Alfredo Maillefert

«Maybe we are saying goodbye, now forever, to the landscape of Michoacan, which has served as the background to the loved evocations of this book*. If it is so, what a deep melancholia not to reflect over, but to leave on paper, as a flash in the memory those mountains, those white clouds, the cities and their old porches and their fresh plazas, the narrow streets with their stone pavement that end on a field, or maybe on a blue lagoon...! If this happens, what do we leave behind here? What can we leave now between the pages as sensitive memories? Maybe the morning song of a rooster, or a white cloud or a flower...?

Yes, let's leave a flower between these pages, as it was in the Romantic time; when a flower was cut. But which? Which can we pick from so many that flatters our memory? A purple bugambilia, one of those that grows and leans on the strong and pinkish stones of the aqueduct -in the old Valladolid- or in the sunny plazas twisting their reins between the fresh ash tree branches? Or a yellow rose that spreads its fragrance over the dusty fences in the Saint Peter woods? Maybe better, a white flower from Saint John, one of those that in the rainy month of June crawls into the rooms, and that always appears soaked in the long and dark rain of the day? Maybe a sunflower, or a poppy, or an azalea from Uruapan? Or a Calla lily, those that grow lonely on the lake side of Patzcuaro? Or maybe we can simply choose one of those little flowers without a name -a weld or a bluing- that grow on the stone walls, eaten by the cattle, or in between the big stones from the Franciscan court yards? Or we can place a rose, a red rose, eternal like a verse from Garcilaso?

No, lets not cut any flower. Lets evoke them, yes all of them, but leave them as and where they are. Don't let our hands abuse their admirable rest, their stillness they should only be disturbed by the hands of a woman when she arranges them or cuts them, by the soft waves of the air, or by the drops of water, that, like diamonds, slip through the softly velvet petals. Lets not abuse their admirable rest. Just leave them free -like the birds, like so many birds, or like the clouds that set there their whiteness over the indigo of the sky, or their slow shadow over the green of the field or over the clean stone paving of the alleys...»

Alfredo Maillefert: Ancla en el Tiempo