“In love madness is sensible.”
That stanza is from a poem that Machado wrote to his great love, my grandmother. A physically platonic and emotionally intense love that lasted eight years until war and death separated them. In Machado’s poems, my grandmother, Pilar de Valderrama, is Guiomar.
How was that love born?
My grandmother married Rafael Martínez Romarate at the age of 19, a socially and culturally prominent figure who respected that my grandmother was a writer and playwright.
A well-matched marriage?
He had several lovers, my grandmother found out when one of them committed suicide by jumping out of the window. She was very upset, but she did not want to be separated from her children.
Nor from her husband?
At that time, if you separated from your husband, they would take your children away from you, and since she lost her father when she was 6 years old and her mother remarried a man she didn’t like and spent her life in a boarding school, He swore he would never abandon his children.
So you met Machado?
Yes, when she found out about her husband’s deception, she decided to go to Segovia and meet one of her favorite poets. It was June 2, 1928.
Was Pilar de Valderrama already a writer?
Consecrated, she had already published two collections of poems, and she was an admirer of Machado, who taught at the Segovia Institute, and wanted to meet him. She was 36 years old, and he was 53. Pilar writes in her memoirs: “When he saw me, I didn’t know what happened to him, but I noticed that he was as if enthralled, because he didn’t stop looking at me.”
He had been widowed.
Yes, from the young Leonor, a fact that had led her to stop writing.
He soon returned to his poems.
From that meeting with Pilar he composed the wonderful Canciones a Guiomar. Then came many more meetings and a lengthy exchange of letters.
What was the nature of their relationship?
My grandmother told the poet that out of fidelity to her beliefs, to her children and to herself, she could only offer him a sincere friendship, a clean and spiritual affection, and that if he was not accepted in this way, they would not see each other again. He answered instantly: just to see you, anything.
They were in love?
Lost, but they kept their relationship a secret, she didn’t want to make anyone talk. I lived with my grandmother until I was 22 and she never told me about her deep love for the poet.
He published it posthumously.
Yes, he left his memoirs written: Yes, I am Guiomar. Memories of my life (1981), to be published after his death. The surprise was that, while organizing his things, I found several boxes full of documents, photographs, unpublished poems and more than 500 letters, back and forth; with Machado and with the writers of the generation of ’27 and some of ’98.
And the traces of their love story?
Of course. Machado addresses her as my queen, my goddess, my Madonna del Pilar. It was a relationship of love and intellectual affinity. In her letters, Machado conveys all of her concerns regarding politics.
She a bourgeoisie, he a worker.
But with great complicity. A detail: when Machado writes the play La Lola, she goes to the ports with her brother Manuel de ella, she asks my grandmother to “put two couplets of her thoughts.”
And what does she answer?
“Lola’s heart is only given in the song,” and that is how it comes out in the work. And Machado tells Unamuno to read Huerto cerca by Pilar de Valderrama, which is the best thing that has fallen into her hands in recent years.
They must have known of each other’s existence before they met.
Yes, they both admired each other, but she does not listen to Machado until she finds out that her husband is unfaithful to her. That is the safe conduct that takes him to that first meeting in which they have dinner together and walk around the castle.
Eight intense years.
Until she, just before the Civil War breaks out, goes to Portugal and he goes into exile to Cotlliure, where he dies in 1939.
What was Pilar de Valderrama like?
Intelligent and daring, to go meet Machado she took the tram and crossed all of Madrid to the outskirts, where they met in a working-class bar.
She was a suffragist.
Yes, and under the umbrella of the theater it welcomed many characters who at that time had sexual tendencies outside the norm. She was an academic of Latin America in 1930, the second most important after the Royal Spanish Academy.
And do you declare your love for Machado in a letter?
Yes, in a poem, Testament of an impossible love. They created a third world, a world in the imagination, there they met with their thoughts at 12 at night and gave free rein to their imagination.
