We must not romanticize the rural world because if people left in silent disarray in the middle of the last century it was to escape misery. But it is true that today the towns are small homelands in which life flutters without need. … of so many sophistications, and that in our time is a treasure. The Smiths, the American couple who landed in Logroño from Kansas three years ago and who share their impressions of life in La Rioja on social networks, recently explained it unintentionally in this newspaper. In the interview that Inés Martínez did with them, they confessed how the concept of ‘people’ had surprised them; They heard people say that they were going to town on the weekend or that that day was the town festival and their heads exploded with questions: What is this about the town? Do they all talk about the same thing or are they different? Do they have two houses? When I listened to them, they reminded me of the book ‘A hipster in empty Spain’ in which Daniel Gascón humorously recounts the shock that Enrique, the archetype of the young bohemian-bourgeois urban man, suffers when he goes to live at his uncles’ house in a town. from Teruel. At the beginning of the plot there is a revealing passage: Enrique wakes up one morning and asks his aunt to please not go get sheep’s milk for breakfast: «There is something that bothers me about milking the sheep. “It is still a form of sexual harassment.” The Smiths are not going to star in such ridiculous episodes because they are intelligent, they understand how the world works and the United States is a much more rural country than people think, but it is true that there are people like Enrique and the book exposes that cultural clash with success and much grace. In these kinds of scenes written as a diary, a parody is composed and therefore a mirror that returns – even if deformed – the reflection of a part of the reality of Spain: the contrast between two worlds that are interconnected.
The best thing about this game of mirrors are not the jokes but the characters and landscapes that Gascón exposes in the book: the grandparents’ bench, the Thursday market, the wandering around the bars in the square, the fun of the kids or the distant rattle of the mechanical mule; They may seem clichés but they are truths embodied today in every Spanish town.
Although life in rural areas is full of unpleasantness, what Chekhov said is true, that in the countryside there is always a kind of wild freedom. After the pandemic, many families and several friends of mine understood it, just as The Smiths have understood it, because now they also want a town in which their son Quentin, who was already born in La Rioja, will grow up; Now that “having a street” has become so fashionable, it seems that deep down it makes having a town much more enriching.
€2/month for 4 months
#Argentina
