Memory, good memory, should be a premonition of the future rather than a confused repository of pasts, and nothing like the prose of Calzadeño Pedro A. González Moreno as a place and blood to confirm it. Pedro has always preferred, against the Machadian "word in time", the Crespian "time in the word". Years ago, in an ingenious article where he tried to get closer to his poetic work, I wrote something like in his poetry "the memory of the past life always precedes what has been lived", and that to live is "to tell the light that memory detaches ” while caresses and erosions are noted. At other times, there are lengthy barista conversations, we have agreed that living is losing, with slow mist, the aroma of the moments in which we were happy, those in which life is offered to us as a possibility, as an adventure without borders. , that to live is to eat the bet and the joy of the adolescent, youthful dream, to the contention of others, to the dispute of paths without signs (sometimes of wine and roses, at others of burning basalt).
I always believed that the great poet that is Pedro A. González Moreno would be forced to recount with paused precision, beyond what has already been pointed out in many of his poems (read 'The noise of the sap'), the proletarian homeland of his childhood , the landscape of hills of their adolescence, the clothes and readings with which they cross the threshold of the world –always under construction– of adults. We knew we needed to tell each other and tell each other. Put it on paper. He has done it, still young, but without urgency, in 'Against time and oblivion', a volume that Valentín Arteaga has recently presented and that has been edited by Almud, the spirited Castilian-La Mancha publishing house directed by Alfonso González-Calero.
The memoirs, the book, are a model of style and naturalness. The schoolboy and the high school graduate who was the poet, the novelist who writes them now, passes through the streets and hours of Calzada, still today, as if there were no other paradise. A fenced-in paradise where the events of a world, of a late-Francoist country undergoing accelerated change, barely cloud the necessary steps and daring. The year 70, its ten years, of the last century appears continuously through its pages as an equator of conscience, like that crossing the line that goes from the imaginary of childhood to the ferments of early adolescence. And in that leaven boils the word, the taste for reading, the temptation of what is written. There is an ark in the chamber of his house that serves as a saving board, an altar where writing comes to visit him from the age of 13, 14. Together with the evocation of a sleepy Calzada in front of Cerro Convento and Salvatierra, the pages record the emotional corners of childhood: the green kiosk in the square, the stationery of the first pages, the horn of Holy Week, the children's shop of the Calle Ancha, grandparents and houses, the transformation of rural habitats: it is time to go from lavender plants together on the Iron Bridge to the first appliances, on TV like a dream. And still and meanwhile, the cinema, that custom, that dialogue with a strange world as desired as foreign, but always provocative. How well told that contrast of the attachment to the rurality of the Manchego in Lute Spain with the multitude of sparks (from Pink Floyd to Woody Allen) that already dazzled the young people of that time.
The entire book is a chest of affections for the homeland, a Calzada de Calatrava which he never denied or denied, and in which he is known as 'the poet' since he was a child, as he tells us. And the whole book is the story of an anticipation, of knowing that there was a world beyond, a time beyond, for which the doors were ajar and it was necessary to look for cracks, to dare to cross them. For this reader, the clearest and most powerful part of the book is where he narrates his last years of high school as an initiation ceremony: there his first handwritten texts and the magical appearance of a Lettera 22, that Olivetti laptop that he learned so much about later, there the challenge of writing in a very long romance the story of a Cordovan excursion, and, above all, the gift of being a municipal librarian, owner of the bookshelves, at only 16 years old. All this in the same vital space of the first cigarettes, poker and initiation bars. Then, already transferred to Ciudad Real, the illusion of the first prizes and the first collective book –'Hacia la luz'–, of living the first literary atmosphere in the provincial capital before going to Madrid, to what would come.
Extended over the elegant prose with which, often, with such a clear structure as sober and precise adjectives, is exposed, throughout 33 rooms, the expectant truth of a childhood in its exact place and of an adolescence forging fruitful futures. Because that is the role of memory: to establish passable bridges between what we wanted to be and what we perhaps are. That is why, to save a time of change, which is well deserved, to be saviors from the traps of oblivion, Pedro A. González Moreno has written these white sheets of his memory, pages skilfully sprinkled with recovered texts, some of they are unpublished, that return to him and return to us the steps, the instants. Ours owed it. But most of all, he owed her.
