About eight kilometers away from Almazán, and in the direction of the fields of Gómara and beyond these, to the land of Ágreda and the foothills of the mythical Moncayo, a small town, Partridges, languishes like a cicada warming up under an autumnal sun that, sheltering in the popular allusive refranillo to the summers of San Martin, it is incapable of hiding its suspicion to be carried away by the equinoccial and immutable cycle of the seasons, which foresees a long, freezing and harsh winter.

Supplementing the lack of blackberry watchtower or Christian walls - apparently - its parish church, of Romanesque and summoned origin, as a symbolic pillar, in the figure of San Pedro, rises alone, like Torre de Hercules, on a hill.

Attached to his apse - in whose buttresses the anonymous master, in some subliminal way he wanted to play with the magic of the hexagon - the small cemetery jealously guards the memory of some mourners for whom one day time ceased to exist and that, as I would say Don Antonio Machado, his eyes returned to the earth tired of looking without seeing.

As inexplicable as it may seem, that temporary absence is transformed into a feeling of loneliness, as soon as you put your feet in the town. It is, possibly, that literary calm chicha common to sailor stories, in which the sea, suddenly and on a whim, is transformed into an oil raft, without more animation than the monotony of a swell that barely lifts foam.

This is transformed here into the dust they accompany, also, the pebbles that lift our shoes when walking, while we proceed to unfold through the bounded perimeter of a temple that, surely, suffers the lack - sometimes blessed - of visitors.

Damped by distance, the wind - no doubt in its tired and mature facet, before being reborn as a deer - brings to us the sound of vehicles that, from time to time, travel along the general road, both ways.

Clouds, white as milk and without signs of evil in their gut, break, like evanescent islands, the monotony of a sky whose blue, and in the absence of a better diagnosis, seems to suffer from anemic melancholy.

Despite its nature, of a longevity that probably dates back to the dawn of the thirteenth century, its gallantry is hardly rewarded by a bulrush that, atypical in the province, suggests hands coming from the neighboring land, where the sons of Romulus and Remus they left in the Aqueduct a refined memory of their centuries of domination.

Perhaps, the parish church of San Pedro suffers from a certain lack of refinement that keeps it away from the notoriety of many others; and yet, among its few ornamental details, it manages to convey that genuine sensation that I sometimes turn to, when I affirm that even an artistic style like the Romanesque - sometimes branded as cold, when not boring - can become a Enthusiastic children game.

Playfully interesting, it turns out to see how that elusive muse of enlightenment, flirtatious and ungovernable for more signs, gives her free will the babble sense of interpretation.

There seems to be no doubt about the harpies that decorate the capitals that crown the buttresses of the apse, as well as its symbolic function, which recalls the fragility of that imaginary bridge that separates concepts such as virtue and sin; the plant motifs, which do not proliferate in sufficient numbers to make a particular glossary of the medieval apothecary of the place, but which, nevertheless, follow, even if modestly, the patterns of that folkloric typism that so much abounds in this type of constructions, and that, on the other hand, we find again in the brackets that, in the manner of gargoyles, adorn the ends of the bulrush, like capes specially prepared to receive some visitors, who will surely ask who represented the heads that they are also seen to the side, when the stonecutter worked them and also, here is the interpretive curl, if between the two bearded ones of the ends, a female face offers a small hint of peace.

There is hardly any memory of our visit when, approximately a sigh later, but not before spending a little joke on our gracious Alkaest at the graveyard gate, we left a town where, perhaps by chance, we have not met anyone.

Along the way, outraged without provocation, as appropriate, a canid escorts us. Seconds later, and confused with the dust of the road, we leave it behind.

NOTICE: Originally published on my blog SORIA WAYS TO WALK. Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property. The original entry, where you can verify the authorship of juancar347, can be found at the following address: https://juancar347.blogspot.com/2009/11/perdices.html

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[Martial, latin poet]

Ars vtinam more Animvm qve effingere. Posses pulchrior in ter. Ris nvlla tabella foret.

Arte Ojala pudieras representar. el carácter y el espíritu. No habría sobre la tierra. Imagen más bella

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