Clásica y Moderna reopened and the City of Buenos Aires regained a cultural refuge. Nothing less.
After chewing on the good news, I thought of the ruins. It wasn't just because I remembered the collapse that many of us felt when Clásica closed its doors in 2019, after more than 80 years of life. The association is also related to the fact that their story tells part of ours.
It could all begin in the middle of the nineteenth century, when a little boy was torn from the arms of his dead mother and the green cradle where he had his first dreams was engraved in his mind.
It was Emilio Poblet Diez, who arrived from Spain in 1916 with the plan to open three bookstores on Callao Avenue. The Green Cradle was the title of the book that his granddaughter, Natu Poblet, published in 2013 so that her memoirs would last.
Natu Poblet, re-founder of Clásica y Moderna. Clarín Archive
Emilio was the father of Francisco, who founded Clásica in 1938, with his wife Rosa. And that same year they were the parents of Natu, the soul of the great refoundation of Classical. It was in 1980 when, together with his brother Paco, he began to resurrect the gatherings, renewed.
In Callao at 800 they created the bookstore-bar-little corner of good music that stayed with so many of us here, in Costa Rica or in Luxembourg, among other places in the world, from where messages of support arrived when the news of the closure spread.
Classic and Modern reopened. Courtesy C & M.
In addition, Clásica attracted with the recommendations of Natu, a voracious reader, curious to the point that she said that part of her decision to leave architecture and disembark fully in the family business had to do with the fact that she had read a lot of authors but did not know any of them personally.
Closed. Classic and Modern in 2019. File
For this reason, Clásica was also a place to go to look for new authors who were always worthwhile, apart from the "secret capital of Buenos Aires" for the writer Álvaro Abós, a key biographer of the City; a "university in the shadows" according to the philosopher Santiago Kovadloff and a "place of encounters and confidences" and of "ups and downs of ideas", according to the critic Ernesto Schoo.
In these times of "cancellations", it is worth noting that Clásica was plural. David Viñas, Josefina Delgado and Ricardo Piglia gave courses, to name a few, and it became a magnet for banned authors during the last military dictatorship.
Raquel Rodrigo. New owner of Classic and Modern. Photo: Luciano Thieberger
Natu died a little more than two years before the closure of the place due to debts. Now Raquel Rodrigo – who has just rescued the restaurant El Tropezón (1896) and announced that she will reopen the former Teatro 35 – is responsible for its rebirth and making its way with this storyof immigrants who founded a "dynasty" of booksellers and contributed to making bookstores a symbol of Buenos Aires, on their backs.
Classic and Modern, in recovery. Courtesy C & M
This is linked to my quip about the ruins. Because those incomplete fragments of other times and other lives make it clear that when societies, even empires, crumble, all that remains are testimonies of their culture. Nothing less.
JS