Fallas from the balcony

I have to confess something that in Valencia is close to a crime: I don't love Fallas. I don't hate it either, for the record. But for five days my neighbourhood turns into somewhere else, and since I need my ears for work, I spend that week with musician's earplugs in my coat pocket and an expression of such resignation that Marta says I look like a nun in a nightclub.

We live two streets away from the Cuba-Literato Azorín lights, the ones in every Instagram photo: a cathedral of light bulbs that switches on every night in time to deafening music. It's genuinely beautiful. It also means that from 15 to 19 March you can't walk on the pavement, our doorstep fills up with people eating churros, and my bike stays locked in the hallway, because getting it out would be like trying to cross a river against the current with a cow in your arms.

Marta, fallera

Marta, on the other hand, has been a fallera since birth. Her family belongs to a falla committee in Benimaclet and she has a traditional Valencian dress in her wardrobe worth more than my violin, with a hand-embroidered bodice and ornamental combs she keeps in a velvet-lined box. On the day of the flower offering she gets up at six so her aunt can do her hair, because the three-part bun is not a one-person job. She comes home at eleven at night with ruined feet, shining eyes, smelling of hairspray and carnations.

This year I helped her get dressed, or rather, I held pins while her aunt, a short woman with a lot of character, gave me orders in Valencian: "Xiqueta, eixe no, l'altre" (not that one, sweetheart, the other one). I felt part of something, even if it was only as a pincushion.

The noise

What I cope with worst is the despertà. At eight in the morning our street's committee marches past behind the brass band, throwing firecrackers, and no earplug on earth can help. You wake up with your heart in your throat, convinced someone has fired a gun inside your bedroom. The first day you put up with it. By the third you're talking to yourself.

But then the band plays a pasodoble, and in the band there's a girl with a clarinet who looks exactly like my cousin at fifteen, and something in me softens. I go out on the balcony in my pyjamas and watch them pass. Once, years ago, the clarinet girl looked up, saw me with my wild hair and waved without stopping playing. I still don't know how she did it.

In the afternoons, when I manage to get out, I buy pumpkin buñuelos from the stall on the corner. The woman who makes them stretches the dough with two fingers and drops it into the oil with a flick that looks like a magic trick. I eat six, dipped in hot chocolate, standing up, burning my tongue. I don't know why I always burn my tongue. I've been eating buñuelos for twenty-seven years and learnt nothing.

The cremà

And then comes the night of the 19th. Last night we went to watch the cremà, the burning, of our street's falla. It's not one of the big ones, just a neighbourhood falla, and this year the main figure was a giant man with a landlord's face who raised the rent every time he breathed. The neighbours laughed and took photos. Marta, still with traces of hairspray in her hair, took my arm.

When they lit the fuse and the fire climbed up the cardboard legs, the heat hit all our faces at once, like opening an oven. The firefighters were hosing down the building fronts. Someone shouted "Visca València!". And I started crying, like every year, without quite knowing why. Maybe the heat. Maybe it's that something someone spent a year building disappears in ten minutes and everyone claps.

Marta said nothing, because she knows me. She handed me a tissue that smelt of carnations.

This morning, when I went out on the balcony, I found a scrap of burnt cardboard on the music stand where I sometimes practise with the window open. It's black on one side and pink on the other. I've left it there.