One fine day you told your son the first bedtime story.
Since then, night after night, you have explored together an endless atlas of adventure and fantasy.
In your nocturnal ritual, with its ceremonies and its repeated liturgy, you would like to take him to travel the most intimate passages of your own landscapes, your beloved authors, your beloved myths.
But the child demands again and again his favorite stories, making sure that you do not change a single word: his freedom is learning to speak.
For centuries, childhood was a voiceless age, a time of silence.
The Latin word
infantia
it meant "without speech." There was little interest in the inner world of children, whom they considered incomplete beings, sketches of the future. Artists often depicted them as miniature men and women. The researchers say that this indifference was due to the very high infant mortality rate: it was a strategy to avoid attachment. That mindset changed with advances in hygiene, medicine, and enlightened pedagogy. Painters Chardin and Goya began to reflect children's games and gazes without corseted gestures. Dickens in his novels denounced the cruelty against the little ones, and Freud underlined the importance of those first years in our personality. After a long pendulum movement, today it is well seen to affirm that you keep the child within you alive.
In an old metal box you keep the only possession that you keep from your great-grandparents. Through the ravages of war and years of deprivation, your grandmother protected the collection of stories from the Calleja publishing house like a treasure. From those miniature books, the size of your pinkie, foxes with glasses, daughters of millers and inhabitants of Jauja speak to you. Each story included illustrations and a biography of a famous person. Its pages popularized that "they were happy and ate partridges", a gluttonous outcome that still survives. At the end of the 19th century, in a country that was starving and where still few children knew how to read, Saturnino Calleja wanted to reach all pockets and all schools. It launched very long runs, lowering prices to promote reading, and gave copies to the poorest schools.He recruited the best illustrators and writers such as Zenobia Camprubí or Juan Ramón Jiménez. In those minutiae, which fit in the palm of your hand, a revolution was beating: the letter would enter, not with blood, but with dreams.
Perhaps that is why the dream factory soon became interested in stories. One of the most amazing found his "once upon a time" in Teruel. A young draftsman was born there who, in 1899, had the bizarre idea of emigrating to Paris and joining the crazed crew of the great invention of the time: the cinematograph. Segundo de Chomón, who combined the spirit of the engineer with the fascination of a magician, became the international master of special effects, hired in his time by the best European filmmakers. Dazzled by Calleja's stories, Chomón adapted them to films starring demons and mountebanks, where objects moved by themselves or where Gulliver discovered giants and Lilliputians, gaping. From these traditional narratives he created prodigious phantasmagorias,He cemented a pioneering work in animation and left us unforgettable illusions.
In those early days, cinema was silent - as children should also have been - and, perhaps for this reason, many voices despised it as a childish and insubstantial spectacle. Intellectuals like Unamuno and Antonio Machado criticized those early films without being able to see in them, like Chomón, the call to wonder, the magic and the wonder that has always beats in the stories whispered around the bonfire. Saturnino and Segundo relied on the power of imagination: their innovations changed the landscape of our fictions. Telling stories every night remains today a magical and crucial ritual: in the wake of sleep, children discover words, childhood comes out of silence.