…what you’re going to see next.
We were in Malaga, as part of the Nuts & Bolts Writing Course. It’s a lovely city and makes a nice change from sitting indoors to write. Writers need experiences by the bucketload to enrich their writing so excursions and walks are part of the course.
We’d just finished lunch in the square across the way from Picaso’s Birthplace and were about to go over the road and pay the gallery a visit, when Sandra nudged me,
“I wouldn’t mind getting a photo of these coming now, look.” She nodded in the direction behind me and I turned to see what had caught her attention.
Filing towards us was a group of young women, dressed from head to foot in gauzy, floaty black material. In the glare of bright sunlight, the black of the constumes was stunning, especially in a group of six to eight. My first thought was that they were nuns, or some kind of religious order.
“Get your camera out and pretent to be taking a different shot, then get them as they walk past,” I said.
No such luck. The camera was no sooner out than a man was standing in front of us holding his hand up and shaking his head. He watched us constantly after that, but to be fair we watched them back.
In attendance was an older woman in a white shirt-like jacket which reminded me of the kind of uniforms you see on American doctors in sitcoms. Okay, thinks I, maybe they’re from some sort of hospital. They didn’t look like patients though, not with the men in close attendance.
All the women were fairly young, mid twenties or so, and all glamourously made up, with big, dark, smoky eyes and bright lips. Despite the total cover-up of the loose black clothes, they were attractive, tall, haughty. It was impossible to ignore them.
Most strange of all were the masks worn by two or three of the women. They were shaped around the face so as to cross the forehead, and come down across the nose, then end in a kind of mustache shape that covered the mouth. It looked exotic, strange, and totally fascinating.
We crossed the road and went into the musuem, and as it happened the group of women followed us across and also went briefly into the museum. They didn’t stay long – no more than a few minutes. But to be honest we were more interested in them by this time than we were in the exhibitions, so we didn’t stay much longer.
As the group made their way out, still very closely attended by the men, we asked one of the attendants in the museum who there were.
She told us one of them was a princess of the Emirates, with her companions.
Ah. Suddenly they became even more interesting.
We followed them out and had just crossed the road when a small bus with darkened windows pulled up outside the museum. The bodyguards, as we now understood them to be, stopped all the traffic so the bus could stop right outside, and they wouldn’t allow any to pass until the entire entourage was safely aboard.
And the masks? A religious symbol. Apparently the more elaborate, the higher ranking the wearer.
Now we know. Fascinating. Especially for a writer of speculative fiction, as that’s the kind of sight rarely experienced in a modern European city.
