Klara’s New Year and Those Twelve Grapes

Klara participates in her first New Year’s Eve in Spain at the Residencia de Estudiantes, which has invited women from the Residencia de Señoritas. Her first months in Spain have witnessed nation-wide demonstrations and strikes protesting the deaths of construction workers and of protesters. A recent and unsuccessful coup in Jaca, to bring the Republic back to Spain, produces national heroes and martyrs and demands for amnesty.

Midnight approaches and the windows of the hall are thrown wide open. Students circulate, passing out little glass plates, each one bearing twelve perfect white grapes. Klara reaches out to eat the first grape but her student, Herminia, stays her hand, laughing. At that moment, the huge clock in the Puerta del Sol begins to chime. With the first metallic and dissonantly-reverberating stroke, everyone in the room plucks the first grape from the plate, utters a wish, and pops it into their mouth. Wishes for “salud, prosperidad, amor” by the twelfth chime and the twelfth grape, have evolved to wishes for “libertad, democracia y república.”

By the new year of 1936, the final three wishes have yet to be fulfilled. And the twelve strokes of 1935 are eerily and bitterly prophetic.  The daily paper Ahora reported these wishes on the morning of January 1, 1936:

Grape #1: May there be no bloody battles among Spaniards.

Grape #2: May Spain not be involved in foreign warfare.

Grape #3: Let there be jobs.
Grape # 4: Let there be freedom
Grape #5: and well-being
Grape #6: and peace.
Grape #7: May there not be too many government upsets.
Grape #8: May the Theater survive.
Grape #9: May Spanish film triumph.
Grape #10: May Spanish sports grow.
Grape #11: May we reach the night of the 31st of December, 1936…
Grape #12: With joy that Spain still survives. Amen

Source of the 12 wishes, translated by me.

 
The beginnings of that new year, 1936, witness the promise of those wishes with the electoral victory of the Frente Popular. But the fears of bloody war are realized with the military coup of July and many thousands of Spaniards will not reach the end of the year alive. The twelve grapes are consumed by milicianos and milicianas. Klara will eat the grapes in the basement-kitchen of the Hospital Obrero among her fellow medical workers, and the chimes from the Puerta del Sol will have to be imitated by the intonings of a hospital orderly:  “Tan! Tan! Tan!”

Image courtesy of Alan Warren