la concordia ‘72 – part one

the sun rises over sidrón. today will be grand.

the work started days ago (for the shopfronts along the harbour, the better part of a week ago) — and so by dawn, the streets are already half-dressed. paper lanterns are strung from balcony to balcony in the hundreds, the cord sagging under the weight of them, and the stalls thrown up overnight still smell of cut wood. someone’s hung multi-coloured garlands the length of the harbour road, and someone else has been up since before dawn sweeping the plaza mayor so it can be dirtied again by noon.

by six, the cooking has begun. first on the list: espetadas, skewers of fruit and meat blackened just so at the edges, and brushed with a special spicy sauce. then, there’s pão de cinza coming out of the ovens by the basket, sweet loaves dusted grey to look like they’ve been pulled from a fire (which is the joke). then, there’s mousse de grana — a novelty float made from the island’s reddest fruit — crushed down into soda and capped with a head of salty-sweet cream foam you eat the first inch of with a spoon. and on every other table, bolachas — sugar cookie figures the children beg for (and the grown-ups buy “for the children”), moulded and painted into the faces of the nightcrawlers. look: you can bite the head off a monster before it gets the chance to bite yours!

the boats come in heavy all morning. they’ve been coming for days — the harbour’s been thick with them the whole week prior — but this is often the day that empties the most people out onto the island. over the years, the helmsmen have learned these tourists are never ones to be punctual. but they arrive in droves with their film cameras, wide-brimmed hats, and wallets full of money they’re itching to spend on “authentix culture” — and so, in turn, they’re greeted by frenetic enthusiasm from the port all the way to their hotels.

the street performers are out by mid-morning, and the procession everyone waits for comes with them: la sierpe, the vibrant serpent of cloth carried on forty shoulders at once, winding down the harbour road with a drum at its head, keeping its tail in tune. behind it come the masked — both islanders and tourists (though mostly tourists), faces under the lacquered masks la concordia is built on, looking equal parts gruesome and camp. some are shiny and tacked with plastic fangs, some are furry and come with shuttering yellow eyes, and some are simply hairpieces with unnaturally orange synthetic fibres attached — whatever that implies.

there are stages going up in the plaza mayor for the vaudeville that runs after dark, with the bill rewritten extra special for the week. at the mouth of every other alley, there’s a ring-toss nobody has ever won, lifting coins off visitors who’ll swear blind it’s rigged (and then queue for it again anyway). and then there’s the one booth that turns up every single year — the mysterious woman behind a mulberry veil who reads off a deck of cards and tells you only the parts you’ll be pleasantly spooked to hear.

and the island is happy. well… most of it is. the children are happy, sugar-drunk by nine and feral by noon, the tourists are happy to serve as the audience for an overblown celebration of something that may or may not have ever been real, and the vendors are happy in the way that they see this year’s rent completely paid stroll past them in flip-flops.

but go up the hill, off the harbour, and you’ll find the other side of sidrón: where an old woman closes her shutters against the racket and keeps them closed the full week — indicative of the islanders who’ve sat through forty of these and given up finding any of it charming a long, long time ago. they don’t say much about it. you learn early on sidrón which complaints are worth the breath, and the festival that keeps the lights on is not a complaint anyone’s getting anywhere with.

at ten, the church bells go, and the crowd thickens in towards the plaza mayor. ten is when the president speaks. he does it from the balcony of the casa de gobierno every year — president landis villamor — in a suit woven from pineapples, yet still sweating through in front of the cameras (and loving every second of the attention). and the speech is how it always is.

“sidrón welcomes you,” he says, and the square goes quiet enough to let him. “fifty years ago, the old, cursed quarrels of this island were laid to rest for good, and the peace we’ve kept since was won by people who understood what a place like this costs its own when they turn on one another. fifty years of peace is no small feat, and la concordia is how we celebrate our nation’s tenacity. so celebrate. eat. and spend.” — and the laugh he waits for comes in right on cue — “and carry a little of sidrón home in your pocket, so that sidrón goes on!”

and then it’s done. the square spills back into noise, and the day goes as it’s supposed to: louder, fuller, and sweatier — until the whole of the island is one body swaying to a rhythm they don’t remember hearing start.

this is the fiftieth la concordia — more special than the ones that came before it — and for the length of one bright day, sidrón is going to be exactly what it promised on the posters. the rest can wait.