We were talking here seven days ago - when it was the middle of winter and there was a minute to go before the heat that has already arrived - about the shocking action of the snow on the sound, how it extinguishes it and sucks it up, eliminating any attempt to echo or reverberation, as if the world had become an airtight room, the walls and ceilings covered with cardboard boxes. Noise bothers us but its absence scares us. A sound emitted that does not return, as if something or someone caught it and accumulated it, who knows with what intention.
The noise of the world orients us like bats, but the silence alerts us and stops us, stiffens us like a meerkat on the prairie of predators. Especially when he bursts into the bustle, making himself heard by silencing us. And this just happened in Madrid. The city is silent. The scandal surrounding regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso and her partner, which points to a plot around the purchase of masks that threatens to spread like a septicemia to health privatization and the millions of public money surrounding these operations since the time of Esperanza Aguirre. "Public-private collaboration", in acceptable language.
But what has been new is the silence. No one putting their hand on fire, no closing ranks of the party, not a single hashtag on the networks of those who should be gossiping about who they say is the victim of an institutional operation of systematic harassment orchestrated from the power. Nothing. A silence broken only by the shouts on WhatsApp of the communication director of the affected person, which became a trend to threaten journalists and the medium, Eldiario.es, which raised the hare of tax embezzlement. And a president who uses the expression "rolls of bills" to talk about money B, with disturbing familiarity. And the silence around.
The aria da capo is a type of baroque composition that unfolds in three beats, three acts like those of any drama: introduction, nudge, denouement. Three times that in contemporary politics tend to be rise, success, fall. The third beat is never written in the score, which only presents the note that gives it its name: da capo, "from the beginning". And it was the singer who solved it. Da capo is therefore a note of memory, which asks the performer to return, to remember who he is, to remember who he was. Who is and who was doesn't seem the same, but it always is.
The parts of the da capo aria are closed with a cauldron, an indication in the score consisting of a point covered by a semicircle, as if it were an umbrella, which warns the performer that there is a silence. Bach is credited with the current use of the cauldron: a note for choral pieces that warns singers that the phrase is ending and they must take a breath before continuing. And that's the lesson: the play goes on. And before it's over, it will remind you of who you were.
