Those who travel by train to Madrid, those who leave Madrid, those who pay attention to the entry and exit notices of travelers, cannot miss in Atocha or the point of arrival the name of Almudena Grandes, the writer who founded the memory of the Spanish civil war and made that terrible episode a way of explaining his country.
Among all the celebrations that occurred after his death (on November 27, 2021, he had been born in May 1960) the most significant was the gesture of giving his name to that emblematic station in the capital of Spain, without a doubt the most inhabited and the most lasting hug to this woman who never ceased to be joyful.
Traveling from the Almudena Grandes Station is, now, like living in the anteroom of your books.
Since that early death, there have been hundreds of Spanish celebrations, everywhere, for the author of Malena Has a Name of Tango,
The Ages of Lulú, The Frozen Heart
or
The Mother of Frankenstein
.
Now, in addition, she already has a book that portrays and commemorates her.
And it is not just any book, but a book written (by the writer Aroa Moreno, the author of
The Communist's Son
, which pleased Almudena so much) and drawn (by the painter Ana Jarén).
It is both a biography and a painting in which a general chronicle of the writer's way of being and a tribute from both creators to one of the most beloved women of all those who are part of the literary history of the post-Franco era stand out.
It is not just drawing and words, it is a journey to the very soul of a woman whose way of being, frank, impulsive, generous, was also part of her literature.
To those values that marked her, in Spanish society, as a woman committed to both politics and joy, Almudena added her sense of friendship, which she cultivated as the place into which her energy flowed. she.
Football (he was from Atlético de Madrid, the most traditional in the Spanish LaLiga) was a passion, but he had the same passion for getting together, for demonstrating against the worst scourges of wars or public vices.
She was, so to speak, a perpetual passion, a woman without rest.
He was clear that he was only interested in heroes “who are afraid and doubt and make mistakes,” and he made his passion for the history of Spain, and for freedom, the banner of his literature.
Her issue was what happened to her country, which, in times of destruction of republican ambition, suffered a civil war that always kept her red-hot.
The book opens where Almudena wanted most, his work room, the overwhelming place of his imaginations, related to that hardened and sad Spain before the war, in the war and in what happened after the tragedy.
She got up at five in the morning, and there she wrote, her tobacco close to her, her notes, her passion full of imagination and certainty.
Ana Jarén, a 38-year-old Sevillian, tells how she saw that room, and how she painted it.
“That room has given me a lot of information about what she could be like and at the same time, I have also felt very identified with her character... In those details of the room I have met an artist... There is her love for books, a passion that exceeds the profession or the job
.”
Aroa (from Madrid, 42 years old) entered that space with Luis García Montero, poet, director of the Cervantes Institute, Almudena's great love.
“
There it is, intact, a very vivid space, Almudena is not there, but you can imagine it perfectly.
There are the notebooks where she was taking notes, also those that she wrote during confinement and those that occurred when she became ill with the cancer that finally took her away.
There are all the books that documented her writings about the civil war or the Republic.”
The book is, says Ana Jarén, the consequence of a work “hand in hand, a process in which the texts that Aroa sent me and the drawings that I was making of the different areas in which life took place have grown together. and the writing of this unforgettable woman.
I was getting to know her through Aroa's eyes, and that can be seen in the illustration.”
“
There were illustrations
,” says Aroa,
“that moved me a lot, like the one in which Almudena is in front of Don Benito Pérez Galdós, she with a lantern, tiny, in front of her idol, who is so big.”
On the endpapers of the book is Almudena in front of the solitude of the computer, behind it is the stroller of her daughter, whom she is raising, the old computer, the life of a writer eager to create a world.
Aroa and Ana see there the portrait of a self-absorbed writer to whom her own reality, the one she lived with her loved ones, was not foreign to her even while she was writing.
The painter, says her book companion,
“has done a very beautiful job, respecting the spirit of Almudena as it was, and as her literature was… The tenderness that her universe means, the space of friendship, since childhood.” .
“Aroa
,” says Ana,
“has been telling me about Almudena's childhood, how her brothers, her friends, her relatives saw her;
“She has made me her accomplice, in history and in the present, so I have not seen her as a character but as a person.”
This is how Aroa followed her,
“like that robust girl who is achieving her personality among her brothers.”
That childhood “was a territory that would always accompany her in her own literature, and that is why childhood was such an important topic for her… With her brothers I went to Becerril de la Sierra, where they lived as children, and there they told me that until Her sister died, they did not realize the importance that she had had in Spanish literary life.
That gave me an idea of the family normality that marked her lives, with Almudena fabulously from the time she was eleven years old until the moment she was no longer going to be among us.
She had been a fun, loving girl whose foundations were a childhood that began with the Franco regime, which later became an adult, and politicized, and finally the great writer that she would be.
Here she is, in the book, drawn or told, the Almudena who puts on her aprons to cook, for friends, for family;
the one in Rota, Cádiz, where she would live alongside important people in their lives (hers, García Montero)... Among those characters were the singer Joaquín Sabina, the poets Ángel González, Benjamín Prado or Felipe Benítez Reyes... The drawing that evokes That time is a scene full of drinks, full ashtrays, running out of food, the spirit of summer…
“What you see there,” and what you see in the drawings, says Aroa, “is an everyday affection, domestic, which lasted and lasts, because there is the spirit that she achieved.”
Ana Jarén wanted to make her drawings an exercise in “
respect, humility and affection to transfer Almudena to an illustration in which her essence was not lost, trying to reflect her personality, from admiration and gratitude.”
And Aroa?
“
The great tribute that she has received was the one that her readers gave her, the day after she left.
The readers, the booksellers, the people.
What I wanted to do in the book is maintain loyalty to what she was, to her work, to the Almudena who interpreted the Spanish post-war period, to whom she wrote The Ages of Lulú, the book with which she burst onto the literary scene. Spanish, to which he dealt with the past and present of Spain, to which he taught to respect the wound left by the civil war.
Who looks at the book
Almudena.
A biography
(published by Lumen) sees and listens to that woman.
I confess that, even the tone of her voice, so peculiar, so powerful, in the end as tender as the breath in which she ended her joy, stands out in this book that remembers her, lives her and portrays her.
From The Ages of Lulú to the last breath.