Leaonard Cohen’s death was announced via Facebook on the 11th
of November 2016 so we played his Greatest Hits CD a number of times, saddened,
yet comforted by the fact that there are many more Cohen songs out there that
we have still to hear: songs like ‘Goodbye Marianne’ and ‘Everybody Knows’ will
gradually imprint themselves on our receptive brains as he touches our
imperfect bodies with his mind.
Darkness had fallen in our Spanish village of La Fresneda as
we listened to the songs we loved and, as Allelujah, the last track on the album, played
we heard monastic chanting in the background. Margaret threw open the window
despite the chilly evening and the sad and moving strains of the monks blended
with the rising crescendo of Cohen’s most famous song.
“I want to see if we know who’s died,” she said leaning out
into night.
This, of course, was nothing to do with Leonard – the whole
world knew that his free spirit had slipped away. No, this was to be a local announcement
from the town hall of our village. La Fresneda, like almost all Spanish
villages, is laced with loudspeakers all linked to a microphone at the
village’s control centre: the system is called the pregon and the chanting
monks preface news of a death dolefully delivered announcement as their voices
fade away. But Margaret, I noted without surprise, did not recognise the name
of the dead person. Interestingly, this
is the fourth death since we arrived six weeks ago. So what’s going on? It’s
quite simple, the villagers are dying of old age. I can only guess at the
average age here, but sufficient to say that it must be in excess of fifty and
the replacement rate, given Spain’s low fertility and continuing drift to the
cities, is well below that needed to sustain the population.
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| Our Street |
La Fresneda has a street called Calle Fantasma, Ghost
Street, and it is gradually becoming a village of ghosts. This morning I
completed a little survey of our own street, Santa Agueda. It has thirty-one
houses in total arraigned in two terraces on each side of the road. The houses
are tall and thin and the street is short and narrow. Of those thirty-five,
five are wrecks supported mainly by their neighbours. One of the wrecks is
occupied by a fierce dog. Two of the houses I know to be rented, though the one
next to us, we are glad to say, is currently empty. One house is currently
being renovated, just four are permanently occupied, and the remaining nineteen
are occasionally occupied, mostly at fiesta times only and mostly by people
from Barcelona who have inherited their houses from family. We currently live
in our house for nearly half the year and are therefore more permanent that
most.
In a way this is a sorry tale. My neighbours and friends in
the street above us are in a sorrier state. They tell me that only two of the
houses in their street are occupied -
the other by Vicente, the current proprietor of the old bar in the main square.
But everything is relative. Relative to England this is an incredible tale. Relative
to rural Spain our village is quite lively. There are children and there is a
school. There are two bars, two restaurants, two grocery shops, two butchers, a
bread shop and many visitors – it is a beautiful place.
Is La Fresneda dying? In a way it certainly is. Looking back
on our years here we realise that most, though by no means all, of the people
we know are from the older generation. Many of them were touched either
directly or indirectly by the civil war in Spain. They remember well the heavy
hand of Franco and the sudden transition to a liberal democratic state. We like
them. They talk to us, they are interested in us and we in them. They are
country folk, they give us gifts of tomatoes and more. The younger generation
are more metropolitan. With a few exceptions they do not see their future as
olive growers or olive growers’ wives. They have been exposed to a wider world
and want to be part of it.
It is often said that a Spaniard’s thoughts and action are
ruled by family and then village. Affairs of state are secondary and relatively
unimportant. For many that is changing, for many it has already changed. The
old boys in the bar had neither the opportunity, nor the inclination to go to
university and to the big city: the village was there world, and their
ambitions lay in growing olives, almonds and vegetables for the table.
Similarly the girls aspired to marry a good provider rather than following a
career. When we first came to the village just sixteen years ago there were a
few mules and horses working the fields, and men carrying firewood on
their backs. Now there are machines that shake the olives from the trees and
one of the villagers owns a JCB, a tractor, a number of motorbikes and, I
think, a modern vibrating road roller!
So, once again, is our village dying? Well we all are bit by
bit, aren’t we? To actually die a village must lose all of its inhabitants, and
in Spain that does happen. However, it is not likely to occur in La Fresneda. Instead of dying, it is changing.
More tourist come to absorb the beauty and history of the place, the number of
events are on the increase; not just fiestas but fairs on various themes like
the antiques fair which gets bigger each year. The number of bars has doubled
(now two) and with that the amount of outside seating in the main plaza is much
greater. There is now a very successful camp site nearby, a swish hotel and
cheaper inn.
So, like Leonard Cohen’s music, La Fresneda will go on and
on. But the village will never again be the place we were so delighted to
discover just sixteen years ago.
