11/06/2005

Something Smells Fishy In There [NOVEMBER 6, 2005]

Humanity has come up with some pretty strange celebrations in the name of tradition. Some cultures dip their newborn babies into water, others have them circumcised before they can even blink, and still others order their young men to join the military (and become killing machines) before they can truly be considered adults capable of respecting others. But these are all but unique traditions. Things most people go through only once in a lifetime. The most exquisite of traditions aren’t the ones that we see but a single time throughout our many years, but the ones that happen again and again, year after year. And there’s no time of year when these types of traditions get stranger than at the end of October and beginning of November.

Christianity has All Saints’ Day, the Brits have Guy Fawkes Night, and we Americans – along with most of the Western world it now seems – have Halloween. I thought we had the world beat with Halloween. I mean, how can any culture possibly have a stranger tradition than that one? A bunch of kids go around their neighborhoods asking for either a trick or something sweet and, if they’re lucky, they get the fright of their life after Dracula pops out of the closet. Keep in mind, the Count is popping out of the closet of some stranger’s house and telling little five year olds, "I VANT to SUCK your blood!" If that happened on any other night of the year, the police wouldn’t go long without a disturbing complaint from a frantically concerned parent. But, on that one night, mom and dad tell their frightened little one, "Oh Honey... It’s nothing to be scared of...." Even E.T. got to walk around the town during Halloween and no one was the wiser! There can’t possibly be a stranger yearly tradition somewhere else in the world, now can there?

Well, curiously enough, there is and it happens every year here in good ol’ Cádiz. It doesn’t happen all over the city as Halloween does in towns back in the US, but only in the central food market. Why this is will make perfect sense once I explain what exactly it is that goes on during the festival of Tosantos (As the people of Cádiz pronounce Todos Los Santos, or All Saints).


Welcome to TOSANTOS - You're in for quite a treat!

The official Cádiz food market, Mercado Central, is a large one-storey building that occupies an entire city block in the center of the city. It has provided the residents of Cádiz with meat and produce for hundreds of years and continues to do so till this day. Sure there are supermarkets elsewhere, just like in any other modern city in Europe, but if you want the good stuff or the hard-to-come by fish and pork fillets, you go to Mercado Central. The market itself is divided into three sections – fruit and vegetables, meats and cheeses, and fish. This past Monday all three were closed as the mongers within labored away in preparation for their big night. They were dressing their food.


Was that butcher made out of...? Don't even ask.

That’s right, I said dressing their food. And I’m not talking about a bit of parsley on the side. Mama always said don’t play with your food but I guess the matrons of Cádiz have never heard of it.

My girlfriend and I first entered Mercado Central that evening through the produce section. It was almost too comical to believe.
There was a tourist groups of nuts (walnuts if I remember correctly) visiting a scale model of the Egyptian Pyramids and surrounded by camels made of potatoes.


These Spaniards have got to be nuts

Another produce-peddler had changed his juicy citrons and kiwis into an elaborate crossing-the-border scene as illegal African emigrants tried to scale the fences which guard Spanish enclaves in North Africa. Next to them stood the council table of the United Nations as Bush, Chirac, and others discussed what could be done to alleviate the problem.



A better life awaits on the other side................ But should we let them in or not?

Another vendor forgot about dressing and arranging his melons and simply sculpted them, putting what I normally see carved on pumpkins back home in Philadelphia to shame.


A fruit-man by day, sculptor by night

But fruit and vegetable decoration isn’t that strange, right? After all, we have carved pumpkin too. Well, that’s where the meat and fish sections of Mercado Central come in. The night of Tosantos, the fruit pushers aren’t the only ones that have fun, the butchers and fishmongers get in on the action too.

The pigs were what first caught our eyes.
There were pig families dressed in elegant clothes dancing in front of television cameras.


Tonight on the Ed Sullivan Show

There were couch potato pigs eating ham – of all things – and watching us walk by.


Nothin' to do but hang out...

Even the family of the animated film, The Incredibles, showed up wearing what must have been their newly designed pig secret identities.


Is that THE INCREDIBLES in Cádiz? .............................. And they even brought the baby along

There were big pigs, little pigs, fat pigs, thin pigs, pig heads, pig feet... you name it. And, keep in mind, when I say pigs, I mean REAL pigs. The heads and hooves and whatever else is left of the animal when the butcher is done his business. Most of us don’t usually see these things because when we buy meat in a supermarket, we buy it in a nice little vacuum-dried container wrapped with sterilized cellophane. Who’d even think that our porkchop came from that same animal dancing about on the counter in the cute little outfit?

The pigs may have been disgusting and crowned Tosantos as the officially strangest "end of October/ beginning of November" tradition, but one sight at what lay in store for us in the fish section gave the festival the most repulsive crown as well.


You gonna come in or just stand there all day?

Dead rotting fish lined the walls of Mercado Central’s inner most sanctum. I was accustomed to seeing fresh tuna, still jumping shrimp, squid of all shapes and fish of all sizes on display at the stalls there. But nothing prepared me for the grim picture of decaying sea-life that awaited us that day. As my girlfriend’s camera clicked away, I pushed my way through the thronging crowds (mostly families with young kids) and soon found myself, along with all the Spaniards around me, laughing at the witty comments posted by each fish and admiring the creativity of that particular fishmonger.


Go Fish-Racer, GO!


Jeez, can't a fish have a little privacy every now and then?


Fish in their natural habitat: Singing in a choir on the Cathedral stairs



Looks like the Little Mermaid finally got that wedding she always wanted

I know... I should have cringed at the grotesque pig heads and been repelled by the dead fish dressed in wedding dresses (not to mention those in race-car helmets), but the happy-go-lucky attitude of Cádiz is just so damn contagious I forgot completely about how disgusting it all was. That night alone, we were no longer foreigners. We were one of them...

Only after we had done our rounds through Mercado Central and my girlfriend had her fill of pictures, did the repulsiveness of it all finally strike us. We held our noses – the mingling stench of rotting fruit, fly-infested pig parts, and days-old fish heads had by then become too much to bear– and finally walked away from Tosantos, confident that no matter how strange Halloween may be, nothing could beat what we had just witnessed.

1 comment:

Lori said...

That's actually pretty interesting....weird....But interesting!!!

Have a great day!!!