From the heights of the Alhambra, I hear the city roar in the distance on these Christmas days, besieged by hordes of tourists eager to look, to experience, and to consume. All drink from water bottles that will become mountains of plastic; all swallow without pause; all speak into their smartphones and immortalize the moment with photos that immediately turn into waste in the nodes of the networks. Herded behind a guide with a banner or clustered around an immersive spectacle of light and sound advertised as sustainable—when none of this can be sustained, if one gives even a little thought to the limited resources available, to the vulnerable limits of human physical and mental health, or to the indecent margins of the galloping inequality among brothers, unworthy children of Gaia.
The airplanes at the airport, which I can see from here wrapped in toxic clouds, vomit incessantly. The tourist trains, the taxis, the buses loaded with abundant human flesh leave no room for the residents who, through their daily labors, have sustained the city for centuries. All of them growl in frenzied races to reach lunch or dinner at the overcrowded restaurant where more drink than advisable will be consumed, more meat and fish than is fitting, more sugar than is permissible. And the leftovers are thrown into landfills that, already full, overflow down torrents of hunger, along steep slopes climbed by the legions of the world’s hungry.
The city roars in its temples of consumption, in its Nevadas Shopping. Heretical names, for they take in vain the good name of the sacred place: Sierra Nevada, a biosphere reserve, a refuge of silence, of pure air, of fragile blades of grass, of freshly fallen white snows, of balances as natural as they are miraculous, of peace and withdrawal.
Christmas, the fulfilled revenge of the merchants expelled from the temple by the whip of holy wrath wielded by the one said to have been born with nothing.
Will a battlefield roar like this? Is this the thunder of a war?
The city that cradled the Cántico of San Juan, the Immaculates of Alonso Cano, the ideas of Ganivet, the music of Falla, the words of Federico, or the sounds of Morente and Cano—the city of duende and the murmurs of irrigation channels—writhes, wounded. The city where “In the leafy bower of love the nightingales burst forth, / drunk on so much night, on so much melody.” The city of the concave sky that reflects the flowers, while “the gentle breeze curls them with joy.”
Along the Camino del Avellano, the roar gradually fades. The hill of the Sabika, a vertiginous screen, keeps intact the murmur of water, the music of the Darro in its peaceful course along the bank from which the Sacromonte drinks.
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