LITERATURE-SPAIN: Rafael Alberti Has Departed, With Open Hands

By Tito Drago Reprint | | Print |

Tito Drago

MADRID, Oct 28 1999 (IPS) - Rafael Alberti, legendary Spanish poet, playwright, painter and politician of the left, the last of the “Generation of ’27”, set out on his journey to the infinite Thursday, with open hands as a sign of peace and human solidarity.

Alberti died without reaching the age of 100, as he had hoped to do. He would have turned 97 on Dec 16.

He died peacefully in bed Thursday morning in his hometown of Puerto de Santa María, Cádiz, in southern Spain. All political parties represented in the city government unanimously declared three days of mourning.

Minister of Culture Mariano Rajoy, of Spain’s centre-right People’s Party (PP), flew to Cádiz to personally extend his condolences to the world-renowned poet’s widow, María Asunción Mateo.

All Spain is mourning Alberti, but perhaps the greatest and most fitting homage was rendered by the children who gathered outside his home, reading, one after another, poems in his honour.

The poet was forced to go into exile at the end of Spain’s 1936- 39 civil war. Many of his years away from Spain were spent in Córdoba, Argentina, at the home of human rights lawyer Gustavo Roca.

When he returned to Madrid, on Apr 27, 1977, in the midst of Spain’s transition to democracy, the poet once again joined up with Roca, in exile in Spain fleeing the Argentinian dictatorship (1976-83), and together they travelled around the country for three weeks.

On that trip, Alberti explained to Roca what he had meant when declaring in the Madrid airport on his return home: “I left Spain with a closed fist, and I return with my hand open as a symbol of peace and brotherhood.”

The closed fist, symbol of the left and of the worker’s revolution, had become an outstretched hand, in search of peace, democracy and harmony. According to the great poet, the wounds of the civil war needed to be healed by people looking towards the future and participating in the process of restoration of democracy.

And that is what he did, very actively. He was elected parliamentary deputy for the Communist Party, and on Jul 13, 1977, he and his fellow communist Dolores Ibárruri, ‘La Pasionaria’, became – as the oldest members of parliament – the vice-presidents of the first democratically elected legislature of the post-war period.

His political responsibilities did not keep him from providing support to those escaping dictatorships in Latin America, who fled to Europe by the thousands. He was especially active in supporting the Argentinian Human Rights Commission (CADHU), headed by Roca.

Alberti was the last living poet of the Generation of ’27, also comprised of artists and literary greats like Federico García Lorca, Salvador Dalí, Pedro Salinas, Vicente Aleixandre, Jorge Guillén, Dámaso Alonso, and Luís Cernuda.

Following his first prize, the National Literature Prize, in 1925, came a steady stream of awards and distinctions.

In Spain he was awarded the Cervantes Prize in 1983, the most coveted of all Spanish-language literature awards, the National Theatre Prize in 1981, a series of honorary doctorates, and was named lifelong mayor of his hometown, his most-prized distinction.

Although all Spain is mourning the loss of Alberti, the funeral services will be discreet and intimate. On Saturday, his ashes will be scattered into the bay of Cádiz, according to his last wish.

It is easy to recall a few lines of his latest work, the fifth volume of “the Lost Grove”.

“I opened the first page of the Lost Grove with my birth one stormy night at the Port of Santa María. Today, on another stormy night, another December 16, I want to end it while I gaze in reverie at the fire on the hearth in Ora on the seaside, my last home in this small city that has grown up on the shores of the ancient bay that opened my eyes to the first blues…”

“Little by little, I penetrate, this time definitively and irremediably, that gulf of shadows that I announced then, with the eager and perhaps vain hope that the passage of time will not erase my footprints from so many roads travelled.

“I am departing with the eyes of the events of a century. A century of horrors, confrontations, extremely painful separations, of events that dwell within my interior forests.”

A few other of Alberti’s numerous works were Marinero en tierra (1925), La amante (1926), Cal y canto (1929), Verte y no verte (1935), and Entre el clavel y la espada (1941).