A town where the walls scream
I often get calls from people I don't know. They all offer me things I don't need. They grumble and repeat: "Sir, we are calling you because we see that the discount has not been applied to your rate.". "Francisco will pay much less each month". "I tell you that's 40 euros of savings!"It all ends the same: I'm not a knight, I'm a pony, and I want to pay more. More! I want deals where I have to pay more, not less."Sir, what are you saying? Pay more?And in the distance, you can feel heads, neurons, and viscera exploding. The time has come when we must demand to be able to loosen our purses, our strings, our vests. Because we can't even scratch our pockets.
The cashier kept saying there were no bills. Nothing. A piece of a cheap liquor label. My friends wanted to get money out of that place where there supposedly is money: not even your money. Houses. A town made art. A convertible museum has fewer than five hundred inhabitants, and they paint on the planet. Gargar is the Festival of Murals and Rural Art (May 1, 2, 3, 4). Every year and every day. Everyone wants to be Penelles. But Penelles isn't everyone. Penelles is Penelles. The future is the eternal natural mural behind it: the Almenara mountain range. Only those who have the colors and the brushes can paint, but above all, the love for what they step on, what they see, what they feel. Here they brought Pantone from heaven to earth. They downloaded everything in the village. And then they uploaded everything to the planetary cloud. Penelles is a slide. It plunges down with a virolato kaleidoscope. The art of life. Life made art. The journey of childhood is maturity. At the end of the term you will find the Remei castle, the oldest winery in Catalonia. Liquid and spiritual earth around the world. Culture and economy. Economy and culture. Both legs together. Tomorrow slides this way. No need for cashiers: what you need are natural slides.
The children of Penelles studied in the nearby town, Castellserà. When school was out, everyone would go out, pumped up, to fight the horizon. Snacks of laughter, wooden swords with shafts. Insurgents against mustachioed ones: those of Penelles and those of Castellserà. Domènec de Bellmunt explained it in the 1920s. One of the first reporters in Catalonia, also a globetrotter, and son of the other triangle town in the Almenara emotional cluster: Bellmunt d'Urgell. The insurgents of Penelles, fighting like a cat on Earth and a dog on Earth, managed to get school back in the town.
The murals of Penelles are cries on the walls. So that the school doesn't die. So that the town doesn't die. So that life doesn't die. Gargar isn't a global festival: it's the song of the sandgrouse, a partridge. A local bird in danger of extinction. Respect. Let it live. All the money in the world has ruined Barcelona. You have to be able to live at home because this is the world, everyone is here. There's more future in the walls than in an ATM.