In these days towards the end of the year there is a special symbolic power; an attraction of ancient legends to our worldly consciousness. What is nothing more than an illusory division of appointments in the calendar is given an immediate presence of threshold and border crossing. Below that suggests astronomical evidence for the winter solstice, the longest and darkest night of the year, which from now on will recede very gradually as the solar length of days progresses. The original legends have such a powerful hold on us and are so unnoticed as the laws of nature that it costs us nothing, out of recklessness or technological pride, to ignore them. Whether we want to or not, just as we cannot ignore the daily cycle of day and night that determines the rhythm of our lives, neither can we free ourselves from the influences of the millennia-old stories to which we react as instinctively as music.
Historians teach us that the Natalis Solis invicti, the birth or rebirth of the sun after the shortest day of the year, was celebrated in Rome as early as the early days of Christianity. On this ground the equivalent story of the birth of Christ is told on a dark winter’s night, just as a church is being built on the site where a pagan temple stood. As Juan Arias recently explained in the same pages, with the heartfelt wisdom he puts into everything he writes, most of the familiar details of the Christmas story are fictitious and do not even rest on the authority of the Gospels. But it is these circumstantial details that feed the poetic and narrative power of a fable that shock us all the more, because its historical antiquity has its correspondence with the removal of its roots in our personal memory: and not with conscious memory, so limited and so unfaithful, but with the deeper, the one who responds to music and to the smells and tastes that voluntary memory cannot evoke.
Cyril Connolly, so English in his ironic detachment, so exacting in his literary standards, was struck by the simple beauty of the Spanish Christmas carol: “Christmas Eve comes / Christmas Eve goes. / And we will go / and we will not return. Finding these lines in Connolly’s almost secret masterpiece, The Unquiet Grave, I felt as if I recognized a familiar and loved voice in a strange place. The sudden fear they express over time contrasts with the joy of the music and chorus that accompany them. The child who pays attention to it for the first time is overwhelmed by this carol, for it affirms the painful revelation of the fact of death that normally comes to him at the age of four or five, with such unnecessary precocity. It will not always remain as it is now, in the timeless arcadia of the childish present. Parents grow old and die, just like the family dog or cat will die, and unbelievable as it may seem, you will die too, and we will never come back.
Béla Bartók summarizes the key characteristics of popular music in three: formal nudity, expressive intensity, absence of sentimentality. Now Christmas carols are usually a shrill, sweet-voiced ditty played in the background of a mall, but those who sang when I was a child could speak bitter truths like that in this verse by Cyril Connolly, and loved her corresponded exactly to the traits defined by Béla Bartók, which are more or less the same that attracted the two great Spanish explorers of popular music, Manuel de Falla and Federico García Lorca. I woke up one morning in December and knew that Easter was beginning, as they said then, because I smelled of certain homemade sweets that were only made on those days and because the voices of the women in my house were singing Christmas carols through the rooms like they did the daily chores.
The devotional content was almost non-existent in them, save for the rejoicing for the newborn, in which all the rejoicing and earthly wonder at the extraordinary fact that is the birth of a creature was encoded. What attracted me to these carols were their tales of weather and homelessness and a wealth of detail about folk life very similar to those found in Neapolitan cribs, in late medieval and Renaissance painting, and in those 18th-century Portuguese presépios or cribs. Century, which are like visual encyclopedias and accurate documents about the vocations, devotions and festivals of the working people, farmers and shepherds who are the first to receive the good news of Christ’s birth. There was a Christmas carol about the Flight into Egypt in which the child cried from thirst: “Ask not for water, my child / ask not for water, my love / for the rivers go murky / and you cannot’ drink it. ” In another, the baby Jesus appeared frozen and naked at the door of a house, and a charitable woman decided to welcome him: “Well, tell him to come in / and he will warm himself / for on this earth / there is no more charity.”
Again, they are powerful words that contrast with the sweetness of intonation and melody, and for this reason they are heard at the end of cinema’s most bitter Christmas fable, Luis G. Berlanga’s Plácido, where a note is added the charity, which too the women in my house sometimes sang: “And there never was / and there never will be”. While in Plácido the orderlies flaunt their self-righteousness of their small charities, a helpless family drives from one place to another asking for help, which no one gives them, as vagabonds on their poor car like José and María in the Gospel story, the unemployed Schreiner and the very young pregnant woman about to give birth who cannot find shelter to spend the night in and where she may have to give birth. As he listened to Christmas carols in the warmth and safety of his home, sheltered by his family, the boy felt the fear of uprooting, the inexplicable cruelty of a world where there were roofless people to protect them on frosty nights. that December
After many years and much disbelief, I realize that perhaps it was in the carols and popular art that many of us were given our first notions of goodness and justice, of the radical line between protected and outcast, among the powerful riding in with treasure laden processions and the poor bringing the precious offering of a basket of eggs or cheese or a chicken to the Bethlehem portal. Horrific scenes of the massacre of the innocents can be seen in the background of some paintings of the Nativity and some Portuguese Presépios. The same wandering couple who found no shelter in Bethlehem must flee to another country with their newborn son to avoid persecution by a murderous despot. Vladimir Putin’s bombing of schools and maternity hospitals is one of Herod’s variable names. There are fables that last forever because they contain a kernel of contemporary truth.
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