There is a house in Chamberí where poetry lived. Poets, friends and poets friends who were looking for a word of mood, an advice, an opinion of his dweller, Vicente Aleixandre (Seville, 1898 – Madrid, 1984) paraded through that place. Today the house awaits closed that poetry returns. Not long ago its doors opened for Javier Vila, who rolled there Velintonia 3, presented this week at the Malaga Film Festival. The film works on a double axis: that of the poet’s word and his friends, and the image of the house of poetry.
The poet inhabited the house since 1927 (“I came to this house being an unprecedented poet,” he says) until his death in 1984, with the only interruption of the civil war, which set the front of the battle of the University City very close to there. There are 630 square meters, divided into three floors and with a 799 -meter plot surface, which the Nobel became a pilgrimage for poets.
A magician song, House number 3, He put Vila on the track of this place. “I was impressed by the generations of poets that have passed by. And, from the audiovisual point of view, how an inanimate object (very special for the relationship he had with the house) could serve as a thread to tell the story,” explains the director. After much insistence, he achieved permission to roll and celebrate even a poetic evening like those of a long time.
The house had been closed for years, a victim of disagreements between Aleixandre’s relatives and the indecision of administrations to acquire and protect it. After two deserted auctions, the Community of Madrid has announced this week its intention to bid with 3.2 million euros to turn it into a “artistic reference center of our country”. In June 2024, the Regional Government also announced that it opened a file to declare it of cultural interest, but it has not yet done so. At the moment, it is very of patrimonial interest, which means that the property has to be kept, but not necessarily with its original destination.
From the holidays with García Lorca to conversations with novel poets
That is not another house. Aquejo of a disease that forced him to rest, Aleixandre lived much of his life between those walls. As he could not leave, he got others to go see him. “This house has always been open to the free circulation of all the people who wanted to visit me.” Velintonia 3 keeps conversations, parties and confidences of four generations of poets, from 27 to the newly. Without leaving his home, Aleixandre became the most related Spanish writer, enthroned in the heart of friends and disciples.
“Everyone needed to visit it at least once in life, with the hope of receiving a word of breath and sympathy from the prophet, or a recognition or advice,” is told in the documentary. He always asked if they had taken him a poem. It was a meeting of Dámaso Alonso, Pedro Salinas, Rafael Alberti, García Lorca and other generation partners. In it, the figure of Carmen Conde (first academic of the RAE), the Witch Academy that brought together a generation of women artists who claimed that their voice was heard was heard.
Visits also served to connect with the lost generation after the civil war. Aleixandre was an intimate friend of Emilio Prados since his childhood shared in Malaga. Also of Miguel Hernández, who every time he visited him wore him orange that he spread in the room and said: “Now he is full of stars.” It was one of the few who attended his funeral, without fear of being indicated. From García Lorca recalls Concha Méndez that sat on the piano and sang a composite letter for the waves of the waves, and then danced with a tied napkin as if it were a suit, simulating being a cupletist. “It was the joy itself.”
Post -war censorship
During the war, Velintonia 3 was “looted by the Reds,” Aleixandre, who saved the books he could collect in a cart in which Miguel Hernández accompanied him. Among them, an edition of the Crying by Ignacio Sánchez Mejías of his friend Federico, in which he retained the footprint of the militiaman who had stepped on her. His republican sympathies did not serve him to avoid arrest and transfer to a Czech. Neruda saved his life: “It’s ours.”
The first postwar years are censorship. “There was a public repudiation of my name: I could not sell my books, I could not publish anything and I could not even be mentioned. They scratched up to my name.” Aleixandre always signed the manifestos against torture and the death penalty.
“Velintonia 3 was the lighthouse where those who were in exile, symbol of culture resistance, but did not have an exacerbated political point,” explains Javier Vila. “Now I am glad I could not go into exile. I wanted to live and I have lived the fate of my people. I admire the classmates who left with such dignity, but I do not regret having made and seen the story from within, as they did from the outside,” he says, who planted a cedar as soon as he returned to the house in 1940.
During those years he wrote Shadow of paradise (1944), perhaps his best known work. “I was lucky to touch me a friend censor.” A book that would not have had no childhood in Malaga. “My eyes always see you, city of my marine days, hanging from the imposing mount, barely stopped in your vertical fall to the blue waves.”
The closure of the house
Aleixandre died in 1984 and his sister in 1986. “From then on the house is forgotten,” explains the director. For a while, Amaya Aleixandre, the poet’s granddaughter, gave permission to visit her. Also once a year for poetic evenings Poets fly to Velintonia. “She is sensitive to the subject and understands the figure and value of the house.” Hereditary disputes, however, closed the place.
Vila and his team were able to return to the philologist Alejandro Sanz, one of the greatest experts in the Nobel, president of the Association of Friends of Vicente Aleixandre and editor of his complete works published under the title ‘Complete poetry’ (Lumen, 2022). Velintonia 3 Take advantage of the visit to go through Aleixandre’s life and work through the interviews he granted, the reading of own and others, the conversations with whom he was known and the leisurely and harmonious promenade for the stays of the house. The camera stops in its dark corners, its rickety doors, its dust covers, its chipped walls, reflexes of abandonment.
Aleixandre writers and friends and members of the last generation that Velintonia knew in Nobel’s life, returns, 40 years after his death, they return to remember what this place meant for them and for the generation of 27. Antonio de la Torre, Ana Fernández, Mona Martínez and Manolo only put voice to Aleixandre himself, Lorca, Neruda, Miguel Hernández or Carmen Conde. And young poets read Aleixandre’s texts.
“I would like him to recover the spirit of all his times: a meeting point, an island of freedom, a place of creation. A house of poetry,” concludes Vila, who for an hour and a half opens again in pair of the doors of the house of poetry.
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