The field veterinarian and writer María Sánchez, columnist on the Comer channel of La Vanguardia, has been awarded the Julio Camba International Journalism Foundation Award for an article published in the pages of this newspaper. This is “Escoitar os mortos” (Listen to the dead), a text that was published in June 2022 in which Sánchez talks about the ritual of invoking our missing loved ones through food, a reflection on the which came when he went to live in Galicia when he heard the name of the new deceased of the day on the radio every day just at lunchtime.
Since yesterday, his name has appeared on the list of journalists who, since 1979, have received this award in a contest that was conceived to distinguish the quality of literary and opinion articles published in recognized newspapers in the Spanish language. The jury considered that the text combines “its emotional and literary capacities, as well as its own perspective, open and respectful of tradition.”
The award, which was presented at the Casa América in Madrid yesterday and has a financial prize of 10,000 euros, in addition to a statuette of journalist Julio Camba inspired by a caricature by Siro López, was also nominated by journalist Armando Álvarez, who participates with the article “The glacier and the light”, published in the Faro de Vigo; and the columnist José María Paz Gago with the opinion column “The pen and the gun”, published in La Tercera del ABC. The total number of applications this year was 134.
The president of Afundación, Abanca’s Social Work, Miguel Ángel Escotet, started the award ceremony with a few words that highlighted the purpose of the award: “The search for excellence through the recognition of quality articles and promoting and giving wings to to navigate the exciting, and so necessary, craft of writing”.
Columnists from Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica and Spain have participated in the 44th edition of the award. Finally, among the 134 applicants there were three finalists, and the journalist María Sánchez has ended up emerging as the winner.
The court was chaired by the writer Alfredo Conde and its secretary was the communications director of Abanca, Isaac González Toribio. In addition, journalists and writers Bibiana Candia, Manuel de Lorenzo and Cristina Sánchez-Andrade acted as members, as well as Jaime Abello, director of the Gabo Foundation, and the writer and former vice president of Nicaragua Sergio Ramírez.
This is a phrase that I never imagined would end up becoming something of my own and routine in my daily life since I settled part of my life in Galicia. It is time to listen to the dead, they always say, in this house, when it approaches one thirty in the afternoon, the exact moment when most days we prepare to eat or find ourselves preparing the table and the lunch. Listening to the dead requires attention, silence, a change in the body. Many times, suddenly, all the noise concentrates to disappear, to give way to the voice of the radio that every noon announces who left the previous hours, how their farewell will be said, at what time, in what place we could meet, What words and ceremonies do their families choose to say goodbye to them.
At first it shocked me to hear in minute detail a list of those who died every day while I was preparing to eat or ate as if nothing had happened. Not just the name of the dead man as he directs the spoon to his mouth, but everything that happens and unfolds around him. The links, the stories, the anecdotes, the shared paths. Sharing the table with the dead reminded me of that verse by Quevedo that said “listen to the dead with your eyes.” Only here, among parsnips and collard greens ready to be served, I listen to them with my mouth, with my hands, with an overflowing plate and a bread always in front of me, with appetite and curiosity to know more about those who have just disappeared in that permanent absence that devours while I clean the plate. I am a body that needs food, I am alive and I learn, or so I think: being part of this side of the living means living with loss every day, and perhaps this is nothing more than another way of rehearsing one of the oldest farewells in the world.
Olga Novo told me when I told her about this immersion in her land and how I felt, that it was beautiful that shared path that opened between the food and the deceased, because they were the ones who, at the end of the day, had a voice again and They continued talking to us, sitting with us at the table. Perhaps, through food we could invoke them, that’s why my grandmother, as soon as she returned from the cemetery after my grandfather’s funeral, the first thing she did was go to the kitchen to prepare some fried eggs and potatoes. My mother tells me this with a mixture of anger and tenderness, but I, now that I am on this earth that does not let go of what disappears, understand it, I see it now from a different place.
Something similar also happened to the German writer Judith Schalansky. In her book, Inventory of Some Lost Things, she decides to open the prologue with a memory, or rather, with a conversation with death. She walks, one day in August, in some northern city, through a sailors’ neighborhood. Near the sea, he discovers something that will end up being grafted into his memory, an image that he will not be able to get rid of, that will become a memory, that will have its own voice and weight, will forcefully occupy the first pages of this book: in the There is no market in the center of the town through which you walk. There is no square, there are no shops, bars, restaurants. Some young lime trees learn to shade a cemetery. Here, in this place, the space designed for life, for exchange, food and movement, talks and meetings, baskets and exchanges, becomes something else, has another destination. The center is a place for silence, for eternal rest, for a land that little by little allows itself to be made by the coexistence of roots that are hollowed out with the bodies of those recently submerged in the mantle. She, in these pages, confesses that at first she was overcome with a kind of discomfort, a sensation that grabbed her body and did not let go until it gave way to an immense stupor.
From the place she occupied as a newcomer to the heart of the stage, an image suddenly appeared and struck her: in front of her, an open window that revealed a kitchen. From her, the noise of pots and fires, the smells of the pantry and patience. Up there, a woman was preparing the food, always with a view of the cemetery. While she cared for what she stirred and fed, she could see at all times the grave of a son that she left too soon. An invisible thread hung in the space, it became present, it entangled the stranger and also those of us who began to be part of the conversation. One in which one does not live with one’s back to death, one in which one does not hide, one does not silence oneself, one does not cover oneself with old sheets and rags. An old conversation that becomes new every day in which the bond is not broken, one that makes it possible for everyone to continue sitting at the table, eating together, sharing, talking, listening to each other attentively, while breaking bread and they silently contemplate futures and pasts at the same time.
