Little Sailors on Leave

In this week's Camino a Ítaca, a look at a piece of Spain that is in flux. Not-so-slight shifts in social contexts, yet some adherence to the norm. Click over to read the originally published version in Spanish in el HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo) 

Personally, I miss the little sailor suits. They are one of those small pieces of disappearing Spain, like bares de toda la vida, that are quietly slipping away as tastes evolve. While I’m sure the parents were somewhat well meaning, but the years of therapy provoked by looking back on those photos surely tells a different story.

When I first arrived here in Extremadura I remember being baffled by the little white suits with mariner capes in all the springtime shop windows. I asked myself, why were they selling little sailors costumes here in this landlocked region so far away from the sea? Was it some sort of noncoastal yearning for the ocean?

And then communion season began. The weekend streets were flooded with those suits from the shop windows. Crowds of young boys looking like little sailors on leave, anxiously trying not to get dirty, tacitly obeyed their smartly dressed parents drinking cañas (little beers). The little girls looked even more uncomfortable, dressed in impossible looking wedding dresses that made climbing stairs and even sitting down at the restaurant difficult.

Then I remember the polemic that was raised when a travel writer from the New York Times wrote that children in Spain looked like colorized photographs from the past for the way that they were dressed. The uproar and indignation was akin to chorizogate when the British chef, Jamie Oliver put chorizo in his paellas. Yet when you looked around, you had to admit that the Times writer wasn’t entirely off the mark in her observation.

But tastes change and styles evolve. The sailors on leave are far and few between these days. Now on the streets it seems that the style has moved more towards the smart casual style favored by peperinos at their summer rallies. Little neocayetanos with pastel colored shirts and light sports jackets, sometimes even with the sleeves rolled up, look much more comfortable, preppy with just a hint of modernity.

The girls however haven’t been lucky enough to undergo the 2.0 makeover. Their dresses have only become more ornate, if possible, somewhat disturbingly making them seem even more like underaged brides.

But beyond the ornate ostentatiousness of it all, what remains a mystery to someone like me from outside is why they even do it at all? I have yet to hear a child say they actually enjoy catechesis and the borderline abuse of being told that their friend’s two mommies will spend eternity in a vat of boiling sulfur in purgatory. In fact, what I more often hear is that they never want to go to another mass again. From the outside it seems like some sort of twisted revenge on the part of the parents. If I had to suffer through this, you do too.

It would be consistent if these people were in fact believers, initiating their children into the catholic faith, but the overwhelming majority will not set foot in a church again until the next funeral. In a way, making fun of true believers. According to the CIS, less than 19% of the population declare themselves as practicing Catholics yet almost 50% of Spanish kids will take the first communion.

Blessed indeed are the incoherent.