I am one of the few Catalans who have chosen to spend time in Tamurejo (Badajoz), in the middle of a heat wave and without coke or firecrackers, almost 700 kilometers from Barcelona as the crow flies (and there is no crow flies). Feast of Sant Joan. La Revetlla is one of my favorite dates of the year; It always reminds me of Dagoll Dagom, Sisa and Montse Guallar on the one hand, and Frazer’s Golden Bough on the other, because of the solstice and the human sacrifices of the druids in the bonfires. I then traveled to Tamurejo, sad at not being able to see the party, with a vague apprehension of going to a distant land, and the mood of Nicolas Cage on the way to Summerisle in The Wicker Man, which ended that way completed. Then they will say why the hell he went there. Well, with my old Adena card in my pocket, I wanted to meet FĂ©lix RodrĂguez de la Fuente’s little daughter, Odile, and think of her father. I also wanted to see some Dartford (Cyanopika kooki) the pretty blue crow.
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The official reason for the trip was to participate in the fourth edition of Siberiana, the Festival of Literature and Nature, directed by Gabi MartĂnez, the writer who in our country gives a special place (and worth the redundancy) to nature writing or literature. has given . Gabi is from Barcelona (indeed the other Catalan in Tamurejo) but as she beautifully told in her book Un cambio de verdad (Seix Barral, 2020) her family roots are in the Extremadura region of La Siberia (one of them) . 11 cities is Tamurejo), a land of forests, meadows, olive groves, pastures, roars, large herds of merino sheep, transhumance and today 155,000 hectares of Biosphere Reserve that is already space.
I traveled to Ciudad Real by AVE after a rushed change due to a delay in Atocha and a driver was waiting for me at the station, who took me along with the experimental poet from Zaragoza, Gustavo JimĂ©nez, another festival participant by the looks of him. brought to Tamurejo very versatile. I’ve been listed as “an institution in travel and nature journalism” who shoots from heights. During the hour-and-a-half ride, the driver, the poet, and this institution without festivals were immersed in an endless and lonely world of wild and ancient beauty under a vast sky dotted with Bonelli’s eagles and red kites. During the tour I called Jorge de Pallejá, who was a great friend of FĂ©lix, in Barcelona to tell him where I was. “Well, I’m sorry I’m not coming,” he replied, surprisingly cheerful considering that not only was he not invited, but he’s also 99 and has a broken femur. Jorge had great adventures with RodrĂguez de la Fuente, including that with the anaconda, which almost ripped off the naturalist’s face. “You know, the day he crashed in Alaska while filming for TVE, and it was exactly his 52nd birthday, March 14, 1980, he had to call me about a trip to Tierra del Fuego. He was a great guy.
FĂ©lix RodrĂguez de la Fuente teaches Charlton Heston how to hold a hawk in front of RamĂłn MenĂ©ndez Pidal during the filming of “El Cid”./ JAIME PATO (EFE)
We arrived in Fuenlabrada de los Montes – the town with the most beekeepers per square meter in Spain – where we lived, and from there we went to Tamurejo in a minibus with other participants and with Gabi, who lived in her mother’s region . where his grandfather was a shepherd puts him in a melancholy and almost ascetic state. We pass Garbayuela, headquarters of the Pedrusco FĂştbol Club, owned by the worst team in Spain, and make a detour to Siruela. “That’s where we went when the Black Caravan was,” he pointed out the window and we both sighed and remembered AgustĂ Villaronga, who took part in the beautiful experience of herding a herd of Black Merinos with artists in 2018.
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We arrived in the festival town at 7pm and just had time to walk to the main square as it was already time for the activities to start. It was indescribably hot, well over 40°C, which gave a surreal touch to the name La Siberia and the strange idea of ​​decorating Tamurejo’s balconies with bedspreads and wool blankets. In the first row of chairs in front of the platform set up in the square, I saw FĂ©lix’s daughter, who had already arrived from Guadalajara. I recognized her immediately. She is a very attractive woman and has something of her father about her. I told him (the latter) and he surprised me with an affable “come on, you look alike too with that felixian hair”. I was touched because when I was a child, in the 1960s, and I explained it to Odile, I had achieved a certain fame (with family and friends) for imitating RodrĂguez de la Fuente. I would sit at a small table with feathers, hair and pellets and point to maps and drawings behind me with a pointer, I would reproduce whole programs of fauna: “Dear friends, today we are going to talk about the Egyptian vulture, companion of the mighty vulture and the throbbing fulcrum of the wild bog of our most conspicuous lands”. It was also embroidered with the depiction of the dormouse’s face. House visitors never stayed long, even when Mama gave them brandy.
Odile RodrĂguez de la Fuente, at the Tamurejo Festival.
Felix, I ran over your daughter, she meant everything to me. He devotedly followed his programs while the tam-tam on the curtain – foreshadowing AntĂłn GarcĂa Abril’s later famous tune for “El hombre y la tierra” – synchronized my heartbeat in an adventurous key, and he collected his encyclopedia Salvat de la Fauna from Beginning conscientiously Issued on January 28, 1970, when he was 12 years old, every Friday (25 pesetas per issue). I keep the volumes that I had been eager to get bound in a printing shop on CĂłrcega Street, near Venespa, and today I open Volume 1, Africa, with the sgraffito of a lion on the cover and this in a glossy finish cloaked animal splendor paper smell. Before visiting them personally many years later, I was with Felix in the Serengeti, at Lake Manyara, in Ngorongoro, where later one night in a tent, surrounded by roars, I experienced the same fear as he did. I was surprised to read in the biography of Benigno Varillas (La Esfera, 2010) that the naturalist was able to feel fear with such intensity (the “Night of the Lion” or that of the lightning on Venezuela’s Autana hill ) and to explain it. We weren’t wrong about him, he was one of us, or rather we were one of his. I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out two old cards to proudly show Odile: that of Adena (number 762) and that of Club de los Linces (October 26, 1971, member 13,129), in which they are handstamped ‘Felix’ and my signature; next to it the “Lynx Code of Honor,” a decalogue I’ve tried to stay true to in order to be worthy of Captain Miller’s memory as Private Ryan.
With all these emotions and those awakened during the long hours of the journey by reading the beautiful book that Odile dedicated to her father FĂ©lix, a man on earth (Geoplaneta, 2020), in which she presents important texts of his and his reflections After deepening the deeper insights she presented to me, I went to the dais to speak with the naturalist’s daughter. Odile, a biologist and for many years director of the FĂ©lix RodrĂguez de la Fuente Foundation, is, as I can imagine her father, a very special personality who not only dealt with the predators of nature but also with those of politics (which he as “a necessary evil”) and those of the media, and despite it all, to keep his enthusiasm and passion undiminished. Odile stressed to us the need to win back her father, and not out of nostalgia and love for our own childhood (although FĂ©lix himself was a person deeply rooted in his childhood, a free, rapacious Burgos chasing the red biker, and who claimed that “the child “makes the man”), but from the realization that he was ahead of his time – even in environmentalism and feminism, his daughter claims – and his basic ideas for the present.
As he watched her speak with energy and authority, stoically ignoring the bead of sweat that trickled down her cleavage, he thought of the seven-year-old girl who received the news of her father’s death. This girl is in Odile like the boy is in Felix. She was the third daughter of him and Marcelle Parmentier and the only one whose birth the naturalist was not on an expedition in Africa. “I was expecting a lion and was born a gazelle,” he joked at the time (and only those who don’t know what he loved and admired about gazelles will misunderstand). In any case, Odile is more of a lioness than a gazelle. The first thing her father did was put his arms around her and smell her like animals smell their puppies.
The FĂ©lix phenomenon is much deeper, Odile told us, who believes we need to see it as some kind of shaman, a wise man trying to reconnect us with the earth and animals. He recalled his father’s ability to move people and stories as touching as that of Chamal, the saker falcon given to him by Emir Abdalá bin Abdulaziz; that of TitĂ, the fox he adopted as a child and who was stoned to death by the neighbors for vandalizing their chicken coop; or that of the shepherd stealing food from the nest of a Bonelli’s eagle protected with a pot for a helmet. Little-known facets of FĂ©lix: he was a stomatologist, an athlete with a record 400m dash, a photographic safari guide, a friend of Konrad Lorentz and a pygmy from Ituri (Lazabo who gave him the elephant hair bracelet he had) . never started). Felix was a man whom a wolf fell blindly in love with, but not like Shakira, but a real wolf, “slender and sweet Sibila”, who brought him pheasants. Felix lived an extraordinary life “and died in the place of his big dreams, in the great north of James Curwood and Jack London.” How was it? I asked Odile to break the sad silence and live in a house like the animal friend. “It struck me as odd that the other children didn’t live among wolves and hawks like we did,” she replied. And I sighed because I had never met this girl before. We would have been like Tom Sawyer and Becky. I like Becky more.
FĂ©lix RodrĂguez de la Fuente practices falconry in one of his TV shows.
And so the afternoon passed and we talked about Felix like we were alone in a bar, two lifelong friends. We finished and sat down in the audience, I was still excited, moved by everything, Tamurejo, Poza de la Sal, the conversation, the memories, the fauna, the glowing face of the wolf, the heat, Odile. The singer and poet Duende Josele took over the stage for us. “We are migratory birds,” he sang, “high clouds on the move.” His voice – accompanied by Alfonso Seco’s guitar – resounded in the square that rose to the sky between the swallows, the mystery of life and inexplicable things, unbridled beauty, where no one expects them. “And if one day you kill me, kill me with tenderness, for love is a dance a coward does not dance. Because I loved once I know I’m not alone, because I loved once I know I won’t die at all.
The next day, at dawn, he was alone, waiting for the taxi back next to the 16th-century Church of Nuestra Señora de la Ascension in Fuenlabrada de los Montes. Everything from the day before seemed like a dream to me. And then came the swifts. The swifts that loved Felix so much. Black and fast across the newly awakened sky. Screaming, drunk on light, life and freedom, they raise their incalculable screams. “And I assure you, friends, that masses of swifts, soaring and screeching like a wedding, have stolen my soul. The swifts are wonderful animals.” Life and memories are wonderful.
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FĂ©lix RodrĂguez de la Fuente teaches Charlton Heston how to hold a hawk in front of RamĂłn MenĂ©ndez Pidal during the filming of “El Cid”./ JAIME PATO (EFE)
Odile RodrĂguez de la Fuente, at the Tamurejo Festival.
FĂ©lix RodrĂguez de la Fuente practices falconry in one of his TV shows.