The word noise appears very early in
Don Quixote de la Mancha
. Alluding in the first person to his bitter experience of prison, Cervantes says that in it “every discomfort is his seat and every sad noise is his room.” An old soldier who had known the roar of explosions and screams in the battle of Lepanto, captive in Algiers for five years, a frequent guest at the terrible inns and inns on the roads of Castile and Andalusia, Cervantes was one of those people of disposition. calm that was almost always harassed by the sad noises of the world. That is why he celebrates silence so many times in his literature, and repeatedly describes it as wonderful, a refuge and an antidote against the stridency and cacophonies of an inhospitable reality. In one of the most mysterious chapters of the Second Part, when Don Quixote and Sancho find themselves welcomed in the house of Don Diego de Miranda, the Knight of the Green Coat, what they both enjoy the most, in addition to the good treatment and the abundant food , is the “wonderful silence” that reigns in it. It is silence that prevails in that chapter in which there is no incident: having almost single-handedly invented the art of the novel, Cervantes also invents that novel in which almost nothing happens, except for the most difficult thing to tell, which is the everyday flow of life, without plot plot or effects, as in a story by Flaubert or Chekhov, or in a diary page by Josep Pla.
Loving silence and calm is a serious inconvenience for those who live in Spain. I have met Japanese people who are outraged against that commonplace, so repeated and apparently so unfounded, that Spain is the noisiest country in the world after Japan. If I were to write my autobiography, a constant narrative thread would perhaps be that of the search and loss of silence, the escape from the “mundane noise” of the poem by Fray Luis, who by the way also suffered in prison, and for a longer time and with more rigor than Cervantes. “I don't see with noise,” says Juan Ramón Jiménez, another fugitive from the world in search of silence. At one stage of that trip, many years ago, I ended up with my family in a small semi-detached house in the mountains of Madrid, imagining summers of leisure and effort without stress, around that simple personal paradise that one always desires, a desk next to a window, with a door ajar but never closed, a place as favorable to the absorption of work and reading as to the contemplation of external beauty and the rumors of family life, which at that time still had the high-pitched timbre of children's voices. I installed my simple wooden desk, the bookshelf, the then bulky computer, the shelf for the music system. The first day in a new house is like the first page of a blank notebook where life will be written. A cool July morning entered through the window, pierced by the whistles of swallows, and an early light filtered through the crown of a large chestnut tree. At the bottom of a plain dotted with holm oak forests, one could see the distant hillside and the towers and severe walls of El Escorial.
Just at the moment when I was enjoying the prelude to work, it exploded like an earthquake that shook the walls and the floor, and that became a rhythmic and crushing vibration, like a giant machine, like the engine room of an ocean liner would sound. . The formidable noise came from the other side of my newly installed bookshelf, still smelling of wood, from the chalet to which ours was so closely attached. I left the now impossible task on hold at the desk and went to talk to the neighbors. As soon as the next door opened, the multiplied roar of that formidable machinery came like a thunderstorm. The owner of the house informed me, with kindness and resignation, that her teenage son's vocation as a DJ had been awakened, and she and her husband had given him, not without sacrifice, the gift of a complete set of electronic music equipment. Rubbing her hands in a hurry, the lady promised me that she would try to convince the boy to limit the hours of study and rehearsal, and suggested that perhaps she and her husband could make the effort to soundproof the wall that separated their house from the house. our. After a short time we left, even further away, to another house in a wilder place, next to a pine forest from where the deep, rhythmic sound of a woodpecker came.
I have lived on a second floor where at two or three in the morning the legs of the bed would shake from the sound waves of a “ambient bar” that had the striking name “VERY VERY BOY'S”. I have read in the newspaper manifestos signed by writers—many of them living in luxurious urbanizations on the outskirts—who protested against the limitations of nighttime hours in bars, while in my house in the center of Madrid it was not possible to sleep or even live during the nights. massive bottles on the weekends. I have climbed the trails of the Sierra hearing the wind and smelling rosemary and I have had to step aside so as not to be run over by a line of barbarians jumping on motorcycles like a patrol from
Mad Max
. In Granada, during the Day of the Cross festival, which in the early nineties proliferated for an entire week, I lived under the siege of beach bar speakers that thunderously broadcast sevillanas day and night, negotiating with difficulty the mountains of garbage and the rivers of vomit and urine left by the participants in the party. When I was a child, during Holy Week, after several days thundered by drums and trumpets, I was relieved to contemplate the stealthy passage, in the light of the burning torches, of the Brotherhood of Silence.
Perhaps in Spain there are even more reasons for acoustic exile than for political one. Franz Kafka tells his beloved Milena Jesenska in a letter: “A silence like the one I need does not exist in the world.” In a chronicle by Nacho Sánchez from Almería I have read the story of Rocío Quero, a woman who left Seville looking for stillness and silence in the admirable austerity of Cabo de Gata, a stone's throw from the natural park and the sea, in an urbanization that It's called El Toyo. Rocío Quero, who in a photo in the newspaper has an affable and energetic air, her blonde hair disheveled by the sea wind, lives fifteen minutes from her work, and also very close to Almería. She likes to take long bike rides through those landscapes that still have something of an untouched world and to walk her dog along the beach and dunes.
Rocío Quero, and all her neighbors, have discovered, with horror and helplessness, that their paradise of tranquility is not untouchable. With the enthusiastic support of all the authorities, from the Junta de Andalucía to the town councils of the area, this place so full of beauty and biodiversity is going to be the location, this summer, of an electronic music festival that will last three days and three nights and which will be attended by about forty thousand people, with the foreseeable effect of devastation on the calm and sleep of the neighbors and the fragile natural environment in which until now they had found refuge. Their complaints are received with perfect indifference, because one of the many abuses against which a citizen in Spain is defenseless is the abuse of noise, even more so when it has the excuse of identity or festive brutality. Faced with the threat of decibels, there is no other remedy than flight. The wonderful Cervantes silence is fleeting and always somewhere else.
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