When my children were small, I used to take them to the carnival, which would come to Granada each year in June. In the 1970s, the carnival site was still within walking distance from where we lived, although later on, it was moved to the northern part of the city.
My husband never went with us because he always had a lot of work to do. Not that I was all that keen on carnivals either, but I still remembered what it was like to be a child. And so I would take the children there to see the sights and to have an adventure. There were large crowds, plenty of dust, and music blasting at 300 decibels. I usually wore earplugs, but my children enjoyed all of the noise and hullabaloo.
They would walk around with helium balloons tied to their wrist as they became progressively stickier from eating cotton candy and popsicles. Sometimes they would become so engrossed in the exotic carnival scenario that their balloon would become untied and fly away into the sky. I would then replace it with another. A carnival is not a carnival without a balloon.
The carnival was filled with set of fairly lame sideshows, which people (including me) actually paid money to see. There was the occasional calf with two heads, a midget reported to be the strongest (midget) in the world, and a bearded lady, who resembled one of my neighbors. My children, of course, wanted to go in and see all of these wonders.
One sideshow advertised a “mujer en cueros”. “En cueros” [in leather] is slang in Spanish for “naked”. People, of course, paid to go in. However, instead of a glamorous Venus in her birthday suit, they found a lady completely encased in a kind of leather cocoon with no skin visible except for her face, which had become quite red because of the intense heat. The audience felt deceived and somewhat disgruntled, but linguistically speaking, it was not false advertising.
There was also a show late in the evening, which I never had the opportunity to view. It was thought to be overly risqué for ‘good’ women, who had to be protected from all of the evils of the world except cooking and housework.
The show was called the Teatro Chino [Chinese Theater]. It was where spectators could enjoy a number of vaudeville acts as well as visually savor the talent of a burlesque dancer called Manolita Chen, a Spanish lady, whose Chinese husband helped her organize the acts and theater entertainment. In the early 1970s,
Franco, though gradually progressing towards mummification, was still marginally alive and thus able to safeguard the moral values of the populace, who were all too eager to forget about said values whenever possible. For that reason the Teatro Chino was regarded as pretty racy stuff even though by then, Manolita was in her 40s and a bit long in the tooth.
There were also carnival games. One of them consisted of a board with a series of openings. When a mole (or whatever) popped up out of the hole, it was necessary to whack it to push it down again. A high IQ was not necessary to play this game. One only had to have good reflexes and sharp eyesight to obtain a reasonably good score. Needless to say, it was one of my sons’ favorite games though they never won any prizes.
In Times of Coronavirus, we are now strolling through the carnival, and playing carnival games……though in this new carnival, there is no Manolita Chen, who long ago went to that great burlesque theater in the sky.
In this new Coronavirus Carnival, everyone in Spain is celebrating the New Normal while pretending that it is like the Old Normal. The weather is hot and sunny, just the right temperature for ‘botellones’ [outdoor drinking parties]. Travel is now possible. People have fled to the beaches. They wish to forget about confinement and make up for lost time. And who can blame them? It is summer and everyone wants to be on vacation, exactly like in the Old Normal.
As of yesterday, we have also begun to get tourists back. Everyone in the EU and the UK, as I predicted, can now come here to roast on the beach without having to quarantine. This agreement, however, is not as yet reciprocal. Spaniards entering the UK are forced to spend 14 days in quarantine. However, we are desperate, and many Britons have vacation homes on the Costa del Sol. Spain needs them (and their pounds sterling). The restaurant and hotel industries here are in dire straits.
Meanwhile, the Mayor of Madrid (who despises the current government) has been crying out in the desert for the last three weeks, requesting an effective protocol as well as money for personnel to identify tourists with Covid-19.
So far, the only measures are a form that everyone fills out on the plane, a temperature screener (when available), and a visual scan by a healthcare professional (when and if such professionals are ever recruited) or by someone else who hasn’t a clue what to look for (it is enough to gaze fixedly at everyone that walks by). The mayor’s exasperation is understandable because if there is a new outbreak, she will be blamed for it.
Unfortunately, all of this opening up has already started to have its downside (and we haven’t even really begun with the tourists). So far the Spanish government has dealt with 36 recent outbreaks, 12 of which are currently active. They are uncontrollably popping up all over the country in various provinces from north to south.
These outbreaks are occurring in hospitals, factories, birthday celebrations, ‘botellones’, nursing homes, and even a convent. A few days ago, there was even a small outbreak in Granada. In Huesca, there are a few that are so bad that three regions of that province have been expelled from the New Normal and have been demoted to Phase 2 (which, as you may recall, is really Phase 3).
So, the Minister of Health, Mr. Deer-in-the-Headlights is now being forced to feverishly play Whack-a-Virus. And like my sons when they were small, he is making a praiseworthy effort but so far, has only obtained limited success. Like them, he is trying to outguess the mole/virus, but right now, he is not doing so well. And it is obvious that he is scared again.
Television is a caustic medium, which amplifies traits that would otherwise remain hidden. Mr. Deer-in-the-Headlights has the same problem that François Mitterand used to when he was President of France. When he speaks, it is evident when he is not at ease, because his eyes keep blinking as though he were flashing the headlights of his car. The number of blinks-per-minute is a measure of his nervousness. Lately, he has been blinking quite a lot.
In a way, it is understandable. The game board is the whole Iberian Peninsula. All over the country, insidious little moles/viruses are sticking their heads out of the holes, and Mr. Deer-in-the-Headlights is trying to stop the disaster from spreading. Right now, it is a difficult if not impossible task. When there are elections again, perhaps he will be able to blame his lack of success on his hammer.
