Blanca Andreu, the poet who triumphed at the age of 20 and preferred to disappear: “I am flattered that they believe me dead”

Blanca Andreu, in Madrid, in August 1994.

A few years before she died, the mother of the poet Blanca Andreu (A Coruña, 62 years old) asked her daughter about a photo that Andreu was enlarging to full screen on her computer.

“Who is that ugly girl?” she asked.

It was her, Blanca Andreu herself.

"But she was right: the photo was creepy," she says.

She apologizes for not agreeing to be photographed.

"No way, don't insist."

Not because she is ugly, as her mother said, after all because of a bad photo.

But she triumphed at 20 years old, her face came out in all the media, she knew the whole world in her splendor, and time has passed.

“I am not obsessed with the loss of youth or beauty, inside I am 17 years old.

But come on, I don't want a photo, in any way.

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"Being on the front page is a strategic error"

This article, written after two weeks of telephone conversations with Blanca Andreu, has many edges.

Related to her very scarce work by the dropper which, since her first book, has made Andreu one of the most important and revered poets in Spanish, whose last two collections of poems are from 2001 and 2010 (“one of them failed, I did it for the prize money”).

Related to her profound culture and her way of understanding her art (“I believe in the muse, not in poetry open 24 hours a day, like those of Luis García Montero's poetry of experience”).

Related to love and mourning after her marriage to Juan Benet, probably the most influential Spanish novelist of the second half of the 20th century.

And some related edges, finally,

with the loneliness and voluntary ostracism of a girl who revolutionized literature in the eighties and today lives in a small house by the sea, in Orihuela, withdrawn from any public life: “Many years ago a Catalan journalist called me and confessed to me that her friends believed she was dead.

I felt flattered.

I think there is no higher praise for a poet.

In the background, when she speaks, you can hear the sea and the barking of her dog,

full name of the protagonist of Rudyard Kipling's novel

Blanca Andreu's fame exploded in 1980. One day, at exam time, Andreu, a Galician student in the second year of Hispanic Philology at the Complutense University of Madrid, threw all the poems she had written in recent weeks into the wastebasket.

She was exhausted.

She had not studied anything, and she saw her work as "horrible".

A friend of his (Francisco Umbral? “I prefer not to say the name of that friend”) asked permission to pick them up and read them.

The girl, pale, thin and pretty, told him to do what he wanted.

Dazzled, that friend read the poems, arranged them and gave them a title,

, to send them behind the author's back to one of the most prestigious prizes for poetry in Spanish in the world, the Adonais, by Ediciones Rialp.

A member of the jury even asked that the collection of poems be withdrawn from the contest because it was made "dirty", according to what the author herself was told, "with coffee stains and everything".

But in the end Luis Jiménez Martos, José García Nieto, Claudio Rodríguez, Rafael Morales and Rafael García García gave her the award for being "bold, very imaginative in words, brave in language and creator of a poetic world that seems to belong to her." alone".

The collection of poems exhibits a surrealism unleashed and unusual in Spain at the time.

More than 40 years later, it is considered one of the capital books of poetry in Spanish.

The director of the Rialp publishing house, Rafael García (right), presents the Adonáis poetry prize, in the presence of the director of the National Library, Hipólito Escolar, to the writer Blanca Andreu.

EFE

This is how Blanca Andreu saw herself at the age of 20 at the top of a world to which she had devoted herself since she was a teenager, to the point of getting angry when others liked the same poems, or the same authors, as her.

“It keeps happening to me,” she says.

"The other day I saw a petarda in a social network posting a passage that I love by Virginia Woolf and saying that it was similar to what she wrote, and I thought: 'You should be tested before selling you a book of Virginia Woolf”.

made its author a star.

Newspapers, televisions, literary gatherings: everyone wanted to meet the magnetic Blanca Andreu.

José Hierro told her that she could now rest on her laurels, "total, they will always tell you that as the first, none."

“Love between grace and crime, / like half glass and half white vine, / like a furtive vein of a dove: / ancient deer blood that perfumes / the locks of death”, she writes in that book.

“When I saw the title, I was embarrassed.

A girl from the provinces?

I was 20 years old, I was already a lady”.

The title is due to the fact that, when she lived on Diego de León street in Madrid, she went a lot to the March Foundation exhibitions, and there she bought posters.

For example, a poster with a painting by the painter Marc Chagall that she had hanging in the living room of that apartment.

Success, she says, blew her life away.

For better and for worse.

"I did not know that glory was to show one's face," she laments.

Ask.

Her name was all over the place because of something she had thrown in the bin.

Response.

That year I was very embarrassed because I had completely undressed in those poems and many people were reading them.

But people who did not know anything: advantages of surrealism.

Q.

Why does that book survive?

A.

Because it is written in blood.

P.

Why did you survive, suddenly so well known and so young, in Madrid in the early eighties?

R.

Because I was a Martian within the Movida.

Like that beautiful Oliver Sacks book,

.

He didn't understand anything.

I knew everyone because they took me from here to there, but I didn't even listen to pop, I listened to Schubert.

And I used to read poetry.

He had a huge obsession with poetry.

As for drugs, he smoked a lot of hashish.

Neither cocaine nor heroin.

Andreu, who had already won a national Coca-Cola short story contest at the age of 14, published after

the book

(Hyperión, 1982).

In that space, between 1980 and 1982, she won the Adonais awards, the Gabriel Miró Short Story for the story

, the Fernando Rielo World Prize for Mystic Poetry and the Icarus Prize for Literature.

At the beginning of that time, she had an unstable relationship with Francisco Umbral that ended badly and gave rise to a term that she used after her to refer to him (“I was not a muse of Umbral. The muse of Umbral is her

”) and that Arturo Pérez Reverte later recovered in his disputes with the writer.

He had already dropped out of school.

He headed a generation they called the postnovísimos.

And one day of those troubled years, in 1982, a car ("an impressive Daimler, Juan loved cars") stopped in the street and his friend Vicente Molina-Foix got out with Javier Marías and Juan Benet, one one of the greatest Spanish novelists of the 20th century, author of

or

.

Molina-Foix introduced them.

“Juan, from the start, was intimidating.

He shot me a look from above.

But Vicente told me later that that same night he began to inquire about me”.

Benet was then 55 years old;

Andreu, 23. "I don't like to talk about ages," he says, "and I don't like to talk about puritanism either."

They married in 1985 and lived together for eight years, until Benet passed away.

In 2010, Blanca Andreu wrote to Juan Pedro Quiñonero's blog,

, to point out several things about Benet.

“He was a man capable of having 40 people laughing non-stop for five hours.

Everyone who knew his humor maintains —and I include myself— that he is the funniest man with the craziest and most irresistible humor that there has ever been in the world (...) In the depths of the facts and in the depths of the personalities, this was the beloved and feared Juan Benet: a lamb among wolves.

(…)

He was not only a Civil Engineer, Canals and Ports, but one of the only two Honorary Members of the College of Civil Engineers of Madrid, who recognized his worth.

He not only possessed vast literary knowledge, but also scientific knowledge, and perhaps that knowledge, applied to literature, is what apparently weighs it down but actually enriches it.

His knowledge of hydraulic physics allowed him to intervene in the construction of 17 large dams, the last of these being the Santa Uxía dam, the first compacted concrete dam in Europe and the second to be built in the world.

A civil engineer of this degree must necessarily cover not only great mathematical and structural knowledge, but also geological knowledge (as demonstrated in

).

And in the case of Benet they were completed with geographical, anthropological, linguistic and historical ones.

Not to mention the enormous musical memory of him”.

P.

Do you continue writing when you meet Benet?

R.

Juan was very critical and also made parodies of theater and everything, including himself.

I have the feeling that Juan did not like what I had written.

He never told me, but he liked very little poetry.

And over time he would leave me things, he would tell me "read this" or he would recite someone's verses to me, and that changed my aesthetic.

Q.

Did it crash?

A.

At first, because what I wrote were love poems and Juan couldn't write love poems for him: I would have thrown them at my head.

He was very modest.

I had always written with a lot of loving desperation.

And with Juan the desperation is over, love and its lack no longer hurt me.

P.

With him you only published

(Visor, 1988).

He spent six years without publishing.

R.

I was blocked until that third book.

Sometimes I tried to write poetry, but commissioning it myself.

That does not work.

I believe in the muse.

I remember one day that I spent the whole afternoon to make five or six verses with all the elements that made them work.

When Juan arrived, I told him: “Look at this”.

He read it, threw the pages in the air and said to me: "Who are you fooling with this?"

Q.

How hard.

R.

Of course.

But the best thing is that they treat you harshly.

That's why I don't want to post.

Because nobody can tell me: "Hey, this is a birria".

P.

There are things that seem bad to some, and they seem good to others of as much value as the first.

A.

He was right.

A poem breathes or it doesn't breathe, there is no middle ground.

Either it is a poem or it is an artifact written with the head.

However, something written from inspiration is something else.

There are primitive poems of the Greek lyric that are alive, that seem to have been written yesterday.

You see that with the great poets.

And besides, as the Romans used to say, from time to time Homer dozes.

The writer Blanca Andreu receives the Icarus prize for poetry, which was awarded by 'Diario 16', in December 1982. EFE

Q.

Did you fall in love again after Juan Benet?

R.

It is not that I fell in love again.

It's just that when Juan died I was left so alone, so weakened... I remember when I lived in Plaza de Pontejos in Madrid.

I was going to buy at the delicatessen that was next to the Plaza Mayor and the boy from the delicatessen told me: “Have you cut your hair?”.

And I already thought: “Oh.

Will he like me?

He has seen that I have cut my hair, he notices me”.

It wasn't a crush, it was a state of brutal need.

But after Juan... Yes, I've had something.

But, bah, inshore fishing.

P

...

R.

It is very difficult after having been with someone like him.

He was so smart.

He was a man with whom nothing had to be negotiated.

Very dominant.

But not sexist, not at all.

He was dominant because he ruled over a lot of people when he did public work and in the cultural world he was the real star.

His death [in 1993] disabled me for years.

To write, to bowl, which is what makes money.

Then it was said that I had retired because I went to live in Coruña, and they stopped calling me.

In 1994, during an interview with EL PAÍS, Blanca Andreu said that she was surviving "badly", for example with some radio substitutions "for two dollars".

“I have some outlets: if things go badly for me, very badly, I emigrate to Galicia.

My parents have a house in A Coruña that they would leave me”.

Things, in fact, went very badly, and Blanca Andreu ended up living in her family home until her parents died and she and her brothers (there were five, three are alive) sold it.

In Orihuela, where she spent part of her childhood because her father, a pediatrician, had a practice there, she has bought a house with a garden and a swimming pool, one kilometer from the sea.

“It is normal for poets to have another profession.

Many of them teach classes, or work in a publishing house or in the press.

I do not.

But I'm not complaining, because when I need money it rains from the sky.

A collaboration, an article,

a prologue, something... During a vacation in Greece I thought: 'It's over, now there's no more', and within 15 days Beatriz Pécker called me, an incredible boss, for a collaboration with her on the radio that lasted me until Zapatero gave early retirement to all those over 50 from RTVE”.

As a young man, they even offered him a column in EL PAÍS.

“It was Juan Luis [Cebrián, then director of the newspaper].

I rejected her because she didn't feel like making a fool of herself.

Now I do have a lot of opinions, but at the time I didn't have any."

As a young man, they even offered him a column in EL PAÍS.

“It was Juan Luis [Cebrián, then director of the newspaper].

I rejected her because she didn't feel like making a fool of herself.

Now I do have a lot of opinions, but at the time I didn't have any."

As a young man, they even offered him a column in EL PAÍS.

“It was Juan Luis [Cebrián, then director of the newspaper].

I rejected her because she didn't feel like making a fool of herself.

Now I do have a lot of opinions, but at the time I didn't have any."

“On top of my wounds I discover an unfortunate and ocher cloth, / torn by enemies, / or a word drunk with sealing wax.

/ But when I fall asleep / I will no longer love you”, writes Andreu in his poem

How do you define your poetry?

“True poets are original and unlabelable.

I am not always a poet, I am not a poet on duty.

I believe in poetry as a rapture.

There is a very beautiful scene in one of the Socratic dialogues in which Socrates is talking with his disciples, with his usual maieutics, and his head was covered by a blanket.

Plato says: 'Suddenly he took off the blanket from his head, and the muses snatched him away'.

And at that moment Socrates begins to tell that the soul is like a chariot driven by two horses.

Poetic writing is just that, taking the blanket off your head and being snatched away by the muses”.

They no longer call her for women's poetry congresses.

In 2001 he said: “I don't believe in female poetry.

It is written with the brain, which is not a sexual organ.

When I have glimpsed that what I write could be called that,

P.

How is your day to day?

A.

I am very lonely.

I love loneliness.

This morning I have been tending the garden.

I have also swam in the pool.

Then I started cutting branches.

And I've been studying some easy baroque pieces.

I have a keyboard here.

Q.

He plays the piano.

R.

I pound it.

But I really like to study it.

Above all, taking scores and extracting from them what is inside, which I sometimes recognize.

I have taken the dog out, we have taken a walk to the park.

A very peaceful life.

And I read.

Right now I'm reading a book by Woolf, which is the first one she wrote,

P.

Are you aware of what is published?

R.

Every year, the best bookseller in Spain, who is Diego Marín, sends me a box with news.

Q.

What do you think about when you are alone?

R.

I try to unravel the past.

I think of things I have read.

Or in very silly and not very silly things, and issues that I have to solve from day to day.

I am also very religious.

Q.

Yes?

R.

I do not practice any religion, but I have a lot of faith.

I think about how I have to manage my life to be able to do, as Vicente Ferrer told me, the good deed.

Because such a lonely life is not a life very inclined to do things for others.

In short, I am also involved with the Vicente Ferrer Foundation.

I have nine of his letters that I treasure.

He helped me a lot after Juan died.

Q.

Will you ever post again?

R.

I think of stories, which is what I have wanted to do for years, and I have quite a few writings.

But, as Cervantes said in reverse, "the grace that heaven did not want to give me."

What they tell me is good for me is unpublishable.

And what I think is the Parthenon they tell me is a very old writing.

Q.

Who?

A.

My court advisors.

Q.

Poetry.

R.

I have unpublished.

Perhaps posthumously they will come out.

I had someone who gave me perspective.

You need a mirror before going outside, and I don't have one.

I don't have Juan, nor a poet friend whom I gave a lot of credibility to.

And one more thing.

Q.

What?

R.

Just thinking about publishing a new book and putting myself in the hands of critics repels me.

P.

Criticism has treated you well.

R.

And bad.

I lack prepared criticism in this country.

Things get passed.

There are some old verses: "The heron in love goes badly, she goes alone and screams".

Put the present and the past in that sentence.

Well, there is a novel by Soledad Puértolas in which she does it throughout the entire book without screeching.

I didn't see anyone notice it!

I called her excited.

It is an impressive technical display.

Years ago, Vicente Molina-Foix and Luis Cremades published

: what the two do there is a marvelous structure that was not sufficiently singled out either.

As for me, I don't feel like letting my enemies mess with my mind.

Q.

Do you still have enemies after so long?

R.

In the literary world, yes.

I left very early, with a lot of noise, before my generation.

And that creates tensions.

The generation of poets of experience — not all of them — came out directly against me.

He had to have come out against the previous generation, as is always done, against the newest, not against me, who was his.

“What seasons where there is nothing and no messenger remembers that distant music, those eyes that shine in the dark like two living animals

Andreu wrote in

"As a child she wanted to be Baudelaire because she thought he was the only possible form of immortality," she said disenchanted almost two decades ago.

After winning the Adonáis, she told Juana Salabert: “You can't start writing at 20 years old.

A writer has always had a passion for language within him, even if he decides to write very late”.

In

, she writes: “Listen, tell me, she was always this way / something is missing and we have to name her”.

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