Three tales for his or her daughters earlier than Franco’s vile garrote | Culture | EUROtoday

Before the painter Lorenzo Aguirre was taken from his cell to be executed with a garrote one morning in October 1942; earlier than the artist tried to calm his executioner by telling him “calm down, you are not responsible: it is your job”; earlier than the repressive equipment of Franco’s regime murdered this set designer, poster designer, illustrator, lyricist, panorama artist and caricaturist dedicated to the Republic within the Madrid jail of Porlier, who had escaped from Spain as a result of Civil War and who later returned from France as a result of Nazi occupation; earlier than his physique fell inert to the bottom after which the regime ordered the deletion of his entry within the Espasa-Calpe Encyclopedia in order that nobody would ever hear the identify of Lorenzo Victoriano Aguirre Sánchez once more, that 57-year-old man sentenced to demise, accused of aiding the revolt, persecuted as a communist and a freemason… Before all that, that bald man with a contented temperament ready to say goodbye to his three daughters within the coldness of a cell. He had already accomplished so by letter from his spouse, Paquita.

But how do you say goodbye to a few daughters aged 7, 9 and 11? What are the final phrases of a father to these poor ladies who, on their knees, had begged clemency for his or her father earlier than the Generalissimo’s daughter, Carmencita, on his saint’s day?

Lorenzo selected the story. A narrative written, drawn and painted in watercolor for every daughter. For the dreamer, for the courageous, for the presumptuous. A narrative for every one. The cocky cockroachfor Margarita, who teaches that you simply shouldn’t be useless or search revenge, however at all times assist anybody who wants it, even when they’ve handled you badly prior to now. Marimiaumiaumiau and Marrañauñauñaufor Jesusa, the place he claims that the smallest beings, in the event that they unite, can deliver down even probably the most highly effective ogre. AND The magic frogfor Paca, which intoxicates with a priori not possible loves however which the drive of will makes viable and which speaks of a prince with a reputation utilized by the novelist Blasco Ibáñez, an admired good friend of his father.

Now, those three stories, after a lifetime of unpublished stories since they were composed in the anguishing solitude that precedes capital punishment, are going to see the light. The Valencian publisher José Camarillas has rescued them, through a daughter and grandson of Lorenzo Aguirre, and is trying to publish them in a hardcover album through a crowdfunding campaign that is advancing drop by drop. The project The presumptuous cockroach and other stories by Porlier (Llibres de l’Encobert) needs 7,000 euros to publish the three stories that Lorenzo Aguirre wrote and illustrated for his daughters, which will also be accompanied by an investigation that reconstructs the artist’s biography and demonstrates, according to Camarillas, some “irregularities” in his judgment.

The meanderings of History are curious. When little Paca Aguirre received her father’s story, the one about the little frog, and began to read that in a cabin very far from the city she lived with her mother Rosalinda, a beautiful girl who, after attending to the housework, took the sheep to graze in the fields, it was impossible for that girl to imagine that shortly afterwards she herself would begin to write, and that over the years she would be an immense poet, wife of the poet Félix Grande, secretary of the poet Luis Rosales, and that her work Complete – crossed by memory, loss and the scars of time, which are childhood anguish, horror and golden tears – would be anthologized in the 650 pages of Dress rehearsal. Collected poetry 1966-2017 (Calambur Editorial, 2018), and that almost at the end of his life he would receive the National Poetry Prize and the National Prize for Spanish Literature.

Kneeling reminiscence —she, who in useless knelt earlier than the dictator’s daughter for her father— and who in her verses would say: “Behind time there is always another story, a story that was and was not, like in children’s stories.” Like within the farewell tales that her father gave her and her sisters.

In the opinion of the editor José Camarillas, “these stories are a type of farewell letter for the girls. The form changes, but the final message that Lorenzo Aguirre leaves his daughters is the same that so many other victims of Franco’s regime did with their children through letters or other objects of memory. That message is: do not have resentment; study hard; help everyone, even those who have hurt you, and especially the weakest in society: if you you do, everyone can be free.” That legacy of love and dignity, Camarillas explains, he already saw in the letters of eighty families with whom he worked to compose another of his books: The memory cardswhich compiles the farewell writings of numerous people murdered by Franco’s regime and which are accompanied by the answers that their relatives – daughters, grandchildren, sisters or nephews – wanted to give them. post mortem so many decades later. A delayed emotion bomb.

Apart from being an artist with 5 work within the Reina Sofía and 100 works guarded by the Gravina Fine Arts Museum in Alicante, Lorenzo Aguirre was additionally a police officer. That was the origin of his issues with the dictatorship. With the outbreak of battle, Aguirre remained loyal to the Republican Government. He had been director of the Spanish Police School and in September 1936 he was appointed Senior Chief of Police of Madrid. The Franco regime accused him of getting been behind the homicide of the far-right deputy José Calvo Sotelo 5 days earlier than the army rebel of July 18. However, within the analysis for this guide, José Camarillas claims that he has discovered proof that dismantles the plot alleged to sentence him to demise.

“The regime accuses him of having ordered Calvo Sotelo’s bodyguards to let them kill him or finish him off. Although it has been known for decades that this event was revenge for the death of José del Castillo and that Calvo Sotelo was not even the main objective of the assault guards who killed him, I have found new documentation for the case. There are quite a few testimonies of conservative police officers against Lorenzo Aguirre and even old disputes from when he was a drawing teacher at the Police Academy. But the main plot is formed by the Traditionalist Communion deputy Joaquín Bau and the guard Rodolfo Serrano de la Parte, Calvo Sotelo’s escort, and there are payrolls and documentation that show the contradictions of what they attest,” the editor summarizes before his investigation comes to light.

At the end of the war, after passing through Valencia and Barcelona, ​​Lorenzo Aguirre went into exile to France. He returned in 1940 for fear of the Gestapo. Then the Spanish authorities arrested him, tortured him, imprisoned him and, two years later, executed him in Porlier. They executed the artist with a garrote who, according to the report made about him by the Masonic Lodge, The accidental“he was a man of democratic ideas, of broad culture, good character and calm and calculating temperament, good professional honesty and good behavior with his family as well as his moral solvency is good.” Nada de ello sirvió ante la ley franquista.

Many years later, the poet Félix Grande dedicated a beautiful and long poem to the father-in-law he never met, titled The exile of Espasaand that said: “How did they execute him? Did they exterminate the painter Lorenzo Aguirre, the Free Institution of Education, the Republic, the paper bowties that Miguel de Unamuno taught you to make along with your thumbnails and a pin? How did they kill you, three years after the tip of the battle? What did they achieve from that crime? What enjoyment did they get from a whole household of ache? And what was the purpose? the order to withdraw his identify from Espasa?” His identify fell from the Espasa and went by lengthy oblivion. His lyrics, nonetheless, remained in some tales and within the recollections of three ladies.