It was a few days before the Night of the Dead, when I received an email from my dear friend Cándido Heras, in which he told me and in fact, he confirmed with some photographs, that the venerable ivy skin was being removed. my memories - in fact, I do not remember having seen it any other way - covers what is now a private property, but that once constituted the monastery, it is said that Templar, of San Polo or Santo Polo, place of passage forced to access the hermitage octagonal plant and raised above a cave -like the ancient sanctuaries dedicated to Apollo, which in turn, many of them made good adage hermestino that what is above is equal to what is below, for they were considered as entrances to the underworld, where Hades-Pluto-Saturn and his wife Persephone reigned-of the Patron Saint of Soria: San Saturio.
And I also remember that, word more word less, I told him that this -whoever was the inductor: whether the Town Hall, the Provincial Council or the owner of the place- seemed to me an authentic attack against that other romantic complement that makes the ancient monastery - that, according to the old chronicles, it had the best vegetable gardens in the city - a place with a very special charm.
And I admit, I say it the way I feel it -as I felt last year, the hooves of the disgusting barbarian tainting another place no less interesting and certainly more charismatic than this, as is the hermitage of San Bartolomé, in the Cañon del Río Lobos - I felt an infinite sadness thinking about how we like to alter what should be pampered as something belonging to the spirit of the place.
I thought, too, of the chaotic possibility that someone might think of incidentally peeling off the golden poplars sitting next to the banks of the Douro, on that walk of Machado's lovers that leads to the hermitage, reducing it to dust and oblivion some crusts that have initial engravings that are names of lovers, figures that are dates. And I remembered the place and the great poets and writers who had surrendered, no doubt, captives of his spell.
But no, I will not say that they were the usual, which of course fascinate me, those who came to my wounded memory, but another, less known and unjustly forgotten, great intellectual and born, for more signs in Logrosán, town of Cáceres . I refer to the one who, giving him the deserved qualification of a magician, gathered, at least, one of the main qualities of his Tarot counterpart: his superhuman creativity. I refer, of course, to Don Mario Roso de Luna.
And to remind him, is to remember, at the same time, that beloved character of his occult novel The Demand of the Holy Grail, Ginés de Lara and Montalbán, of which we are told, precisely, that he was the last Templar of Santo Polo.
Firstborn son of Don Nuño de Lara and Mrs. Mencía de Montalbán - I suppose, of that singular town of Toledo, with its imposing castle from which a good part of the Christian and Templar forces that participated in the famous battle of the Three Kings or of the Navas de Tolosa and in whose neighborhoods there still stands an imposing Visigothic group, the one of Santa María de Melque- through whose blood flowed the most staid Burgos ancestry, which went back to the Counts Laín Calvo, Nuño Rasura and Fernán himself González That one - and I quote Don Mario - old Castilian hero, native of Nájera, born in Soria and disappeared without a trace behind him, in those Sierras de la Demanda - of the demand of the Holy Grail !, disappeared, perhaps , in the lost monastery of Alveinte, that place of what was said that of Templar, what did you do, that Alveinte came? - That east of Burgos, in the most mysterious and least visited area of all Spain, serves as a divide to the Arlanza and to the Arlanzón, tributaries of the Duero, the Oca and the Tirón, tributaries of the Ebro, to the south of the Idúbedos mountains and to the north of those of Neila, Cebollera and Urbión, in that weralic valley of Lara ...
And I also wondered if perhaps such a famous hero did not disappear in that mysterious Sierra de la Demanda, but still lies there, under one of the three funeral steles that still survive from the old cemetery of the monastery, that one, perhaps, on whose obverse is recorded a druid's foot or a five-pointed star. And if so -finita speculae-, would not your spirit feel strange, as you wander through a place from which the magic of the ivy of the familiar monastery that lived in life has disappeared?
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NOTICE: originally posted on my blog SORIA WAY WALK WALKING. Both text, images, and video (with the exception of music, reproduced under a YouTube license) are my exclusive intellectual property. The original entry can be found at the following link: https://juancar347.blogspot.com.es/2015/11/gines-de-lara-el-ultimo-templario-de.html
