Ahmed looks with suspicion at the works that have been installed months ago on the street of the emblematic Cervantes theater in Tangier. “They raise a lot of dust and people avoid passing by here.” But there is a car that doesn’t seem to care about that, as it has been stopped for a long time in front of a colonial building. A woman looks out the window, looks at the house carefully, and then closes her eyes. She wants to retain each and every one of the details and aromas that she perceives at that moment. She is the writer Olga Lucas, widow of José Luis Sampedro (1917-2013). The writer, economist and academic also lived on that farm until he was 13, when the city was synonymous with paradise and freedom.
“He often spoke about Morocco. This place allowed him to develop the freedom of thought that would always accompany him later,” he tells La Vanguardia while walking through some of the places where little José Luis ran around, such as the great Souk; the Sacred Heart school, where he studied during his early years and where a plaque is dedicated to him today; or the avenue near the marina that this year has been renamed after him. He is accompanied on this journey by the director of the Cervantes Institute of Tangier, Javier Rioyo, and professor José Manuel Lucía Megías, who has just published the biography José Luis Sampedro. A frontier man, just ten years after his death.
“There are not many cities that have managed to be truly international, like my Tangier in the 1920s. There you could be Christian or Muslim or Israelite; “You could wear a jacket or djellaba, shoes or slippers and you could carry pesetas, francs, pounds sterling or Hasaní reales in your pocket,” Sampedro himself recalled in 2000 on the RTVE program Esta es mi tierra.
In those streets full of hubbub, where the smells of different spices intermingle, a future writer began to develop who would establish that conviction years later in the Peninsula, where he went to complete his studies. “If I, as a physical subject, was born in Barcelona, ??as a writer I was born in Aranjuez,” he would acknowledge. “In the Madrid municipality he had a kind of vision, as if the Virgin resembled him, in the metaphorical sense and, since then, he did not stop writing a single day. Her horizon to achieve this goal was a degree in Philosophy and Letters, studies that, due to a thousand circumstances, she never managed to complete,” explains Lucía Megías hours before the Tangier tour, during a breakfast with Olga at the historic Rembrandt hotel, which overlooks good faith of what the city was a century ago.
“We were three brothers and the family’s economic situation was not enough to have three children studying a university degree in Madrid. Once that diagnosis was made, without anyone pressuring me, I decided to prepare for Customs exams for utilitarian reasons: it was a short career that would allow me to earn a good salary so I could study whatever I wanted, without being a burden on the family,” he reflected. the academic.
The same logic followed and then he enrolled in the Faculty of Political and Economic Sciences at the Complutense of Madrid. She was the only one who at that time taught classes in the afternoon and which allowed her to combine her studies with her work in Customs. Her role as an economist began as a result of chance, although he would never separate himself from her, becoming one of the visible faces of the 15-M movement, despite him, since he did not feel comfortable feeling like a protagonist. . But when he enrolled in college, her goal was to have a degree that would allow her to earn more money so she could dedicate her time to writing. The obsession and vocation were always there,” remarks the biographer about the author of October, October (1981), a novel that, by the way, is closely linked to Carmen Balcells, since it was the first major work that the literary agent managed.
“They had a very special relationship. Of all the women who have been part of Sampedro’s life, there has only been one with leadership in his life, and that was Carmen Balcells. The day before meeting her I got nervous. I knew that if she didn’t accept me, Sampedro might back out. Luckily, he did. It was she who bought our wedding rings,” Olga Lucas fondly recalls, acknowledging that her husband “felt indebted to her because he rescues all of her leonine contracts and makes them come true. “He always considered that he owed his career to her.”
Mario Vargas Llosa was responsible for joining their paths. Specifically, his car, a Triumph. “She asked him for advice to obtain the necessary permits so that the Peruvian could drive her car through Spain,” says the widow. A first contact that was the beginning of a relationship that would make him the popular author he remains today.
The relationship between Balcells and Sampedro was forging while the one the writer had with Olga was staying, which arose in 1997 in the Alhama de Aragón spa, in Zaragoza, a place that always held a place in their hearts.
“I had admiration for him since I saw him on television for the first time. Fate brought us together in those bathrooms, but I didn’t dare to greet him. I was traveling with my friends, who told me that my love for Sampedro wouldn’t be as great if I had him there and I didn’t go near him. One night when I was alone waiting for the hotel dining room to open, I got brave and did it. We met for dinner and, after that meeting, I knew that he had conquered me and that this man could do with me whatever he wanted,” his wife concludes with a smile as she remembers the times they lived.
