BALLAD AND PRAISE TO SAN FRUTOS PAJARERO

 

Under the colossal naves of the most graceful cathedral in Castile (pulcra leonina, dives burgalensis, alta segoviensis; they call her the lady of Gothic cathedrals, the swan song of late Gothic) the violins sob. The alto attacks a single allegro ma non tropo. They edging the basses and it seems to me that every October 25 an angel appears to us dreamers like this servant, sentimental catholic ugly and somewhat older who went up to Segovia to sing the hymn of San Fruto our glorious patron. And the beloved melody that evokes so many memories in the distance of life and memory floats and flutters over the pinnacles of the cathedral of my town, climbs the steeps, jumps to the leapfrog from flying buttress to flying buttress, makes a flying dodge like a swallow on the carpanel from above or begins to play tute with the souls dressed in a surplice in a corner of the triforium. The dead are invited to the party protagonists of this concert there when autumn through the fields of my country wears its last silks and disguises itself in nature in the best colors of the year. God how beautiful!

One thinks that there can be no religion more beautiful than our Catholicism. Perfection is worshiped here. They call that phyllocalia. The cult – and Manolo Vicent was right in your wonderful article on the desecration of our religion that Luther brought first and then the liturgical reform of the last council but I will try to prove, dear Manolo, that you are wrong – it cannot be dry. He has to be subject to the most visceral and intimate reverberations. Christ was a Hellenizing Greek and he must have loved all those things that make an existence worthy. Being born and having lived in the shadow of a cathedral always imprints character. And I was six in this cathedral and whenever I enter under the door of San Frutos, which is our Sarmental, it seems that I am listening to the dear voices of the canons:

-Children in choir - dean Don Fernando Revuelta thundered from the steps of the presbytery.

 The polemicist Don Benedicto went from here to there panting with much flapping of skirts and cloak. He was sweating up to his hood with the runs he was hitting. Where was Don Benedicto going, who was very fat but had plenty of spirit? What all those bats? Añafiles and kettledrums sounded, a custom like in the Middle Ages, and the bishop made the entrance to his headquarters. That bishop there are few left like him, he was the last of his generation, a complete bishop and those of now bishops nothing more. Why pray in the hermitage when one knows the cathedral? Three acolytes dragged their great cape of at least eight meters and the master of ceremonies shouted orders to the organist Don Celso:

-Celso, it's time for the bishop to come.

Every October 25, the children of the earth gather at the altar that keeps the relics of San Frutos to sing the hymn.

The notes climb to the top of the vault between infinite incense puffs. It is the magic of the Eleusinian mysteries. The echo of the voices is lost through the steeps and goes under the wings of the seraph who displays a crystal baton and makes arpeggios with the notes of an ancient melody that we all know by heart: "To the unfaithful good servant who begging without ceasing he obtains eternal goods, etc.” That stanza was embroidered on my friend Marianillo. What happened to him? Would you sing mass?

The 25th is a magical party in Segovia. Of love and happiness, no politics. We honored San Frutos with which the flocks of the malvís goldfinch and golorito arrived because our patron saint is an ecological saint wherever there are. It is a dies fastus that the Latins would say. Nothing to do with 11M or 11S – a new way of cataloging the claws of the beast on the calendar. October 25 is the festival of love and little birds. San Frutos Pajarero arrives when autumn is overdue. The wine in the press, the grain in the barn, the branches of the maternal vine converted into mustelas for our warming, the short days, the new must and the first snows that crown the vertex of the mountains.

The echo of the notes returns by work and grace of one of those wonderful mysteries of orthophony and of the Christus Musicus, the sonorities of this triumphal hymn to this father of the country and to this saint of the earth whose real existence was a nebula but as faith it is to believe in what we did not see, quiet stocks that in my town we are not Lutherans. Santo de casa they say that he does not perform miracles. I think that aphorism is wrong. San Frutos pajarero did quite a few. I remember those visits to his hermitage during my childhood on a hill in an impressive cliff where we would go to see the knife of San Frutos, the cut that hit the living rock faith of Moses on the way to the promised land and the land was opened and the Moors who They were chasing him, the earth swallowed them, and they were all buried in the abyss.