The still warm embers from yesterday’s fires, going out. Or already cold. The ashes of the magical night. The ashes are always the witness of something that was. The coast strewn with bonfires. The Mediterranean on fire. The aphrodisiac tuft of gunpowder. The rockets: a cremation of tears in the sky for those who are no longer there, tradition says. For those who are expected and do not arrive. The pagan ritual of the worship of the sun that resists being a stab at traditions and another loss, sacrificed by a glorified and perhaps gerontophobic youth – social symptoms make you fear it – intervened by the dictatorship of the screen, social networks, and the market. And fearfully absent from its ancestral heritage. Young people who have been robbed of their candor. And the origin of the illusion. And the meaning of the rite.
But since everything that lasts is what was founded by poets or popular culture, we still don’t feel longing for ourselves or those revelries on the rooftops of the neighborhoods. In the background: the solstice reign, the metaphorical nuptial parade of red-faced and love-struck teenagers, the flared pupils, the flirtation postponed until the following year. That remembered ancient naivety framed by rockets, firecrackers for all tastes and ages. And as in an epic and initiatory experience, the house-by-house collection of old furniture, the food for the bonfire – one on each street -, for the benign sacrifice, for the ritual. For the offering. Time for secret desires, for promises, for salt in the wound of lost love.
Like shepherds on duty, the elderly tutoring boys and girls gently in hand, upside-down chair, empire shirt. Keeping the bonfire. evocative Like in a Dalí or De Chirico painting, chairs, cupboards and doors burning. Carbonized skeletons of furniture that was. Coal the color of blackbird, fire, mesmerizing borders of fine lava. Turner’s palette.
And dodging noises and sparks, the peripheral crowd, night down to the appointment with Empastre at the Monumental. Those of Sants in Les Arenas. A parade of emotions, screams, cakes, heat…
The carnival has already passed, until a year from now… If God or the devil does not prevent it. Or an ordinance.
