Toledo: burying the Count of Orgaz in the Casa del Greco

I could say, paraphrasing Hemingway though substantially changing the setting, the plot and the city that Toledo, like any other city, own or foreign that still retains much of the glory of its ancient historical and cultural heritage -which continues to be , in the background, the closest thing to a miracle I know-, constitutes -look from any angle- a two-sided coin, in which, after all, anyone can receive great joy or great disappointment. It is not a criticism, at least in its destructive sense, as we usually think and pretend to be, always saving those weak boundaries that delimit the reality of dreaming, a constructive argument, which should not limit or pretend to undermine, at all, a glory certainly deserved.

Eminently splendid city, in terms of History and Heritage, it is not surprising that Toledo makes available to tourists and visitors a wide range of cultural activities, whose exploitation, legitimate, would be more lacking, contributes to enrich such a juicy coffers in and of itself , that could be compared, without exaggerating, with the legendary riches that the galleons that arrived to Seville from the New World brought in their cellars. Based on this, it is understood that part of this wealth is used or has been used to rehabilitate and provide generous protection and security measures, to the best of this inestimable heritage, including, as it could not be otherwise, the house where that 'sailor of the twilights' resided-as a private title, I have a good employee to call Domenico Teotocopuli, El Greco-where one of his most brilliant and recommended works is conserved: the burial of the Count of Orgaz. In fact, and here is the criticism, it is not understood that this wonderful canvas is the only thing that one has the right to see, upon payment of an entrance - eye, not to photograph, not even without a flash - of such a sanctity. Sanctórum of History and Art. So when you leave such a place, regardless of the feeling that you lose a good part of intimate history, which affects proportionally to that shadow of voyeur that accompanies us all, whether we recognize it or not, you leave with the feeling of having transformed in occasional lacrimae mother for a few moments, the necessary time that has passed, it could well be said, attending a funeral.

There will be those who, to enhance their self-esteem, think, after all, that for a psychological issue close to narcissism, they have had the opportunity to attend the burial of a great man from Spain, imagining himself within a select group of mourned gentlemen who shine in their chest the cross of Santiago, to the detriment of the cross of other military cavalry orders, whose actions were eminently relevant in the recovery of a country that nowadays waters on all four sides. It could be the case, likewise, that by observing the scene next to the most beautiful of an Ecclessia anchored on the highest point of power, he feels chosen for glory, congratulating himself with the thought that the heavens open exclusively for those who exhaled their last breath in an odor of greatness, not necessarily of holiness. And you may think, for a moment, that the twenty-four earthly characters who come to return the dust to dust, no matter how noble the spirit that inhabited it, would represent the honorable twenty-four Elders of the Apocalypse, whose presence was remarkably outstanding in many. Romanesque tympanums.

Even going further, congratulated with the thought that the imagination, like the poetry prophesied by Alberti, is a weapon loaded with the future, perhaps it is done on the possibility that El Greco, that after all and like all artists, resorted to the tutorials of Santiago de la Vorágine, in search of a sacred symbolism, whose mud, after all, came from previous muds, also got wet in them. Maybe so, raise yourself suspiciously, fixing your attention on those good-natured skies that anyone would think that they just gave birth to a Vesica Pisces in the middle of a black hole, why the artist of the mourning figure - would go too far, propose a comparison between this and our universal Don Quixote? - replaced the figure of the inseparable companion Virgine et Calvarium, that is, the Evagelista, by that other unfolding of the Roman god of the two faces, Janus, who is Saint John the Baptist, patron of the solstice by summer and by default, heir of Beltaine or the Celtic bonfires that commemorate such a significant event. In short, speculation about a man, a house, a burial and a Toledo, despite the 'dimes and diretes', no doubt that continues to be magical.