These days we should be in Highlands but we have moved the trip to another time because of a swing in the flights and a little because of the little faces that our two adopted cats (Tractor and Purrún) have made every time we explode a howitzer on the street.
It's not the shooting of apocalypse now, is Valencia two years after a peace that no one expected but how well we have walked around the neighborhood the days before San José these Ides of March between the pandemic and the spring that does not come. Let me go to hell to spare the hater the article: I hate failures.
My sister is a fallera, one of my best friends loves them to the bone, I have beautiful memories ( a cream hand in hand with my dad), I hit legendary parties beyond adolescence, I ate then (very select, eh) no less than fifty mascletas, I have known those other Fallas with iconoclastic spirit, I lived half my life in the Fallas City, I remember playing among wood, nails and cork —those hangars distilled crafts, enamel and forearms more like a buccaneer than a poet. Perhaps this understanding of writing as a physical act comes from there, there was a lot of beauty in that outskirts.
A few months ago a good one got involved in this clumsy Valencia because the mascletàs, firecrackers, castles, bombardments and other artifacts of acoustic torture they do not cohabit very far with the feline colonies or with so many abandoned dogs, which they only know how to suffer the party and die for your homeland girl, fallerito. To all this, our mayor has a clarinet: "The suspension of a mascletà cannot be conditioned to the fact that there is a colony of cats". Hey you, Joan Ribó.
Of course, yes, if all they are animals, strays too, kittens homeless: there are many. Where are you going to compare that bunch of furry little annoyances with a very fat and very beautiful mascletà, to show off your heart of palm on the balcony of the Town Hall that I pay for with my taxes. Now that I think about it I also pay for Fallas with my taxes. And your salary too. And I think that the chocolate fritters that you will be eating these days too, since I wear. Long live the party, of course.
Poster for Las Fallas, Valencia 2022.
when i write these things torches take command of the argument to a good part of the audience coent but this is my column and These are my nonsense I intuit that a Valencia without Fallas would be for the Valencian (a nonsense) but how beautiful the Mediterranean looks without more noise than the waves and the rain (because Zeus , the God of the rain, punishes the terreta every year with his clouds and his thunder without consolation) and the rustle of the terraces. But no, no way: they live very strong in the most traditional heart and also not so long ago the chin held high with the ethical perch of being UNESCO Intangible Heritage.
The Fallas have returned around the slogan "renaix de la flame" and a beautiful poster of fire on fire, hopefully the celebration is closer to its pagan origin ( purification and ecstasy before the spring equinox that is coming), hopefully more heart and less turbulence.
Nor is it that the kicking of the reader in this little corner can be very surprising: I hate the noise, the rudeness, the bulls (I think here as Manuel Vincent, Valencian outlaw: "Presided over this butchery there is no longer a God thirsty for plasma who has to be satiated, only wild cattle are publicly beaten, drilled with hooks, dragged by the neck with a rope, burned alive with pitch balls, slaughtered in in the middle of a great revelry”), the misunderstood tradition, the tacit machismo, the rancid provincialism, the blocked streets, the drunks without criteria, the smell of fried food, things just because, understand folklore (beautiful, so many times) like a mixed bag where everything fits. Well look, no.
I want to imagine another way of understanding them because Las Fallas are also the fire purging, symbol of rebirth and the life to come; the pagan mysticism of salvation, reflect in front of the flames around who you are and who do you want to be, let the bad burn in the bonfire of conscience, be better than before. We are nothing if we do not grow. A party to celebrate life. Renaix of the flame.