One day in 1964, Petra Martínez, who wanted to be an actress, went with her boyfriend Let’s see Caligula to the Fine Arts Theater in Madrid. There, the girl, 20 years old, did not take her eyes off Escipión, the role played by Juan Margallo, 24 years old. “I have always paid a lot of attention to men’s legs, I like them a lot. And when I saw them I thought: what beautiful legs! Of course, I was wearing those Roman skirts”, says Petra Martínez (Linares, Jaén, 78 years old) in front of a cafe on a terrace in Madrid. “But you hadn’t been with that boy for a long time,” continues Juan Margallo (Cáceres, 81 years old). “No, he was a boyfriend from work. I was already bored with him and he with me. Boyfriends, when you are young, are boring”, she replies. Within a few weeks, she asked that boy to buy tickets to see Cleopatra at the cinema. “He called me to tell me that they weren’t left, and I told him ‘well, look, I don’t want to see you anymore’.
Read, in Petra Martínez’s last response there are echoes of Fina Palomares, the extremely twisted and feared owner of the one that is coming, the famous series by the Caballero brothers, but the gesture belies it: when he speaks, even when he pronounces the most unexpected phrase, he always smiles. She is now shooting a new season of fiction. Margallo, by his side, prepares the second part of champions, the award-winning film by Javier Fesser for which the actor was nominated for a Goya. Despite this noisy foray into the cinema, he is a legend of Spanish theater (two times winner of the MAX, Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts). Petra Martínez, who has also done a lot of theater, has appeared more on television and in the movies. Her last movie life was that, has given him nominations (including the Goya) and awards; In it she plays a woman who teaches, she said, that “there is no age to change, meet, fall in love and start over.”
For the delivery of the award for best actress at the Feroz, a few months ago, he did not prepare a speech. “I told her: Petra, she prepares something in case you win, but she never prepares anything. So she went on stage and said that she masturbated five times a day, ”says Juan, resigned. She lets out a laugh. “Look, I didn’t want that role precisely because I didn’t see myself in certain scenes, like the one where she masturbated me. But then I thought: we have to normalize this. She played the role, and delighted. And as she walked onstage she was thinking how close I came to rejecting him on the subject of sex, and by the time I got to talking I only had masturbation on my mind.” And he said, in front of a dedicated audience: “The most important thing is having masturbated in front of many people, because I think that masturbation is totally silenced, and now I masturbate about three or four times a day because I’ve caught the mania, and Juan tells me: ‘Let’s go to bed’. And I tell him: ‘No, I prefer on the sofa, watching TV, and that’s how I masturbate watching Javier [Cámara]”.
They have been married for 54 years. They have two children, Juan and Olga; they have grandchildren. They worked together always or almost always: in theater groups such as Tábano, El Búho or El Gayo Vallecano, until they founded, together, the company Uroc Teatro. They presented programs together (for example, the Sesame Street of the Caponata Hen). They have breakfast together every day, they live together. And jealousy? How do you live in two actors who fall in love and fall out of love with others in fiction? “I’m going to tell you one thing,” says Petra: “I’ve been an actress all my life, but I haven’t done any scenes of kissing or sleeping with anyone. Never never. And John, neither. I don’t think I would like to see him kissing someone else.”
Petra Martínez saw Juan Margallo again in the sixties in the acting classes she was taking with William Layton. “I saw it and I thought: ‘Damn, the one with Caligula. At that time I lived with my parents in a chalet in the Retiro neighborhood, and I really liked parties: I was a party girl. So I invited him to one and he came. We don’t dance or anything.” Later, Juan went to London (where he worked as a waiter, dishwasher and singer of four boleros) and, when he returned, he found that Petra was rehearsing a play, bedtime story, at the Beatrice Theater He went to see her a month in a row. At the end, she went to see her in her dressing room, where one day they kissed for the first time. “I left the theater euphoric.” They decided to buy two rings in a jewelry store. Petra shows it on her finger more than half a century later, Juan lost it a long time ago.
One day, Petra became pregnant. They decided to move in together. All this, at the end of the sixties and without getting married. Since they did not want to do it for the Church, they decided that the wedding would take place outside of Spain: in Gibraltar. But the fence at that time was closed. “My brother, who lived in La Línea, couldn’t come to the wedding: we had to see each other through the fence,” recalls Juan. They had to travel first to Tangier, and from there to Gibraltar. The one who spent it regularly at the border was Petra’s mother, Luisa Pérez Matamoros. To avoid conflicts, she falsified her passport: Luisa Pérez Matamaras. “If they find her with her falsified document, who knows what happens to her, but it worked,” says Juan.
The father of the actress, the youngest of seven siblings (“the little one in the house, the protégé, that’s why it was so difficult for me to leave”), was a telegraph operator; her mother, an unstoppable woman in everything she tackled (“if she had been born later, she would have invented Amazon”). When the war was ending, they left Spain on foot, crossing Behobia to reach France. Her father could have fled to Russia or Mexico, but he wanted to return, deceived by the Franco regime’s offer: nothing will happen to all those who have not committed blood crimes.
“He said he didn’t want his children to be foreigners, which is a bit of a silly phrase because I would have loved to have been born in Paris,” says Petra. She came back and they locked him up in a makeshift concentration camp in the Tabacalera de Bilbao. My mother managed, through the wife of a lieutenant colonel who went to the same park as her with her children, that she became interested in my father. They put him on trial. He was released, but without being able to climb the ladder and exiled to Linares, where I was born. He was able to return to Madrid afterwards.
The father of Juan Margallo, a soldier who waged war on the Francoist side; his mother, a teacher. “He was practicing when the war broke out, he stopped working, had nine children —we are all alive— and raised them; when he finished, he went back to teaching.” When Petra and Juan already had a son, and had not married, Juan’s father could not see her. Literally, not in the sense that he disliked her. “She was awesome,” says Juan. “Petra came home with the child already born and my family locked him in a room. I didn’t know what to do with this of ours. One day he bumped into her in the hallway, Petra. And he told him very seriously, because he was a very serious soldier: ‘I have nothing against you.’ And I thought: but if she tells him about her, why can’t he see her? Petra: “She was over that, you have to understand.” Juan’s sisters are part of Petra’s group of best friends. “You’ll tell me: I’ve been with them for 54 years, the same time I’ve been married to Juan.”
In Live on air, his memoirs, Margallo remembers that he was born thanks to the International Brigades. His father was taken prisoner by the Republican Army in the Civil War: “It was in the Cerro de los Ángeles, and they had the commanders in a hole. I think my father was a sergeant back then. They had the commander shot, then the captain, the lieutenant, and when they were going to shoot my father, a Mexican from the International Brigades said: ‘Why don’t you let him? Who tells you that he doesn’t want to have more kids, when all this is over? Nine, he had. That’s why Margallo misses from time to time, as a tribute, saying kids instead of children.
When he learned that his little girl was leaving home with a baby, and in the midst of the family ruckus, with screams everywhere, Petra’s father, Manolo Martínez, went to bed for seven days without speaking to anyone and hardly eating anything. “Did not talk. Not with my mother, not with me, not with anyone. Seven days,” she says. After a week, the father said the first word, then the second, and even he got out of bed. Petra’s mother telephoned her daughter: “Dad is fine, he’s already talking!” Her daughter asked her father what had happened to her. He answered honestly: “That he had a crazy head. He needed to reconsider, and I have already reconsidered: do what you want”. It happened to her again when she wanted to commit suicide, after her mother died. She went to bed again without talking to anyone and without eating. Petra, her youngest daughter, took him to a doctor who had assisted some prisoners on hunger strike in Madrid’s Yeserías prison. The woman told her: “Manolo, death by hunger strike is frightening”, and she told him what it consisted of. That night the man called Petra to her room. “Run for two burgers and a beer.”
The families, except for those first hours of peculiarities, turned to them. And his friends, and his theater partners: helping with the babies (Olga and Juan), allowing them to continue working and traveling, making a living in theaters and outside of them. It is then, remembering it, when Petra Martínez makes this reflection:
—It is said that love is a matter of two. It can be, but it almost never is. What surrounds you is very important. If one of the two families doesn’t turn over (or if they don’t both turn over, look what happened to Romeo and Juliet), or if the friends don’t push, you can get ahead, but it’s more difficult. We have been very lucky. With Juan’s family and mine, who bet everything for our love. With our friends, who conspired to make this work. We have always had things around us that favored us to get here. We have not done it alone.
—It has been fundamental, says Juan.
—We argue to reach an agreement or get closer to it, not to distance ourselves and hurt each other. Of course we argue! But not to be me the smart and you the fool, or vice versa. We argue to get closer, to try to understand the other (…). Life is changing, the world is changing. The absurd thing is to think that you do not change the love you have for your partner and the one your partner has for you. Look, it’s very hard to reach our years together, you have to go through bad times, but it’s worth it. Even if it’s just to see, after so much time, how you manage to have a room of your own at home, in case you want to sleep comfortably.
They laugh and ask for the bill.
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