He was what sociologists would call a liberal petty bourgeois , a citizen of a democratic and parliamentary republic. He earned his bread and his freedom by making newspapers and writing articles, and with them he had the illusion of animating the spirit of his countrymen. He never believed in the salutary virtue of great commotions and felt an insurmountable hatred of stupidity and cruelty, because he knew that the only sin that has no forgiveness is sin against intelligence. Today he rests in a grave without a gravestone and without a date , under the black squawking of crows and the routine roar of the airplanes that cross the sky over the cemetery of North Sheen, London, far from the homeland that kept his name in oblivion during half a century because nobody remembered his memory.

His name was Manuel Chaves Nogales, and he presented himself as a simple journalist when a simple journalist could guard alone the always threatened heritage of civilization. That "moral weight" highlighted by Ignacio Peyró , architect from the Cervantes Institute in London of a tribute so necessary that we do not understand how it had not been done so far. Chaves had to testify to the epidemic of Cainism that enraged the poor Celtiberian, whose blood and whose fire he testified as no one still struggling with the unlikely lucidity of a historian. His words, today canonical, had to be rescued first by Abelardo Linares and Andrés Trapiello , who yesterday at the foot of his grave confessed the secret of well-understood historical memory: remember to forget to win peace. "I called Abelardo and told him that in Chaves he had found the vault code of my book." That book was and is the weapons and the letters , which is the work that Abel would write about his brother with a look of peace, of piety and forgiveness, but never of forgetfulness.

The writer and journalist Manuel Chaves Nogales.

Next to Trapiello was Juan Belmonte's great-granddaughter, Tatiana Beca Osborne, paying her respects to the biographer of the legendary matador of Triana. And there was also Antony Jones, grandson of Chaves himself , who carried a volume of A blood and fire as a declaration of intent. The miraculous prologue of that work was read in Spanish and English by the actors Jorge de Juan and Candela Gómez, and the echo of those perfect phrases updated a commitment to the harmony that Spain, once again, urgently needs again. «You see that tomb has no tombstone. He doesn't have it because my grandfather's true gravestone is this one, ”said Antony, patting the cover of the book that contains the exhumed truth about the two Spains and is only reached from the third .

«The conscience of no apostasy does not accuse me» , our dead man will write, who wanted to give himself the luxury - then excessive - of not having any solidarity with the murderers. When the Republican Government left his post - not a minute before or one later -, he preferred to walk around the world with his hands in his pockets, carrying a spiritual citizenship of irreducible Spanish, resigned to better support servitude in another country.

Thus he arrived in Paris, where the Gestapo came to look for him, and thus he arrived in London, at Fleet Street of the race nibs, from where he continued typing until his life was over in 1944. He was then searched for a bureaucratic span of land , CR19, on the side of one Kate Churchman, who died in 1936 . His family has declined offers to upgrade the plot or return his remains to Andalusia, because -reason- if he was never used by a politician while alive, he will not serve propaganda while dead. His daughter Pilar, at 99, lamented from Marbella that he could not attend the sober but exciting moment in which Ambassador Carlos Bastarreche and Antony deposited a simple crown of flowers on the unnamed piece of land that covers their bones, next to the rotten stump of a cherry tree

London lent for a day the clarity of a sky in Seville, although its unequivocally English humidity could not be saved. A cold November funeral brought the solemnity of the sacrifice to the lay mass for the most noble son of our journalism, along with Larra. Fate was cruel with both. Both loved their country until suicide, writing or exile, which sometimes, when there is no other choice, is the same thing. But the third Spain that triumphed in 1978 cost too much blood and too much fire for stupid gravediggers to come back from the other two . We look at the forgotten tomb of Chaves and renew the oath that will never happen again.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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