At number 5, Calle de la Imagen in Alcalá de Henares, the same wooden gate that has opened the house of the former president of the Second Republic, Manuel Azaña Díaz, is still preserved. On the first floor, before the 145th anniversary of the republican’s birth is commemorated on January 10, María José Navarro Azaña, the closest living relative of this long line of Complutenses, is waiting. On the table is a document, a postcard and a book, which she will leave as a legacy in the Caja de las Letras of the Cervantes Institute.
It won’t be the only one. Isabelo Herreros, president of the Manuel Azaña Association, and the Henares Forum, an Azaña entity that every year holds a conference around this time in Alcalá, will complete the tribute. A few centimeters from other legacies of figures of knowledge and the arts, such as Margarita Salas, Nicanor Parra, Antonio Buero Vallejo and Severo Ochoa, will lie first editions of novels by Azaña, a postal letter sent from France and the speech that the politician gave before more than 500,000 attendees at the Comillas field in Madrid, in 1935.
Navarro firmly and delicately grips a document varnished brown by the passage of time. “Here we have a notarial inscription from the registry, where my great-uncle worked. It is dated May 27, 1924 and his signature appears,” he introduces. Although curious, it is the least personal object that she will deposit at the Cervantes Institute.
It is followed by a first edition of The novel by Pepita Jiménezpublished by Manuel Azaña under the Cuadernos Literarios label in 1927. With a cost of 1.50 pesetas, the prolific writer and politician thus joined the list of authors published in the same collection, such as Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Gerardo Diego, Azorín, Eugenio D’Ors, Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Ramón Menéndez Pidal.
The letter sent from Paris
Navarro, daughter of Pepita Azaña Cuevas, in turn daughter of Gregorio Azaña Díaz, brother of the president, will be the person who will donate the most objects in this tribute. The Caja de las Letras of the Cervantes Institute will keep for posterity a letter sent by his great-uncle on November 24, 1911, which arrived in Madrid two days later. Written to Ramón de la Guardia, husband of his sister Pepita Azaña Díaz and sent to Imagen Street, then number 3, in Alcalá de Henares, the future president conveyed his good arrival to the French capital.
The postcard features an image of the Parisian Tuileries Garden. On the back, with the orientation turned, it reads the following: “Dear Ramón: I just arrived, without news. While I find a better accommodation, I am installed at the Hotel de la Loire, rue du Sommerard, 20. I will write to you more slowly.” Signed, Manolo.
These three small but symbolic documents are just some of the many that Navarro has amassed after decades of searching. “Everything I have has been the result of asking and buying in used bookstores and fairs,” he comments a few meters from the room where Manuel Azaña was born. And he adds: “I have some magazines and newspapers that my mother kept after exiling herself in France for four years. There appears news of his uncle’s death. The shame is that it was a time of great fear, and many other things have ended up destroyed in the fire.”
Azaña through his correspondence
The president of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Montero, the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory, Fernando Martínez, and José Morilla Critz, president of the Henares Forum, will also participate in the institutional event. Next to them will be Jesús Cañete, responsible for the Azaña Conference organized by the Azaña entity. “Since 2010, and with a break due to the pandemic, every year we organize a series of meetings promoted through the figure and work of Azaña. This year we have the support of the Cervantes Institute and the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory,” he introduces. Among its tasks is to highlight the mark that Manuel Azaña left as a Complutense citizen not only in the city of Alcala, but at the state level.
On this occasion, they have prepared a complete program that from January 9 to 14 will address Azaña’s correspondence with various politicians and intellectuals of the time. In the tribute this Friday, January 10, of the Cervantes Institute, the Henares Forum will participate with part of the legacy. They will leave a first edition made in Argentina by the Losada publishing house of the novel The evening in Benicarló which dates back to 1939, written by Azaña after the events of May 1937 in Barcelona and which did not see the light of day in Spain until well into the 1970s. They will also provide the first translation made of one of his works. “Despite being a very Francophile man, Italian was the first language into which one of his creations was translated,” says Cañete.
It is a short play that was only performed in Spain under the title Hors d’oeuvres and that it was published as a libretto in Italy, under the name of Madrid intermezzo. In addition, the volume is accompanied by a piece written by Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, the poet and bullfighter honored by Federico García Lorca after his death from a goring in 1934, titled The queen in Spanish and The queen in Italian.
The speech before the Popular Front
The president of the Manuel Azaña Association, Isabelo Herreros, will also provide a first edition of the novel The garden of the friarspublished in 1927. Herreros, on the other hand, has been a controversial character since June 2023. After the municipal elections of that time, the former Republican Left activist ended up giving the local government of the town of Pelahustán (Toledo) to the Party Popular. The PSOE was the most voted option in this town in the Sierra de San Vicente region and won three councilors, like the PP. The vote of Herreros, who headed the list of the Pelahustán Exist Electoral Group, was decisive.
In any case, “Herreros is perhaps the person who has most developed dissemination and research work around the figure of Azaña,” Cañete presents. The president of the Association will also leave a miniature of the speech that Azaña himself gave in 1935 before half a million people arriving from different parts of Spain: “It is the third of the great speeches he gave that year. First in Bilbao, then in Valencia and finally in Madrid, Azaña politically assesses the situation at a time when the right governs the country through the CEDA. There he suggests the common candidacy that would later materialize in the Popular Front in the 1936 elections,” explains Cañete.
The lack of a foundation endangers the legacy
Navarro, the great-niece of the Republican president, strives to ensure that the memory of a family that has been staying in the same house since shortly after 1800 is not lost, after joining the prestigious Catarineu family, renowned for their soap production. and bleach. “There are many things to do here, although I don’t see much motivation,” he says. For years, the idea of creating the Manuel Azaña Foundation has been floating around in his mind with the purpose of making it a public entity that centralizes his precious archive and is in charge of disseminating the figure of his great-uncle.
“What I have I have at a private level. What will happen to it when I’m gone? This Government seems inclined to explore the possibility of the foundation, although for the moment everything has remained in good words, and time is passing,” Navarro complains. Cañete, for his part, also welcomes the creation of a foundation, “especially to investigate, not so much in his work, which is already very well studied and accessible, but in what concerns his time, his interests and relationships, which are infinitely rich,” concludes this expert.
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