The 3,200 books by Pardo Bazán trapped in the Pazo de Meirás

Library of Pardo Bazán in the Tower of the Chimera of the Pazo de Meirás CONCHI PAZ

On the night of February 18-19, 1978, months before the Constitution was approved, a fire that the authorities at the time attributed to a short circuit ate the entrails of the Meirás pazo.

The alarm was raised by Sada, and civil guards, military and residents of the Coruña municipality where the towers stand launched themselves, with the only light of the flashlights and car headlights, to save everything they could from the flames.

The next morning, countless valuables were piled up like the remains of a battle in the garden.

The press of that day cited a grand piano that had been dragged out by various journalists, figures, tapestries, rugs, paintings, amphorae, furniture.

Also books, quite a few books, which after surviving the fire ended up drenched in that rain that so often breaks out after a fire.

That incident left Meirás uninhabitable and the library that had belonged to the woman who preceded Franco in possession of the property, Emilia Pardo Bazán, was amputated.

About 8,000 volumes were donated to the Royal Galician Academy (RAG), whose headquarters is precisely the birthplace, and now museum and archive, of the writer in A Coruña.

But an undetermined number were left behind, trapped inside that mansion that the dictator's grandchildren lost last month in the first instance, after Judge Marta Canales recognized the State as the rightful owner.

Now it is known that these books that remained in Meirás, later punished by decades of humidity, reach the number of 3,200.

The Academy has inventoried them on successive visits since 2016, and intends to recover them.

The idea came from Xulia Santiso, director of the House-Museum of Emilia Pardo Bazán, who assumed the contacts with Carmen Franco, and the Academy, which was then chaired by Xesús Alonso Montero, relied on the fact that the pazo itself was already a Property of Interest Cultural (BIC) since 2008 to enter.

During two years, in weekly visits, a team of researchers led by Cristina Patiño was collecting titles and references of the 3,200 confined volumes.

"Many came out glued, with the leather binding melted from the heat of the fire," describes Santiso.

On the damage suffered, the father-in-law of one of Franco's granddaughters, Fernando Quiroga, also testified in the recent Meirás trial: "You take a book off the shelf and you get six together."

Now, the RAG is preparing the publication of the complete inventory of the Pardo Bazán library, with the books it already had in custody and those it aspires to incorporate from the pazo.

According to the current president, Víctor F. Freixanes, the institution will present to the Xunta in a few months the BIC request to protect as a “unit” the entire collection that the literary woman treasured during her lifetime.

In 1956, Blanca Quiroga, daughter and heir of Pardo Bazán, decided that upon her death not only the writer's house on Calle Tabernas in A Coruña would be donated to the Academy, but also all the documents, 420 books and assets that she kept.

The condition was that the institution, of which the writer had been named honorary president in 1905, "take care of her memory and her legacy," recalls Freixanes.

"We feel we are heirs and trustees of their heritage," he says, "and heritage is not just the stones, but the spirit of a person represented in their books."

In Meirás there are two libraries.

One located in a room on the ground floor that Franco had ordered built, in the wing that suffered the least from the fire, and another, that of Pardo Bazán, which had its epicenter in the Torre de la Chimera, the highest of the three that make up the palace and the writer's favorite.

From that room that overlooks the garden from which she called "the balcony of the muses", as she accumulated volumes, the countess ordered the construction of bookstores in other rooms, also in her bedroom.

During visits to the pazo, the guide explains that the author got up at four thirty in the morning and locked herself up to work in her office, surrounded by books.

The smoke, more than the flames, especially damaged this sector of the building (which the Francs rehabilitated 20 years later), and in an effort to save as many objects as possible, a good part of the books were taken out onto the lawn amid the chaos.

Out in the open in that month of February both the

and the Countess were left.

The book

(Galiza Semper Foundation), by researchers Carlos Babío and Manuel Pérez Lorenzo, reports that the specimens ended up being sheltered in the chapel of the palace itself and in the Infantry barracks, after being loaded in four trucks by replacement soldiers.

Today it is believed that many volumes of the more than 11,000 kept by the author were not lost in that event.

All were identified with careful cards, and as explained by the director of the RAG Archive, Mercedes Fernández-Couto, numbered with a red stamp and organized in various rooms according to plans in the handwriting of Pardo Bazán that are preserved.

The writer Marilar Aleixandre, who represented the Academy in the so-called Xunta pro-Devolución do Pazo, defends that the books that sleep their lethargy in Meirás since the dictatorship and those others that in 78 were delivered by Carmen Polo to the RAG, for intermediation of the Ministry of Culture, make up "an author's library."

"In them are the topics that interested him, his notes, the readings that influenced his works," he details.

What "is not known", he continues, is "the criteria" followed by Franco's widow to decide which books were to remain in Meirás and which were to be delivered to the Academy.

The institution that watches over the Galician language guards 7,423 volumes (of them almost 600 damaged) and the remains of "another 450 irrecoverable but whose title is known."

“Let's Europeize!” Cried out in an article Pardo Bazán, a voracious reader who insistently traveled to Paris and other European capitals where she could spend entire days in bookstores and libraries.

In addition to many first editions and copies dedicated by their authors, in its collection there are abundant books in French, English, German, Portuguese, Italian.

Among many others there are Dumas, Balzac, Voltaire, Zola, Flaubert, Concepción Arenal, Galdós, Valera, Pereda, or reference, travel and science books such as those of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt or the essays of John Stuart Mill. In general, the collection brings together the infinite "interests" of "an open and passionate woman, who enjoyed life", defines Aleixandre, who has just delivered to Editorial Galaxia her latest work,

, written with María López Sández.

No trace of Galdós's "volcanic" letters

As Babío and Pérez Lorenzo narrate, Franco showed since his arrival in Meirás interest in preserving the library of the former inhabitant of the towers.

From Madrid, in 1940, the concierge of the National Library, Evaristo Naya, traveled several times to review, clean and pack the books in order while the carpenters rebuilt the shelves.

In a report, the manager downgrades Pardo Bazán's collection.

He emphasizes that there are "very few good bindings" and that "the same can be said of the merit of the books."

In later years, during his stays in the mansion, the dictator himself selected batches of books and successive remittances were sent to the civil governor, with instructions for him to entrust “their binding, as usual, to the boys [orphans and needy] of the Home Calvo Sotelo ”.

But if most of the books are preserved, this is not the case with the letters that Benito Pérez Galdós sent to the writer during the years in which they maintained a fiery relationship.

The book by Pérez Lorenzo y Babío recounts the alleged burning of those letters, allegedly sinful, during Carmen Polo's first visit to Meirás.

According to this version, the dictator's wife would have acted on the advice of the parish priest.

Julia Santiso acknowledges the difficulty in confirming this episode, and explains that although Franco's daughter related these events to her in a meeting, years later she denied it and said that the love letters had been delivered "in a box" to her. daughter of Pardo Bazán.

But in the legacy given to the Academy, those letters of a "volcanic" relationship (in the words of Marilar Aleixandre) were not there.

Of those that Galdós wrote, barely one from 1883 is preserved. The tone can be guessed, however, from the correspondence sent by Pardo Bazán that is kept in the writer's house museum in Gran Canaria.

There are 92 epistles that in 2013 saw the light together in the book

from Isabel Parreño and Juan Manuel Hernández (Turner).

The relationship evolved from the "admired teacher" and the "dear friend" of the early years to the "ratonciño", "dulce vidiña", "miquiño" or "monín" of 1888 and 1889. "Pánfilo de mi corazón: rabio also by throwing your eyes and arms and body all over you.

I will crush you.

Later we will talk sweetly about literature and the Academy and nonsense, but first I will bite your cheek! ”, The passionate countess wrote in those letters.

"There is such an emotional and physical life in me, that I can without lying say that I am all yours: All."