ENRICO MARTINO

In the still humid night air, the first lights of Good Friday's dawn warm the façade, yellowish like a wedding cake, of La Merced church while Pontious Pilatus argues with two thieves and the great priest Caifa calls home on his smartphone. Everything miraculously reassembles itself to the dull call of drums. From the dark atrium of the church materializes a wooden Jesus Christ clad in a red tunic. He stands on large palanquins pushed by dozens of cucuruchos, penitents with long purple tunics staggering under the weight. Around them, hundreds of incense burners dangerously twirled in the air, scattering rivers of incense from which emerge the Mayan faces of Roman soldiers. Because if the Indigenous can play the Romans, penitents traditionally come only from families for whom parade is the sign of belonging to a caste, inherited from generation to generation. Throughout the day, endless processions mark Holy Week in the heart of Guatemala's ancient capital, Antigua, an elaborate setting of churches without roofs and theatrical façades surrounded by the dramatic skyline of the volcanoes that ravaged the city. The Holy Week here is a spectacular and dreamlike collective ritual where anybody relives centuries ago's gloomy and charming Spain. Thousands of penitents twist in sneaking paths to an inextricable traffic jam of Saints, Christ, and wooden Madonnas in the main square. Everything stops at the siesta's sacred time but starts again when the lights drop, with the inevitable delays. "Those of St. Felipe church split the minute, but this procession always starts an hour late," comments a young man with a drum waiting for its hermandad, the brotherhood of the various churches that compete to organize spectacular and theatricalized processions. Meanwhile, the Mayan peasants from the villages on the slopes of the volcanoes flock to the churches in front of naïve paintings enriched by special effects, with lightning and thunders on a stormy sea where a Jesus Christ statue seems to float precariously.