Pombo: "Umbral and I were in both Spains and we ended up with frozen hearts"

Luis Alemany Madrid

Madrid

Updated Monday, March 18, 2024-9:01 p.m.

• Interview Álvaro Pombo: "What I was and what I am is homosexual. There is no more leftist than that"

• Umbral Pilar Adón Award, the best book of the year 2022

This afternoon, Álvaro Pombo received the

XIII Francisco Umbral Prize

at the headquarters of the Community of Madrid,

which recognizes his novel 'Santander, 1936' (Anagrama) as

the best published in 2023

.

Pombo, who succeeds Pilar Adón, Darío Villanueva and Elena Medel, accepted the award with a speech in which he referred to his friendship with

Francisco Umbral with extraordinary words

, out of all routine.

Pombo remembered Machado's verses about the little Spaniard whose heart would be frozen by one of the two Spains and said that Umbral and he had been

to both Spains and had ended up with a broken heart

.

He cited Kafka, Rilke and José Antonio Marina to explain that Ubral was "the writer of writing. [Umbral] is incessant writing. Kafka said that writing is a religious act. Mariano José de Larra said that writing in Madrid is a monologue desperate and sad for only one.

Umbral wrote in Madrid, he wrote Madrid, but he did not make a monologue

. Umbral did not monologue. He had the art of referring to a reality that converged. Umbral was a continuous 'oratio'. There is a magnetic religiosity in the work of Francisco Umbral, in the sense of dedication to a task. It is a Rilkean dedication. It is admirable and moving. That is why he is with us, because he gave his oratio continua a transcendence. In his last interview he was asked about transcendence.

And Umbral answered: transcendence is me.

He was saying something that Juan Ramón says: the gods had no more substance than what I have. What else is there more than that transcendence?

To know more

The missing data.

'Alvarito', the Falangist and executed uncle with whom Álvaro Pombo has won the Umbral Prize

• Editor: FERNANDO PALMERO

'Alvarito', the Falangist and executed uncle with whom Álvaro Pombo has won the Umbral Prize

Literature.

Álvaro Pombo wins the Umbral Prize for 'Santander, 1936'

• Editor: ANTONIO LUCAS Madrid

Álvaro Pombo wins the Umbral Prize for 'Santander, 1936'

Pombo is like this: his appearance is extremely fragile and it often happens when listening to him that

he seems like he is going to lose the thread of his speech

, but then he goes back to building formidable ideas and images.

This Monday afternoon, at the presentation of the Permio Umbral, he did not seem to have much interest in talking about

Santander, 1936

, perhaps because that work had already been done in his laudatio by the journalist Manuel Llorente, president of the jury convened by the Francisco Umbral Foundation that failed the award last January.

Llorente placed Santander, 1936 on the complex map of Pombo's work (closer to Mansard's The Hero of the Mansards than to any of his other novels) and in relation to his ethics as a poet and his self-imposed loneliness. .

"It is not a question of Álvaro Pombo writing well or outstandingly, because

that would mean that he would be judged

according to a scale, a reference table. No. Pombo writes differently. Because he is different. He lives in another place. He is, and not is, of this world."

Llorente ended his speech with some verses from the novelist Pombo that, in part,

explain his entire work and his relationship with literature

and life: I am not from this city or any other / I came by chance and I will leave at night / here I have no cousins ​​or ghosts.

/ Now I will see the trees slowly / the street between two neutral houses / leading to an empty park.

I have already seen in other places how the wind / blows away a newspaper / and I know

that the rain will be beautiful

from that deserted provincial tavern.

/ I will have dinner early and before the wedding couples leave the cinema / I will have stopped being in the enumerative gaze / of the tobacconist / and they will have already washed my cup of coffee / and my fork and my knife and my plate / at the Fonda irreplaceable.

An explanation for those who have not read Santander, 1936: Pombo's book

novel the last months of Álvaro Pombo Ybarra

, the writer's uncle, on the eve of the coup d'état of 1936. That Pombo of another time was a bourgeois teenager but declassed, who had joined the Falange out of a mixture of idealism and vital anguish, rather than out of an instinct for totality or brutality.

Instead of confronting his father, an Azañista who disbelieved in everything but deeply moral, and his lifelong friend, Tote, a PCE militant and rival in some brawling incidents,

Pombo Ybarra desperately sought his affection

.

As if only in his reunion with them he could give meaning to a life that is still short and tragic, like the date that gives the novel its title.

"Pombo and Umbral have been protagonists of the newspaper el MUNDO, from the time

in which the newspaper forged its ethical and aesthetic model

. The two appreciated each other, loved each other and read each other, they shared a natural inclination for loneliness,

a kind of orphanhood and melancholy

, like a Proustian character. They were two beings from afar and the two most poetic novelists in Spanish literature," said in his speech Joaquín Manso, the director of the newspaper EL MUNDO, the newspaper that promotes the award for the best book in the world. anus.

Umbral, Manso recalled, wrote that the most important thing that democracy brought to Spanish literature was the return trip of the novelist from Santander, after his years in London.

Santander, 1936 is also a document that speaks of the spirit of reconciliation of that time.

"Literature can open doors for the rigorous historian," said Manso.

"I hope

we never lose hope for a reunion

like the characters in this book and Santander, 1936 serves as a lesson to us."

María España Suárez

, the widow of the author of Un ser de lejanías and president of the Umbral Foundation, praised Pombo's "writing and unique style", of which Umbral himself was an admirer, as he confessed.

Suárez was accompanied in the speeches by representatives of the public administrations that support the Umbral Award: Lola Moreno, mayor of Majadahonda, and Mariano de Paco Serrano,

Minister of Culture

, Tourism and Sports of the Community of Madrid.

At the end of the event, Pombo shared a round table with

Manuel Llorente and the writers Fanny Rubio and Juan Cruz

, members of the jury.

And he once again demonstrated that what he wanted was to talk about Threshold.

"Umbral was a little older than me. He had something of an older brother to me. When they gave him the Cervantes Prize, I went and saw him in the Royal Palace,

sitting in a chair. There was no one around

. I greeted him and congratulated him. We "We were always talking about you. He told me: 'Soon they will give it to you'. I am still waiting for the prophecy to be fulfilled."