A walk with Machado through the Land of Alvargonzález

Although the exact date remains an enigma, the vast majority of historians agree that it was in September 1910, when the great Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, made this peculiar journey through one of the most unusual, impressive and, of course, extraordinary, of that little Castilian Celtiberia, orphan, generally, of government attention, which is that same Soria, who, in a certain way, saw him grow as a poet and to whom, of course, he also owes the most flowery of his profound popular poetry .

The environment, in particular, could not be better or more qualitative, to feed, even more, if possible, that scorching fire, emphatic and always expanding, which endowed his poetry with the imperishable magic of the mundane and the marvelous. ; or what comes to the same thing: from the essence of a popular folklore, that, in this precise place, the Court of Pinares and the surroundings of the Picos de Urbión, constitutes a metaphorical hook set by the Muse to capture the attention of the passionate ones, with the always fresh bait of the prodigious.

It is true, likewise, that it was precisely in this period and place, where that man who had always dreamed of his childhood and to which he repeatedly returned through those verses that eagerly searched for 'that patio in Seville where the lemon tree grew', He also found lurid stories, which far from intimidating him, supposed, for his feverish imagination, the necessary fuel to create one of the most dramatic lyrical episodes in the History of Literature: the Land of Alvargonzález.

Thus, the trip that I propose here, disguised, like a comparative Harlequin, as a peaceful stroll through the explosive arteries of an expanding autumn, is characterized -like Janus, the Roman god with two faces- by a circumstance and two peculiarities: a trip, in which the spectator has the possibility of living an experience, where the real and the imaginary strengthen ties, to the point that, as the spectator goes deeper into these unique places, he tends to lose the notion of which is one and which is the other.

Inspired by one of the terrible crimes committed in a town located about 15 km from Vinuesa and named Duruelo de la Sierra - around whose old church, dedicated to the figure of Saint Michael, you can still see the old medieval cemetery of anthropomorphic tombs, excavated in the solid rock and it is also possible to ascend, from there, to the solitude of the mountains where the Duero river is born- the trip ends at the same point as Antonio Machado's narrative: in that mysterious oval of possible volcanic origin, known as the Black Lagoon and the place where the parricide brothers threw the corpse of their old father, pushed by that Cainite vein, that fury to possess the land, which has always been the sword of Damocles that has fallen on the most deep in the soul of the Spanish peasant.

Tortuous, but at the same time, paradoxically, a spectacular uphill path through jungle forests and dark as pitch, in some parts, more jealous of allowing the sun's rays to penetrate their secrets, which also invite you to dream of the strength of a chromaticism, whose greatest contrast is evident, between the eternal passivity of some pines and fir trees with inviolable leaves and the mutable lightness of being -paraphrasing Milan Kundera- suffered by all those other trees, which, according to an old and endearing story, they did not want to give shelter to a wounded bird and were, consequently, punished: oaks, elms and poplars, those same ones, which, curiously, were revered by the ancient druids.

And between one and the other, soft mattresses of jungle bushes, such as gorse, anchored to the edge of some immemorial rocks, where in many of them, the impertinence of the numerous colonies of lichens have hidden the old rock carvings left by forgotten hunters of the Neolithic, which in many points form a riverbank with the thin streams that emerge, in free fall from the neighboring peaks, where it is still possible to see the Moon, enraptured, like Narcissus, contemplating itself with childish rapture on the surface of the waters of the lagoon.

In short: a real trip and also a literary one, but, above all, a trip specially prepared for those insatiable gourmets, metaphorically and comparatively speaking, who are always our senses.

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