II Memorial de poetas palentinos

Jesús Castañón Díaz: life and poetry

María Ángeles Rodríguez Arango

Spanish version

Text of the speech to the II Memorial de poetas palentinos. Club de Amigos de Alemania. Function Room of the Council of Palencia, 19 November 1993.

Jesús Castañón Díaz was born to a mining family in La Casanueva (Moreda de Aller) on 21 February 1928. His father worked for forty-six years in the Asturian Colliery. The mining environment would be recorded in his memory and, in time, the book entitled Romances de grisú would emerge.

Owing to a postnatal illness suffered by his mother, he lived for a time with his aunt Rosa, a sister of his grandmother, in the village of Los Bustios, situated on the northern slope of the Cantabrian Mountain Range. He always had an affectionate relationship with his aunt because, as he relates, she was very caring and communicative. She knew many legends, proverbs, tales or stories which she would tell the boy as they walked to the mill, the church or the countryside, or whilst they sat beside the fire during the long winter nights. She differed from her husband, uncle Pedro, who was strong and brawny, more primitive, almost a titan with large wooden pattens, which he made himself, with nails that allowed his footsteps to be heard from afar.

He became very fond of the people and animals here, and would spend hours watching corn being milled or go into a reverie watching the trout in the water or the birds in their nests. He played with the domestic animals: the cows, especially Cereza - who owed her name to her red colouring and whom they ate in secret during the war - the mare Morica - so-called because she was black - the calf Careto or the dog Pastor, whom he remembers in the last poem of Marea de retorno and in Pirueta blanca, in which he makes the little girl play with the dog:

Entre la brisa

de la alameda

cuatro muñecos

cantan y juegan:

Pedrito el oso,

Yonila la negra,

Pastor el perro,

tú, mi princesa.

He would transform daily objects into playthings. The third edition of Romances de grisú includes the poem:

Por Los Bustios, la lechuza.

Y por Los Tornos, la nieve ( ... )

( ... ) Una tabla, mi escopeta.

Mi caballo, un ramo verde.

He transfers the evocations of his own childhood to the world of his daughter:

Abeja y mariposa

siempre en tu juego,

jugarás con la luna

del arroyuelo.

Con el perro y la nieve

con tu pandero ( ... )

( ... ) Con los niños y niñas

de todo el pueblo.

He continued to spend many holidays with his aunt and uncle, and for this reason the war found him in the village with so few residents. The wave of hatred and executions by firing squad that took place throughout the coalfield also reached these parts, although to a lesser extent, and at the age of eight he witnessed horrifying scenes. He saw how one of his uncles, aged twenty, was capable of challenging a firing squad to "come and get me", taking to his heels across the mountain range in desperate flight. For several years the boy and his aunt tracked large areas without finding any trace. The young man had reached an incredible refuge and from there he would later pass to the front, overcoming obstacles that would have been invincible for anybody who did not know this kind of country. But the searches in the house and in the boy's room took place again and again. From this moment, he identified with the cornered, solitary or anguished man who appears in his books. War, desolation and death were themes that would appear over and again, together with the world of hard work that every man has to conquer.

Between the ages of eleven and fifteen he boarded with the Dominican Fathers in Corias (Cangas de Narcea) and he then continued his studies at the Alfonso II Secondary School of Oviedo.

Some of his friends and family encouraged him to study as a medical assistant, a qualification that he obtained at the Faculty of Medicine of Valladolid in the year 1947. From 1947 to 1950 he completed his military service in Valladolid, posted to the Military Hospital. He then worked for a short time as a civilian medical assistant in Lastres, a small village on the Asturian coast of which he always retained pleasant memories, especially of his friendships with the fishermen, with the patroness who took great pains to control prices and with the doctor, Pedro Villarta, whom he evokes in one of the poems of Marea de retorno, in blank hendecasyllables without rhyme:

Silbaba contra el viento del Cantábrico

sus suaves cancioncillas en la noche,

ya viejas cantinelas toledanas

o sones populares, aprendidos

a fuerza de subir las escaleras

de un puerto marinero de mi Asturias

con cientos de marinos y de enfermos.

Llevaba medio siglo allí arraigado,

con su fonendo a cuestas y su boina.

Era como un abuelo que ya había

visto nacer a todos los vecinos.

Conocía a los buenos pescadores

y a los que hablaban más de lo debido

y tenía un Citröen pobre y viejo,

que jamás arrancaba a la primera.

Cuando murió no quiso panteones,

sino una tumba humilde junto al pueblo,

al lado de los viejos pescadores,

cuyas bronquitis crónicas curaba.

Después -así es la vida- le pusieron

su nombre y una lápida a una calle.

Y yo llevé conmigo a mis tres hijos

para aprender esta lección de hombría.

Indeed, we were present at the unveiling of the tombstone in September 1972. He was deeply moved and wrote this poem.

He also evokes the port of Lastres in the poem entitled "Puerto del Norte", with the arrival of the boats, the movement of the fish market, the voices of the sardine sellers offering their fish, the smell of the fish and the factories, the chatter of the old fishermen who yearn for the times when they performed the same tasks and the old sea dogs who evoke past adventures on their way to the tavern. Before them, the sea is impassive and oblivious to all that takes place in those little houses clustered beside the water.

He dedicated many other poems to friends, whom he admired for one reason or another, almost always for their dedication to work and in the service of others.

There are poems to the young friends in Marea de retorno, Pliego de descargo and Tierra de lontananzas.

Algunos os moristéis cuando eráis unos niños,

dejándonos un poso de imborrable amargura

con los labios quemados y el sabor aún caliente

de vuestra risa joven, ya para siempre helada (...)

(...) Durante años hemos soñado con vosotros.

Después la vida puso a todos diques nuevos

y no hubo más remedio que ir arrinconándoos.

There are compositions dedicated to his mother, the first verses of which he had engraved on her tombstone when she was buried in Moreda, in 1976, and he did the same with his father in 1983.

All of his work is directly related with the environment and experiences that took place throughout his life. The poet lived events intensely and held them in his memory to make them emerge again at a given moment, transforming them into poetic material. He possessed the magical power of reality and fantasy to see and love the daily routine. He stimulates his readers to an awareness of the work and toil of human beings, especially the most humble, to survive.

Although the poetic mystery is unattainable, we must try to clarify what we know or suspect in order to approach his way of seeing the world. Jesús Castañón has left us written clarifications on three occasions:

a) Cinco presencias, the introduction to a recital given at the Sábados poéticos, or Poetic Saturdays, of the Casa de Cultura of Palencia, on 3 February 1968.

b) Trayectoria y sentido de mi silencio, published in Palencia in 1969 by Gráficas Diario-Día.

c) Introduction to a recital, at the Casa de Cultura of Palencia in 1974, which formed part of the cycle "Chequeo a Palencia".

To his written confessions, I shall try to add memories, anecdotes or oral confessions.

He began a degree in Philosophy and Arts in Oviedo, where he completed the two core courses. He moved to Madrid to study the speciality of Romanic Philology, at the same time as studying at the Official School of Journalism, which was headed at that time by Mr. Juan Aparicio. He finished both degrees in the year 1957. This last year we coincided again in the halls of the Complutense University, where I attended some PhD lectures.

He began to teach at private schools and while preparing competitive examinations for State Secondary School, during the moments of greatest intellectual effort, he wrote Romances de grisú, seized by emotion with the memory of his land (Moreda) and his people who in those years suffered a serious employment crisis. He would write and keep drafts to subsequently give them definitive book form. At the same time he compensated for the monotonous work of studying. He did the same with the last of his publications, Tierra de lontananzas, which he wrote in Valladolid whilst trying to overcome the obsessions caused by the serious professional problems posed by the changes of syllabus. This compensation, balancing daily problems, also occurs in other books, born of the warmth of longing, solitude, tedium or the tiredness of travelling.

Romances de grisú signifies his identification with the mine and the miners. It is a song to the land where he was born, to the people who live there and their grim and hard forms of subsistence. It is in the current of social literature of the nineteen-sixties, but with a very personal voice. It reflects deep social sensitivity with a sense of egalitarian collectivity, elevating the humble: miners and workers in general. He would later do the same with the seasonal workers or "agosteros", the agricultural day labourers or emigrants.

In this book he declares his mining roots over and again, from the last verses of the poem that opens the book:

Yo también llevo carbón y dinamita en las venas

until the led by the "Nuevos romances":

En mi breve copla

te diré quién soy.

De la mina vengo

y a la mina voy.

Just as the mine mountains are empty and cold inside, so the people feel the emptiness of life and the sorrows that distress them although they take pride in the fact that they never show this. To drive away their sorrows, they sing at work and on the road, they drink rowdily in the tavern, spend money noisily, but floating in the background is the possible tragedy that stalks them. Only at these moments do they become totally silent and they must cheer themselves with wine in order to continue. They invite the young hurrier to do the same while they continue their work rhythmically or listen to the distant blasts of dynamite.

Toma un campano, rampero.

Este vino es el cordón

que te unirá al universo (...)

(...) ¡Cómo resuenan disparos

de dinamita a lo lejos!

Toma un campano,

rampero.

The sound of the work is rhythmic, we hear the clogs, the curses, the hammers, the plane, the compressor, the wagons... And also the songs. Finally, the wave of firedamp in the mine explodes with a boom and silence is absolute. There is no more singing, or cider, or joking, nothing.

When the miners arrive for the nightshift along snowy footpaths, by the light of the moon, some wolves follow them. Death will be more ferocious with them; they will not live to see the following morning.

What great silence when the "cage" comes up with the bodies! The pit and the village are in mourning, the lists of names fixed to the lampposts make passers-by shudder. Some survivors save themselves astutely, climbing through implausible parts of the galleries and reaching the surface through the vents and valves of the old mine. The greatest tragedy is being trapped. If they can manage to escape they do so, even if it means amputations. This is the case of Francisco Suárez García, strong, proud, resolute and vigorous, with grey hair and a beret, smoking a pipe in the village with the air of a popular hero.

He has also seen with much love the victims of silicosis who, fatally wounded, fall during the autumn and winter owing to the cold. All the professional categories in the mine parade before our eyes, especially the hurrier, who is called "apprentice, bonny child, cricket, buck" owing to his youth and his aspirations of becoming a face worker in the prime of his life.

In the first edition he concentrated on the world of work. As from the second (1962), the people of the vicinity and some female professions appear: washerwomen, water carriers - who distributed water in earthenware "botijos" - mothers who rock their children while dreaming that they will soon be hurriers, coal women who delivered to the homes the coal given out by the mine company - assisted by a suffering donkey, exploited and burned in a slag heap who was the origin of the poem "Antípoda de todos los Plateros".

He also pays attention to the conversations on the way to the company store, which occupy a working day:

Economato.

Charla y más charla.

El río sigue

canta que canta:

Pasan las mulas:

larga reata.

Las dos mujeres

charla que charla.

Pasan mineros:

negra mirada.

Las tres mujeres

charla que charla.

Fin de jornada.

A la cadera

sus manos anchas,

cuatro mujeres

charla que charla.

The reading of various poems from this book at the Instituto Príncipe de Asturias, of Aller, within the II Jornadas (1986), was met by a great deal of enthusiasm and the anecdotes that had caused them gave rise to great emotion. The students thought that the author had worked in the mine. Although he knew it well he had never worked there, as had his father, his uncle and other members of his family. His great-grandfather Miguel, uncle Miguel del Campo, who was one of the ten residents who lived in Moreda in 1880, was the owner of the meadows and hills that the mine company bought and expropriated from him, while incorporating the family members in the work of the company.

The Literature teachers of this Institute, José Antonio de Lillo and Alejandro Antolín, presented a study with previously unpublished data - based on a survey that they had conducted in Palencia. They told how as a child he had gone with his mother to take the lunch and at the age of about ten he observed the change of shift in the lamp room and the coming and going of the miners. His father then worked as a carpenter in the square (the space in front of the pithead). He had previously been a timberman and, in 1940, he became a nurse at the company Sanatorium in Bustiello where he worked until his retirement in 1960.

In the post-war years the mines needed labour and people from other regions were incorporated. They lodged in the company's hostels, "albergues", owing to which they received the generic name of "alberganos". The poem entitled "El albergano" describes the efforts of the newcomer from faraway lands in Andalusia to acclimatise in his new habitat, with which he will never totally identify.

Orgullo de hombre

me ató a esta tierra.

Tus galerías,

en mi solera.

Asturianadas,

por peteneras.

Para mortaja,

las vagonetas.

Y por campanas

quiero sirenas.

Canta la sidra.

La plata suena.

Asturias verde.

Cuenca minera.

Andalucía

lejos navega.

His memories and roots are somewhere else, very distant from all that surrounds him.

"Albergano" has come to mean emigrant, in general. In the nineteen-sixties and seventies the people of Aller who emigrated to Belgium or Germany called themselves "alberganos".

The same song to the emigrant lives on in subsequent books. When we moved to Palencia in the year 1962, newly married, the Tierra de Campos Plan filled the people of the area with great hope, which would be extinguished little by little and a considerable exodus began to the countries of Central Europe.

Thus we saw in Elegía del Páramo the emigrants prepared to take flight, like swallows at the end of summer for new lands, leaving behind the memories, the roots and the village, sometimes under the waters of a reservoir. This is why he says:

No me quitéis los pájaros que quedan

volando noche y día sobre el páramo.

No me quitéis las flores, arraigadas

con dulce obstinación entre las piedras.

No me robéis el ocre de los surcos

ni la paz interior de cada ocaso.

No me arranquéis del alma los majuelos,

ni el canto del milano entre las zarzas.

The nostalgia grows and the premonitions of solitude, uprooting and forgetfulness seize his soul:

Y cómo se marcharon, de qué forma

perdieron sus andares para siempre,

perdieron sus canciones y sus voces,

que absorbieron de noche los trigales.

Faced with this desolation, faced with the abandonment of the villages a glimmer of hope appears and the song to supportive work arises:

Todos al mismo ritmo:

los pies descalzos,

todos pisando los racimos.

Todas las manos, todas

segando iguales campos:

todas, todas las manos.

Que con el ritmo nuevo

crezca la espiga, el canto

y el mosto de cada pueblo.

He also sings to the brown land and sees people like Christ who suffer injustice, extenuating work and extreme poverty:

Hay Cristos como espadas, verticales,

clavados en la tierra castellana,

sedientos de justicia como chopos,

coronados de espigas y sarmientos.

Y Cristos como galgos, alargados,

los morros abrasados por el viento,

la carne macerada de canales

existentes tan solo en las maquetas.

Y Cristos como niños, somnolientos,

dormidos en el musgo de las criptas,

que esperan un redoble de tambores

para salir un día de sus tumbas.

Y Cristos ganapanes, descarnados,

labrados con sudor en las canteras,

duros como estas torres de Castilla,

historia en carne viva escrita en piedra.

He could not have identified more with the landscape, interiorising it, and with its simple and generous working people whom he exalts in the roughest of tasks. Perhaps one of the most significant poems is the definition he gives of the "agosteros", profiled on the horizon like distressed silhouettes under the implacable Castilian sun:

Espaldas curvadas

y afiladas hoces.

En todas las manos

un dolor salobre.

Y un sol de justicia

sobre el horizonte.

On many occasions he reflects the pain of these people and their effort in the face of adverse destiny, with deep respect for their discreet silence, their innermost sorrow, with hands chapped by frost and work, and very expressive eyes that reflect all that they are thinking although they never put it into words. This is why he will say of these people that "their anguish does not fit in the thimble of words".

All his admiration for the Castilian woman, hard working, deeply religious, who watches over her family as wife and mother:

La tierra de tus manos, rubia espiga;

la hogaza de tu amor, un pan sabroso;

tu voz, acariciante, dulcemente

templada en suficiencia para el mando (...)

In a special way, he pours this enthusiasm into the "Romance de las madres palentinas", read in the Teatro Principal on the occasion of the Fiestas of San Antolín of the year 1975:

Mujer de corazón en hondo surco,

y nunca, inútilmente, a flor de tierra,

la madre palentina ha soportado

con dignidad espartana, guerra a guerra

el lento desangrarse de sus hijos

y el nublo que destroza las cosechas.

Con temblor, ha oteado el horizonte,

con temblor se ha asomado a las almenas,

ha entreabierto con miedo las ventanas:

mujer para su casa y de su hacienda.

Su varonil esfuerzo está premiado

con la banda dorada y su paciencia

ha sido proverbial siglo tras siglo,

lo mismo que su celo y su prudencia.

Después ha contemplado estoicamente

la emigración del hijo a otras fronteras

o ha esperado impaciente los ronquidos

del tractor, cuando vuelve de las tierras,

el agua ya caliente y la comida

a punto y preparada ya la mesa.

Cuando hubo que espigar, fue espigadora;

cuando hubo que estudiar, fue la primera;

humilde en el hogar como en el trono,

hábil y astuta y dulce compañera.

Citar nombres ilustres supondría

no acabar esta larga sementera:

María de Molina o de Padilla,

o Blanca de Castilla o Berenguela....

o tantas ignoradas heroínas,

que a su paso dejaron honda huella.

Mujer inteligente, aunque sencilla,

siempre en su puesto y firme la cabeza,

de los cuatro cuarteles del escudo

vivo ejemplo y vibrante pregonera:

rojo de sangre y llanto con el duro

batir de las lombardas en la guerra,

azul para el esfuerzo cotidiano

de parca austeridad y honda paciencia,

y, a la hora de empuñar libros y espadas,

mujer para las armas y las ciencias.

When he was awarded the post of secondary school teacher he worked in Algeciras, Albacete and Torrelavega before returning to the Jorge Manrique Secondary School in Palencia, where he was posted in 1966.

During his stay in Algeciras he wrote the drafts of two books: Rueda del girasol -published in the Rocamador collection in 1964 - and Pirueta blanca, which appeared in 1967.

Rueda del girasol reflects the experiences of solitude which he suffered during the 1963-1964 academic year in Algeciras. There is no lack of allusion to contraband, indifference and the feeling of insecurity and estrangement in the middle of the street surrounded by strangers. These are moments of longing. A large number of the drafts were written by the author during a trip to Ronda, where the landscape cut to a peak had impressed him so much that he felt weightless, in the air, far from the bustle of the city and trade.

The book consists of three parts: the first part contains autobiographical definitions, his anxieties and deliria, aspirations and failures which can be summarised in this short poem:

Ansiosamente busco

las altas madreselvas.

Pero en las amapolas

las alas se me enredan.

In the second, he deals fundamentally with the city through which he walks in sadness:

Pies y más pies ... Y luego,

más pies y más cemento,

más hoscas soledades,

más humo negro...

Más tardes sin sombra

noches sin sueño,

madres sin hijos,

novias sin besos.

Or this other:

Por entre los semáforos

y los escaparates

camina un hombre solo

por todas las ciudades.

Sin amores, ni amigos;

eterno paseante.

And the third comprises reflections on the work itself and the scant value of the word:

Amo a esas pobres gentes

sobre cuyas gargantas

se rompen, al hablarnos

temblando las palabras.

Pirueta blanca is the result of the memory of his daughter who stayed in Palencia, playing happily, while he went away. From the beach of El Rinconcillo or the cafeteria of the Paseo de la Marina, where he spends the afternoons writing and also dreaming before the sea, he imagines her with her mimes, games and chatter. Even now Charo remembers the commotion they made every time her father came, listening to music, playing and making preparations to go out into the street together. They would walk along the bank of the Carrión, over the Puente de Hierro up to the Fuente de la Salud and they would return via the Puente Mayor. The girl would chatter and ask endless questions.

SThere are thirty-three poems that sing their movements of mill, weather vane, swallow, goldfinch or bell. The first teeth, the symphony of the dummy while she slept, the cricket voice, the humming, the games and movements of hands upon waking. He pays special attention to the toys, comparing the soft animals - bears or dogs - that the girl has with the live animals of his own childhood:

Yo, cuando niño

siempre a caballo,

correteaba

por sierra y campo.

¡Tú sólo tienes

perros de trapo!

He finishes with various sleepy lullabies whilst the child rubs her face with her hands to allow sleep to pass from the terrace to the pillow.

The author himself has defined this book as a look of paternal love and a song to the babbling silence of the child.

It incorporates drawings that she made in pencil on the poet's drafts, which he had left on the table during a holiday. He found them one day, surprised, interpreted them as a kind of dialogue and decided to publish them in the book. Rafael Oliva reproduced them in ink with exquisite care.

Since the second edition -Gráficas Diario-Día, 1969 - it includes musical illustrations - a lullaby and a song in three movements arranged by Andrés Moro with the lyrics of the corresponding poems. They were premiered at the Jorge Manrique School on 23 April 1969. The lullaby was sung by Tina Velo.

The portrait of the child, which appears on the cover, was drawn in pen and ink by Demetrio Cascón, Drawing teacher at the Marqués de Santillana Secondary School of Torrelavega. He did it using a photograph as a guide, but based on the facial features of her father whom she greatly resembled.

The result of the fortnightly trips from Albacete in the next academic year was the poems of Cancionero de proa, in which the night express trains that cross the Castilian plain symbolise the fleeting passage of life, the race towards death, working laboriously to reach, wheezing, the final goal:

Por entre agujas,

a disco abierto,

rumbo a la muerte,

van los expresos.

The intense cold of that winter is reflected in many details: in the poplars of the river banks (compared to the oranges and olives of the Andalusian countryside now so far away), in the frozen threshing floors or in the pretty description of the railway station where the travellers waited:

La garra de la niebla se cernía

con su bota de plomo por mi tacto.

Ni en el andén el aire se dormía,

ni florecía el sol sobre los campos.

Tan sólo las bufandas se movían

en rítmicos paseos solitarios.

This was the station of Palencia where he waited for the express at midnight on Sunday.

He observes the employees and the track gangs, numb with cold, who are protected by an angel of mist while they work. He dedicates a memory to them all, but he especially addresses the shunters, whom he metaphorically invites to foster human solidarity:

Enganchadores:

enganchad bien las manos

de tantos hombres.

La velocidad del tren hace que lo vea como:

Látigo que en la noche

sacude el viento,

por la inmensa llanura

bufa el expreso.

His attention is also drawn to trips by car, by boat or through space. The latter would be the preferential theme of the book El Rey de las estrellas, published in 1969, with the sound idea that man would take possession of the new spaces, once he had managed to put a foot on the moon. There he would find silence and the most absolute solitude, he would meet with himself, with sleep and the chimera of life.

A silence that he experienced here, in Castille, indicated by José María Fernández Nieto when he pointed to the central idea of each one of the poets of Rocamador in a commemorative study of the twenty-five years of the group.

Trilogía de la muerte is a book, as the author himself says, written in waves. The meditation on death is located in two specific places: the Cantabrian sea seen from the beach and the Wall of Gijón - where he spent hours contemplating it - and the Plaza Mayor of Palencia - where he imagines Christ agonising, suffering passion updated in extreme circumstances. The sea provides a series of images of death and the comings and goings of human life, with illusions and failures, achievements and disillusions. Furthermore, the sea is the immensity, greatness and enormity of the great beyond, transcendence. At the mystery where we will arrive via death itself, tired of fighting against human adversity and pain, we must arrive purified by incessant effort and toil, as the verse "Hecho espuma de mar y no carroña" says.

Here, in Palencia, the poet tells us how one morning, suddenly, he saw a Christ hanging, dying, reincarnated as a man of the twentieth century:

Allí te vi tendido, de repente,

con tu rostro tranquilo y tu sonrisa,

sordo a toda blasfemia y al continuo

rugir de los motores y los claxons (...)

(...) Aquí quiero pensarte, aquí te tejo,

bajo esta leve sombra recostado,

mientras se clava el sol en los trigales

y la luz reverbera en los pantanos (...)

(...) Te tengo tan desnudo que quisiera

un poco de piedad para mi espanto.

Hay ovejas al fondo y suena un perro

ladrar mil injusticias contra el campo.

Si tú no mueres, todos moriremos.

Si tú agonizas, brotará mi canto.

And so begins the adoration of these people "whose eyes bore the walls when they speak, men of dry earth, whose hands hardly move like statues, who speak with a serene voice and leave deep the seed in the furrow rooted and shepherds whose gaze is of lead and of silence. The "agosteros" will come, the reapers, those mutilated on the battlefields"...

Y yo vendré con ellos a Castilla,

donde el silencio quema en la garganta.

Por todos te presento mi abominable pliego de de descargo.

Palencia is the axis of his life and poetry. From 1966 to 1980, he taught Language and Literature at the Jorge Manrique Scondary School. Before and after this he spent all his holidays and weekends here. The children were born here. Palencia is the fundamental inspiration of his poems beside his native Asturias. On 14 May 1968 he pronounced his admission speech in the Institución Tello Téllez de Meneses on Sebastián de Miñano y Bedoya; and since then successive works appeared in this Institution written by Jesús Castañon on the said author, on Francisco Vighi, on Jorge Manrique, on literary movements of Palencia, on literature and the press in Palencia. For La Historia de Palencia he has collaborated with El panorama cultural de la Ciudad, reflected in the Press, between 1939 and 1985.

From 1970 to 1973, he was Head Master of the School and then Deputy Head until 1980 when he became a professor at the University College in Valladolid.

From 1968 to 1973 he edited the school magazine "Jorge Manrique" and until 1980 the "Tertulia Jorge Manrique", with pupils of the centre.

Together with Antonio Alamo Salazar and José María Fernández Nieto he guided the young people of "Los Viernes del Arte Joven" in the 1975-1976 academic year. He was an enthusiastic collaborator in the organisation of the events for the celebration of the Twenty-Five Years of the Institución Tello Téllez de Meneses in 1974 and for the 5th Centenary of Jorge Manrique in 1979. In 1983, he published the anthology Palencia piedra a piedra with the works of over fifty poets and illustrators. He participated on the juries of prizes and in the cultural activities organised by the Town Council, the Provincial Council, the Caja de Ahorros y Monte de Piedad de Palencia and other Institutions.

In Valladolid he directed the Encuentros con la literatura infantil (1984 and 1986), published in 1985 and 1989, respectively.

Copies of all of his publications are conserved in the Public Library of Palencia as is the doctoral Thesis which Julia Patricia Howell wrote on his work in 1988 at the Canadian University of London Ontario.

He died in Oviedo at Easter in 1990, after a long and deep look of love at all that surrounded him, fulfilling the anticipated vision of his own death, contained in the poem entitled "Silencio":

A claridad sonaba en la mañana,

la música dorada de los trigos.

A claridad tocaban sobre el alba

las sombras de los muertos y los lirios.

Y al fondo sonreían los mil labios,

los mil ojos de Dios, sus mil sentidos,

su sombra que cubría los espacios,

cegándolos de luz y de cariño.

Enmudecieron todas las canciones.

Mi pulso reventó en tremendo grito.

Átomo fui en la paz del universo,

silencio de silencios infinito.