gathered crying and hugging each other, reminded that we must honor love above all, that any moment could be our last, that we must drop our anger or sadness or envy or ambition or selfishness or judgment because none of that serves us in moments like these. I wondered again about the perspective of the saint, what he was teaching us in this tragedy that happened at his church on the first day of his festival. I think my brother-in-law’s girlfriend summed it up in her quiet way, as we were expressing our gratitude each family member to the next. She said ”We should not wait for an event like this to happen to give thanks to each other and tell each other of our love. We should be doing this every day.”
Two days later, when the procession passed down my street, we cried in church and lingered long after mass in the church yard. We requested songs from the band and we all danced and danced, giggling under the giant umbrella of a palm tree, entranced by the blaring clarinets and trumpets, and the spinning of feet on the flagstones. If an explosion can come to some good, may it be neighbors and cousins who might not talk to each other in the street suspending judgments, may it be families forgetting arguments, may it be lovers forgiving each other, for this brilliant happy moment. We cheered under fluttering confetti, “Viva! Viva! Viva San Sebastian!”
