Scenes from a Spanish Plaza

Sitting at the northwest corner of San Fernando Plaza in Leon, I can scan the plaza from left to right and see almost a million little dramas, exciting interactions, every spectrum of emotion, every single age, and what really accounts to regular Spainish people doing their regular late-July evening activities.  But first, the structures.

At one end is a fountain.  It is very simple: just water flowing from a lions head.  It is entertaining the kids as they splash about and it refreshes the masses as people come to it to drink.  It just constantly flows.  Pretty for the eye to look at and also quite practical.  On the other end of the plaza is a gazebo where I can  only assume bands play during festivles and speeches are made.  Dena and I thought for a second that it might be a nice place to pitch our tent, but we´d never get to sleep if we had done it.

Around the outside of the plaza are cafes, restaurants, shops, the panaderia (where people buy bread), even though it has long closed its doors for business, and people drinking wine, smoking, laughing, and telling stories.

Then there is the space between the fountain and the gazebo, which is where the people come in.  As I gaze from right to left, I see it all.  It starts with the old man, sitting silently and solo, making up stories in his mind about everything he sees.  I can understand him pretty well because I am doing exactly what he is doing: watching the people.  One difference is that he has a cane and uses it.  Yes, I can relate to him but I can at least get around a little faster than he can, despite my fast approaching 30th birthday (AAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!)

Past the older fellow, I see a group of middle aged women, many of whom are smoking, no doubt telling stories to each other about their days.  This seems like a ritual to me; like they have to do it every single evening (at least in the summertime anyway).

At the foutain, grade school aged boys are filling up water pistols and shooting each other with them.  That is, until they are interruped by a high school aged boy carrying a big helmet.  He scans the plaza, just like I am, takes a drink, and dissapears as fast as he approached.  Dena and I speculated that he really didn´t want to get a drink; that was his excuse to see which of his mates (or maybe see which attractive chicas) were present at the plaza this evening.  Because no sooner did he disappear then did he reappear on a four-wheel ATV, huge helmet and all, rolling through the plaza.  One of his mates was on a motor-cross bike behind him.

Futher to the left, at the far corner of the plaza I see middle school aged girls who had just spent all their money at the sweet shop, trading sticks of gum for chocolate.  There is a pack of middle school aged boys nearby, all on bicycles.  There are no rules about bicycles in the plaza.  In fact, there seems to be no rules at all.

In the center of the plaza, grade school aged boys are using the gazebo as goal posts for their futbol (soccer) game.  It is the downhill end of the plaza so every fourth or fifth shot, the keeper has to go running through the people sitting in chairs at the cafe at that end of the plaza.  Oh well, any other night the goal could have been anywhere else at the plaza.  After a quality goal, the shooter would throw his hands in the air and shout something that I couldn´t hear over the din of the masses.

Last, to my immediate left, a very young girl is crying because her older brother hit her.  The brother is getting a “time-out” from Dad, but I saw it all.  Really, the little sister was antagonizing her brother until he couldn´t really handle it anymore and laid a whopper on her face.  Secretly I laughed, but I also might go to hell for it.

Through all this, I was munching on a bocadilla with Dena and just enjoying the entertainment.  It was better than TV.  Bruce Springsteen has a line in his song Jungleland (I think) in which he says: “There´s an opera out on the turnpike, there´s a drama being fought out in the alley.”  This is Spain, not New Jersey, but the happiness and sadness, and simple emotions, and standard evening feelings were as apparent out here in the plaza as they could have been anywhere.  I fell asleep that night like I understood another part of the world that much better, despite the fact that they were the same things that happen anywhere.

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