It was really rather easy to track down the Kings. Just follow the reverberating noise down the narrow calles, the echoing stot of boys with lightweight footballs. The girls with gender-stereotypical pink stuffed toys. The local worthies have dressed up and located to the plaza to distribute presents, although there seems to be a degree of ‘dressing-up box’ confusion. I’m sure Saint Nick has donned a plastic crown to disguise his assemblage from ten days earlier.
It’s twelfth night give or take a couple of days, the traditional gift-giving day. (Given the number of new cycles being ridden around the park on Christmas morning, it’s the alternative, additional, traditional gift-giving day). Parents are striding through the plaza, rolls of wrapping paper under one arm, the other balancing at least one cake box. The Roscón or Rosca de Reyes; Three Kings bread, a soft, orange, sweet confection sprinkled with lurid red and green candied fruits, shaped as a large round doughnut or a small lifebelt. They’ve been on sale for weeks, even the ones that purport to contain ‘cream’, and a shelf life that could cover next year’s epiphany.
Tradition extends to the contents, I still have a small ceramic ‘king’ from a previous travel, but not the ‘bean’. Find the wizened haricot in your wedge and it’s your turn to buy the cake next year.
That was Córdoba yesterday, tonight we’ve taken the bus to Úbeda. On the way into town, passing the local tractor dealer’s yard I spot a row of decorated floats and wondered; as it’s Sunday could they have had their parade last night? Going from the bus station to our accommodation was a surreal experience after the ‘over tourism’ and stagnating pedestrian congestion of Córdoba, for there were more street barriers than people. Even the fly poster of seasonal events in an empty window held out no more hope. Those barriers were the sole indication that a ‘happening’ might indeed happen.
Checked in through the anonymity of reception-free door codes, we head out to find the one and only store that might just still be open.
They’re loading the projectiles onto Balthasar’s float: ten boxes, each with forty litres of dental caries, four hundred litres of boiled sweets, and that’s just one magus’ float. That would be one of those wise men who followed the star from the east on John Deere tractors.
I’m not entirely sure how long the parade route was, what I do know; it took at least a half hour just to get moving. We followed it for over two hours, left to get a resupply of food, an event that always takes longer than intended, only to rejoin the spectacle long before the tail-end came to pass.
Four bands, some with over fifty brass instruments and a percussion of drummers who won’t cease all night. Now add the inflated pirate ship that’s mizzen mast is punctured by a street tree, the shoal of dancing sea creatures, a ghostly jazz combo, several casts of characters from the Disney empire. Stilt-walking hang-gliders, a remnant of Santa’s happy helpers and a walking biplane. Not to forget the ‘woke alert’ of a blacked-up band of Bedouinos. The other big band were toga-draped Romans, whose players could render a tuba into a cornum and the gladiatorial march into the coliseum.
As well as Gasper and Melchior’s boiled sweetie distribution service.
Most are here to watch the spectacle, the small boys to fill a plastic carrier bag with ‘pic an’ mix’. The more enterprising have recruited a father to increase the yield of distributed largesse, an upturned umbrella held upon high.
The bagpipe might be a UN-sanctioned instrument of war, but it’s the drum that has the impact to drive life into a battle and into this parade. Stand at a particular spot with the throng on the edge to feel the reverberations driven through your chest, to understand why Napoleon’s infantry columns were so feared. Wellington’s instructions to his riflemen: eliminate the sergeant and the drummer boys. The brains and the engine. Emasculate the advance.
Still the bands plays on, still the boilings rain down, still all scrabble for sweets, nothing is still, nothing is silent this night.
An evening’s free entertainment to punctuate a shopping trip. And as always; a conundrum. Is the regional bank in league with the dentists, that they have own branded boiled sweets?
