We have recently passed on March 8 and it is evocative to imagine Simone de Beauvoir, author of The second sexwalking through the Madrid of the first Francoism, observing the truffled streets still of ruins and writing about it, promoted by the cause of the anti -fascism of World War II. It happened in 1945, although It wasn’t the first once from the French intellectual with our country or with the city,
The first contact of the philosophers couple formed by the feminist and Jean-Paul Sartre with Spain will take place during the summer of 1931, when both come to release the Second Spanish Republic. A 23 -year -old young Beauvoir, a high school professor, will be dazzled with the Mediterranean light of Catalonia and, singularly, with the strength of Barcelona anarcosindicalism. In Madrid they went to the bulls and the Prado Museum. It was also pledged to the Castilian yellow -ávila, Segovia, Toledo-, although he left the reunion written with the green: “I had liked the hardness of the Castilian plateaus but I am glad to find in the Basque hills an autumn with the smell of ferns,” he wrote in The fullness of lifewhere he gives an account of the trip.
The following year they returned to Spain and visited Andalusia by car along with a couple of friends. He left in writing some brushstroke of the social climate of the Sanjurjada (a failed coup against the Republic) that caught them in Seville: “A large crowd ran through the streets shouting, singing, shouting. We follow it; On Sierpes Street, under the awnings, some aristocratic circles burned. While firefighters approached without a hurry, people started shouting. ”They don’t turn them off!” “Do not fear,” the Firefighters said; We are not in a hurry. ”
Jean-Paul Tarte and Simone de Beauvoir committed shortly after with the cause of the Second Republic, such as other intellectuals of his generation who saw in the war in Spain a battle for humanity. She would return to Spain in February 1945, just after France had been released and before the world has finished. He is passing through Lisbon, where he will pronounce some conferences. His impressions about the city of Madrid were reflected in the article entitled Quatre jours à madridpublished a few months after fighting, The French Resistance newspaper.
In the article, whose translation we can read On the History Conversation pageThe intellectual description of her incursion in the postwar Madrid since she arrives at the train station in the capital. His reunion with the most central streets dazzles her. The stores are supplied in Gran Vía and Alcalá, an abundance that calls an apparent, which fades as soon as workers’ salaries are compared with products prices.
Anxious to know the reality of the ordinary people, he took the subway to go to Vallecas and, the next day, Tetuán. “Tetuán is built on hills in front of the Sierra Nevada. To the southeast of the city, Vallecas is more industrial, surrounded by a landscape of railways and factories. But there are deep similarities between these two neighborhoods, ”he will say.
The French makes a description of the less obvious little hot sponsis of the two neighborhoods that does not differ too much from those of Spanish journalists who talked about the misery of Madrid outlets before the war:
“Children walk barefoot and, often, dress with rags, with their backs discovered. Men and women wear espadrilles or shoes, and never shoes. Parents, children, goats and chickens are piled into the tiny huts whose dark interiors can be seen through open doors. In cold and rainy days (and winter is hard in Madrid, and the rains are strong), it must be terrible to live in these houses and walk through the soaked earth. In sunny days, they live outside. ”
The concern for women is also very present on the author’s horizon, which only four years later would publish The second sex:
“On the thresholds, women bathe their children, rub their clothes and make their repairs. They make a tremendous amount of washing and you can see picked and discolored rags everywhere, drying in the sun between chickens and goats, since the least amount of fabric is terribly expensive. They must wear their clothes until it falls in pieces. Life is very hard for women. There is no water in the houses and you can see very small girls who bring water from the source in cubes that are too heavy for them. There is no fuel, and to have a little coal you have to stay in a long line. So women have an air harassed around. They are dressed in black, prematurely old and ugly due to concern. Men seem less bleak; They feel the hardness of their condition, but they are not crushed by it. ”
But in the message the strength of the people is very protagonist, which has not been totally destroyed by barbarism:
“Misery in Madrid, however deep it is, is not sordid. Children play, young women laugh, men talk to each other with happy voices. Poverty has not turned them into resigned cattle; They are still living men, men who rebel and have hope. ” Years later, Simone de Beauvoir would treat in France the exiled anarchist Cipriano Mera, a native of Tetuán and the same class that he describes in his words.
Simone de Beauvoir’s visit to Tetuán occurs only two days after the assault on the Falange barracks on Avila Street by communist guerrillas, in which two people will die. On the occasion of the detainees he will say, always comparing the situation with the French and with the present German ghost, “they shoot a lot in Madrid. They torture. As close to Lauriston Street in Paris during the reign of the Gestapo, there are neighborhoods where the shouts of the victims during the night prevent people from sleeping. ”
Vallecas and Tetuán, great workers’ neighborhoods of Madrid, nurseries of the militias, remain during the postwar period Mythical spaces of anti -Franco propaganda in exile. Frequently, the clandestine press Glosa the exploits in the defense of Madrid of its inhabitants and encourages the rebel embers of its neighbors. This is a fact linked, surely, to Beauvoir’s text, which in no case subtracts value from its vivid descriptions and the decision to shed light on that peripheries punished by hunger and postwar repression.
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