What would Chaves Nogales have thought of this? On a cold, rainy and gray London morning, trying to find the grave without a headstone or name of the Sevillian journalist in the North Sheen cemetery, west of the city, could be a desperate task. But Google Maps long ago registered the devotion of thousands of readers for the author of works such as Blood and Fire, The Agony of France o The Tour of Europe by Plane. On the map displayed on the phone screen, the icon of a tower, which symbolizes a place of historical interest, warns: Grave (unmarked) of Manuel Chaves Nogales (Unmarked grave of Manuel Chaves Nogales). It is position 19 of the CR plot. It is easy to get to it.
“All space is battle, everything is fight and action. Wireless transmissions have given captains a Jovian voice that brings order to chaos, dominates the noise, makes space intelligent and docile, eliminates distances…” wrote the journalist when he was able to visit the American troops camped in Northern Ireland, awaiting the order to disembark on the continent. He was a reality reporter, capable of understanding the role of technology in the dizzying advancement of history.
It was not easy to track, compile and organize Chaves’ latest works in his English exile, delivered at a frenetic pace that led him to produce hundreds of articles while dreaming of creating his own agency. The Information Centre; It informed readers on the other side of the Atlantic about the course of the World War or the situation in Franco’s Spain; and began to build a bridge journalistic project that would connect Europe with a Latin America that had demonstrated in those years its relevance in geopolitics.
The El Paseo publishing house has finally published the third volume of the World War II diaries from Chaves Nogales. The first, From Parisnarrates the beginning of the great European war, the daily life of the French capital and the astonishing docility with which the French surrendered without resistance to the German invasion. The second, In Londonrecounts the stoicism of the British in the face of blitzthe merciless bombing by German aircraft against the British capital. He declares his admiration for the character and politics of the United Kingdom and begins intense work as an agency journalist to inform American readers of the tragedy that the continent was experiencing.
“England has always been a land of asylum and refuge for expatriates of all classes and conditions, for fighters of all ideals who, under the liberal protection of English law, can exercise here the powers inherent to human freedoms and dignity. Today, more than ever, London is the refuge of free men from all the countries of Europe, invaded and devastated by tyranny,” writes Chaves.
Although the agency is no longer based in the historic building, 85 Fleet Street, where Reuter was based, remains standing. Chaves worked, signed and delivered dozens of his articles there, through the AFI (Agence Française Indépendente), for which the Sevillian worked.
Just behind the property is the Church of Santa Bride, the temple consecrated to journalists where an altar collects the photos of all those correspondents who lost their lives in wars and conflicts. And a few dozen meters further, on the way to the Strand, the Ye Olde Cock Tavernthe old rooster’s tavern where Chaves went to have lunch or to write some of his chronicles. That environment, that street, with all the historical headlines of English journalism, renewed his enthusiasm to undertake new projects and give birth to new ideas. An abdominal infection, the result of peritonitis or stomach cancer, cut short his life. In the early morning of May 8, 1944, at the age of 46, Chaves died alone in a hospital bed in the Chelsea neighborhood.
The third volume, Latest Chroniclesbrings together the journalist’s unbridled career in the last two years of his life. Articles about Rommel’s campaign in Africa, the failure of the Falange in Spain, the fight in Stalingrad, the relations between Mexico and Great Britain or the preparation maneuvers of the American army before D-Day (he dedicated four reports on the ground from Belfast) give an idea of the journalist’s concerns.
“Chaves lived in the present, he was a quite intense person who lived every moment as if it were his last. When he leaves Spain he has that disappointment, that almost resentment. And then, when he leaves France, he does it again. But finally, when he dies, he is in one of the most hopeful moments of his life. That is the sadness. He is always the same Chaves and never repeats himself, because he is always the same person, with the desire to move forward, with enthusiasm, with projects,” says Yolanda Morató, philologist, translator, poet, bibliophile and professor of English Philology at the University of Seville.
Morató is the editor of the three volumes. He has dedicated years of intense research to compiling, organizing and distilling the original trace of the more than six hundred unpublished articles in which the Sevillian journalist recounted the war that devastated Europe.
The latest chronicles reflect the hope of a witness of his cosmopolitan and universal time who has found in London the perfect platform to dream of a future that was ultimately denied to him.
“Today London is the paradise of planners. The atmosphere that is breathed here is the most favorable climate for idealists, dreamers, arbitrators, redeemers, all those who naively believe in the unlimited possibility of improvement of the human being and have blind faith in their perfectible nature,” describes Chaves.
His idealism leads him to focus on Latin America. The Spanish-speaking community that surrounds him, his agency colleagues, the emergence of countries like Mexico on the international stage… everything leads to more ambitious and broader journalism.
“He always covers one more circle than the others, one more line than the others. It is that breadth of vision that leads him to first ask himself why he has to focus exclusively on the civil war if he has colleagues with conflicts in their own countries who speak the same language as him. He realizes that it is an intense market. He sees an enormous opportunity, in the same way that he saw it in Madrid, when he set out to cover Europe. He was a monolingual journalist, proud of his monolingualism, who sees his terrain in the Spanish-speaking market,” explains Morató.
“Today there is a sentimental London citizenship that is based on the pride of having shared the suffering and heroism of the great city. I have heard a Chilean dispute the right of citizenship to a Londoner by saying: ‘It is true that you were born in London once many years ago; but I have been born every night in London for six months,’ says the journalist.
Like many other exiles whose ability to analyze the future of Spain was blinded by the development of the conflict in Europe, Chaves also sometimes errs on the side of voluntary optimism when speculating about the end of the Franco regime.
But it is his long-term vision, and his dissection of the Spanish political character, that remains intensely present. The third volume includes the interview that his friend and Brazilian colleague Murilo Marroquim gave to the journalist, in which, like all the “respondents” with whom he spoke in depth throughout his career, he captures a vision of Spain, of Europe, of the world, which demonstrates the scope of the Sevillian’s vision.
“Anything that involves talking about unification, in Spain, is disastrous. Spain is not one, but several. To want to unify it is to kill it. Not knowing this, the Falangism could not create a State. We must accept Catalan separatism, Basque separatism and the ‘separatism’ innate to every Spaniard, that formidable and miraculous centrifugal force, which is the best thing that Spaniards have,” reflects Chaves.
London gave the journalist the freedom to be forceful. Alone, far from his family, increasingly physically consumed by deteriorating health and a devilish pace of work, the global resonance of the British capital, the historical moment in which he lived there and the possibilities that opened up to comprehensive and expansive journalism, however, provided Chaves with unrepeatable opportunities, such as the series of reports on the American troops in Belfast, which he published The Time from Bogotá exclusively.
The latest chronicles of Chaves are proof that the character wanted nothing more than to do journalism until his last breath.