Esther Mucientes Madrid
Madrid
Updated Wednesday, February 14, 2024-08:07
Interview The success of Albert Espinosa's time machine: "All the guests say they won't cry, and in the end they do"
Máximo Huerta
said
last night in
El Hormiguero
, where he went with
Albert Espinosa
to present the second season of
The Road to Home
, that "what remains of me is what was saved from that child." He is a harsh phrase if ever there was one, but after watching the first episode of the new season of
The Road Home
everything makes sense, it hurts and reconciles, it also reconciles.
Máximo Huerta
's tears
in
El Hormiguero
predicted that Albert Espinosa
's program
, produced by
Pablo Motos
and
Jorge Salvador
, was going to be really hard. It is true that
The Road Home
already demonstrated in its last season that it opens doors that we all usually close. The doors of painful childhood memories. T
he way home
is a journey in time and, if time travel existed, and we could all return to that walk home that we took as children when we left school, we would all find joy, innocence, purity, happiness, but also pain and, in many cases, darkness.
Television
Premiere.
The success of Albert Espinosa's time machine: "All the guests say they will not cry, and in the end they do"
Editor: BORJA R. CATELA Madrid
The success of Albert Espinosa's time machine: "All the guests say they will not cry, and in the end they do"
What no one expected, although
Albert Espinosa
had already warned days ago that the first chapter of
The Road Home
was coming strong, is the catharsis that it was going to mean for
Máximo Huerta
to come face to face not only with that road home but with a childhood of pain, fear, violence, which led him to become an adult where forgiveness was his greatest learning.
There was a phrase during the program after
Albert Espinosa
showed him images of him as a child rescued from the Super 8 that perfectly describes what it has meant for
Máximo Huerta
to have participated in
The Road Home
:
"I had forgotten that I was happy"
. In those images you see
Máximo Huerta
on the beach, you see
Máximo Huerta
's mother , now immersed in the oblivion of Alzheimer's, laughing, enjoying, being happy. Máximo
Huerta
had forgotten his happiness and that of his mother because the memories of terror, of fear, of having to stay at home in his childhood and adolescence to be his mother's safe passage, had busy everything. "There she seems happy... My mother always said that what happened at home should not be seen outside of her, but I see her happy there."
The promise that Máximo Huerta broke
Máximo Huerta
had promised himself that, even if he participated in
The Road Home
, he was not going to express or show what his mother said should be left behind closed doors. From the outside it is easy to promise him, but when you are there... As soon as he crossed the door of the school where he studied,
Máximo Huerta
began to feel everything, much more than just his guts. He saw the gym, which he remembered with horror, and remembered how he decided to stay away from it when he was always the kid that no one chose to play soccer. "No one would catch me to play soccer and there was a moment when I said:
'well, if they don't catch me, get out of it
.' And that means stopping participating."
For
Máximo Huerta
there were professors and teachers. There were the "bad teachers" who punished him against the wall on his knees holding a chair on his head, and there was Don Melchor, his teacher. For the Valencian writer, Don Melchor, whom he met again in his class, he was much more than a teacher, although he never knew it.
He was the positive male figure, the father who taught him, the mentor, the example that he did not have in his house
. There,
Máximo Huerta
still
clung to that promise he had made not to stir up the past too much because of what might come out of it.
However, it was beginning to be seen that the former minister's childhood was the childhood that no child should deserve. He clung to books, to Pipi Longhunter's comics, to the little paper boats that he threw into the ditches of the Buñol orchards when he returned home, to his paintings, to that painting that he painted for his grandmother with all his love. of a grandson, the little grandson, and that was replaced without a word by another granddaughter's painting, "prettier, better."
"It was one of my first frustrations
. "
And the path continued through the square where her mother washed clothes, along the wall where she sat eating pipes and "signing in", through the reunion with her friends, through the good memories, the happy ones, the few that gave birth to Darkness. Because
Máximo Huerta
was even afraid of the sound of keys when opening the door of his house, of the sound of steps, of voices, of serious words, of... his father. It was
Albert Espinosa
who wanted
Máximo Huerta
to break that promise not to reveal the bad things about his childhood or name his father too much. Going down the stairs of that square, he asked
Máximo Huerta
to tell him about his father. During the eight minutes following that request, darkness invaded The Road Home, but it was
Máximo Huerta
, his ability to forgive, his relief, his catharsis that kept away a cry that was irremediable. Because as
Albert Espinosa
says , remembering the bad is also beautiful.
"Just the sound of the keys was already scary"
"My father marked my life. He was very rigid, violent and I got used to it. When I said before that I rarely went out it was because I preferred to stay at home watching my mother.
I was my mother's life insurance
. I don't know what happened when I left. I was going. I got used to the discomfort. I am the son of a family that did not love each other.
With one look from my father there was already fear
. My mother said: 'when will your father die', because that meant her freedom and mine. We lived like that all our lives. He would catch us looking at 1, 2, 3 and when we heard the keys, life changed.
Just the sound of the keys was already the fear
. I know fear, and what's worse, I got used to it as a child to fear. I know what it tastes like." Hard, very hard.
It was then that
Máximo Huerta
recognized that there was no longer any resentment:
"There is pain, but no resentment
. "
And he said that his mother was forbidden by his father to paint her nails and dress red, that he was forbidden to pick up things... Fear. "I recently posted a photo of my mother's hands with red nails. I painted them when she already had Alzheimer's, and I did it as an act of revenge for the past," he admitted through tears.
And it was then that
Albert Espinosa
took a small handkerchief out of one of his pockets and gave it to
Máximo Huerta
to smell. In it was the aroma of his father. In him was all that fear, all that pain, all those memories that marked his childhood.
Máximo Huerta
broke into a thousand pieces, those of us who were watching him, too. "I can't justify anything he did, but he was my father," he said, his voice breaking. "He left in peace and so did I," he acknowledged with a small voice and clutching that small handkerchief with all his strength. "When I was very old, my father couldn't climb stairs and he had almost no strength. One day I said to him: 'with all the strength you had...' And he answered me: 'I'm sorry'. And it was a sorry." "That he said it because of everything he had done to us (...) Now my father is in the beers he drank when I sat in a bar."
Máximo Huerta
's father
was a truck driver at a cement factory near Buñol, he traveled a lot and it was on a New Year's Eve when
Máximo Huerta
was very little when he suffered an accident with the truck that changed everything. "After the accident my father changed, he was never the same." Never since it happened has anyone explained to
Máximo Huerta
what had happened.
At home there was no talk of the accident, he only knew that it happened because his father was hospitalized for a long time and afterwards he had many consequences. "When he sneezed, glass came out of his nose," he said last night in
El Hormiguero
, minutes before the start of The Road Home. Albert Espinosa discovered what really happened by meeting him again with one of the people who were in the accident. Another door that opened only to close it forever.
But there was the last one, the worst of all the doors, the one that led back to the house of his childhood, to the house where the sound of the keys was scary. "I'm going to give you an honorary degree because when you grow up with pain, not turning it into resentment like you have done is being a hero,"
Albert Espinosa
told him in the doorway of that house . And then he took out the keys, invited him to go up, to enter, to open that house and close that pain, although
Máximo Huerta
knows that it will never be closed. He entered, he recalled, but was unable to reach his parents' room:
"I can't get in there
. "
The pain.