Torretarrancho: a depopulated Soriano talking about himself

'My soul is an empty carrousel in the twilight ...'
[Pablo Neruda]

They say that memory is a cancer that affects peoples, when its inhabitants move away forever with the intention of finding their fortune elsewhere. Maybe that's why I feel irremediably sick and my memories are like a deep swamp, difficult when not impossible to wade through. I know I had a name; and that he, for generations, figured gallantly in birth certificates. It also did, unfortunately, in the death certificates.

Curiously, now that I think about it, I could not say where in my lonely homeland was the cemetery. Maybe there would not be, and my beloved neighbors would return to earth in the sacrosanct soil of a larger town. The crosses may have been carried away by the wind, like the bell of the old church of San Miguel - the tongues, good or bad, say that it is kept in the church of Valtajeros, as well as a representation of the Virgen del Castellar - and that the shroud of grass, which this year has sprouted with unusual strength, has lovingly tucked graves that have long been accustomed to anonymity.

In any case, what great truth is that human saying that emphasizes the Wisdom of Nature. I wonder, if within that wisdom there will also be a subtle display of poetry. Perhaps for that reason, he wanted a plant to be born precisely, in the bare vain of a window, near the small altarpiece where the children used to come singing, just this May, with flowers to María.

It is from this window, curiously, where you have an excellent view of the majestic Moncayo. So fantastic, I would add without an iota of shame, that on clear and sunny days, his vision looks like a real mirage. It may be an optical effect caused by the snow that accumulates on your Jupiterian summit. There where they also say the languages, good or bad but languages after all, that the Romans raised an altar to their supreme god. I wonder, then, if the situation of the church and its dedication to the archangel warrior would not be, after all, a kind of guard post before the fear of the resurgence of the old paganisms.

It does not stop being curious, on the other hand, the detail of that intermittence in the memories, as one is encouraged to speak. Anyone would say, that after all, the memories are something like migratory birds that go away when the summer comes to an end and return again with unexpected joy in spring.

Speaking of them, I suppose there are endless springs that have passed since the origins of what was my first settlement, there, on the top of a hill that is now called El Castellar. I have to suppose, therefore, that I was something like a tutor of brave Celtiberians, surely of those who nourished with their blood the right to freedom in the Numancia site. Closer in time, but perhaps not enough so that the cancer that corrodes my memory does not suffer any relapse, I think my name was something like Torre Tarrancio.

At that time, I remember that I barely consoled myself with eleven neighbors-six or seven shepherds, three farmers and a carpenter-who depended on the Duke of Alba, who religiously paid the rent, and the jurisdiction of Suellacabras, where there was a monastery dedicated to a curious saint, whose name, by itself, gave off a slight whiff to heterodoxy: San Caprasio.

Even though I survived numerous catastrophes until the 20th century, I do not remember any of them as fatal as the one that occurred in the 1960s, when the last inhabitants of the town, the ones who fed on the sparrows that they drunk by adding brandy to the crumbs of bread - According to the writer Soriano Avelino Hernández (1), mysteriously disappeared, like the others, and never returned to here.

Sometimes, the wind, inseparable companion, brings me the distant echo of the bellows of the flocks of sheep and sob remembering the happy passage of the herds, because if something I have not forgotten, is that in these Highlands where I am just a memory, the merines, pure race, made History.

Until then, I went to the town of Torretarrancho. Now, I'm just the ghost of another depopulated more. Or maybe, as the great Chilean poet said, my soul is just an empty carousel in the twilight ...

Notes:

(1) Avelino Hernández: The Sierra del Alba.

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NOTICE: originally posted on my blog SORIA WAY WALK WALKING. Both the text, as the photographs, and the video (except music, reproduced under a YouTube license), are my exclusive intellectual property. The original entry, where you can check the authorship of juancar347, can be found at the following address: https://juancar347.blogspot.com/2013/05/una-de-cal-el-despoblado-de.html

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