There are not few who consider Antonio Machado as the greatest Spanish poet of the 20th century. His deep and clear poetry is inscribed in the sentimental memory of collective schooling, consolidated by the exciting informative work that Joan Manuel Serrat carried out with it. The harsh conditions of his death in Collioure, a man exhausted after the long march into exile of those defeated in the Civil War, round out the profile of a secular saint. Talking about Antonio Machado implies reverence and respect.
Less indisputable is the figure of his brother Manuel, a brilliant modernist poet whose musicality and charm usually leave less of an impression on the reader than Antonio’s humanist classicism. Although the author of well-known pieces –Adelfos, Andalusia…–, his status in the changing society of letters is not clear, and his permanence on Franco’s side during the war, due more to fate than to ideological convictions, it hasn’t helped.
Antonio and Manuel had always maintained an excellent relationship and collaborated on various successful plays in the 1920s and 1930s. When in the terrible February of 1939 Manuel received the news in Burgos that his brother had died, he decided to undertake, accompanied by his wife Eulalia, a trip with unforeseen consequences through the devastated Spain at the end of the war to the town of Roussillon where Antonio has just been buried, to pay him his last goodbye. He still doesn’t know that Mrs. Ana, their mother, has also died there two days later.
Joaquín Pérez Azaústre’s novel El querido hermano, which received the Málaga prize and published Galaxia Gutenberg, is one of the good surprises of the season, is the focus of this itinerary so charged with emotional, literary and historical connotations. A powerful and very bitter story with beautiful moments; a reading that removes
Pérez Azaústre (Córdoba, 1976), a poet, narrator and journalist, tells me that his interest in this episode goes back a long way, “since Antonio Machado represented my first contact with poetry. When I heard about that trip -at first Manuel and his wife believed that Antonio had died in Paris- I saw in him a moment of great intensity, not only dramatic, but also lyrical. It symbolizes a Spain divided politically and geographically, but not in emotion or affection”.
The Andalusian writer mentioned the idea twenty years ago to Pere Gimferrer, who had edited a novel for him in Seix Barral, and the Barcelona poet recommended that he wait until he had lived longer to understand some protagonists “who face abysses of pain”. .
Pérez Azaústre has started from documentation where he could, and where not, he has fictionalized it. “There was little data on that journey, and I have been incorporating details that seemed credible to me, the car, the driver… I wanted to put myself in the shoes of a 65-year-old man, bronchitic, vulnerable.”
Manuel had been in the entire fight in the Castilian city, where he had been jailed on suspicion of rojerío and had a very bad time, until the good offices of José María Pemán protected him from certain danger. “Manuel is already an old man and although he has died a large part of his world, he feels the physical and sentimental need to say goodbye to Antonio.”
If Spain is destroyed, once in France the poet is surprised by normality and good food, “and that allows me to flashback to the Parisian period of Manuel and Antonio in 1899, when they lived happily in bohemia and treated Jean Moréas and Oscar Wilde . I have tried to focus on less well-known episodes than his stays in Seville, Baeza, Soria or Madrid, which are already very few”.
To end up stopping at a small Mediterranean cemetery, in front of a bare tomb donated by a kind soul, and marked with the republican flag.
