Arturo Barea, with his somewhat atypical voice, sends a Christmas story through the waves of the BBC at the end of 1957. «The reality is uncertain but hope persists ... We always make plans even though many the devil takes them ... On the eve of the New Year, we all make good purposes ... ». Arturo Barea stayed to live forever since Christmas Eve of that 1957 in a British cemetery. Today, it is impressive to hear who wrote The Forge of a Rebel , one of the symbols of the third way along with Manuel Chaves Nogales, through headphones at the Archerías de Nuevos Ministerios de Madrid, in an exhibition on exile .
Half a million Spaniards crossed the Spanish borders in 1939. So much to know, the figure has lost its luster and tragedy. 500,000 people, more or less, fled in espadrilles, with blankets on top, many stepping on the snow and others on wagons. With berets, backpacks. Wire fences like those photographed by Agustí Centelles or painted by Josep Franch Clapers.
Almost no one returned. Some did try: Max Aub walked around here in 1969 but did not find the Spain he expected , or did not find himself. From that arose the blind chicken . He died three years later. A year earlier he had tried again because he might not fully understand what had happened to him or that Spain. A photo in which he appears looking at books on the slope of Moyano certifies it.
Aub's misfortune may well serve as a metaphor for what happened at that time in Europe. Born in Paris, he came to Valencia because his Jewish family (his father was German, his French mother) fled from fear. "The man is where he does high school," he said. After the Civil War, he was interned in two camps, Vernet (France) and Djelfa (Algeria). Then, already in Mexico, this polyglot and myopic man wrote about everything and in all genres. Even lies: he created one Torres Campanals, a cubist son of countrymen who rubbed shoulders with Picasso in Paris , and published the splendid translated Anthology , a work with verses of about twenty fabulated poets. In Nuevos Ministerios there are the covers of some of his books. And copies of Euclid's mail , with crazy texts: «Solution to the Arab Jewish conflict. Nasser accepts the Kingdom of Murcia ».
There is everything there. The visitor returns where he was not, but it seems familiar . Picasso's works, posters, sculptures, oils and photos, many photos. It is striking that ships, such as Sinaia , which sailed in 1939 from Sète (France), the city of Paul Valéry Marine Cemetery, and arrived in Veracruz (Mexico) 19 days later with 1,599 people on board. The novelist Andrés Trapiello in Odyssey in Days and Nights . To get an idea of the journey, he commissioned a model to write the book he has given for this exhibition. A “cyclostylated daily bulletin that was distributed among passengers, whose managers included Manuel Andújar and Juan Rejano, and in which Pedro Garfias, Ramón Gaya, Benjamín Jarnés ... collaborated with texts, was thrown aboard the trip”, he says the commissioner of 1939. Spanish Republican exile , Juan Manuel Bonet, in a 700-page catalog. The exhibition, open until January 31 and with more than 300 pieces, was opened by the Minister of Justice, Dolores Salgado. "Eighty years later, the democratic regime established by the 1978 Constitution is in a position to repair the moral debt contracted with the victims of Franco's condemnation and forget the memory," wrote Dolores Salgado.
It is wonderful to visit the exhibition with Bonet. "Look at the face of that man," he says referring to a photograph of Robert Capa in which a wrinkled man is seen, looking at the camera as consoled and holding what looks like a double bass in the Bram concentration camp (France ). A map of the neighboring country shows the enclaves where Godot expected 275,000 Spaniards, on the beach, in barracks. Prats-de Mollo, Arles-sur-Tech, Agde.
But he also went to America ( especially Mexico, Argentina and Chile ), the Soviet Union ... Niceto Alcalá Zamora, Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, Maruja Mallo, Antonio Machado, Ayala, Alberti ...
In Buchenwald (Germany), Jorge Semprún was interned with almost 400 other Spaniards. In Mauthaussen (Austria) there were more than 7,500 compatriots. There is a record of everything. Cardboard and wooden suitcases, barbed wire, stoves, boys writing letters, children sleeping on bales. And volunteers on the tanker Guadalajara on the way to the liberation of Paris in 1944. Picasso pigeons when they were not yet the dove, paintings by Óscar Domínguez and black and white sculptures by Baltasar Lobo together with a poem by José Ángel Valente from 1960.
In the August 1, 1940 issue of Romance magazine, he realizes the death of Bagaría, the great cartoonist. In this biweekly publication you could read Alfonso Reyes as well as Corpus Barga or José Bergamín.
There are numerous books , first editions , with drawings by Ramón Gaya, such as the Spanish exodus and the crying of León Felipe, Thought and poetry in the Spanish life of María Zambrano, Letters to the Ebro by Benjamín Jarnés. And others, more sober, by Emilio Prados, Concha Méndez, Moreno Villa, Domenchina. There are also much more sophisticated ones, such as the General Canto by Pablo Neruda with guards by Diego Rivera and Siqueiros and typography by Miguel Prieto (which is portrayed by Juan Rejano). There are even Américo Castro ( Spain in its history: Christians, Moors and Jews ) and Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz ( Spain. A historical enigma ), whose visions about the country faced them (and others).
Some names today are not as well known, as Rafael Dieste and Luis Seoane, although how modern and clean his drawing for emigrant Galicia . And it is not lacking, it could not be missing, Poet in New York by García Lorca published in Mexico in 1940 ("with four original drawings, poem by Antonio Machado and prologue of Bergamin"), for some the first edition of that chilling book.
The list of those represented is long and powerful. Josep Renau, Eugenio Granell, Rosa Chacel, Juan Gil-Albert, Miguel Hernández through a sculpture by Alberto, Juan Rejano, León Felipe according to the portrait of Enrique Climent ... And some nice book covers edited in Tolouse ( the capital of the French exile ) that includes from Nothing less than a whole man of Unamuno to The ford of Ramón J. Sender.
And even Don Juan Carlos and Doña Sofía greeting on November 20, 1978 at the Spanish embassy of Mexico City to the widow of Manuel Azaña, Dolores Rivas Cherif. And Salvador de Madariaga reading his speech of entry into the SAR in 1976 so many years later (the twice minister had been elected academic in May of 36). And Dolores Ibárruri and Rafael Alberti in the Congress of Deputies ...
It is difficult to draw a straight line that delimits the end of exile although there are several candidates, such as the arrival in Spain of Guernica in 1981 (with some photographs not seen so far, according to Bonet) or the return of María Zambrano (November 20, 1984). Although already in October 1977 Manuel Fraga had presented Santiago Carrillo at the 21st Century Club. It was the symbol of national reconciliation.
The National Library has also not forgotten the event through another exhibition, although in a more modest way (also with books, drawings, photographs and auditions). And the Student Residence has dedicated several meetings, under the title Institutionism in exile , with Juan Pérez de Ayala, José García-Velasco and José-Carlos Mainer, among others. And until January 31 you can see the exhibition Boats of Freedom. The evacuation of Spanish refugees to Mexico (1939-1942) . A trip that seems endless, maybe a bad dream that lasted too long. Without a doubt, the longest.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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