A week in Spain, part two: jesters in Madrid

So, my story from Madrid that I left out of my other post... One evening we were hanging out in the Plaza de España, which was a lively square. Various entertainment for the summer seemed to be going on. There was a stage set up with some intermittent live music playing. In the midst of that, there was a random, student-art type thing where a guy dressed in ragged clothes with a cat mask on was sitting around next to a tv for awhile. Then he left and a bunch of people who had been sitting around the square sat on the ground in front of the TV, pretending to watch it. The guy in rags came from off to the side and spat up something that looked like ketchup and stumbled around before finally crashing next to the TV. The ones "watching" the TV booed and yelled at him for getting in the way. At the end they threw pieces of paper at him which said (in Spanish) "Does a reality greater than TV exist? Dare to look, coward." Right. Then they all broke up and left the scene. Hilariously, a homeless woman came over to where the guy in rags with the mask was still lying next to the TV and she was poking at him and saying something we couldn't understand. Doubt she was part of the plan.

Anyway, we went back to sitting in front of the square's fountain until awhile later when we noticed a bunch of stuff going on down near the stage that was set up. There was a guy on stilts and some fireworks going off. We joined the crowd watching and found a bunch of people dressed up as jesters (I think they called themselves "bufónes" in Spanish) doing various silly, jestery things. O has posted one photo of a few of them. One side of their costumes was a typical jester costume, but the other side was like a skeleton, and their makeup was half-life, half-death as well. But they were happy people and loved playing pranks on the crowd. The guy on stilts had a tank full of water on his back (I think a tank like you use to spray pesticides) and he was always spraying the crowd or aiming at one person in particular. He got me right in the back at one point and when I turned around to give him the evil eye, he of course put on an innocent face.

After the first bit in front of the stage, where there was a lot of talking we didn't understand, along with some dancing and fireworks and acrobatics, the jesters told us all to come follow them and dance with them, and slowly, shyly, the crowd did. They circled us around the square, stopping occasionally for more antics. Or just doing them as we walked along. There was a guy on a unicycle who would purposely run into you or pretend he was about to crash. Another guy did that freaky thing with the clear balls where he runs them over his hands and arms as if they weigh nothing. Others just tapped you on the shoulder and ran away. And all the while the spraying of water...

They stopped for a bit when they got to the point opposite from where we'd started and there was dancing and music and more tricks. O got this photo when one of the jesters snuck up on him while he was taking a different photo, then O turned the camera on the jester. No long after that, I got pulled into their fun when two of them came walking towards me holding hands and snagged me between them. They then circled around me and danced me into the middle of the crowd. I stood there giggling while they danced around me. I don't remember much except for their faces going around and around. Another one joined the circle and they continued spinning around me. Soon they started shuffling me across to one side of the crowd, to a bench where two older women were sitting. They got the women to scoot apart and had me sit on the bench between them. One of the jesters sat on my lap, and another sat on his lap and so on until 4 were piled up in front of me.



I turned to the Spanish woman to my right, who'd had her nice quiet evening with her friend interrupted, and I just shook my head and laughed. She laughed back. All the jesters got off me and let me go hide back in the crowd, waving goodbye as I left. The one at the front of the four of them blew me a kiss. I now regret not slapping the guy sitting on me in the butt to see how he'd react to that.

We all continued on around the square and we came to a trapeze that had been set up. One guy did a little trapeze act. Then a woman, who I loved watching, did a fire-eating act. Then they got someone from the crowd to try the thing where you twist around in long pieces of fabric and hang upside down and such. They made it seem like they just picked this woman who volunteered to try it who then happened to be really good at it, and they had me fooled at first. But she did too well to have never done it before. When she went back to where she was sitting she was telling a guy in the crowd that she really had never done that before, but she was just a good actress.

Soon after this the time for their act was over, and they all took a few bows. We gave them a hearty cheer, especially those of us who had followed them all around the square. It was so fun, so spontaneous, and they really tried to get people to loosen their inhibitions for just a little while and enter their strange, silly alternate reality.