The rocking chair has changed rooms. The presidential seat of Don Miguel Delibes Setién, better known as “El Grandpa!” by those who this Friday morning contemplated the wicker seat under another roof, belongs to the immense material legacy of the writer from Valladolid, in addition to the immeasurable cultural and intellectual one, which can be visited from this Friday in the Butrón palace in his hometown. The circle closes on the 105th anniversary of the novelist’s birth, an event that occurred a few streets beyond the street of May 2 in the Castilian capital, where he died in 2010. Since then his awards, books, paintings and various belongings were still there, at the expense of moving to a museum, a family desire finally achieved through an agreement with the Junta de Castilla y León and the City Council of his hometown after decades of fringes unresolved. The family welcomes the move to the patriarch’s sixth home in Valladolid, perhaps the last, with the nostalgia of farewells and the hope that the author remains even more alive in that city where he set so many works.
The inauguration of the Miguel Delibes House Museum has brought together in the palace, as well as the Municipal Archive of Valladolid, a wide array of descendants of the writer and journalist, director of The North of Castilefather and grandfather, hunter and walker, reflective from the cradle and in a better mood than the chronicles describe. Local and regional authorities have also appeared, all excited to find a home for more than 1,000 of the novelist’s belongings, among which are also his beloved bicycle, on which he ruminated phrases for his books or discovered the human and natural landscapes of the Castile that he narrated. There is his old fishing rod along with lines and hooks and the framed photo of him with a wonderful trout; many images of his walks with hunting dogs or adventures among donkeys near the berets essential for the cold Burgos of his refuge in Sedano; memories of his travels around the world that he also transferred to his books along with characters such as Mr. Cayo, Daniel The OwlDoña Menchu, Azarias, old Eloy, the young and dethroned prince or that heretic Cipriano Salcedo, protagonist of The hereticthe last novel by the Valladolid native, who lived near that Butrón palace where the museum resides today.
The house museum is distributed in four areas: Welcome space, The Delibes house, The writer and nature y exhibition hall, areas where the attributes of the novelist are sectioned. The descendants have toured the rooms with smiles and nostalgia, observing the robust table where the grandfather imagined and wrote under the immortalized gaze of his wife in red on a gray background, Ángeles de Castro, portrayed in a painting. “Grandpa’s sofa is missing here, where he used to sit and watch football!” comments one; another alludes to the caricatures that the artist drew with a pen in the blink of an eye, others are amazed that “it is very clean” because, they admit, the writer’s uninhabited home—a nocturnal lair for those who went too far when they went out to party—had some dust after his death. “There’s the coat!” they exclaim when they see it hanging next to the sober bed where the man from Valladolid rested in his last days.
The mayor of Valladolid, Jesús Julio Carnero (PP), has described the house museum as a “dream pursued by different entities”, alluding to the fact that the old Butrón palace is mentioned in The hereticthe author’s last novel. Carnero has demanded that the Pucelano airport take the name of the novelist as Federico García Lorca gives it to that of Granada and Jaén. The regional president, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco (PP), has recognized the “generosity and justice” of those who have collaborated in the process: “We pay a tribute due to one of the most universal figures of the Spanish language.” For him, Delibes is “a symbol beyond ideologies and an accurate mirror of our land.”
The writer’s eldest son, the biologist Miguel Delibes de Castro, has fondly remembered his father and his beloved and longed-for Ángeles de Castro. “As happens with every change of address, we disembark full of hope, expectations and uncertainty about whether we were right with the decision to move,” he expressed, listing that his father lived in five houses in Valladolid, including where he was born, and that the Provincial Archive of Valladolid will be the sixth home, in this case the legacy. The descendant has explained that the museum inherits a little from each home, but particularly from the last, and has described the current move as “joy and heartbreak, bordering on sadness.” The great expert on the Doñana natural park lives in Seville and has confessed that in recent years, when he returned to Valladolid, he liked to sit in the author’s chair and remember when he, in his years of final illness, asked him to open the window or joked when he went to the bathroom, assuring that his Real Valladolid would take the opportunity to score the long-awaited goal: “For 15 years the house remained as he left it and dismantling the rooms has been like removing the scab from a wound that bleeds again.”
Of Delibes, distinguished with the Prince of Asturias of Letters, the 1947 Nadal Prize and many other laurels, these days it has been remembered how he rejected the Planet, as he recorded in his letters to his friend Francisco Umbral in The friendship of two giants and as he detailed in 1979: “(José Manuel) Lara told me to accept, that in the end everything was positive: he won, I won and the readers could find an acceptable novel. I answered that there were some losers: the 150 or 200 new writers who compete for the prize and hope to win to start their literary career.” Delibes de Castro has recalled with regret how, upon the death of the writer in 2010, there was some official from the Administration who blamed the crisis on the lack of funds to have a museum with the “blushing” phrase of “If your father had died a couple of years before…”.