It was 25 July 1936. In Madrid, Paco Ciutat, an officer of the General Staff of the army of the Spanish Republic was worried. The fascist forces of Francisco Franco had captured Oropesa, and were heading for Toledo, where El Greco had his studio and had produced many of his finest works. If the Republican government decided to defend Toledo, the damage to its cultural heritage, particularly its El Grecos, could be enormous.
Thus begins one of the many adventures of a young Spanish writer, María Teresa León, a writer and wife of the celebrated young poet Rafael Alberti. Her memoir, Memoria de la Melancolía (Memoir of Melancholy), was re-published in 2020 and was one of my lockdown reads.
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| María Teresa León in exile in Argentina after 1939 |
Paco spoke to María Teresa, who went straight to the monastery of the Descalzas Reales (Royal Discalced Order), the headquarters of the Junta de Incautación del Tesoro Artístico (Committee for the Appropriation of Artistic Treasures), formed only a week earlier to protect “all works … of artistic, architectural or bibliographic importance … that in its judgement are in danger of destruction, loss or damage.”
The committee instructed María Teresa to go to Toledo, so off she and Rafael went. They were directed to the office of the city’s mayor, who refused to give them keys to the building where an important El Greco was located on the grounds that the people of Toledo were excessively possessive of their treasures and did not want them to be removed. Nevertheless, the two writers went to the Hospital de Tavera, where they found El Greco’s portrait of Cardinal Juan Pardo de Tavera (oil on canvas, 103 cm x 82 cm, 1609), but they arrived too late to prevent the cardinal from being decapitated. An anticlerical militiaman had taken a pair of scissors and cut off the cleric’s head. Challenged, the soldier replied “María Teresa, don’t get so upset about a priest”.
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| El Greco, portrait of Cardinal Juan Pardo de Tavera |
The next destination was the church of Santo Tomé to see The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (oil on canvas, 480 cm x 360 cm, 1586), an enormous work considered one of El Greco’s finest. But mayor de la Vega refused to allow the writers to remove the painting. Besides, he observed, how would they get such an enormous work through the door? A friend has pointed out to me that there was a simple answer to the mayor’s question. The painting was on canvas, so it could be removed from its frame and rolled up, but since María Teresa and Rafael were not conservators, they did not know this. The painting was later removed from the wall by a Hungarian conservator, laid on the floor and covered with sandbags.
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| El Greco, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz |
At this point gunfire interrupted the cultural heritage rescue mission. The two writers sheltered in a nearby building until the fighting subsided. And then their mission changed. The fascists had captured Talavera de la Reina about 80kms from Toledo. The plan to stop their advance was to dynamite the bridge over the river Tagus. Instead of rescuing El Grecos from destruction the writers were now asked to lead a team of miners from Puertollano in Asturias to destroy the bridge, and thus prevent the hated Moors of Franco’s army from reaching Toledo. So, off they went in their little British Hillman car driven by Antonio, a former racing driver. When they reached the bridge, the miners explained that they did not have enough dynamite to destroy the bridge. As María Teresa writes, quoting Lope de Vega, this was a “night that manufactured tricks”. Then someone had an idea. “Let’s blow the railway line”.
María Teresa and Rafael left the miners to their work to return to their lodging at Puebla de Montalbán. The town’s civilians were fleeing the advance of the Moors, and the garrison had abandoned the rifles given to the Republicans by the Mexican government. The phone rang. The Ministry of War was calling. María Teresa was ordered to organize the defence of the town. She found a group of young men willing to fight and armed them with the Mexican guns, soon to be joined by the miners from Puertollano. At that moment, a bullet-proof train arrived and the officer in charge relieved the young writer of her command.
Later that year, María Teresa and Rafael were again rescuing paintings, this time with greater success. On 21 October, together with the essayist, playwright and poet José Bergamín, and his fellow poet Arturo Serrano Plaja, they removed works by El Greco, Velázquez, Van der Weyden, Tintoretto and Goya from the monastery of El Escorial to Madrid. Later María Teresa and her husband found themselves in charge of evacuating treasures from the Prado, including Velázquez’s large masterpiece, Las Meninas. The great painting was placed in a wooden crate and loaded on to a truck of the 5th Motorized Division. When the soldiers reached the bridge of Arganda del Rey over the Jarama river, they discovered that the paintings were too tall to pass under the metal stanchions. The soldiers carried them across the bridge, loaded them back on to the trucks, and continued their journey to Valencia, where the paintings were stored for safekeeping in the Torres de Serranos, the remains of a Gothic fortress. As the fascists advanced, the paintings were moved again. Now they joined the human tide of Republicans, trudging, like the masterworks of Velázquez and Titian, into exile – in the case of the paintings in Geneva.
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| The Puente de Arganda |
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| The Torres de Serranos, Valencia |
The Mexican government of Lázaro Cárdenas (president 1934-1940), which had supplied the rifles used to defend Puebla de Montalbán, provided practical and humanitarian support to the Spanish Republicans during the Civil War. As María Teresa tells the tale, a group of trainee officers from the Military Academy in Mexico City deserted to join the Republican ranks in Spain. After the Republican defeat Mexico generously offered asylum to many exiled Spaniards.
María Teresa and Rafael were inveterate travellers and had visited Mexico, where they travelled by train from the Gulf port of Veracruz to Mexico City. There they met Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, leading figures in the revolutionary artistic movement that covered the walls of public buildings with murals. Rivera was “fat, slow” and lived in a house “full of old stones [Mesoamerican sculptures]”. Kahlo always wore the typically Mexican skirt of the china poblana and lent the house “an air of acute intelligence.” Siqueiros carried himself with a proud grace, with the military bearing of a lieutenant, rather than of a colonel, holding his head high. Siqueiros, it seems, painted María Teresa’s portrait.
The artists had convened a public debate in the Palace of Fine Arts, a grand building covered in marble built in the late 19th century during the dictatorship of Porfirio Dîaz. Violent disagreements were expected, so a neutral figure was required to chair the meeting. To her surprise, María Teresa was asked to do so. All went well until Siqueiros launched into a speech laden with Marxist dialectic. Some in the audience applauded, others shouted insults. María Teresa tried to “intervene with a little kindly oil” only to be greeted with yells of Mexican’s disparaging term for a Spaniard, gachupina. The chair of the meeting became truly concerned when a speaker walked to the podium, removed his gun from its holster and began to speak: “Comrades, painting today …”
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| Federico García Lorca (left), María Teresa León and Rafael Alberti in Cuatro Caminos, Madrid, 1934 |
These two stories reveal María Teresa to have been a quite extraordinary woman. Her upbringing was traditional in the extreme. Her father was a military officer, trained like many other members of the family in Toledo. He sent his daughter to a school run by Catholic nuns, who required the girls to be escorted to school by a chaperone. She clearly loved her father dearly, but espoused views which must have alarmed a military man. Her memoir is a tale of absolute commitment to radical politics and action. Only when she flies to Algeria as the Republic was defeated did he surrender the pistol she carried during the Civil War. In her memoir we meet leading figures of Spanish letters of the first half of the 20th century: “Federico [García Lorca], who died as the agony began; Antonio Machado, at its end [in exile in France]”; Pío Baroja, who like Alberti and María Teresa was exiled to Paris; Miguel de Unamuno, novelist, poet, playwright, and philosopher, and grand old man of Spanish letters, who died in 1936, a few months after the start of the Civil War.
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| Antonio Machado |
She also introduces us to the international literary scene. She visited Ernest Hemingway in his home in Cuba, accompanied by the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. María Teresa and Alberti invited the Russian-French writer Elsa Triolet and her surrealist husband Louis Aragon to join the Alliance of Intellectuals of Madrid in 1936. They renewed their friendship in exile in Paris where they found work in the Spanish language service of Radio Paris. Pablo Neruda, Chilean Consul in Paris, invited them to his home and arranged visas for them to live in Chile. But when they disembarked in Buenos Aires en route to Chile, they were met by an exiled Spanish publisher, Gonzalo Losada. Losada had worked for Espasa Calpe in Spain and founded his own publishing house, Editorial Losada, in Bueno Aires. Losada tells them he will be their publisher and will arrange residence papers for Argentina. And so they lived their exile in Argentina, eventually to return to Spain in 1977.
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| Pablo Neruda |
María Teresa’s memoir is in one sense a panorama of the international literary scene of the 1920s and 1930s, and a very personal account of the tragedies of the Spanish Civil War. But above all, it is a moving lament for a lost cause, for friends who died in prison, who were executed, or who did not live to set foot in Spain again. María Teresa ends her account of her life and adventures thus:
“Pero, aún tengo la ilusión de que mi memoria del recuerdo no se extinga, y por eso escribo en letras grandes y esperanzadas: CONTINUARÁ.”
“But I still dream that my memoir of memories will not die, and for that reason I write in large letters full of hope: TO BE CONTINUED.”
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| Rafael Alberti (left) and María Teresa León on their return from exile 1977 |
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