Stone and Lime Streets

Foto de Samantha Logan en Unsplash

    I remember the streets I used to pass by wondering what this or that person was doing as I passed by. The streets with a wild aroma that did not know the bustle of a life pressed by the materialism that I see today. The cobbled streets that looked limpid despite the passing of the years that they set foot on them.

    The old «Calvario» Street, the one that leads to the central church of the city ―historic center for some, remnants of the past stained with man for me― was driven with a certain melancholy air among the other surrounding streets. I can still see the orange and lime branches fastened with ropes to the bars of the old houses to receive the Easter festivities. Children running along the sidewalk stumbling without consideration for the adults who, sitting outside their houses, rested their heads on the side of their doors and watched life go by.

    The Calvario’s frontispiece, tinged with ashen smoke, revealed years of layers of lime and torture within its walls. That side street ―sheltered by the side of the baptistery and the row of mud houses that can still be seen and that only count the days to be forgotten―, hid secrets of lives that stepped on those stones turned into new cobblestones over the years. Seeing that street, I can't help but wonder: How many lives did he see pass? How much aroma of Easter bread slipped down that street? And now I remember, perhaps like cracks of that broken mind that at times forgets and then remembers fragments, an open door in that street with the aroma of freshly baked bread coming out onto the outside.

    I remember the boxes full of eggs, bowls of sweet raisins, sacks of sugar that exuded a sweet aroma in the yard, sacks of flour that—when thrown against the cement floor and placed on top of others—spread dry white mist over those who passed by, and jugs full of fresh milk. The oven made anyone who looked into it a few meters away shiver, the heat was suffocating and the logs inside the brick-lined chamber crackled trying to keep the heat for the loaves that were brought in a separate room. The wooden pallets leaned on the large clay vault, blackened perhaps by smoke coming out of his mouth, all of different sizes depending on the amount of bread to be placed in the oven. The scent of yeast in the side room that rose and permeated the roof planks, mixed with the dry essence of the clay of the tiles that covered the roof of that shack.

    Why have these memories come to me? It is not yet Easter and I have already anticipated the date, but they are memories that arrive and that may be lost if they are not put on paper. Surely, whoever is going to read me, will wonder if I had a childhood with a father or grandfather as a baker, but no. I have to admit that my father and grandfather worked, when they were only a few springs old, as bakers for a short time. However, I am fortunate to know the bakers of the old trade. Those men with cheeks flushed like large strawberries, with their hands dyed white from so much kneading, with almost nothing beautiful on their forearms from the burns due to the heat of the wood-burning ovens; with serene looks and seriousness of someone who does not want anything to interrupt the nobility of that trade that, like many of the past, required innate precision to meditate the baking time only to the calculation of a good draughtsman as my grandparents would say.

    However, this is just one of the scenes that come to my mind when I look back at those streets that existed long before me in this city. I always say that I live in a city that, if things happened in reverse ― and the past were forward and not backward ― it would be the town I once saw. People would dwell more on those old sepia photographs powdered on the shelves of the houses that still survive, but no. The life does not go back or stay in the past, but memory does have that rewind button and stops at those tapes that evoke feelings that we can no longer have in the present because we have to live new ones, create new tapes. There are those who have told me, on more than one occasion already, what it is that afflicts my soul, what weighs inside me that I sketch writings plagued by melancholy and sadness, but no one can hear the inner voice that we have in our heads like echoes that reverberate between the walls of bone. My voice is calm, I find serenity between what I write and part of me is that sadness that does not have a specific name and many that I know and do not yet know.

    Remembering is like self-evaluating between the "me" of the past and the "me" of the present, what will come out for the "me" of the future with these constant reflections? I have no idea, but I am sure that I am heard and read, that is enough for me.