Permanent poetic realism

At the Vitoria train station, I chat with Ángeles Encinar, a professor at various American universities and a corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy, about the posterity of Ignacio Aldecoa (Vitoria 1925–Madrid 1969). He is one of the great writers of the generation of the 1950s, whose birth centenary is celebrated this year. Encinar maintains that he doesn't occupy the place he deserves, having died so young and due to the power of his classmates. The centenaries of Ana María Matute and Carmen Martín Gaite will be commemorated in 2025. Last year, it was the centenary of Luis Martín Santos. In the fall, the National Library of Spain will present the exhibitions "Carmen Martín Gaite (1925–2025): A Paradigm of a Woman of Letters " and " Ignacio Aldecoa and the Generation of the 1950s ." The exhibition "Ignacio Aldecoa" has been mounted in Vitoria, where Aldecoa is a leading figure. The storyteller who performs at the Ignacio Aldecoa Kultura Etxea Cultural Center.

I tell Ángeles, based on my experience as curator of this exhibition, that perhaps this year it won't be the subject of major recoveries and reissues. But the fact is that Aldecoa has never disappeared from the literary scene. His complete stories are being reissued (Alianza, Alfaguara, De Bolsillo). His four novels are doing well. He's also had good success in film, and both Young Sánchez (1964) and Con el viento solano (1966), with a superb performance by Antonio Gades as the fugitive gypsy, are great films. Author: Mario Camus. And Gran Sol (1989), by Ferran Llagostera i Coll, is also good. Perhaps it's more interesting for an author to maintain his reputation, with a loyal readership, than to appear and disappear at the sound of a trumpet.

He frequented gypsies, flamenco artists, harvesters, and workers, who allowed him to show another reality.

Where to begin reading Aldecoa if you haven't read him? With a short story. Catédra has a good anthology in its catalog (17 editions), a selection and prologue by Josefina Rodríguez de Aldecoa. Since his student days at the University of Salamanca, Aldecoa frequented gypsies, flamenco artists, harvesters, workers, and ordinary people who allowed him to explore reality from new perspectives. He wasn't a recipe-based realist: he introduced the narrative techniques of North American authors and explored a lyrical dimension of reality. In the Vitoria exhibition, a young illustrator from Álava, Saioa Aginako, has reinterpreted eight characters from his stories. What a gallery! The innocent, happy gypsy boy who lives with his parents under a bridge and who, as the years go by, gradually falls into emptiness and nothingness (how similar this story is to Espriu's "Tereseta-que-baixava-les-escales," with its use of ellipsis). The country girl who arrives in Madrid one night when there's no work of her own, goes for a drink at a bar on the Glorieta de Bilbao. The retired bullfighter, humiliated by revelers for fun, is forced to drink so much that he explodes. Or Young Sanchez, a young debuting boxer: he will break his face to save his people. It's a boxing story in which the ring is not featured: an exception among the classics of the genre. Aldecoa said he would like to have the same epitaph as Robert Louis Stevenson's grave in Samoa: "Ignacio Aldecoa, Storyteller." It's the title of the exhibition.

No biography has been written of Ignacio Aldecoa, who died so many years ago of a heart attack, but there are two excellent books that explain his work better than any study. The first brings together a series of lectures by Carmen Martín Gaite in the United States, Esperando el porvenir. Homenaje a Ignacio Aldecoa (Waiting for the Future: A Tribute to Ignacio Aldecoa) (1994), published by Siruela. The other is an evocation of Josefina Rodríguez, his wife, Josefina Aldecoa by name, an important writer: En la distancia (In the Distance) (2004), published by Alfaguara. Aldecoa is portrayed as a free man, devoted to literary creation. His fascination with New York, where he spent a year in 1958, is also recounted. Some photographs by Carles Fontseré survive in which he appears alongside the diplomat José Félix de Lequerica and the La Vanguardia correspondent Ángel Zuñiga.

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His other passion was the islands: Ibiza in the 1960s and the island of La Graciosa in Lanzarote, where he set his last novel, Part of a Story (1967). This spring, photographer Rocío López documented the landscapes of Aldecoa in La Graciosa: the river that separates the two islands, the yellow mountain, the beach, and the cemetery. In the novel, a group of foreigners arrive at the place after crashing their yacht against the rocks and an alcoholic clash ensues with the fishermen, people with no expectations. Alcohol plays a fundamental role in the literature of Aldecoa and other authors of the 1950s generation: it's nothing new. Aldecoa's novels are read with fascination. The best-known is Gran Sol (1963), which he embarked on a fishing boat to write. It has a Catalan sister: Els argonautes (1968), by Baltasar Porcel, about smuggling. The Flash and the Blood (1954) and With the East Wind (1956) form a diptych, based on a play on point of view. In Maqueda (Toledo), Aldecoa discovered a Civil Guard barracks built in a castle and created the symbol for the imprisoned guards. One of the guards has been shot dead, and the women don't know whose husband it is. In With the East Wind, he tells the story from the perspective of the gypsy who shoots and flees. Aldecoa's work is well worth reading.