Our past up for auction

Jesús, a disconsolate reader, writes to me because in his father's town, where they later returned to spend the summers, they have auctioned off the old school desks. Jesus does the math and calculates that these school tables housed the dreams, fears and failed illusions of creatures since the 1920s. They are desks whose strong, grained wood not only contains the memories of those who studied but also of those, like Jesus' father who is now 90 years old, who were torn from study by poverty and thrown across the fields of Castile to shepherd; They are desks that tell us the story of a generation that poverty and war condemned at just nine years old to suddenly enter adulthood. Everyday objects have their own voice, powerful and deep for whoever wants to hear it, and they give material proof of what life was like for that generation that is about to disappear; Getting rid of them denotes ignorance about what an anthropological treasure should be.

Those of us who are old enough to enjoy a certain perspective witnessed the contempt with which, in the seventies, eighties or nineties, the old was treated, as if it were irreparable and had no room for a second life for its use. The people of the towns, especially the elderly, were bartered; noble things that had stood the test of time were exchanged for low-quality china and plastic or skai furniture; Wherever a vine provided shade, those little corrugated roofs appeared, now justly reviled. But in those decades of thoughtless progress, those who tried to warn of the value of all those objects that ended up in the rake or at the stake were already caricatured. The term

goodism

did not exist then , but it would have been a fitting insult for those people who perceived, against the dominant current, the beauty and sustainability of objects that had resisted the scourge of time unscathed. But then this fight for conservation was seen as the whim of people who foolishly refused progress; This defense of the old was criticized as romanticism because it was considered to have become stale. An object was discarded as much as a landscape was despised. A landscape. I receive a message from Carmen, from Soriana who is a member of one of the associations that defend the countryside that Machado's verses sing about, and who today is threatened by the bulldozers that are about to urbanize one of the most beautiful natural areas in Spain. . We have learned something, at least now, although it is always difficult to paralyze a real estate project, there are countrymen who are outraged, organize and demand help from those of us who have a platform. “We cannot go down in history,” writes Carmen, “like the generation of Sorians and Machado readers who allowed their landscape to be crushed: 'poplars of love near the water / that runs and passes and dreams, / poplars on the banks of the Duero / You go with me, my heart takes you!” It is not about unhealthy nostalgia for the past, quite the contrary, it is the awareness that we must work so that in the future we do not have to regret what we let be lost.

I think about these messages that I have been receiving for some time frequently denouncing fellings, landslides, demolitions, and I think that it has something to do with the feeling in the air that the drift of the world is not in our hands, that others will decide for us whether hell increases or shrinks and, faced with such a perspective, we need to defend what we feel is ours, as if in those trees that “have in their bark/ engraved initials that are names/ of lovers, figures that are dates”, the stories of those who left and those who will come were written, and on that desk auctioned the childhood of all the children who could not study.

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