palenpoin

Palencia in the poetry of Jesús Castañón

María Ángeles Rodríguez Arango

Text of the speech at the III Congreso de Historia de Palencia, presented on 31 March 1995.

Literary work constitutes a source of knowledge and possesses a specific rationality. It lights up the deepest layers of reality, which are present, but which are discovered with greater lucidity by each writer.

According to A. López Quintás (1) literary work is a privileged meeting point of man with the various dimensions of reality. It is convenient to re-live the gestation process, search for biographical reasons or feel a presentiment of the reasons that have made the author pay attention to certain details which he then elaborates in a personal manner.

Palencia and its people will have a different iridescence according to the light and intensity that each poet grants them.

Jesús Castañón arrived in Palencia in the summer of 1962 as a teacher at the Jorge Manrique Secondary School. Having been born in Asturias, the contrast of the Castilian landscape with that of his birth produced in him a deep emotion. The immense plains, the great distances, made him feel small. He was also overawed by the silence and the sensation of infinite solitude. These same plains, in the same way as the sea, will be seen on occasions as great symbols of transcendence and will give rise to serious meditations.

He sings to the landscape, the monuments, the people with the concerns that overwhelm them, beside the daily tasks and events.

To begin with, he feels the city as a bitter-sweet place, rested, in which the hours and the centuries elapse watching the human beings pass by intent on their daily chores.

This urban whole is presided over by two towers and a mass of houses clustered around them, under their protection. And he adds:

Lo mismo son tus pueblos: sobre el eje

de la torre, las casas compactadas.

This vision coincides with the schematic representation of the city of Palencia in a painting by Fernando Zamora, which had greatly impressed him. For this reason he says in a poem which he dedicates to the painter:

... Como el río Carrión vamos dejando

anécdotas y torres sobre el agua

de esta Palencia de silencio y piedra

y ternura jamás imaginada,

reducida a unas casas y a dos torres

-síntesis pura de ardua pincelada-,

al paso inexorable de los siglos

y a una media docena de palabras:

Palencia en cuatro planos

y, sin embargo, entera en cuerpo y alma.

The tender meeting with daily life invades us upon listening to the early morning sound of a cart that that used to come to the city in the cold early hours of winter mornings. Its monotonous clatter, finely evoked in the sharp rhymes of the hendecasyllabic pairs, corresponds with the somnolent awakening of the poet:

Cada mañana casi en vuelo,

como un preciado carillón,

escucho el carro del lechero

ir salpicando su canción.

Luego me duermo, sigue el viento

entre la niebla del balcón

entretejiendo olas y sueños

con la caricia de su voz.

Cuando despierto, nunca entiendo

el laberinto del reloj.

Walks along the riverbank lead to meditations on human fugacity and the eternal return of life cycles in the nature that surrounds him:

Paseamos del brazo yo y mi sombra

bajo impasibles chopos centinelas

remachando los clavos de tu puente

con el eco tenaz de nuestras botas

por ver si conseguimos por lo menos

acelerar el ritmo de las penas.

(...) Tiembla sobre el agua la alameda

y algunas piedras de musgosos siglos

-la Catedral con su honda geometría

labrada a contrapunto con paciencia

y el viejo Puentecillas, cuya historia

conmueve a la ciudad hasta los tuétanos-

entre el ir y venir de los camiones

y los turismos de veloz carrera.

Embelesados, los enamorados

desgranan junto al agua amor y besos

(...) y vuelven del paseo solitarios

viejos cansados de arrugadas caras,

mientras tu corazón y el mío vuelan

a toda vela hacia profundos mares.

The places mentioned have as their reference point the river and their proximities on one side or another. We enjoy the walk beneath the poplars, the freshness of the water and the images of buildings reflected in it. He emphasises the Cathedral, Puentecillas with its power of evocation, and the Puente Mayor, a place of heavy traffic in those years. The by-pass had not yet been built and in summer there was heavy congestion to cross the city, due to the many emigrants who came to spend their holidays with their cars full of family members and possessions.

He contrasts the peace of the pedestrian in the evening in such idyllic locations, enjoying the beauty of the surroundings, with the bustle and impatience of the drivers waiting in long queues to leave the city via the León highway or vice versa.

At the same time a jolt is perceived in the contrast of the bustle of the people with the slow and inexorable flow of the river towards death. His company is shadow, identified with his own death, which he will never be able to banish.

He observes the constructions, since the city has been totally renovated. A crane, like the red leg of a stork, shines in the Barrio de la Puebla neighbourhood, between the streets of Colón and Teniente Velasco, totally remodelled in the nineteen-seventies:

Roja cigüeña, la grúa

eleva al cielo su pata,

mientras gira que te gira

coqueta y enamorada.

He shudders upon seeing uncovered the indoor rooms of the houses in ruins, where other people have suffered discreetly and solved the distressing problems that affected their lives. New generations will inhabit the same spaces with perhaps a very distant memory for those who have preceded them. The poet will quicken his pace to dominate the emotion:

A todo trajinar giran las grúas

en todas direcciones, con urgencia

de ambulancia que trae en los ladrillos

la roja sangre para vidas nuevas.

Hay casi intimidades de quirófano

latiendo bajo capas de pintura.

(...) Y, sin querer, aprieto un poco el paso

volviendo la cabeza hacia otra parte,

mientras piquetas insensibles siguen

derribando a destajo el barrio antiguo.

For years, he takes daily walks of several kilometres and his preferences are focused on contemplating the city silently from Monte El Viejo (the Casa Pequeña) or from the Cristo del Otero. He dedicates a poem to the latter, of which various versions have been published. I consider the most complete version to be that which is included in the book Palencia piedra a piedra(2) which is entitled "Cristo de las palomas". It sees the inside of the image as an immense sacred dovecote, from where the birds disperse throughout the city, spreading peace and love, over the hill and the surroundings. To him will come from faraway lands the emigrants and the people obliged to abandon their place of origin temporarily or definitively.

Federico Carrascal presented an exhibition of dovecotes in the Caja de Ahorros Popular de Valladolid in 1979 in which he accompanied each drawing with the corresponding poem. The idea of the statue-dovecote was shocking, but it is based on the words of the sculptor who explains in his Memorias (3) how the pigeons penetrated the hollows of the eyes to nest inside the head:

Cristo de las palomas: huracanes

de palomas volando contra el viento,

buscando las bodegas de tus ojos

para incubar la paz en tu majuelo,

en el azul remanso de tus manos,

en los hondos nidales de tu pecho...

Cristo de las palomas: cataratas

de palomas en celo sobre el cerro,

sobre los trenes en el alba, sobre

la Huerta de Guadián, sobre Correos,

Las Claras, San Francisco, el Instituto,

La Nava, San Miguel, el Monte El Viejo...

Palomas que han cruzado otras fronteras

vuelven al palomar de tu recuerdo

inundando de besos zureantes

la calcinada arcilla de tus huesos,

tu adusta soledad de piedra-páramo,

la luz embriagada de tu yermo...

Cristo de las palomas: solidario

palomar inviolable del Otero.

He likewise sings to the countryside and the landscape of the province, fields of stubble and wheat contemplated generally from the train on his frequent weekend trips, when he approaches Palencia from his teaching post.

At the end of the 1962-63 academic year he passed the competitive examination to become a secondary school teacher and he worked in various cities before returning to the Jorge Manrique School in 1966.

During these years he wrote the originals of three books: Rueda del girasol, Pirueta blanca and Cancionero de proa. The first two were published in the Rocamador collection in 1964 and 1967 respectively; the third in Gráficas Diario-Día, also in 1967. They all let us feel the longing for Palencia, where his family was, and the most intense was Pirueta blanca, since these 33 poems are dedicated to his small daughter who awaits him with excitement, ready to go out and walk in the city, along the banks of the Carrión, chattering ceaselessly and wanting to know the reasons for everything that surrounds her.

The cold of winter is reflected in many poems: in the poplars of the riverbanks, in the frozen threshing floors or in the pretty description of the station of Palencia where he waited at midnight on Sunday:

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.

Once installed in this city, the serious meditations on death begin, which will give rise to the Trilogía de la muerte (1973). One morning, suddenly, he saw a Christ hanging in the Plaza Mayor, 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.

The adoration begins of the "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... And I will come with them to Castile where the silence burns in the throat".

Silence is an element that Jesús Castañón has lived intensely in Castilla, to the point that he entitled a conference that he gave on his own poetic work Trajectoria y sentido de mi silencio, which he then published as a leaflet in the year 1969 in Gráficas Diario-Día.

Silence as the axis of his poetry was indicated by J. P. Howell in his work La visión poética de Jesús Castañón (4) and by José María Fernández Nieto(5), 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.

Jesús Castañón finds in the silence of the Castilian countryside a resonator of grandeurs and deep solitudes of the human being. This is the sense of the title of his last book Tierra de lontananzas, published a month before his death.

Not only the religiousness of these people, but their spirit of work and struggle against adversity is patent in the poems that evoke the emigrants, the seasonal workers (or "agosteros"), or those who suffer injustice owing to extreme poverty:

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.

And, faced with the abandonment of the villages in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, 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.

Finally, the poet sets his gaze on the Castilian woman in general and the woman of Palencia in particular. For the Castilian he lingers on the contrasting qualities, sometimes difficult to reconcile, such as love and sweetness, together with sufficient energy for command and the thrust of hard work; deep religiousness and hopeful acceptance of the bitter trance caused by the absence of her children who have dispersed around the world, beside the grace and composure that she maintains, deeply rooted in her lineage and in her family:

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.

Clavada al corazón y a la garganta

con el dolor del surco y de la espuela;

mujer profunda, nunca te derramas

inútilmente entre los secos cardos.

Fiel a tu esencia, sigues inundando

con tu oloroso vino las bodegas,

mientras que tu oración remonta el cielo

como un halcón en todas direcciones,

como una flecha en busca de tus hijos

aventados por todas las fronteras.

Y tu gracia total, imperceptible

acaso en la distancia y en la sombra,

está tostada al sol bajo las hoces,

curtida en el amor de tu honda estirpe.

The "Romance de las madres palentinas" was read at the Teatro Principal on the occasion of the fiestas of San Antolín in 1975. The version published to date is reduced. The original was read again at the II Memorial de Poetas Palentinos organised by the Club de Amigos de Alemania in November 1993.

Jesús Castañón has submerged himself in the realities of his surroundings and has lucidly programmed his working life in favour of others. He has always maintained a welcoming and reverent attitude towards the land and people of Palencia, which has been affectionately corresponded. A good-natured look causes him to situate them in a context of historical resonance, with the little houses clustered around the tower - castle or church - at the foot of a hill or a low ridge, and they are serious, thoughtful people, who meditate on the deep meaning of life and the possibilities for improvement that each moment can offer them.

The poet penetrates the land where he lives and his work is the product of his intimacy and feelings.

__________

Notes

(1) LÓPEZ QUINTÁS, Alfonso: Análisis estético de obras literarias. Madrid, Narcea S.A. de Ediciones, 1981, págs 17 y 35-36.

(2) Palencia piedra a piedra. Recopilación, introducción y notas de Jesús Castañón. Palencia, Caja de Ahorros y Monte de Piedad, 1983, pág. 313.

(3) MACHO, Victorio: Memorias. Madrid. G. del Toro, editor, 1972, pág. 140.

(4) HOWELL, Julia Patricia : La visión poética de Jesús Castañón. The University of Western Ontario. London, Ontario, 1988. (Trabajo presentado para la obtención del grado de Master of Arts). Inédito.

(5) FERNÁNDEZ NIETO, José María: "Castilla en los poetas palentinos de Rocamador". Publicaciones de la Institución Tello Téllez de Meneses, número 44. Excma. Diputación de Palencia, 1980, págs. 416-418.