Up-to-the-minute portrait of two poets | Culture | EUROtoday

Over the years, the passions that any character has skilled stay etched on their face and switch them into an enigma. Every wrinkle, each spot, fold and erosion on the pores and skin varieties a crossscape of paths to the previous. In my days as a reporter, when going through a personality to conduct an interview, I used to be guided above all by the impact that his face, his gaze, his voice, his gestures, implied within the environment that surrounded him at that second, produced on me at first look with out making an allowance for the data that I had about his story. With the interview he tried to resolve the enigma that was in his face and in his environment with a portrait on the minute, a form of picture sales space, like on this case that of the poets Rafael Alberti and Juan Gil-Albert.

When he walked by way of Madrid upon his return from exile, Rafael Alberti may very well be acknowledged from many meters away. The cap on a mane of spun egg hair, the intense clothes of shirts with palm timber contrasted with the rat grey coloration that also reigned in Spain. Despite that obvious happiness of a sailor on land, his face on a naked neck hid a sure bitterness that his voice, already very drained, couldn’t conceal. With his considerably dilapidated hip, he moved across the metropolis between the enjoyment of being acknowledged and the concern that anybody who approached him with the excuse of asking for an autograph would stab him. He had been in Spain for 5 years and it appeared that he had not but unpacked his baggage. He had his suitcase open on the mattress, able to flee on the first name of the bugle.

Alberti by no means totally believed within the return of democracy and maybe that was the rationale for the bitterness that mirrored on his face. He lived day-after-day ready for the information from a tiny transistor that he carried in his pocket in case he needed to depart once more. He had gotten uninterested in dozing in his seat within the Congress of Deputies subsequent to Pasionaria. Suddenly he determined to flee ahead as if the world was going to finish the day after tomorrow. Being a poet on the road consisted of taking a airplane to recite Garcilaso’s poems in Managua, dissolving each night time between tribute dinners, colloquiums, theater evenings, events with many canapés. That Transition truthful was nonetheless open at daybreak with all of the ferris wheels spinning and Alberti had abruptly turn out to be a toddler along with his pockets stuffed with tickets and passes for all of the points of interest that the newly conquered freedom provided.

The poet Juan Gil Albert was a Valencian with white and brown sneakers, wafer-colored pants and a light-weight blue polo shirt, with a white brush mustache and the pores and skin on his face a bit flushed. This is how I bear in mind him from a summer time afternoon at his home, sitting within the nook of the strawberry-upholstered couch in that front room that the afternoon solar lit up with a golden muscat grape. Within that vibrating area that surrounded the poet, every part was organized in a chic and meticulous order, the furnishings lined in white linen materials, on the console the portraits of two lovely and lifeless sisters, Valois castles on the wall, the picture of the youthful poet himself with a flaccid collarless silk shirt and the cuffs of a swordsman as Ramón Gaya had painted him, the light faces of Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust and André Gide, the books with the golden covers, the wink within the ornate show instances of the trinkets and fruit porcelains.

At that point, solely buddies and a few specialists knew that an important forgotten poet lived in Valencia, a uncommon and beautiful product of the Generation of ’27 who had returned from exile in 1947, on tiptoe, by way of the false door and had settled in silently to spin verses with out disturbing anybody. Sitting on this similar chair he had spent 20 years of solitude like a novelist who hopes that someday literary glory will come to him. Gil Albert got here from a really rich household of industrialists from Alcoy. In its heyday, his home in Valencia had 11 balconies that ignored Colón Street.

The poet remembered the sepia picture of that journey to Alicante 75 years in the past in the midst of a cloud of grey mud. Gil-Albert was dressed as a sailor, the driving force of the Hispano-Suiza wore a duster and diving glasses and, subsequent to him, the women wrapped the fruit hats with gauze tied round their chins. That world collapsed when Gil-Albert, inheritor to the corporate, needed to take cost of the enterprise upon getting back from exile and signed the invoices like somebody who wrote verses. That summer time afternoon the poet was joyful as a result of the physician had given him pleasure. What was considered a severe sickness seems to be an allergy to yellow rose pollen.