The Girl Girl's Scream

From the Environmental Ideas Blog, we pay tribute to a pen that told like no one else about the miseries of the rural world and the profound complexity of its women and men, their hardships, the hardness of their lives, but also the greatness of their dreams and dreams to achieve their dignity.

The humble house of Paco “el Bajo” nestled on the side of one of those infinite Extremadura pastures, where the song of the little herrerillos nestled in the eardrums of the ears, lavender flowers covered the retinas of the undergrowth and deer roamed their zeal in the shade of the leafy oaks. A kind of paradise on earth could be thought of. Suddenly, the heartbreaking cry of a girl breaks that apparent and superficial calm and shakes us and shakes to bring us back to the harsh reality, to the hardships of those who live there, to the daily lives of their constant humiliations, their resignation and their lack of opportunities.

Literary realism has always been a powerful means to explore the complexity of the human being and our social reality, challenging preconceived notions and inviting us to reflect on the world around us. Just like John Steinbeck deconstructed the American dream in The Grapes of Wrath, or Scott Fitzgerald woke us up from the hedonism of the happy and crazy 1920s in The Great Gatsby, Miguel Delibes I would also use the girl girl's scream or the traps of Nini To hunt and eat rats, as an allegory to question the great success of developmentalism in the 60s of the last century, telling the world that the economic growth that transformed Spain, driven by industrialization, urbanization and the rise of tourism, was built on the basis of millions of silences, privations, miseries and tragedies.

That is, to a large extent, the master plot of the Delibes universe and its profound narrative humanity. Faced with this transformative change in developmentalism that dehumanized people, swallowed labor, emptied villages and filled railway stations with thousands of forcibly uprooted human beings who, clinging to their square leather suitcases, were looking for a better tomorrow, Delibes suggested that the true value of life is found in the simplicity of the authentic, the love of the family, the roots of our land, solidarity between equals and fascinating and captivating respect for nature.

— Dad, why can't we be happy where we were born?” — I would ask Daniel”The owl” to his father, with a deep lump in his throat, the night before he left his village to go to the city. The question asked by that 11-year-old boy in El Camino (1950), another of the writer's great works, perfectly summarizes that deep emotional fracture when human beings prevent us from being happy in our own living space, surrounded by our loved ones, together with our old friends, with our birds, our streams and our fields. An open, deep and unhealed wound that is still the cause of that emptied Spain and that the honourable Members of Congress have not yet been able to repair.

March 2025, when it is now 15 years since the physical disappearance of one of the great feathers of contemporary narrative, is an ideal time to learn from the moving dignity of Régula, from Pedro's desire to never lose the illusion of being happy, from Daniel's desire to return again and again, and again and again and again to his native village and be filled thousands of times with his sky and soil, or to fascinate us with that passion of Nini to discover and unravel nature, — what is more important, going to school or knowing where golden eagle nests are? — the boy would proudly ask Doña Resu, teaching us, through the naive eyes of a child, that the connection with the earth will be essential to understand our own existence.

And may every March of all the years we have left to live become unrepeatable moments to remember that cry of silent but powerful condemnation about the vulnerability of the weakest and most oppressed, of injustices that, however distant, do not always reach our ears and of never forgetting about the human beings whom great Western progress condemns to live on the periphery of history, making them invisible in the sight of a world that is driven only by interests and that does not want to understand that the future, if not for everyone and everyone, it's not a future.

Recommended reading by Miguel Delibes:

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