That day, the condestable of the order of Toledo was not for jokes, if he was ever; He had founded the order “after having an ethyl vision in the cloister of the cathedral, which led him to enter the Carmelites” not to make me friar, but to steal the box of the convent “(My last sigh) and, as many times, he had gone to the city of the three cultures with several of his crisks. In addition to the condestable, one Luis Buñuel, the order had a secretary, founding gentlemen and other titles not entirely irrelevant, with his associated obligations; For example, being a gentleman involved Amar Toledo “without reservation, getting drunk at least for a whole night and wandering the streets”, because “those who preferred to sleep early” could only be squires and, as for others, not even that. From time to time, they arrived by train, they were staying in the missing inn of the blood – for being the place where, Cervantes had written The illustrious mop– And they had their particular Toledo night. In one of those, the group crossed with several cadets of the Alcázar, who spunned one of the gentlemen of the order, María Teresa León: “Rubia, I would eat it to you in a suit and everything” (Melancholy Memory). “That? What has that cadet animal said? ”Bramó Manuel Ángeles Ortiz, Escudero. Buñuel “laughed his shirt” and advanced towards them; Alberti followed him and, after a dialogue of knuckles, the cadets ran between the applause of the neighbors. For once, “the civilians had fallen to the military,” says León in his indispensable work; But the defeated wanted to avenge, and the civilians escaped a miracle “of the anger of the entire Infantry Academy” for “the unexpected clandestinity that the Toledo opened for us”, through a “mysterious toledo” of doors, corners, Patios, “indicating hands” and “accomplices and demure smiles.”
The anger of the summer of 1936 was not so mild. The members of the Artistic Treasury Seizure Board, founded on July 23 at the initiative of the Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals to protect the heritage in danger, were so “work overloaded” that, when María Teresa León approached her headquarters from The real barefoot to warn them of what could happen in Toledo if the Alcázar fight extended, they begged him to take care personally and save the possible, which he certainly tried. At a certain moment, «I began to feel with my feet something like stones that fell, like sparkles that hit the ground. They were the bullets. The war had reached them, composers such as Rodolfo Halfter and Acario Cotapos and painters like Thomas Malonyay, who rescued several paintings from El Greco in the province, such as the San Francisco before the Cross of the convent of nuns of Cuerva; Everyone, doing the impossible to save as much as possible. “On that occasion,” they didn’t have much luck; Nor did Emiliano Barral, trying to take the Greeks of Illescas, who in the end ended up in the basements of the Bank of Spain and had to be restored; But the experience undoubtedly contributed to the success of the subsequent transfer of the works of the Monastery of El Escorial and the Prado Museum to Valencia, in which the writer and stage director was also involved. Suddenly, and by certainly exceptional circumstances, artists had more weight in the direction of artistic affairs than bureaucrats; The “policy of consummate facts”, which Dr. Negrín would say later in reference to what the axis powers and the non -intervention committee were doing, had forced the overflowing authorities to ask the creators, who responded as the Pueblo de Madrid in November of that year, despite the enormity of the challenge. “I never dreamed,” says León in Melancholy Memorythat would enter the Prado with “an official document authorizing me for such a large company (…) Rafael became so serious that I was afraid of guessing what he thought: how are we going to be able to fulfill what they have ordered us?”
There was no longer the order of Toledo; I couldn’t there. The pumps of German aviation and the obuses of the Franco artillery fell day and night on the capital and, although they made an exception with the Salamanca neighborhood – they had order in this regard -, they did not respect anything else; Not even Argüelles, in the middle of the front, where the old study of Zuloaga and Miranda was located that had been residence from León and Alberti for several years and meeting place for Bergamín, Petere, Hidalgo de Cisneros, proof of Mora, Lorca and Carpentier, among many others: the house of Marqués de Urquijo, next to the Park of the West; The place from which, in Neruda’s opinion, the name of one of the best known works of the Portuense author, The lost grovesister for obvious reasons of Melancholy Memory. What the black biennium agents had not done, who had assaulted it “convinced that a poet could only keep machine guns and rifles under the roses of their terrace”, the Africanists. However, the inevitable metaphor of that attic with the sunk roof and the soaked books gave way, for the revolt that caused, “a wonder of fraternity, communication, parity in the dangers”, because “the defense of Madrid » – he says in his autobiography – and the world of culture began to change structures on his own, taking advantage of the multiple gaps. Magazines like The blue monkey and the Theatrical orientation bulletininstitutions controlled by the creators such as the Central Theater Council (Renau, Machado, Cherif, etc.) and initiatives such as the Art and Propaganda Theater and the theater guerrillas, who acted in rear and the front. María Teresa León was in all of them, in the company of her husband; And not only as a member, but of founder, renewing the atrophied structures that Max Aub criticized. Nothing strangely, not in a country where artists like her had become “soldiers” of the Republic of Letters, the war would end up being a period between the premonitory deaths of two giants of their literature and their conscience: Valle-Inclán and Antonio Machado, whom León Felipe and Rafael Alberti had to press again and again to leave Madrid, against his will.
Decades later, when I thought about the house of Marqués de Urquijo, María Teresa did not rememb Miguel de Unamuno appeared to lunch, read them “one of his plays,” he finished eating, he stayed to have the tea, stayed to dinner and left after leaving them “a paper bow tie” – in reality, a Owl— and recite a poem for one of their grandchildren. “How much he liked to talk!” He says; Even more, apparently, that to the incredible inhabitants of his next address, the former Palace of the Heredia Spínola, headquarters of the Alliance of Intellectuals, in whose library the was born Blue monkey. «I don’t know who used to say in my house: you have to have memories. Living is not as important as remembering, ”he says in Melancholy Memory. The war was lost and, with her, everything that allegedly led to Azaña: “It will be a hundred years”; But, whether or not they are one hundred, it is possible that the history of culture ends up putting things in its place, as accustomed to the laps as it is. After all, the involvements have some of the bed bugs that ran “by and everywhere” in the anecdote of the two lovers of the order of Toledo, that its female protagonist concludes: “How good Rafael slept with the Cross chest by hundreds of animals looking with frenzy the hiding place of poetry! He ignored me. He continued sleeping. I turned off the light, I went down to the patio and started talking to the illustrious scrub, the only person living those hours in the inn of the blood ».
#Blood #Inn
