Antonio Gala, to his “Galician” friend: “I hope you always have someone to share your time, your enthusiasm and your joy with”

In every attempt to bring order to a pile of old papers, by throwing them away, Antonio Tabucchi always appears with his own Pereira holds. He seems to recall that obituaries are usually the greatest demand of cultists. Maybe that’s why there have been newspapers and photos of Cándido Moreno Aragón about his most famous neighbor for years. Another phase has passed, this one of silence, of what this graduate of philosophy and literature and pedagogy calls his “Guadians with Antony Gala».

The first eyes of that Guadiana were like this: «Under the Milky Way, in those hot nights in La Mancha when, no doubt, our respective mothers, María Adoración de los Reyes and Cándida María Luisa, wives of the city doctor and apothecary, had to walk looking a little breeze because they carried us in their bellies. I arrived in this mischievous world two months before you, and my mother, thanks to your father’s expert help, found it more bearable. This is written by Cándido Moreno addressing Antonio Gala, both born in Brazatortas —”the name has fabric”, he admits in another text—, in the province of Ciudad Real. The photo shows the houses of both families a few meters apart.

Cándido Moreno, who has been living in Galicia for more than half a century, continues to talk: «Later we appeared in Córdoba. You before me And in the central terrace of your house, in Claudio Marcelo street, I see myself playing, waiting in front of the bathroom and hanging around the balconies to watch the Holy Week processions pass by».

Moreno collected memories of his relationship with Antonio Gallo in one of the many books he published himself, especially after his retirement. These are unique volumes, as they contain his reflections on all kinds of issues along with articles by different authors published in different media. Some titles of those books are Spain, dreams and reality; Today’s Aspirin Dosing Issues; Intrahistory of Cambados; Soul of Galicia; The world of bulls or Towards raging human cosmic love.

In some cases, there is no shortage of jabs at the neighbor: “Antonio Gala: neither Cordoba nor the state attorney”, when he realized that these data from his biography were not clear. Sometimes he writes “The second loophole”, and once he says: “The shadow of Seneca, Hosea, Averroes, Maimonides, the Great Captain and Manolete himself has enriched the depth and gallantry of your humanism. The Foundation respects your name and memory. After we clarified the place and date of your birth , the charity of fantasy allowed you to fall into the consensual fiction of your attorney general and the fact that you graduated from high school at 14. Come on, my friend, get back to your roots.”

“With your little golden beak”

IN the path of utopiaMoreno includes a photograph of the Cultura Española-La Salle school, in Córdoba, from the academic year 1946/47, in which the author Turkish passion: «[En ese centro] I don’t remember you running on the terraces or taking part in sports competitions. Your world has been different since then». He remembers that, among other groups of students, he spoke with his “golden beak”.

The years passed: “In June 1963, as I was preparing to take a plane to Equatorial Guinea as trustee-director of the Bata Normal School, I saw on television that you had been awarded the National Theater Award.” Moreno told this newspaper how one day he saw an albino gorilla near the school that they were supposed to take to Spain. Later he found out that it was Pahuljica, on the way to Barcelona.

In 1971, Moreno moved to Galicia to teach at the former Workers’ University of O Burgo (Culleredo) and at the University College of A Coruña. And it was in that city that he saw Antonio Gala again, who had already become a famous writer.

The meetings, sometimes accidental, were repeated: «[Primero cuando] Walking with the daughter of the Plaza de María Pita, we ran into you who were going to the City Hall to enter the golden book of the city» and on the occasion of some of the presentations of his books in which the writer came to Galicia.

Sometimes they were letters for Christmas, like the ones in which Gala expresses her wish to her friend: “I hope you always have someone to share your time, your illusion and your joy with.”

“Forgetting does not exist”

what friend Galician What he wanted to share with Gal was the text, the prologue for another one of his unique projects: «Do the papers I gave you tell you anything? As you can see, I’m still working on Volume II A realistic Quixote written in Galician Spanish. I am about to finish it if so many of the current windmills stop appearing to attack,” he told him in a letter. And although between the lines of the song Sierra de Córdoba Gala wrote “Forgetting does not exist”, this unforgettable writer did forget about this prologue.