let’s imagine a world

Let’s imagine not really Spain but a utopia or a different country blessed by a foreigner who would let him do it, with Goya or Picasso influences behind it, and they would have dedicated it to this improbable land. like an island of celluloid, painting and photography, a space where young people can study their work, from the absurd to the genius or fantasy. Let’s imagine a place where he can understand why he stubbornly takes up all kinds of music, as if he had a personal attachment to musical emotion, the seventh sense of his soul.

Let’s imagine Carlos Saura and see him at home. mid collar, a few steps from the train that brought him to Madrid; in his room full of relics and cameras, his photographs, self-portraits as well as his jokes are always ready; The TV room has a unique treasure trove of movies and photobooks, from where he watches how his dogs and other animals thrive.

Everything is great except that room where he is giving interviews or reading or writing his books, novels, but behind him, next to the kitchen and lunch, there is a huge table where he exhibits for himself or those who come. The paintings, pictures, photographs he prepared for successive exhibitions were as if he had torn the calendar and his age was a mirage in an almanac.

Sometimes you don’t have to imagine, he’d go out to dinner with his daughter. Annawho was his guardian angel or with his son Antonyor at least I enjoyed some of these wanderings, having once been in the midst of the fog, caught in the cold of Collado in the winter, and moreover, relaxed with the wine he drank to spice up the stew. One of the times when we talk about this country and the war is the incident that struck fear into the body of his entire family. This country could not get rid of the perverse logic that brought death, including the death of Lorca, one of its most important projects. About that war, and this time as he was observing from the other side of the world, he told me: “I’ve had the war and it scares me that there will be another war in Spain”.

He experienced this in Madrid, Valencia, and Barcelona, ​​”because my father was the secretary of the Republic’s Minister of Finance.” He traveled with the republican army, “I’ve seen bombings and destroyed houses, people hanging… I’ve seen death in war outside of Valencia, a peace haven.” In that case Manuela Menathe former mayor of Madrid had expressed similar fears to hers, and so Saura told me: “I’ve been through the war and it scares me and the possibility of another frightens me… I know it’s boiling, continues I agree with Manuela Ore. A little pale. “You have to be very careful, you have to stop this. As soon as the left and right start to move, or as soon as the Church and the Army start to move, I’m afraid of what might happen.”

He trusted that “the smart people of this country” would agree “so that this doesn’t happen”.. It’s over, he told me, “and the Spanish war was a brutal war between brothers.” That cowardly ghost of the past is found in many of his films, documentaries, photographs, and various arts that sustain him to the end, as if he had always encountered a world unlike himself. It represented blood, murder, and hatred.

“When you stop, you die,” he said, speaking of health, and thus of the uncertain future. He had life around, at home, working both as a farmer and an actor, a man, singing, looking at the clouds, imitating the hesitation of dogs, always waiting for the seasons to change to give him a song. laughs and is also marked by a relentless struggle against mediocrity.

I looked death (he suffered from pneumonia shortly before the age of 89) “with a certain naturalness, although I did not want to die”. We had to mention that last place he was looking at from the side at the time, preparing his work on Lorca, which is another reason history has escaped the specter of war. “I really like her childlike spirit, dazzled by what’s going on. His homosexual relationship with a few people who contributed a lot to him is very interesting. I don’t care if she’s in love with a woman or a man. But the feeling of always being connected to a love, a passion… I love this feature of Lorca. And then his devotion to the left and to Spanish life, being a clergyman at the same time… But they shot him, that’s it, they killed him… 38 years old. The Spanish war was extremely brutal. On both sides, although obviously more on the fascist side”.

Lorca’s murder seemed inexcusable to him. He said it as if his hand was stuck to a chair, his memory was coming to life, getting up and pulling out other dramas that came to him in search of a picture, a book, a piece of music. something that brought him back to today’s world. “Unfortunately,” he told me again, “I don’t believe in immortality; I would love to, but we are animals and we have a limit in life, we perish and that’s it. Maybe we don’t try on some kind of human that someone invented, as Dostoevsky said.

A mysterious hand has underlined in deep black what he has told me about death, and now that I reread it, I see him already saying this or that word as he travels through the skies, reaching his true strangeness in the air. or drama, the true essence of his work and hope, his joyful and at the same time incomprehensible nature, has been a way of being a genius since childhood, who should have had more generous room since the goddamn war. where to invest his enormous capacity as an artist.

But he was born in this country and in this country gave him everything he could, but for some inexplicable reason he never cared that there would be a great roar of applause and victory that could no longer reach him as time passed. he. air of time So much energy, so much love for what he’s done. A biography of wit and torment, of endless voice, of the strange image of a frenzied contemporary artist.