The Night Weddings of Seville

The bride came down the Calle Betis at half past midnight, and the whole barrio was awake to meet her. In Seville's night-shift summer — where the pavement holds the day's furnace until well past dark — the city has moved its most stubborn joys into the cool hours, and the wedding has followed the market and the concert into the small of the night. The ceremonies now begin at eleven and end at the first gray suggestion of dawn, when the guests, fanning themselves with the orders of service, drift home before the heat returns to claim the streets. Abuelas who married at noon under a merciless June sun watch their granddaughters wed by lantern and misting-arch and pronounce it, grudgingly, an improvement. "We used to say a wedding should be in the light of God," said one grandmother, seventy years married. "Now God keeps the same hours we do." The rice, thrown at two in the morning, catches the streetlight like a brief, warm snow, and no one who has danced until four will tell you the century has taken everything.