Waking slowly and reluctantly in a huge, slightly damp bed in the town of Guernica one crisp February morning in 1976, a thin, reedy sound pierced the fuddle in my head. It seemed to be a flute, but it also seemed to be a drum. It seemed oddly familiar - there was a faint echo of Orange and Republican swagger bands - but also hauntingly exotic.
I staggered to the window and heaved open the shutters. Three young men in archaic dress were marching smartly away down the empty street. Each was playing a flute with one hand, and a drum, strung around his shoulders, with the other. The frosty air seemed to quiver vividly with their shrill music, and then they were gone.
This unsolicited wake-up call was a first tantalising glimpse of the world of fiesta. A three-man Basque txistu band was a small beginning, and I soon found that, even within the limited confines of the Basque country, the fiesta could take an infinite variety of forms.
An essential ingredient was missing that first morning: the participation of the public. I had, of course, been watching a rehearsal, but even rehearsals can often spark off spontaneous little fiestas of their own, as a group of friends may dance down a street behind practising musicians, following them just far enough to speed the journey to the next bar.
Fiestas, however, are not just about a bit of craic, not just about dance, drink and letting off steam. There is a much darker side to many fiestas. Think of the intensely erotic, sado-masochistic images of Christs and Virgins in the Holy Week fiestas in Seville. Religion, or at least ritual, is at the heart of every fiesta, and where there is religion there is sacrifice, death and, if you're very lucky, something that might be called grace, or resurrection.
The splendid and terrible ritual of the bullfight is central to many fiestas. No matter how much you dress up the bullfight in the colours of Christianity, it is immediately apparent that its audience is watching - and participating in - something much older, much more primal, than the sanitised rites of the Christian churches. And then flamenco transmutes the drama of the bullfight into song, music and dance, each form shot through with an unwavering intimacy with the mysteries of sex and death, and we have the fiesta as art.
Treat the fiesta as entertainment by all means, and enjoy it to the full, but always be aware that something else can happen here.
Twenty years after my encounter with the txistu band, I happened to be in Madrid during Holy Week. Madrid is a quintessential administrative capital, and is often said to lack the kind of rich relationship with its past which characterises so many towns, and even villages, in Spain. No one, that I know of, travels to Madrid specially to see the Holy Week processions.
What we saw during the day on Good Friday confirmed this impression. The processions were somehow perfunctory and lacking in spirit. Madrilenos at their tables in the Plaza Mayor barely looked up from their midday drinks to watch them pass. The Christ who was noisily taking a whipping a few yards from us bore an uncanny resemblance to a prominent member of the conservative government, which might have encouraged participation in a manner that this fiesta does not permit. But he was probably just a particularly ham theatrical masochist. We went back to enjoying the spring sunshine, and the kind of high only produced by a large measure of anis before lunchtime.
Twelve hours later, we were walking towards our temporary home near the Cathedral of San Isidro, fortified and mellowed by an excellent dinner. We gradually became aware that the streets around us were filling with people who were not just participating in a late-night paseo, but were waiting for something to happen. Above us, the balconies began to fill with expectant faces.
We were halted just before the cathedral doors by the return of the procession. The crowd was now packed tight, and we found ourselves in the front row. The processors moved before us, carrying their burden of saints, and of Christs in varying stages of passion, back into the church. All received polite, but hardly enthusiastic, applause. Then there was a pause, almost a holding of breath.
Out of the darkness came the Virgin, white as a bride, floating on a pool of candle-light, her platform drenched in hot wax, her face glowing ecstatically. As she was carried into the church, a funky handclap began, and a chant.
"MacarEna, MacarEna, guapa, guapa, GUAPA." Guapa means beautiful, in a very sensual way. Not a word you could apply to the bloodless plaster virgins of our native roadside shrines. The chant grew to a crescendo, as did the clapping. The Virgin's bearers went into reverse, and she was drawn back into the street. The people repeatedly called their goddess out of the church, and into their midst, the best place for her, I couldn't help thinking. A young man beside us, who did not have the face of your average daily communicant, was clapping until his palms bled. Occasionally, the clapping and chant would stop, as if at an unseen signal, and some disembodied voice in the crowd would launch into a few phrases of flamenco's most joyfully sorrowful cante jondo or "deep singing". .
What happened that night was not a religious experience, in the sense that it made me feel any warmer about the Catholic Church, or any of the other institutional faces of Christianity. It was much closer to what happens when you see a good production of King Lear, or when you fall under the spell of the Buena Vista Social Club.
Fiesta is a point where art meets life, and life meets art. It is vulgar and sublime, tender and savage. I hope Belfast, whose own traditional celebrations are shot through with so many contradictions, will take the Spanish fiesta to the city's warm and beating heart.
