The entrance to the exhibition at the National Library of Spain makes an impression. It is presided over by a short timeline that spans 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 Francoism, and achieves international resonance… and then falls into the misfortune of a Greek tragedy. Not with one, but with two deaths. It is the shocking start of the exhibition Tiempo de libertad, which commemorates the centenary of the birth of the writer Luis Martín-Santos in 1924 and which Pedro Sánchez inaugurated yesterday.
The initial chronology proposed by the curator of the exhibition, Julià Guillamon, summarizes the last two dizzying years of Martín-Santos’ life: since March 1962 he shakes up the Spanish narrative with Tiempo de silencio (Six Barral), which unites critics social and a revolution in forms, until on January 21, 1964 he died in Vitoria aged 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 33-year-old wife, Rocío Laffon, had died in a domestic accident, leaving behind three children.
They are two years loaded with an intense intellectual life in which editions of his work appear in France and Italy and in which he is arrested for the fourth time by the Francoist regime, which also kept his novel for a year in the censorship Among the unpublished documents gathered by two of the writer’s sons, Rocío and Luis Martín-Santos Laffon, promoters of the exhibition, there is not only a police record of the novelist. Also a letter from José Barreiro, member of the executive commission of the PSOE in Toulouse de Llenguadoc, about the absence of indications that the author’s fatal accident was an attack, since he was a key figure in the relationship between the internal opposition to Francoism and the socialists in exile.
A commitment that led him to present himself to the chair of Psychiatry at the Faculty of Medicine in Salamanca from Carabanchel. For 21 days a couple of policemen accompanied him by taxi to the faculty and after finishing the opposition exercises they returned him to his cell. The exhibition, in fact, covers his scientific and intellectual training, his studies in Medicine, his specialization in Psychiatry, his time in Heidelberg, in which he incorporated psychoanalysis and existentialism, and his direction of the psychiatric services of the Provincial Government of Gipuzkoa. Also his relationship from school with Chillida and his encounters with the avant-garde of Sant Sebastià.
One more factor: “Humor is very important in his work. And the work with language, the elaboration of metaphors, the mixture of scientific language, humanities and anthropology. It’s a festival. Each page is a world”, adds Guillamon, who brings Martín-Santos’ novels to life in the last section of the exhibition, be it with 21 drawings created by El Roto full of rats or a projection that brings the novel closer. the unfinished Tiempo de Destruction (Gutenberg Galaxy). A work that had to precede another entitled Tiempo de libertad, like this one shows that will go to the San Telmo Museum in San Sebastià, the city where the author lived from the age of five and unsuccessfully presented the Tiempo Pío Baroja prize of silence or
