The nuns belonging to the Zafra convent in Albaicín in Granada city won’t be receiving any Christmas cards from the locals after they woke everybody up at 06.30h, one fine Tuesday morning by knocking the stuffing out of their convent bells. Sixty seconds of constant bell peeling is eternal whilst you are wrestling to retain the comfort of sleep, so by the time that it stopped, everybody within the decibel fallout area was awake and not happy.
The fact is that, during the day, the sound of the bells sounding the hour is not unpleasant, but it is entirely a different matter when you are surfing your pillow. In most towns around Spain the first bells that you will hear are at 08.00h and the last 23.45h, which is a mark of respect for the law that governs the country concerning how much noise you can make and at what time.
The Albaicín area – just across the Darro from La Alhambra – is not a hot-seat of anti-clerical unrest; indeed, there are many church goers, but when a group of ladies that have chosen to withdraw themselves from society engage upon intruding upon it, the convent stops becoming just a historical building full of nice, little old ladies and turns in the darned noisy neighbours. One gruff local pointed out, “Just because they have to get up in the early hours, it doesn’t mean that everybody else has to!”
A little under a year ago the convent was denounced (reported to the police) for ‘disturbing the peace,’ for having done precisely that same thing back then. Not much of a learning curve there, obviously.
However, this time Mother Superior María del Carmen Fernández, says that she has no record of the call to worship that had caused the bother. Obviously, the nuns that had taken the vow of silence hadn’t had much to say about it, but outside those venerable walls of the Dominican Congregation of Santa Catalina de Siena a spot of bother had most certainly been caused.
People might complain within their own four walls, or mutter over a coffee in a bar, but between that and stomping off down to the local police station there is a great deal of difference, and it precisely this gap between feeling and expressing annoyance and filing in a denuncia at the local police station that allows local police heads and politicians to come up statements along the lines of saintly María del Carmen: I see no ships!
So, summing up on this latest incident of ‘bell bullying,’ although after journalists in search of a story quizzed the rumpled locals a news story saw print, nothing was written where it counts; i.e. making an official complaint. No doubt the Mother Superior is at this very moment contemplating pushing her luck further before the grumbling locals, confident that nobody really wants to cause grief to a building full of little old ladies.
(News: Albaicin, Granada, Andalucia)