“Do you have ‘October Yellow’?” I asked at the paint store on Hortaleza Street. They didn’t have that exact shade. If you truly know that yellow, you know that Claude Monet’s was a poor substitute (and he knew it too). All you need are ripe, sun-yellow quinces. Slowly remove the fuzz, then chop the hard flesh without peeling, because the most intense aroma is hidden in that yellow skin. Then, slowly cook all that pulp with a third of sugar and a bit of passion fruit, or maracuya as they call it in Brazil (thanks for the recipe, Abraham). Stir it with a wooden spoon until the paste has an appealing golden, almost brown hue. When the paste is cold, fill a pastry shell or filo pastry or brik with it. Fry them and eat them like that, with the pastry crispy and hot, and their heart fresh.
Under the luminous yellow of the poplars, the afternoon smells of damp earth and old wood. It’s time for nuts, chestnuts, acorns, hazelnuts; little treasures that fall to the ground with a dull thud, waiting to be claimed. Animals, attentive, gather what they can. Squirrels burying provisions, wild boars rooting for roots. For them, there are no certainties, only the urgency to fill their stomachs before the cold freezes everything. We, on the other hand, look at the supermarket’s sale calendar and stock up on pasta, coffee, and cans, as if we were preparing for a symbolic winter, a mock hunger.
I was gathering chestnuts to roast later when I heard the crunch of branches. A roe deer emerged into the clearing, hesitating for a moment before disappearing into the ferns. I continued walking, leaving the fallen chestnuts to be part of that network that sustains everything. The roots and fruits, the animals that eat them and the bacteria that turn the remains into nutrients, a microscopic symphony that never stops.
There are seeds that need fire to germinate, others, the toughest, depend on being gnawed or digested. Their shell is a challenge, but when it finally opens, its energy unfolds with force. Perhaps something similar happens to us. Sometimes it’s the heat of a loss, sometimes the slow erosion of routine, that softens our outer layer and reminds us that we are still animals. Creatures of passage, more artificial, yes, but not so far from those squirrels or those wild boars.
Walking in autumn is an exercise in memory. The crunch of dry leaves underfoot, the cold air carrying the smell of wood smoke, everything seems to speak to us of a time when there were no supermarkets or full refrigerators. We were opportunists then, and we still are now, even if our instincts are lined with merino wool and wrapped in plastic bags.
Caught up with all these wild foods, I haven’t mentioned that the guy at the paint store on Hortaleza Street, who knows a lot about autumn yellows and alchemy, offers me the old yellow of goethite, another more intense one of arsenic trisulfide, the classic Naples Yellow based on antimony and lead, and even an old, somewhat hard and dry tube of Chrome Yellow that was the one Monet used. We argue, I tell him that Claude used Cadmium Yellow more, which is a sulfide. He tells me it’s possible. Today, all those poisonous yellows are no longer used, now painters buy bismuth yellow, which is non-toxic, yellows mixed with refined oils that smell of nothing, with which one cannot poison oneself out of love after a walk through the poplar grove and a barely remembered verse by Bécquer.”
Intemperie Editorial
| Season 6. Chapter 24 | Populus |
| Recording date | November 2024 |
| Duration | 2:05 minutes |
| Date of issue | November 20, 2024 |
| Location | Barriopedro, Guadalajara, Castilla la Mancha. España |
| Image and sound | Ernesto Cardoso. |
| Edition | Ernesto Cardoso. |
| Opusculum | Intemperie Editorial |
| Music | Fondos musicales R.I. |
| Song | Chopera |
| Locution | Pilar Martín Martín-Lorente |
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