It is fair to remember that there were other journalists long before us, and that these were the humble beds uploaded to their towers [el primer sistema de comunicación de masas]. In addition, they already said it [casi] All: who was born and who died, who was king and who beggar, how to pray, how to water, when to eat meat or fish, when to flee from fire, if the wolf came, if it was a party or work day … [Et tout le reste est littérature].
That is why I propose here a game … I will divide the journalistic voice of the text into two hypothetical voices or bells. One, the running text, will be the biggest bell [La Javiera]. The brackets represent secondary voice, a smaller bell [el golpe de esquilón de La Radita]. United form the complete melody that is the report.
I put a name not for vanity, but because it is the custom [no hay campana sin apodo]. During the repique [solo un toque divulgativo] There will be a dialogue, as the real bells do in the bells. One will support the other, one says [y la otra añade o concreta].
Two voices and two touches. One cheerful, another sad, one by dead and one to party [como la vida misma]. And a bell tower [esta revista]. And what do you hear, who are you who are, then the landscape paper touches you [de campo de cebada y cielo azul, de plazoleta con palomas y niños, serás la tierra húmeda dispuesta a ser labrada por tañidos…].
The bell of our first story sounds … [¡Ding! ¡Ding! ¡Ding!] It happened in Mondoñedo, Galician municipality with just over three thousand inhabitants. [Galicia interior]. For us, however, it will never be Mondoñedo anymore: it is Hope Espere [llaman hum a la última nota de una campana, la octava inferior que oyes diluirse como un azucarillo en los líquidos del oído cuando cesa la reverberación en los labios de cobre…].
It happened there because it is one of the places where tradition never died [tradición viene del latín traditio y significa ‘entrega’]. It is the only cathedral in Spain that was never electrified [nada de motores y sonidos autómatas]. A resistance zone. A place to save centuries.
Since the Middle Ages there has been at least one bell working in the cathedral with its manual touch [maña y fuerza]. Daily touches have been lost, it’s true [como el de ánimas, el ruego por los difuntos al anochecer]but the golden chain of teacher has been preserved.
The bronze tongue was never silenced. They did not bring modern engines from Germany with automated melodies, already marked, other than the natives of the place, as happened in the Basilica of the Pilar de Zaragoza, which, after the change, when the old men heard it for the first time, they realized that the new bell instead of a party was playing them dead … [un presagio].
There was no hecatombe to the future God [siempre hambriento de novedad]. The bells of Mondoñedo keep talking. It survives that language of “expressive and changing” tañidos, which said delibes. A communication code persists that in 2022 [A rebato, ¡ding, ding, ding!] It was declared Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO to avoid its extinction.
Let’s go with the first promised touch … it’s cheerful [un toque de fiesta]. The stranger appeared in the Plaza de Mondoñedo, at the foot of the tower. I would be eighty -five years old. He was looking for Paula, told who wanted to listen. I wanted to see her [buscaba un andrógino, una caricia de metal, un sueño alquímico…]. Chance will make the man who best knows Paula [el hombre que durante decenios le ha acariciado el lomo]. The woman will tell her that she is there for her deceased mother, who had been a teacher in Mondoñedo many years ago. She had spoken a lot about Paula, and that’s why she wants [necesita] know her [es imposible saber y desplegar aquí los deseos ocultos, solo podemos intuir el tapiz emocional, la fuerza que impulsó a esta mujer en el final de su vida a ese viaje en busca del raro grial, el deseo de recuperar la raíz que te arrancan, cuando se te desgarra el pecho en la hora justa en que pierdes a tu madre o padre, y el universo entero toca a difunto…].
The man [que es bueno y generoso] invites you to go to the tower, because to meet To Paula [en galego] You have to ascend to heaven. She doesn’t doubt it [subirá escaleras, cruzará pasillos medievales]. Already up, in the bell tower, Valentín Insua, one of the last campaign, who has learned the trade [oficio amor] As a father and uncles, he makes the presentation. He says: This is To Paulaand shows the creature as if it were a daughter. Paula de la Asunción. Mondoñedo’s voice. [Una giganta.]
It is a bell forged in 1500, in unknown sand ovens, the oldest in active Galicia. It was forged by the last alchemists when metals were still mysterious. Huge is the mouth [cabe una persona en la copa invertida]. It was said in the town: “To Paula, Co Seu Badal, Hidden in Portugal” The Badal or Badajo looks like the testicles of a celestial bull. A 57 -centimeter scar travels through it [ha sido refundida varias veces, la última en 1885].
To Paula There are 2,500 kilos of love to God and Eva’s belly, and then Insua uses the body [tiene que saltar como el viejo ballenero] And it sounds it. And what if it sounds … [igual que en el primer día del siglo XVI, la misma nota de fiesta]; It sounds like that also listened to that teacher of Mondoñedo who could never forget her. To Paulalike every bell, he has a strange power: it is a medium of time … the woman opens her chest [la vibración penetrándola]and finally cries in the bell tower.
Mother and daughter have finally heard the sound, at different times, but in unique eternity [el tiempo es la imagen móvil de lo eterno, según Platón]; as a caress between two bodies that can no longer hug in the matter, but in the mystery of androgynous notes … [Venía buscando y encontró la magia].
Second touch [Este es triste]. Mondoñedo is deserted [como en las películas de zombis]. Insua is alone in the tower. In the streets that contemplates from the heights there is no soul to play. Only death seems to be around alleys, contempt for the quicios … the bell whisper: “Ben, we are facing” He says it in Galego [siempre les habla en la lengua materna]and he does it in a manner, he is not that death also listens and climbs through the cala stairs. The year is 2020, we are at the worst of Covid. There is touch touch [aunque esta vez no se usó una campana para ordenarlo, sino el televisor]. It is again an enclaustrated, dark, medieval, and Insua world will use the old touch that he believed banished: the touch to pests. He never thought he would have to use it, although he knew that in the cathedral there was a bell forged centuries ago with this purpose [las campanas, como los seres humanos, tienen un dharma, que dirían en el Ganges, una razón celeste].
The truth is that this has a name of matadiablos: Jacoba María de la Concepción. But Insua, like the rest of the neighbors, calls her prima. Will work which shaman playing the drum. He wants to thank the toilets for his effort. And it will be the old touch, and will perceive that this act, like the instrument that hits, transcends the centuries. Others interpreted before him the role in the cosmic theater [La peste, el cólera, la gripe…]: The same bell while the walls close and men and women lower their voice so that they do not listen to death …
“Paula is the feeling of Mondoñedo and for me it is everything, although I have to confess that lately I prefer another bell called Ronda Rosenda María Natividad, but I call her round,” says Insua. [Ay, pillín] Each bell has its favorite. “My brother -in -law is now with Paula,” he adds. Is there a certain mystique with the bell? “Everything is a connection, it’s like the radio of a lifetime,” he adds. “And they are still here for what people need.”
These have been the promised touches. The Javiera is exhausted. [La Radita no repica de noche a perdidos]. I just hope whoever heard would feel the emotion. “The bells convey the emotions, and the belltop must feel what it touches to transmit it,” explains Antonio Ballesteros, president of the Zamoran campaign association. The stories of campaignos who cry alone in the tower are not rare while touching a neighbor.
The bells became language in late antiquity, in churches of the Roman region of Campania [de ahí su nombre]. But the medievo was the consecration. At first square, then which Roman glasses [de tono bronco]and later, stylized and gothic [tono más alegre]They organized life and death in Christian kingdoms [Mahoma concluyó que eran música del Diablo]. They marked social, ecclesiastical and civil rites. The parties and funerals. The estates and social classes [por eso fueron odiadas por liberales y anarquistas]. They gave the time in the world without clock, where the night was as black as the batter of the bat and the only exact hour was the noon [la hora sin sombra]. They were also the last redoubt of magic, the bells scared away [y aún lo hacen] Hail They sing to the black cloud: “(de) Ten-te / nu-blao / do not come / tan-cargaó / ten-te / you / Que-Code / more-what-tú.” Mass touches then represented only 5 % of those made, and today they cover almost all.
“Everything was framed in a series of touches, which had religious connotations, of course, like all the traditional life, where the civil and religious did not separate, it was a dough,” explains the anthropologist and bell in Spain and America). “With anything that happened in the town, the bell played,” says Ballesteros. It was the journalist Avant la Lettrethe first to which the event that should be transmitted in the Code of Tañidos was reported.
They used an ingenious system based on categories and agglutination [cada toque, según la serie y el número de repeticiones, el tipo de campana, volteo o no, etc., representaba un concepto que se sumaba a otros, como si fuera un jeroglífico audible]. “And so, more or less, you knew what or who was treated,” says Llop and Bayo. I could announce a meeting, a difficult birth, a wedding, the agony of a patient …
Each town had their own language that only their neighbors understood, although the regions presented semantic nearby, as if they were dialects. In Mexico, for example, it is still played in the Extremaduran style [pues de ahí fueron los conquistadores]. This means that the same touch could be sad in one place and in another cheerful [si bien es cierto que los toques alegres suelen ser rápidos y los tristes lúgubres].
They played both men and women [en Jaca, por ejemplo, eran campaneras por herencia matrilineal]. And many loved them, so much that even under the Alzheimer’s blade there are still people who identify them if they listen to them on the television of the residence [¡É Paula, é A Paula..!].
In the last century, from the sixties, many campaign were sacrificed “for a misunderstood modernity,” says Llop I Bayo. In the eighties, he made the last interviews with the oldest, old already, ignored people, “the last sardine of the dish” [según le decían]people who never had social recognition. You should read, however, his testimony [puedes hacerlo en esa maravillosa enciclopedia digital que es campaners.com]. There is so much sweetness when they talk about their gigantas [“¡Cuánto las he querido…!”]. They were victims of rites and new time merchants [ese instrumento del Diablo que llamas el móvil]. Something emasculated many of the gigantas and electrocuted copper lips. Something silenced bells [hoy perezosos lupanares de cigüeñas] While Spain emptied its entrails.
The resistant campaign today have some Quixotes. And they continue to suffer “bell fever” [en palabras de Lorenzo, el último de Huesca, ya fallecido, y a quien entrevistó Llop i Bayo]. A fever in force in different countries. When UNESCO was claimed to catalog the manual touch as a good of all, a claimed action was made in which more than a thousand bells from all over Europe sounded [solo el cielo comprendió la totalidad de este espectáculo].
It is impossible to determine if the copper tongue, the manual touch, is in extinction or reborn after a difficult century. In certain areas we observe resistance, new generations arranged to relay, as in Galicia, and also in Zamora, where meetings are held since 1977. There is a school of campaign with boys and girls, and a real effort to make them known thanks to a portable bell tower [400 kilos de peso] that moves the association throughout the province. In other places, it seems that there is a youth resurgence, with very young campaign that fill social networks with their touches, as in the Valencian Community [si bien Llop i Bayo discute si de verdad esto es una continuación o solo un divertimento]. “It is a fascinating world that four fossils remain, and where some of these fossils try to be alive and others have nothing to do with tradition,” says the anthropologist. “I think he will persist, here we have a crack 18 years old that already touches in many parishes, and I hope to have successor in the cathedral, my brother -in -law, who is now with the Paula, who is still the favorite of the neighbors, ”says Insua.
We have what their lovers said. [“Mis amigas, las campanas, no vociferan: cantan”, dejó dicho Lorenzo; hoy en Huesca está todo automatizado y, si se tiene que hacer algo especial, se contrata a unos campaneros de Valencia; en la cercana ermita de Salas es el viento quien las toca de vez en cuando, como si fuera el espíritu sonámbulo de alguien que las amó]. We have new neighbors who sometimes denounce their ‘noise’ and silence them by law. We have new machines that yearn for power [cuentan tus pasos, te despiertan al alba, te ordenan ir a trabajar…]. And a new millennium [tal vez] against. “The ancients had another way to perceive time and space,” says Llop I Bayo. “If you asked them when you touch, they replied that when it dawns. And if you told them … And what time is it? They stared at you as saying: Are you asshole? ”
The last campaign, like the radio announcer at midnight, wonder if someone will be listening to them. They wonder if the century is on its side. If they are fossils with future [¡esperemos!]. If they are still servants of the tower [¡Gárgolas sensibles! ¡Quasimodos del último dong!]. If Quijotes will continue to be tempered the nerves of time, clinging to the beards of the Cronos very [¡Dong!].
#Ding #Dong #speakers #bronze #languages
