Jesús Torbado and Manuel Leguineche tell in Los moles that the writer Jesús Izcaray traveled to Prague in 1960 with the idea of meeting with Jesús Montero . This had been just over 20 years since the end of the Civil War sandwiched in the kitchen cupboard of an old girlfriend in Sada, A Coruña. Very close to Meirás' pazo. Member of the Communist Party, his companions organized his escape. There, in the Czech capital, he was recovering from all the horror suffered when he met Izcaray. After hearing the story of silence and loneliness, the writer could barely write anything. He was so disgusted by the fear of that man who was paralyzed. It was that, it was panic. The infinite trench , the film by Jon Garaño, Aitor Arregi and José Mari Goenaga that opens next Friday and was made with the screenplay and direction awards in the last edition of the San Sebastian Festival, starts at the same point. The filmmakers also, in their own way, traveled to a strange place that oblivion and forgetfulness have covered with mystery. And shame. And they too were paralyzed.
The film tells the life of a man who, in reality, is a thousand. Olmo Figueredo , producer, and José Mari Goenaga, screenwriter, found themselves one day ahead of the story of Manuel Cortés, probably the most famous of all the moles that saw our fratricidal war. Its existence is counted by triple item both in the book cited and in another signed by Ronald Faser (Escondido) and even in the 2011 documentary 30 years of darkness by Manuel H. Martín. In front of the life of the mayor of Mijas, both exchanged impressions and astonishment. And from there arose the possibility of concentrating the wounds of all of them in a single character. And that is Higinio, the name of the protagonist embodied by Antonio de la Torre.
In his besieged body the history of the one of Mijas that was 32 years locked up and that when he finally left thanks to the amnesty of 1969 was surprised he was surprised «of the affection of his native land» , as the ABC stated punctually. There is also the life of Saturnino de Lucas, the mayor of Mudrián, for which they came to offer 60,000 pesetas of the time. The news of his release barely advanced a few months before his death. In April he saw the light outside the attic where he took refuge from the hatred of others for 33 years and in December he died exhausted and ashamed of a life that was no longer his own. Not from anyone. The latter is a pattern that is repeated with an insistence close to the nightmare. Like him, the canary and communist Pedro Nolasco Perdomo Pérez left the three-square-meter hole without ventilation in which he spent three decades, but he left sick and blind. While he resisted he could with everything and even survived a rare disease that left him without memory. But once outside, he could no longer.
The producer says that the mole, the name they institutionalized for these "living with a present body" Torbado and Leguineche, adjusts to the condition of these men with sinister precision. Like those placental mammals, men went blind and even forgetful. Who knows if they are not the best metaphor for a Spain that at one point decided not to see, not remember, not speak.
In an instant of the film, Higinio, like the socialist Secundino Angulo García, jumps from the truck that takes him to the Alto de la Galca del Valle de Losa, the precise place where his traveling companions were shot . Secundino hid for a whole decade in a hole he dug in the stable of his sheep. And like him, Manuel Corral Ortiz, the so-called blue mole, who escaped from the same firing squad that killed his brother.
The twenty long stories that collects The moles open with that of the brothers Hidalgo, Juan and Manuel. The one of these people from Benaque is a fundamentally sad story. The two remained hidden and without knowing anything about each other. Juan attended countless failed records and of all of them he was an invisible witness of exception. "But luck is above the persecutions and they didn't see me," he commented. And it went on: "Since they couldn't catch me, they took her [his wife] and fed her with sticks." That is also Higinio and is in the trench ... As it is, and it appears on the tape, the neighbor who kept his lustros with his rifle in his hand ready to end the ghost of his obsession. "I had an enemy who was watching all night to see if I came ... and I was already there," concluded Juan.
Manuel Piosa Rosado, nicknamed El Lirio, took refuge in the leftover of his house in Moguer and there remained with the loaded shotgun ready for suicide rather than for defense. When he left, everything sounded like new. I didn't know what television was, I barely heard the radio and the memory I had of cinema was confusing. In his own way, he is also Higinio. And it is because of fear; The deep and dark panic. Izcaray could not and The infinite trench is debated against the exact limit of that intimate disgust that everything can.
The cynicism of victory
Drop down
Since the amnesty enacted in March 1969 (there were others, but they were no more than traps), few newspapers resisted picking up the astonishment of a strange story similar to that of the Japanese Hiroo Onoda , which spent 30 years since the end of the world war waiting on an island at the end of precisely the war. The ' ABC ' 'smiles' at the confession of Eulogio de la Vega (which he describes as a "fool on foot") who, after 28 years of confinement, does not understand how many cars can circulate in the center of Valladolid. And the same for the feat of Pedro Gimeno Espejo who in 30 years had time to read all the Spanish literature. But all. Next to him, Protasio Montalvo Martín, former mayor of Cercedilla, tells how he had to be a housewife cloistered for 38 years and the graphic report dedicated to him seems more like a joke in history. The Falangist newspaper 'Arriba' went further and attributed to the Hidalgo brothers "a silly resistance of 30 years to play hide and seek." The news appears next to the advertisements of rigor ("For a knife of 45 pesetas we give a cutlery") and they do it with the declared and, this one, repugnant condescending cynicism of the victory.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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