2023-08-26 22:06:05
Europe looks to the Mediterranean to contemplate itself. The memory of its turquoise waters sings songs of love, conquest and death with an ancient voice, its islands, scattered like different levels of paradise, once crowned us with vines, covered us with fox fur and led our flesh towards the voluptuous placidity of lazy aphrodites.
We belong to the Mediterranean as one belongs to a mother eternally covered by a veil, we do not need to see her face or remember our dream under her waters to evoke her smell, her belly and her calm voice. The Cyclades were a chorus of winged women who called us to devour us or make love to us, the Peloponnese invited us long ago to undress and join a circle of fauns with whom we could die of pleasure among forests of olive, beech and fig trees, the Aegean He looked to Turkey, to the East, to the home of the first mysteries in which the nights, according to dead songs, housed wild beasts and golden palaces.
In Pilgrims of beauty, by María Belmonte, edited by Acantilado, the author returns to us the salty beat that forms us as a culture and impeccably explains the magic of belonging. We access Homeric time, that of the goddesses, the heroes, the tragic queens, the shepherd poets and the crowns of flowers on tanned skins through travelers from the past who, from northern Europe, moved by love, culture, sex or tuberculosis, they were seduced by the touch of the lyre or that of the aulos, the Apollonian and the Dionysian sharing passage on ships and trains bound for the mythical south.
The most moving story of them all, the first, the one that sets the fabulous and nostalgic tone of the book are Greece and Italy seen through Winckelmann, father of neoclassicism and the romantics, whose life in Rome and death in Trieste is almost the response to a filthy childish prayer from his native Stendal, a pronounced kneeling on the half-rotten pews of a Protestant parish church with black mold as its only goldsmith. Instead of the Christian god, it was Apollo, Dionysus and Thanatos who were listening and dictated a little in the ear of María Belmonte.
We visited Taormina, Capri, Corfu, Florence, Rome, Palermo, Catania, Crete, Corinth along with Winckelmann himself, Wilheim Von Gloeden, Alex Munthe, Lawrence Durrell, DH Lawrence, Norman Lewis and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Each of them in search of a Mediterranean that never existed, one tailored to their desires, longings, poetic fantasies, colonial vices and carnal needs, perhaps this is the only Mediterranean that exists within us, the one that evokes a Arcadia of nymphs, fruit trees and minor gods with whom to frolic in an eternal sunset. That of each one of the souls who feel a literary and historical call and try to accommodate without contemplation, sometimes cruelly, reality to the dream.
María Belmonte’s look is beautiful, learned and fair with all of them, she draws us the outlines of people in love with a legend with whom those of us who have ever imagined how the bracelets of the Mycenaean goddesses would sound when shaken immediately empathize. The extractive component inevitable in such persecutions of myth is not hidden in the text, the shadow of that folkloric and tribal observation of the earth and its inhabitants hovers all the time in the words of the protagonists, whose passion for “the simple people” is used to settle among them as true princes and saviors from the cold. Often that south that heals the lungs and heals the wounds of the Protestant cold with the voluptuousness of classical art and the sun of the olive trees, is also the refuge of a persecuted sexuality. Nothing inspires greater pity and understanding than the need for the flesh and the impulse of love, Aphrodite, Pan and Dionysus act as a kind of hosts who welcome lovers who risked their lives in their countries to their sacred soils of grapes and laurels. The silent pact that protected sexual dissidence in Italy is precisely explained in the text, especially the one with Von Gloeden as the protagonist, and it is contextualized so that we fully understand the liberating power of that dreamy Mediterranean and dithyrambs. In the opinion of readers, the moral aspect of these pilgrimages remains, which sometimes used the poverty of “the simple people” to satisfy themselves.
Even with the colonial component, beauty wins in these stories and it is inevitable to surrender to the zephyr that seems to animate Belmonte’s pen.
Reading Pilgrims of Beauty awakens the need to cling to that wonderful identity of Circes and Antinoos, moves with beautiful descriptions of the landscape and its memory, offers a vast wealth of knowledge and above all amuses with the fantastic anecdotes of travelers. It is a pity that this sea of ours, this sea of seas, is now a cemetery spoiled by the same ones who, a hundred or two hundred years before, loved it to death.
#intimate #Arcadia