"CXXXVIII.-A PLATERO EN EL CIELO DE MOGUER
El tiempo acaba su obra Platero.
Sólo nos queda una de nuestras riquezas, si la tuvimos: la de nuestro corazón.
Tengo que confesarte también mis maldades, mis cinismos, …
Que bien te puedo decir a ti estas cosas que otros no entenderían. A ti Platero, que vivirás siempre, poco te importa irte.
Pero ¿Y yo, Platero?"
My father had a dislocated elbow, a chronic injury, courtesy of a donkey, that kicked him when he was a kid, or maybe an adolescent, perhaps months, or a few years before the trans-oceanic periplum that was waiting in his destiny, a travel without return.
He laughed at this horrible deformation, which made the cavity of the elbow sink in an abnormal way when he moved the arm...a profound and broad scar was visible, obviously the bone was violently affected.
I always related donkeys to arid zones of the southern Europe, like southern Italy, Greece or the Mediterranean Spain, so I was curious about this donkey, living in that familiar farm, lost in the Cantabrian Mountains, but the donkey was there, among the family's cows, which weren't many, but they were cows. Possibly this donkey fornicated with the cows, everybody knows the ardour of the donkeys, and their plausible members, delight of cows too, well: the life in the countrisyde is brutal, no one has too many scruples, why the cows and the donkey should? And a donkey was Platero.
Platero is the main character in a novel of Juan Ramón Jiménez, an Andalusian writer of the early 20th century, well-known novel among the Spanish-speaking students, really, because it is always used as text in school.
Or at least it was used when I studied, don't know if the kids and adolescents are still forced to read "Platero y yo", story of an Andalusian kid and his donkey.
The book is excessively melancholic, soft, tepid, almost depressive, and it starts with these lines:
"Platero is a small, soft and hairy donkey: so soft to the touch that he might be said to be made of cotton, with no bones. Only the jet mirrors of his eyes are hard like two black crystal scarabs."
Actually the book was pigeonholed as a "children's book", and apparently used in schools for pedagogic reasons, while in fact his author never said it was a children's book...the sequences of the book, call them 'chapters' if you will, they don't keep a strict thematic relation, or order, it's full of evocative, oneiric and sometimes macabre images, like the sequence when Anilla la Manteca, a little girl, tries to scare the rest of the children guessed as a phantom, but she's fulminated by a lightning in the storm. The kids get blinded, and seem to fall into another reality when the lightning strikes; when they recover the reason, they see this girl carbonized, and the donkey is there, looking at her.
There are some picturesque depictions of the primitive Andalusian zone where "Platero" occurs (Moguer, Huelva), some social criticism of the environment of the brutalized Andalusia of the 1910's, and specially there is a sensation of no-time, as if everything would happen in a strange, golden eternity, perpetual Andalusian afternoon (possibly orange, or blue) where the time stands still.
Still, stands still. Stands, still stands still, stands, still stands? Still.
The epilogue of the book is one of the most enigmatic and sad things that have been written with that simulated innocence of the Hells, "con disimulo", "escrito por el Diablo con disimulo", that angelical dissimulation of the infernal that you well know.
And maybe I know, too, but I'm not sure what I know anymore.
It is "Platero en el cielo de Moguer", because Platero dies, and he finds a place in the sky of Moguer, like a constellation perhaps? Like an infernal tutelar Numen, looking at us from the sky after death, guiding us with amorous, horrid warnings, guiding us from the sky, with his tremendous presence, always there, in the sky, and it's tremendous because it never will really die, is in the sky, looking at us forever, like a luciferine disk and its terrifying gyrations, humming and turning in its supernatural orbit, smiling, full of a love that we don't understand, a love that we...fear.
I speculated about the possibility of our family, relations, parents, anybody we know etc, if they would, could be located, like Platero, in the sky too, looking at us from the night sky, for example in winter, when we hurry to go to the bakery at 6:59 PM, because we forgot to remember to buy bread, or something similar to bread, even with gumy texture...and we hurry our arse, because the bakery closes, and is night already, and our mother is there, in the sky of Gijón, or London, or Calcutta or wherever you have the misfortune of living.
She's there, in the sky, asking us why we didn't buy the bread early.
...Because, deep inside, Jiménez gave Platero the characteristics of a human being, perhaps the only human being of Moguer?
Look at your town, look at the animals of the place, big or small, maybe they are the only human beings of the town.
Now look at your father, mother and anybody you know, now see them in that night sky forever looking at you: they won their own humanity finally, their apotheosis, an apotheosis that you couldn't understand...
A strange fact about all this: how sad and nonsensical will be their presence in that sky when we leave this world?
*note to self: always be happy.
Moguer, 1916
Gijón, 2011
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