La Casona de Tudanca, a unique bibliographic museum in a mountain town in Cantabria, boasts of having the manuscript of the novel ‘La familia de Pascual Duarte’ by Camilo José Cela. The 200 squared pages that he used to write his first great work. But, in reality, it is not the original. Although it is written in the Galician writer’s handwriting, a few decades ago the Nobel Prize in Literature took his and left a copy, after a lengthy political and judicial dispute in which Cantabria, at the request of Miguel Ángel Revilla, he was on the verge of naming the novelist persona non grata. The indignation was such that some cultural official went so far as to propose burying the manuscript for posterity in a hidden place in the highest brañas of Sejos, so that it would not leave the autonomous community.
In the beginning, the writer had some difficulties publishing ‘The Family of Pascual Duarte’. In the 1940s, José María de Cossío, an influential and closely related intellectual, found him a publisher. Cela, in gratitude, gave him the manuscript of the novel with a dedication: “To the greatest culprit that this has ever been published.” Cossío deposited it in the library of his Cantabrian home, a mountain-style mansion in the town of Tudanca. A hidden place in the Polaciones valley with fifty neighbors where he lived between May and October. A house visited by names from literature and culture such as Miguel de Unamuno, Rafael Alberti, Gerardo Diego or Gregorio Marañón. There he received and kept the manuscript along with others by Miguel Hernández, Federico García Lorca and Jorge Guillén, in addition to more than 3,000 original texts and letters from Dámaso Alonso, Manuel Azaña, José María de Pereda and Unamuno himself, among others, in a imposing library of 25,000 volumes.
In the fall of 1961, the writer regretted his donation and wrote to Cossío asking him to return it to him under the pretext of leaving it to his son, who was then 15 years old, “for lack of a more substantial inheritance.” “The time has come for me to make a very strange request to you that, however, you will be able to understand and even explain: Do you want to give me – or, rather, give my son Camilo José Cela Conde – the original of ‘La familia of Pascual Duarte’?”, he transferred.
Cossío responded to him from Tudanca a month later: “I have no reason to hide from you that I deeply dislike your request, and in this you can only see the extremely high esteem in which I have the manuscript and in which I have its author, and a little also the vanity of exhibiting a friendship that so satisfies and honors me, by showing it to my friends,” he wrote. Thus, he proposed a solution: that he allow him to have it as a deposit until his death “as I am approaching 70 and feel the inevitable call of the earth.” In exchange, he agreed to record the recognition of the property to Cela Conde. “I would leave with the autograph a slip of my own handwriting stating that I have such a manuscript in deposit and that it is the property of your son,” he explained in a letter.
The incident at the UIMP
But the role never appeared. When the author of the ‘Los toros’ encyclopedia died in 1977, Cossío’s assets passed into the hands of the Government of Cantabria, then Provincial Council. No one found any document that supported such an agreement. After two years of mourning, Cela decided to formally claim the manuscript after trying indirectly through some intermediaries, such as Minister Rodolfo Martín Villa himself. But the Provincial Council dragged its feet. The curator of the Casona de Tudanca, Rafael Gómez, assured in the press that no one ever heard Cossío speak of that promise, not even his closest collaborators: his personal secretary and the parish priest, nor his executor and friend Ignacio Aguilera, director of the Menéndez Pelayo Library. They all agreed that Cossío never had the will to return the manuscript. The newspapers also published that, apparently, Cela only had as proof a typed letter that only expressed an intention and that was strange, since Cossío always wrote his correspondence by hand.
The matter ended up in court. Precisely at that moment of lack of agreement, in the summer of 1982 Cela visited the Menéndez Pelayo International University (UIMP) and publicly declared that the UCD of Cantabria “is a specimen of hysterics that has reached the sumum and the president of your Provincial Council is a profound subnormal.”
“As long as Mr. Cela does not demonstrate with documents that this transfer that he claims from us was the will of the admired Don José María, no document will come out of the Tudanca house. You can now give me all kinds of tacos, which Cela distributes so easily wherever he goes, that I will not give in,” responded the insulted José Antonio Rodríguez, first president of Cantabria after the approval of the Statute of Autonomy of the Autonomous Community.
“You pee outside the urinal”
Cela’s words sparked enormous controversy. “With these subjects, no matter how much they are candidates for the Nobel Prize, we have to cut things short,” the Cantabria Regionalist Party (PRC) of Miguel Ángel Revilla, already at that time, a political protagonist, said in a statement. The PRC, then the third political force in the Assembly (now the autonomous Parliament), asked to declare Camilo José Cela “an undesirable person in Cantabria.” ADIC, the Association for the Defense of the Interests of Cantabria, also addressed the writer in a statement: “If behind your words hides the bad temper caused by the refusal to give you the manuscript of your masterpiece, we believe that you “He pisses out of the urinal.”
Following the growing anger of the Cantabrians, Cela tried to back down. “You people from Santander have become very nervous and have made things crazy. I have never intended to insult anyone, I have simply made a diagnosis that later a group of hysterics have interpreted in their own way,” he defended himself. Some time later, the writer and the president of Cantabria ended up making peace at a dinner in Madrid. The Galician apologized for the insults.
In 1983, the Santander court of first instance ruled in favor of Cantabria, but Cela appealed to the Territorial Court of Burgos and obtained a favorable ruling. Given the possibility that the Community would take the case to the Supreme Court, there was an initiative for an amicable settlement. The writer promised to write the novel again in his own handwriting. He did it precisely, on the same squared paper as a school notebook with 175 numbered pages in six booklets, ensuring that it had the same lines and identical paragraphs – “and spelling mistakes if there were any, which there aren’t” –, with the exception that 48 years later – he warned – neither his handwriting nor his signature “could be the same.” It took him two months to complete the order.
Pact between gentlemen
Thus, after nine years of disputes, an agreement was sealed in the office of the president of Cantabria, who was already another. Ángel Díaz de Entresotos gave the manuscript to Cela to copy. “This original when it was written did not have the slightest interest. It was simply the work of a boy who was 25 years old at the time,” he said as soon as he received those yellowed papers.
In all those years, the manuscript was kept in the Casona de Tudanca, in that isolated environment, in the mountains, the refuge where Cossío and his intellectual friends read and reflected with no other distraction than the contemplation of nature itself. The only time it left there was when the person in charge of the house-museum took it to the National Library, protected in its green leather case, where they microfilmed it. They also made photocopies, which are used by researchers who want to work on it.
The author of ‘La colmena’ kept his word and in 1991 another president, this time Juan Hormaechea, received the copy of the original from the man who, years later, crowned his literary career with the Nobel Prize in Literature, the writer who was about to be persona non grata in Cantabria.
Coinciding with the resolution of the litigation, Círculo de Lectores published two facsimile editions of the two manuscripts of ‘The Family of Pascual Duarte’. Of the first, written in 1942, 980 numbered copies signed by Cela were distributed, and another 1,000 of the second, which were mostly given to cultural institutions and universities.
The copy that Cantabria treasures is not exact to the original either. The mark left by the ash from Cela’s cigarette on the title of the novel is missing, that day in 1941 when he began to write the first page of the novel that launched him to fame. For its part, the original manuscript has not been able to erase the seal of the Provincial Council that some methodical official happily stamped on the cover and the first page with bureaucratic naturalness.
Years later they asked Cela’s son about the outcome: “Did your father give you the manuscript?” “He didn’t let me hold it in my hands for more than 30 seconds,” he responded.
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