pilgrimage
Todo los años, desde 1912, tiene lugar la Romería de la Virgen de las Nieves, en la que los vecinos de Trevélez suben a la cima del Mulhacén, donde se oficia una misa de romeros a las 12:00h de cada 5 de agosto. Desde la creación del Parque Nacional de Sierra Nevada y en aras a la conservación del mismo, la ascensión se realiza caminando y a la Virgen se la lleva a lomos de caballería. Cuenta la leyenda que allí quiso ser enterrado el monarca nazarí Muley Hassén, de cuyo nombre tomaría el suyo la montaña.
Every year since 1912, the pilgrimage of the Virgen de las Nieves in Trevélez takes places. The locals climb to the top of the Mulhacen (3482 meters above sea level), where a Mass is held at midday on 5th August…the pilgrims walk up the mountain and the statue of the Virgin is taken on horseback. Legend has it that the Moorish king Muley Hassen is buried here, and it is from him that the mountain gets its name.
Source: https://www.turgranada.es/fichas/virgen-de-las-nieves-30604/
We leave Capileira at 4:30am on a still night. A brilliant half moon.
Almost 40 minutes driving up in the dark to arrive in even more dark.
Driving through pine forests, tall silhouettes of trees in the car lights.
Where are the other cars? says Alicia
Not one car behind us or in front of us.
Past a gate which is open
Park on a wide dirt road.
Ah, now there are the other cars. We park, put on our headlamps.
There are park rangers with torches who tell us to follow the kerns - montañitas de piedras, they are called.
There is only one fork in the road, they say, to the right are the lakes (don’t go there)’ to the left is Mulhacen (go there!).
At 3483 meters, the highest mountain in Spain. Named for Muley Hacén, the twenty-first ruler of the Emirate of Granada.
We are here for the start of romería, a pilgrimage that happens every August in the Alpujarras.
Up and up in the dark.
Alicia and Mely, side by side, talking as they go.
I choose to lag behind and then go forward, to be in silence. So I can listen to what wants to be heard. I go up with the express intention of seeking some kind of guidance for this big enterprise of The Good Manners of Colonized Subjects in Spain. Mostly, it has to do with money and art-making. How to afford the dream.
It seems fitting to go up Mulhacen with this in mind. Because when I told someone in Capileira about this, they tell me two things made of legend, connected to silence and money. One that Muley Hacen may be buried at the top. He wanted to be in a place of deep quiet after he died and chose the top of this mountain for its feeling of infinite silence. And the second legend is that along with his body, there may be buried treasure at the top.
I go googling first for his name and find this in Wikipedia:
Abu'l-Hasan Ali ibn Sa'd (Arabic: أبو الحسن علي, romanized: Abū al-Ḥasan ‘Alī ibn Saʿd; d. 1485), known as Muley Hacén in Spanish (Muley being derived from Arabic Mawlay = "My Lord"),
Carrying all this, the legend of the past, the need of the present, I walk up, without saying anything.
And as I walk, another challenge arises. It has to do with the persistence of sound.
My companions are walking and talking. Their voices carry in the dark. See, the biggest encounter of my time in Spain has been the encounter with sound, especially the sound of voices. I’ve always been hyper sensitive to voices. Meaning, a certain frequency can just throw me off and I literally cannot think straight. I avoid crowds because loud sounds make me feel claustrophobic, off kilter. What I loved about the years I spent in New Mexico was having a refuge, a house on a hill, in a quiet valley, near a secret arroyo, where it was quiet. I literally expanded and deepened into that silence. Coming to Spain has been - well, I literally came down the hill and moved suddenly swiftly to Andalusia. And here, what voices! Oh the textures of tones that are so particular to this part of the world, voices that make beautiful music, voices that carry wherever you go. You tell me where there is a quiet café with muted voices and I will drop everything and come find you there!
So what arises for me, on this walk, this morning is the memory of my being challenged with the persistence of sound in Spain. Everything else falls away. It just becomes about sound, voice, and the memory of sound, voice and my wanting to get to the other side of that challenge, Whatever that other side is…
We keep going up in the dark. Me in front now. My companions behind. The sun rises - a fierce spot of orange - and on the horizon of one mountain ridge, I see a line of mountain goats silhouetted in the predawn. Wild ibex in English. In Spanish, cabras montesas. Almost all of them on the ridge seem to have those twisty horns. I know these wild goats. They sometimes descend to the village. For me, no visit to Capiliera is complete till I greet them. I’ve stood right in front of them and stared -- not only the grand ones with the mature twisty horns, but also the cabritas, the young goats - and they’ve stood a good while, starting back, then turned languidly and leapt out of sight. Seeing them on the mountain ridge feels like a curious homecoming. Something begins to shift.
Here, in the high Sierra Nevada, there are no trees and the rocks are shiny flat shale-like, metamorphic rocks, sharp slices of them.
This is all mountain building, the impact of Spain crashing into Andalusia and pushing things up, seismic activity up.
There is a huge bowl shaped mountain where softer rock has fallen in and in the middle of the bowl, a blue green mountain lake.
There are remnants of stone bunkers and watchtowers dating to the Spanish Civil War.
Even up this high, I ask?
Yes.
I don’t know that whole story yet but I will find out. It’s wild to think of war this high up, this treeless landscape, with so little oxygen and amazing views.
Other people start appearing and we are no longer alone.
And three hours later, we all arrive at the windy summit.
Then we hear the sound of horses and here come the cowboys from Trevelez carrying the Virgin de la Nieves in a small box.
I kid you not. A small box tied to a a horse. There are young men and old men, two small boys and I see a girl or two.
Oh, the way of horse people - they have such a way of walking and talking. Their easy stance as they sit on horses.
And then someone begins to sing, A man with a hat sings a song about the Alpujarras Granaina. Just like that.
Now, I am in Mongolia again.
minii aav aduu chinn huun, minii aav duu uchin huun
my father is a horse man, my father is a singer…
(see video at the very bottom for clip of this song; see Stories from the Steppe for Mongolia sounds)
Now we are waiting for the priest. And the wind is fierce.
Everyone is scrambling to find some bit of protection from the wind: lying flat on rocks, scurrying inside bunkers, twisting the body in all kinds of angles to hide between rocks and crevices.
And the priest finally arrives. The box is opened and a small statue of the Virgin de las Nieves, in blue robes, is placed on a rock.
On another rock, another white cloth is laid out with Eucharist and things for mass.
The mass begins. The cowboys and girls sit to the side, talking amongst themselves. They rode six hours to get here, they tell us later.
There is even communion.
Long ago, I was raised Catholic and I spoke the words without thinking and maybe even unconsciously I am repeating them as I listen, even though the words are in Spanish. Peace be with you and also with you.
This is the same church that wrote the treaty that divided the world in two, one for Spain and the other for Portugal to convert and colonize.
What match is one solo play against a whole enterprise that has lived for so long? is one thought that crosses my mind.
The other is that for the world to change, the church has to change. The pope has said sorry to indigenous people and that is only a small start. It has to do more. Unravel its own layers. Create or support projects that seek to dismantle the oppression, the colonization that was of its own making.
Long ago, I was raised Catholic, officially. But also, the other half of the family is Muslim. I grew up in that too, with the memory of the first surah of the Koran, the sound of that. It starts with the word, Bismillah, a word I often speak silently to myself at the start of journeys and when I need the solace of one sound. I watch the mass and think of the Nasrid king of the mountain buried under the rocks where the Catholic mass is being spoken. His treasure, lost. But what a view he has of silence.
One of the cowboys laughs suddenly, at a secret joke and I come back into the present.
I offer my hand to strangers who shake it and say, peace be with you.
virgin de las nieves on mulhacen
photo by Alicia
The mass ends. We descend. Everything and everyone is lighter going down. Including me. Especially me. Then my companions tell me that their conversation, their talking on the way helped them get to the top, helped them keep going, What I thought was the persistence of sound was the persistence of connection and humans helping each other.
Bemused, I give thanks to sound. All kinds of sounds, soft sounds, loud sounds. I see the quiet café I long for receding into that same place where ideal triangles live, some geometric plane, out of time, out of space. Not here.
Mely is seeing shapes in everything. Because I’m a painter, she says. Oh I say, estás pintando mientras caminas…
and like this the poem arrives by the time we reach the bottom
mulhacen viernes, 5 de agosto de 2022
por Shebana Coelho & Mely Torquemada
estás pintando mientras caminas
el verde esta llamandote
cada piedra brilla en tu memoria
pintora de la luz, en este camino de la noche, que viste tu?
en la oscuridad, vi nacer el color
already, you are painting as you walk
all that is green calls to you
every rock glints in your memory
painter of light, on this journey made of night, what did you see?
in the darkness, I saw the dawn of color.
that last line - Mely said it without missing a beat:
en la oscuridad, vi nacer el color
That’s what the audacious dream feels like to me. Without missing a beat, with my whole heart.
I am here to live and die my deepest expression of song, tree, stone, dance, to embody and facilitate experiences that liberate creativity, our true nature.
