In the Almudena Grandes library: "It is just as he left it, so it seems that life continues the same"

When the cameras are turned off, Luis García Montero (Granada, 1958) walks with his head down as if he had a stone between his shoulders.

It is the weight of the loss that has been with him for a year.

Without Almudena, the house that brings back the best memories of his life falls on him.

In order to flee, these 365 days he has tried to fill them with work, commitments, interviews and all the trips that he had pending after the pandemic as director of the Cervantes Institute.

“When one is left alone and is stopped, he begins to spin his head.

True melancholy has to do with losing the future, not with the past, ”he explains in front of the desk, intact, of his wife.

On one of the shelves, the glass of a frame broken in half symbolically separates the couple in a photo of young people.

He rests her head on her shoulder.

They're happy.

"Our relationship was very happy, almost joking, to be in the world betting on joy," he explains in this special episode of

.

Their offices are connected, but they are completely different worlds.

In Almudena's everything is in his place.

Chaos reigns in Luis's.

On his table there is not a space without papers, envelopes, letters, books: “He complained a lot about my disorder.

She was very neat and very disciplined to write.

However, someone who writes a poem can have the idea going around in her head and suddenly wait until one day she is surprised by the need to write it.

Only on this did they diverge.

In the rest of the issues, the couple shared tastes and ways of thinking about life and literature.

An enormous complicity that stood out in the pages of his works.

And also, in the love poems that Luis was leaving him in the final pages of poems by Alberti, Machado or Margarit that he gave him for years and that he would later gather in

, the book that he deposited on the coffin of the woman from the.

“Almudena, she noticed me because she liked my poetry.

Every time I finished a poem she would show it to her and she, when she finished a novel, too.

The truth is that we were quite critical of each other because it was the only way to improve.

But, afterwards, there was no anger ”.

What was the Almudena Grandes library like?

Why does Luis García Montero consider donating it?

What were the essential authors of it?

We discover the library of Almudena Grandes through the eyes of the love of her life in this video format from EL PAÍS, in which we have also seen the personal library of Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, of novelists such as Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Lorenzo Silva or Rosa Montero, politicians like José Manuel García-Margallo or cultural personalities like Peridis or Juan Diego Botto.