notes from my diary 3

 

MIDDLE PAINS

I went to throw out the garbage (we writers are always going to buy bread or run errands for the mistress) and I find a little Moor in an urban construction site that greets me ceremoniously

─Salam Malikum

─Malikum salam

The news reports talk about the present and omnipresent topic because our history is watered with the blood of both nations.

  Morocco always Morocco.

It is possible that the attack in Algeciras has put a cloud of suspicion in relations with our neighbors and they want to be nice.

We talk about the beautiful day in February. Sun in all the hunts.

The hundred-year-old holm oaks bloom at this time and set in November. Sweet glans and acorns with their vegetable hair, from my homeland. The holm oak, the carballo, the cajiga are works of art of our forest.

  Without my asking him, he tells me that Spaniards and Muslims are brothers, we are mixed up, and he says that the attack by the jihadist who slit Diego the sacristan's throat was a thing of the devil (dhil) and I remain pensive. God bless this little guy.

  Many Spaniards think the same. Peace. salam. There is fear on both sides.

I repeat the Islamist peace greeting and return to my books.

  Today is Dolores Medio.

After all, we are not so bad despite all the lubricity that our media recounts: the case of the Brazilian soccer player who forced a girl into a disco in Barcelona, the loves or heartbreaks of Vargas Llosa who apparently does not know what thing can be expected from an eighty-year-old, or the insistence of yes is yes no yes. What a gibberish.

There was never for me ─ in old age smallpox ─ in me as much happiness as when I retired despite my dolamas and my discouragements of this apocalyptic hour. Apocalypse means change. I can binge on the books in my extensive library, write what I want. Publishing and editing is another story.

Thanks to LNE that gives outlet to the thoughts of this valetudinary and old journalist exiled to my Asturias of the soul.

I met Dolores Medio and had coffee in Gijón. I know almost all of her works.

  She was red-haired and somewhat gangly, of great kindness and with an Oviedo sense of humor.

“Nosotros los Riveros” in which she narrates the vicissitudes of a family that is collapsing in the midst of the convulsions of the 1934 revolution. It is one of the best Nadal awards and I think it surpasses Nada de Laforet.

Unfortunately in this country some breed fame and others carry the water.

It is Oviedo's great novel, his Oviedin of the soul, after Clarin's Regenta.

  With the money from the award she bought a flat in Ríos Rosas and there she lived until her death in the company of a sister.

A wonderful story is "A handful of grass." The villager closes the house in his town, but before leaving he puts a handful of grass and a sebe leaf in his bag, and he goes to work in Ensidesa or emigrates to Catalonia.

This narration in idiomatic beauty and poetry will be equated to "Adios Cordera".

Also "Diary of a Teacher" another book and finally another weaker "Lena Rivero" closing the table.

  Dolores did not like Madrid, she must have had an impossible spurned love that she comes out as a ghost in her writings and all her life she yearned for Tierrina.

It was an advance of feminism, an attitude of exaltation of women that has nothing to do with the stubborn feminism preacher of the Montero and other herbs.

She was a socialist.

Curiously, in the Franco years, literature written by women (Laforet, Elena Quiroga, Concha Alós, Carmen Martín Gaite) made its way, which today is conspicuous by its absence. Dolores Medio made me feel the beauty. The joy and sadness of Asturias permeates the work of this writer.

Her gallant prose suggests that literature lacks sex.

  Novels that came from the pen of these artists provide a feminine vision of human reality, great observation skills, sensuality, attachment to the earth, but the human soul is the same, now male and now female.

A dichotomy can never be made until the separators arrived with the intention of breaking that sublime duality of our physiology.

 

Friday, February 3, 2023