Letters from Andorra and Cierzo
I told on social networks that the first time I heard Eloy Fernández Clemente, I was a teenager (because I have also been a teenager) a student at the Institute to be more precise; The professor came to lecture on the history of the Turolense Railroad, one of those projects of dedication in the history of the province that in current times makes you remember that some wear top hats and others wear joteros.
When I listen to a man full of wisdom, I feel on the one hand the immense pleasure of each word, each data, each nuance. On the other hand, the rage of the traditional conformism of this land, of that inability to get up that sometimes -too many- characterizes us, the unconsciousness of how important it is to have communications, windows to the world and above all to aspire to the future, without ambition for the earth there is a future, without a future there is no life, in the end our towns will sing, because of the census of jerks who cannot work for their progress, the farewell in the style of Benasque “those who have people who live and whoever doesn’t, let them fall apart”.
And it is not that Aragón from north to south and Teruel from east to west, is a wasteland in terms of good thinking, quite the contrary, in the avant-garde history of that thought the original moments were lived in Teruel, I already said it ago Some years ago in these same pages, this was where the windows of the struggle for the development of the land of freedom and culture were opened, it was back in the second half of the sixties. Labordeta, Fernández Clemente, Sanchís Sinesterra and, in the 1970s, Ánchel Conte passed through secondary education in Teruel, illustrious examples of what came to be called in thought Aragoneseism as an idea of progress, which should not be confused with “joterismo” that in turn Sometimes it has little to do with the jota as a root and expression, joterismo is a manger, a placement agency and on top of that it has the audacity to stand up in front of a microphone as a loudspeaker of thoughts like those of maestro Eloy Fernández Clemente.
We live in times of cynicism, where having social networks, and a majority party card allows certain satellites to be crowned as “Kings of local/provincial intellect” blushes some data that leaks to public opinion rewriting history at the whim of four enlightened, in which jobs scientific rigor is neither expected nor present, without forgetting certain journalists who make culture a “Chupi” element. In this life you have to differentiate Culture with capital letters from simple spectacle, and above all from performance “cascade style”.
Eloy Fernández Clemente rescued culture as a basic pillar of Aragonese thought, without leaving aside the social context; warned about the railway as an element of progress, looked squarely at the Aragonese reality in its Andalán stages, especially places like the province of Teruel and also the towns of Huesca and Zaragoza, where caciquismo had silenced any free spirit, the reality of What was happening in towns and cities had in this uncensored speaker publication, analyzes that ranged from the state of the nuclei, health, infrastructures to freedom of thought, sexual or religious orientation.
iron generation
There is a generation of iron that goes out, the one that used the war and that gave us food, studies and a life without hardships, there is another generation, the one of letters and poems that grows older, that one gave us thought, understanding to love the land and was a pioneer of struggle, a lot of struggle for identity, for the future, for studies and above all for the truth of history, both the one that makes us proud and the one that shames us. As a society we must collect that legacy, that of that work that Teruel as a province should be proud of, this is the land that gave light, cold and heat to those thoughts and also to artists and art scholars, to the Trullenque, Alegre, Buñuel , Gonzalvo, Chomón, Serrano, Pertegaz, Carbonell, Borrás and a long list that continues to grow.
The train arrived in Teruel late and badly, said Eloy Fernandez Clemente in that first talk he heard as a high school student. I invite you to reflect at the end of your Teruel primer on the railway: It is a story with more shadows than lights, perhaps, but a beautiful story after all, of some ancestors who believed in their future and fought hard for it.