Scenes Behind the Scenes: Calle Ingeniero de la Cierva, Málaga
Written by Regina Lankenau
Málaga, Spain | July 14, 2019
11:30. All seems quiet on Calle Ingeniero de la Cierva, the chocolate-bar streets awash in a muted morning light. The Málaga sun knows no rest.
Around the corner, however, it’s a different story.
Like birds at a fountain, residents congregate in the shade that spills in scant puddles from the tree-lined boulevard. Crews of senior men take up residence in the benches, leaning on their canes to chat, beige chinos rolled up and shirts minimally buttoned. Beads of sweat collect beneath their hats.
11:45. A line forms at the corner bakery. Customers cradling barras and molletes in their arms weave through the group spilling out of the shop and onto the pavement.
12:00. In the Parroquia Virgen del Camino, just a short walk from the neighbourhood nucleus, the first stirrings of Sunday mass begin. The brick church, simple with red stripes, is empty save for two elderly women in faded skirts kneeling to pray. Mounted across one wall, a series of electric fans lay dormant, letting the midday heat sit and stretch its arms to fill the small room.
12:15. Clad in a patchwork of coordinated printed sets, compact handbags slung over their arms, more women shuffle in. One by one, like the multiplication of the loaves, a small flock begins to form. They kiss each other once, twice; a slow-motion reel of puckering and subsequent smacks that replace the reverent silence.
12:20. Ensconced in their corresponding pews, the women catch up with each other: a homogenized chittering of rapid-fire Spanish that can be neither called a murmur nor a shout, but somewhere in between. Beneath the din is the syncopated beat of folding fans being unfurled, like a deck of cards expertly shuffled.
12:25. Five minutes before mass begins, the men trickle in, taking up the pews in the rear of the church. Ruddy faces shiny and legs splayed, many follow the women’s example and flap their own fans back and forth. It is the only sound in the church as the priest takes his place at the front and the conversations die down.
12:30. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.
