The entrance to the exhibition at the National Library of Spain (BNE) makes an impression. It is presided over by a brief chronology that covers less than two years. Two years in which a life accelerates towards the Olympus of success at the most unexpected moment, in the midst of Franco’s regime, achieving international echo… and immediately falls into a misfortune like a Greek tragedy. Not with one, but with two deaths. It is the shocking start of the exhibition Time of Freedom, which commemorates the hundred years since the birth of the writer Luis Martín Santos in 1924 and which Pedro Sánchez inaugurated yesterday afternoon.
The initial chronology proposed by the curator of the exhibition, Julià Guillamon, summarizes the last two dizzying years of Martín-Santos’ life: since in March 1962 he shook Spanish narrative with Time of Silence (Seix Barral), which brings together critical social and a revolution in forms, and until on January 21, 1964 he died in Vitoria at the age of 39 in a car accident on his way back from Madrid, where he had visited Carmen Martín Gaite and Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio. Eleven months earlier, his wife, Rocío Laffon, died in a domestic accident at the age of 33, leaving behind three children.
These are two years full of an intense intellectual life in which editions of his work have appeared in France and Italy and in which he has been arrested for the fourth time by the Franco regime, which has also kept his novel in censorship for a year. Among the unpublished documents that two of the writer’s children, Rocío and Luis Martín-Santos Laffon, promoters of the exhibition, have gathered, there is not only a police file of the novelist. Also a letter from José Barreiro, member of the executive commission of the PSOE in Toulouse, about the absence of indications that the author’s fatal accident was an attack, given that he was a key figure in the relationship between the internal opposition to Francoism and the socialists. in exile.
A commitment that led to him being presented to the chair of Psychiatry at the Faculty of Medicine of Salamanca from Carabanchel. For 21 days, a couple of police officers accompanied him by taxi to the faculty and after finishing the opposition exercises they returned to his cell. The exhibition in fact covers his scientific and intellectual training, his medical studies, his specialization in psychiatry, his time in Heidelberg, incorporating psychoanalysis and existentialism, and his direction of the psychiatric services of the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa. Also his relationship with Chillida since school and his meetings with the San Sebastián avant-garde.
One more factor: “Humor is very important in his work. And the work with language, the elaboration of metaphors, of crossings of scientific language, of the humanities and of anthropology. It is a festival. Each page is a world,” adds Guillamon, who brings to life the novels of Martín-Santos in the last section of the exhibition, either with 21 drawings created by El Roto full of rats or a projection that shows his unfinished novel Time of Destruction. (Gutenberg Galaxy). Which was to be followed by another entitled Time of Freedom, like this exhibition that will go to the San Telmo Museum in San Sebastián, the city in which the author lived from the age of five and to which he unsuccessfully submitted the Pío Baroja Time of Silence award.
