It is the Box of Letters, a project of the Cervantes Institute which occupies part of the more than 1,700 boxes of the old safe of the Banco Espaol del Río de la Plata and with which it seeks to preserve and document the richness of Hispanic culture.
Luis Garca Montero, director of the Cervantes Institute, explained that: “each rental box where money, jewelry or documents were previously left, has become a place to pay tribute to the great names, the great personalities of our literature.” “.
Although it receives offers from institutions, universities and foundations to join the initiative, it is the institution in charge of promoting the study and use of Spanish in the world that, thinking in the context of culture and taking advantage of some event, usually contacts the depositories. With some exceptions, legacies will remain for several decades, or even indefinitely, in the chamber before returning to their owners or joining their Heritage Library.
The inside of the capsule
Behind a heavy metal door that opens to a long double-height hallway with walls covered with metal lockers of various sizes, many of which show the passage of time, rest works by Miguel Hernández, Pablo Neruda, Carmen Laforet, José Emilio Pacheco. or Gioconda Belli, and first editions of the texts of Julio Ramón Ribeyro or Federico García Lorca, among others.
But there are also more mundane objects such as Rafael Cárdenas’ glasses, Juan Eduardo Ziga’s pipe, Claribel Alegra’s mate, the shirt that Fernando del Paso wore to seek inspiration when he sat down to write and numerous work notebooks, photographs personal and drawings.
This extensive and peculiar catalog: “serves to unite everyday life with a time and that time with the creativity of many great authors,” said García Montero in an interview with The Associated Press.
From the legacy left by the writer Francisco Ayala in 2007, just a few weeks after turning 101, to that of the veteran flamenco singer Antonio Fernández Díaz, “Fosforito”, last Tuesday, 166 personalities and institutions from the world of letters , cinema, science, theater or music from around the world have made their contributions, including the winners of the Cervantes Prize for Literature.
foundation
The dancer Alicia Alonso, founder of the National Ballet of Cuba, opened the doors of the vault to Latin American culture in 2008. The contents of the box 1,029 ballet slippers and a manuscript used to be hidden from the gaze of curious people in the basement of the old Spanish-Argentine banking entity founded at the end of the 19th century. Now it occupies for the first time part of the noble floor of the iconic building, guarded by four imposing charithids on its façade, along with a hundred legacies that are on display to the public for a limited time.
Some of the contributions came in the form of a post-mortem tribute, such as the sample of soil from Aracataca, the birthplace of the Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, the first of the almost 60 in memoriam boxes, the manuscripts of the Argentine poet and musician Atahaualpa Yupanqui or: “the keys to a house that later became a great title of (a collection of poems) like The house litby Luis Rosales”, points out Garca Montero.
With the Spanish poets Antonio and Manuel Machado, Cervantes not only united the land of his city of origin, Seville; from Madrid, where they lived for many years, and from Collioure, the French town where the first died in exile months before the end of the Civil War in 1939, but he also set up a mailbox in box 1,722 that received letters from leaders, anonymous citizens and: “children who study the Machados at school. It seems to me that it makes the legacy very alive and the memory is close to the present,” said the director of the institution.
The passports with which the writing couple Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León returned to Spain in 1977, after almost four decades in exile, or the first Grammar of the Spanish language intended for use by Americans prepared by Andrés Bello in the middle of the 19th century, are among the most relevant contributions for García Montero, who has seen how the initiative has grown exponentially since his arrival at the Cervantes.
“I would love to obtain as a legacy a first edition of Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes or a first edition, because we have the second, from the Spanish grammar by (Antonio) de Nebrija. But also a legacy from Joan Manuel Serrat that reflects his relationship with poetry,” he stated. “It is so important to think about a first edition of The Quijote how to think about that daily life that our culture brings to people, such as music.
Messages
Ayala was also a pioneer in leaving secret messages for posterity, since most of the boxes will not be opened again, if ever, for several decades. In his, number 1,000, he left a letter that would not see the light until the middle of this century because the writer, who was born in 1906, wanted: “for people in the middle of the 21st century to know what someone who thought about the future “was born at the beginning of the 20th century,” explained García Montero.
Rumors have grown around this type of legacies. From the unpublished score by the composer Luis de Pablo that could not be performed until after his death to what the writer Juan Mars described as ‘the secret of the escalivada’, a typical Catalan dish, and, above all, the possible work unpublished by filmmaker Luis Garca Berlanga, which did not see the light of day until the centenary of his birth in 2021.
“As he had worked so much on erotic novels and played so much with eroticism in his films, everyone thought it must be very spicy. And what we found was the original of a script that he had never recorded,” said García Montero. The text, titled “Long live Russia”, continues the director’s praised National Trilogy.
The contents of the boxes usually have an important personal connection. Nancy Morejn, one of the most prominent voices in contemporary Cuban literature, left a conch shell from the eastern beaches of the island “where the germs of our independence were born.” While the singer and actress Ana Belén put the earrings that she used to play Adela, one of the characters in “The House of Bernarda Alba”, and a “quite deteriorated” edition after years in her library of the complete works of its author , Lorca.
“It is an honor to reach this vicissitude of seeing myself locked in a box. I never had this idea in my imagination of… being preserved from everything, put in a safe,” noted the writer Luis Mateo Dez last year. winner of the last Cervantes Prize, when depositing his legacy, which included “my logbook with the notes of my navigation” in the construction of his stories.
If he receives a call from the institution to collaborate, García Montero, who is also a poet, is clear that he would leave a handwritten workbook, in addition to texts: “from poets who have formed me and… something that symbolizes my daily life, something that has to do with my family environment, with my marriage and my children.
FUENTE: AP
