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Tears and praises in the burning chapel of Antonio Gala in Córdoba

2023-05-30T10:58:06.582Z

Highlights: The Andalusian city pays tribute to the writer who sang so much to him and where he expressly asked that his ashes rest. Antonio Gala (Brazatortas, Ciudad Real, 1936 - Córdoba, 2023) draws in the play Seneca or the benefit of the doubt to a character as human as contradictory. "Today there is a feeling of strangeness in the city, I have been crossing paths with a lot of friends who, although we knew or could intuit the outcome, we did not imagine in the trance of today," explains a friend.


The Andalusian city pays tribute to the writer who sang so much to him and where he expressly asked that his ashes rest


Antonio Gala (Brazatortas, Ciudad Real, 1936 - Córdoba, 2023) draws in the play Seneca or the benefit of the doubt to a character as human as contradictory, lowering the philosopher from the pedestal and facing his fears. And this is how he has bid farewell this Monday in May – May in Córdoba could already be a whole genre – the adopted city of the poet to the man who was loved as a neighbor but who also aspired to revalidate Seneca, Averroes, who wanted to be Boabdil in The Crimson Manuscript, and collected all the knowledge of classical Cordoba to vindicate it from its past to the present.

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The clamor of the bells by Antonio Gala

It is four o'clock in the afternoon of a post-election Monday and there is no room for a pin in the burning chapel installed in the convent of Corpus Christi, headquarters of the Antonio Gala Foundation, where the remains of the popular writer, who died in the early hours of last Sunday, rest before his cremation: the institutional representatives and media barely succeed in taking center stage in an act of which, literally, the neighbors have appropriated, who come by dozens in a silent demonstration, but also friends —from Córdoba and those arrived from Madrid—, students of the Foundation, relatives and everyone in the Andalusian city who feels their memory inextricably linked to that of the poet.

Several people queue to enter the writer's burning chapel. PACO PUENTES

"When I was little, Gala was the writer from Córdoba who appeared on TV, who successfully premiered his plays in Madrid, but, above all, the one who carried our city on his lips and related us in a quite glorious way with our past. At the very beginning, when Córdoba was vindicated from the Andalusian discourse of the autonomic process, it is Gala who finds that kinship, that mestizo nature of Andalusia and the city, from Greece and Rome to Muslim Andalusia, and makes it a hallmark for our social projection". It is told by the poet, also from Córdoba, Joaquín Pérez Azaústre, who has arrived by AVE from Madrid to bid farewell to the one who was first a reference, then a teacher and, finally, a friend.

"Antonio Gala teaches us to build a new territory. At the time of the germination of autonomous Andalusia, he laid the foundations for us to rediscover our past. He was the writer who needed that time and that Andalusia: Gala is the writer-time-territory union", reinforces Azaústre in the middle of a continuous embrace with the Cordoba that parades through the burning chapel and that put the poet in luck when he was 18 years old.

Personal belongings of Antonio Gala, this Monday at his foundation. PACO PUENTES

No blushes, but from discretion, Cordoba is literally crying. Tears are shed by people who may not have treated him – or who have – and who do not have reserved seats in the small chapel that serves to bid farewell to the poet in a secular ceremony that, however, could be confused with a deeply religious rite. "Today there is a feeling of strangeness in the city, I have been crossing paths with a lot of friends who, although we knew or could intuit the outcome, we did not imagine in the trance of today," explains Azaústre.

The number of people who have been approaching to say goodbye to Antonio Gala gives "a fairly objective measure of the affection that everyone has always had for him: the man is gone, but the writer stays with us because, indeed, his work will remain here. He has left the world, all of Spain, all of Andalusia and also Córdoba, his foundation, which is very much alive, which wakes up every morning, feeds and welcomes and will continue to welcome hundreds of young creators who will come to this city to have an opportunity, "explained José María Gala, nephew of the poet and secretary of the Foundation since its inception.

"Oblivion does not exist. Beauty / is incessantly longed for and pursued: / memory and prophecy of itself. / Beauty is a fate, the same as death. / We were eleven years old / and the word April meant / the same for both of us..." It has been the poem chosen to open the farewell ceremony, which is entitled precisely Sierra de Córdoba. The beats of the singer Clara Montes, who brought the poetry of Antonio Gala to music, sound, and readings, praises and a feeling of belonging to the city that has mutually consolidated follow.

The coffin with the remains of Antonio Gala, this Monday at its foundation. PACO PUENTES

A cane on the coffin and an overwhelming sobriety, perhaps in contrast to the hyperbolic personality of Antonio Gala, have been the hallmarks of a brief farewell, in the same silence of that quiet Cordoba of Manuel Machado that the poet never stopped remembering: the manor house on Calle Nueva, in modernist style, to which he moved with nine years from Ciudad Real when his father, doctor, he was transferred to the Andalusian city; the literary gatherings through which the doctor's son soon began to walk and in which, he complained, there were only "flamencos and bullfighters"; the poets of the Cántico group —Pablo García Baena, Ricardo Molina, Juan Bernier, Julio Aumente...—, with whom his father preferred not to sympathize; his Testament andaluz, a collection of poems set to music by Manolo Sanlúcar; and, of course, the famous opening conference of the Congress of Andalusian Culture that was held in the Mosque of Cordoba in 1978, so current in many of its paragraphs and that ended with that mythical "Viva Andalucía viva" that soon became the clamor with which the region claimed Spain and the world in its process of autonomous construction.

Gala, however, has quietly left, recovering that silent spirit of the Carthusian for a brief period of his life. After many years in Madrid and despite the long periods he spent on his farm La Baltasara, in Alhaurín El Grande (Málaga), the poet has died, as he wished, in Córdoba. His Foundation remains in the heart of the city, his nephew José María and President Francisco Moreno; his secretary Luis Cárdenas, all at the service of an artists' residency project that, on a day-to-day basis, behaves like a family. "When I die, my ashes, together with those of the autumn lady, will serve to fertilize the gardens of my Foundation. I will stay in Córdoba", said Antonio Gala in 2012 when collecting the III Elio Antonio de Nebrija Prize for Andalusian Letters. And so it will be from today.

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Source: elparis

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