Mexican Galicia | Some Good Books

Mexican Galicia
by Pedro Belmonte PEBELTOR

Evil triumphs when good men do nothing, and not everything that matters happens in songs. There were people who needed to emigrate to Mexico, leaving that Galicia where today luxury cars and poor retirees coexist, plus broken days and fatal men with the glow of fireflies.

Women who are also tired of filling their empty spaces with things they don’t need and people they don’t like, preferring harsh distances to warm closeness, and the absences that give peace to the presences that take it away. Women who know that every man wears a badge, even them, some symbol of loyalty.

The Galicia where only love seems to be restless, that of the municipality of Avión and neighbouring parishes, where a monotonous and simple life goes on without great worries, and where when one gets old there is not much to be afraid of, jealously accumulating the errors of man, with that elegance of the old world, as if many were wrong in not wanting to continue being part of it. Having once had other lives to live.

The majority having left poor and illiterate from that backward and ruinous Galicia, archaic in its agricultural exploitations, which persisted for too long in the primitive isolation, coming face to face with the incapacity of the Galician countryside, in addition to allowing itself to be defeated and convinced by the establishment of migratory chains, imitating the fortunate or pretending to have had it (fortune), and taking care of the countrymen or kinship as a way of perpetuating itself beyond the seas.

For Galicia, we had a desire for rain, and a lot of it.

Galicia was always the place, wherever I was.

The real Galicia and not that shit they had turned everything into, with tribes of politicians and their loudspeakers weaning everything, without even being able to have two minutes of relative conversation between them, leaving Twitter and that shit aside.

That Galicia was anything but a tourist community. Avión and its councils were scary. It seemed as if there was a reason for everything in that Galicia.

What was clear was that Galicia was more than trapped in that clumsy intensity of the soul full of rents and lives. Because happiness also meant ignoring the world.

No feeling was definitive, neither the beauty nor the fearsome nature of Galicia.

Galicia, where there were no funeral homes or morgues. Avión and its streets, streets that were filled with silence in winter, only to be broken when summer came, if there was nothing to say. In Mexico, nothing had happened either, nor where men still decided whether women should wear a bra or not. Places where the clothes of the dead, if there were any, had to be given away; and where it would be very painful if a daughter did not love her mother.