A draft blows through the field of dry, golden wheat. The grains form rattles of vellum. The stalks are bent under the weight of the ear, each wheat plant forming a cricket's leg. The entire field is a raft of golden wedges, buried with their legs sticking out.
I went up to Romanyà to pay tribute to Garreta. It fits me perfectly that, apparently, he had the inspiration ofJuneHere, and during the harvest. There's no better observant musician than Garreta. He came for the harvest. He stored in a sardana the endless experience of June in the Aro Valley, presided over by the Gavarres.
Near the village, so that the bell tower feels as if it were in the church itself, there is a large, circular, and perfectly preserved threshing floor without a farmhouse, with every adobe tile in place and a low wall a foot high running along the edge. Before me, I can see the sea of Palamós, and, if I turn around, the plain of La Selva. A few meters from the threshing floor, blessing it, there is a modernist stone cross, its trunk taller than those of the trees. On the capital below the cross are the four bars, as if taken from the four arms of the cross above, which are also the four spokes of the great wheel of the threshing floor. Between the wheat and the cross, between earth and sky, this threshing floor welcomes me.
Sitting on the threshing floor, I don't need to rememberJuneTo feel the joy of the harvest, the whistle of the scythes, and the sound of the freshly cut ears of grain falling. As a child, I could still see the black scythe wielded by a peasant friend, as precise and light as the wings of the swallows that now glide and brush their bellies over the wheat fields next to the threshing floor. They search for insects; it's full: locusts and crickets, butterflies and flies, ladybugs, ants, bees, dragonflies.
In the 1930s,JuneIt was almost declared the national anthem. We would have gained in innovation and enthusiasm. The warm breath of earth and fennel passes through the ears of wheat again, making gold bracelets and earrings ring. But for me, the wheat field is the metal of the wind instruments of this sardana, which is the vessel for the air that passes over the bright, blue sea of June and climbs the Gavarres through the cork forest, which brushes against ancient dolmens, is perfumed by the ciphers and flowers, the chirping of birds and the delicate buzzing of insects, which ripples and repollinates the wheat fields and ends in this threshing floor, where Garreta takes mental notes to transform them into the best sardana ever written.
