See a queue, and know that it can only have one of two destinations.
Two nights until the Christ’s mass and the streets are a clog of citizenry; the pavements might be wide but lane discipline is irrelevant. All wander amiably, absently; mendicants cadge euros, buskers play cellos, whilst the Doñas have retrieved their fur coats from the depository’s coldstore. In this throng you might not at first notice the stationary congregation forming up beside Kilometre Zero, the point from which all distances in Spain are counted. An edifice with history. Originally the headquarters for the postal service, it has a tower for the optical telegraphy line. Then it was the Francoist State Security Ministry with its infamous basement prison. Now it’s the Regional Government’s Presidential Palace.
Queues require investigation. It’s ‘FOMO syndrome’; something’s happening – don’t want to miss out.
I pace it out, but it passes into a ziggurat of crowd control barriers, goes around the corner and disappears into that government building. Well, at least it’s not a run on the bank.
Britons consider themselves as the quintessential proponents of the queue, masters of the social niceties of standing in line. But I suspect that your nominal Briton wouldn’t wait in a quarter-mile line to look at the Municipal Belén. A Spanish family most certainly would.
Turn a few more corners to find another stationary body of Madrileños, asking the same question: “fin de cola?”, “is this the tail-end of the queue?”. Again, I follow the near stationary phalanx around the corner to find two police officers watching this migration entering the State-owned lottery’s shop. Their dedication is remarkable, for this particular line has to thole the questionably odorous pleasures of being stuck outside a ‘Lush’ shop. (Emporia, that for the uninitiated, are always first encountered not visually but nasally, generally at a hundred steps).
The Belén and The Lotto both have Christmas roots but are on differing branches; one religion, the other governmental commerce – aka: voluntary tax collection.
Belénes: tableaux of The Nativity. The creations outside the ecclesiastical buildings are often from the Neapolitan baroque; antique depictions of the simple manger scene. The three principal participants, the only ones mentioned in the testaments as being there on that day; the kings several days away, generally just around the next corner. In the instance of the Belén at La Almudena Cathedral, the Kings and their camels are welded re-bar silhouettes etched in low voltage lights, traipsing along the wrong side of a verge, a street gutter that disappears down a tunnel and underneath the Royal Palace. The inference being that it took some time to extricate themselves, so offering an explanation for their twelve days of delay.
The various municipalities’ Belénes, on the other hand, attract the queues. They’re more of a pageant, dioramas of an animated Bethlehem or a local village’s life. Wood choppers and bread bakers; laundry hanging and sheet bleaching, cabbage growing and water drawing, as well as the other normal travails of life. The lightning-struck, flames-flickering church tower in Segovia; the stumbling wine-carter’s ass. Or the black vicissitudes of Herod’s troops hunting toddlers.
Out in the cluttered expanse of the Plaza Mayor, one trader sells cork bark, boxed moss, sprigs of heather and half a dozen sorry withering specimens that might pass for Christmas trees. The bark a neat substitute for limestone scarps, heather for scrub bush and the moss for tenacious weeds. I gave up counting when I got to ten stalls, all selling the figurines for augmenting your own home Belén. Ass, sheep, Magi, as well as the primary protagonists. Trees, cribs, camels, but no ‘caganer’, that squatting luck-inducing wee Catalonian defecating pooper. Simple answer: I’m in Madrid.
That equation of tree to figurine neatly encapsulates the place of the ‘arbol de Navidad’ in the Latin Christmas tradition. In spite of the Santa-suited motorbikers’ decibels of ego-enhancing horns and echoing rev’d up reverberations on the Gran Vía yesterday morning, Sn. Claus has little input into the general proceedings. It might not be gold, frankincense and myrrh, but it is The Kings who get to deliver the goods on Twelfth Night. Those sorry spindle-shank’d specimens would be long deceased, the presents swamped by their drifts of desiccated pine needles.
The Belén outplays the Tree.
The longer the queue, the better the Belén, or so I want to conclude. We’ve considered a visit on three occasions, but that long, lingering line appears both stationary and tucked deep into winter shadow. This, despite its address on the Plaza del Sol. Strategic planning is required, so we return early on the following Sunday morning.
Moments before opening, we’re very near the front, congratulating ourselves on our brilliant strategy. The snake has already grown, its tail disappearing into the plaza. Thoughts turn to the ouroboros, the serpent that swallows its own tail and what happens when this queue completes a circumnavigation of the block?
Shouldn’t have worried. The doors open and we progress… backwards. The diorama inside is the depiction of a miracle, outside we have a miraculous apparition. The manifestation of one set of parents, the attendant in-laws, their son’s football coach, the dog’s dog-walker and the daughter’s best friend’s family’s neighbours and all their fellow co-workers. The queue doesn’t so much stagnate as impregnate, swelling as the snake consumes a meal of line-jumpers.
The queue does eventually do what queues do, only this one has to first pass through this government building’s x-ray and security measures.
The black phantoms of General Franco and King Herod linger still.
PostScript: five minutes walk after we leave and that second queue, the lotto-line is still in place. The participants might change, but that entity called ‘Queue’ remains. Its tale is for another day, one when I can announce my spectacular winnings in the ‘el Gordo’.
