For years a cat called Negrin. Our daughters had found him as a newborn in the parking lots of the Rota urbanization where we spent the summers. They had brought him to our house, and I gave in to the temptation of putting a plate of milk for him. When Almudena saw the scene, he began to scold us with the common sense that we lacked. The truth is that it was crazy to take responsibility for a cat because we lived between two cities and many trips, subject to round-trip customs that made it inadvisable to welcome a pet into the family with dignity. Understanding that Almudena did not want us to keep the cat, our daughters had the idea of baptizing it. Mom, her name is Negrinand everything changed suddenly, not with a coup d’état, but with a coup with a name, because many things fit into words, and in that animal that they had found on the street suddenly lived the history of Spain, the memory that they were used to hearing over and over again at the kitchen table, on the sofa where we watched television or in the car that crossed the cities and the memory of the landscapes. Negrín’s name made a new exile impossible, the cat stayed with us, he stayed forever, beyond the years and death, because I still very frequently remember the image of Almudena sitting in front of the computer, in the middle of the plot of a novel or an article for the newspaper, with Negrin on his legs. The historical memory of that cat named after the protagonist of the Spanish Republic is part of my most intimate memory. In front of a turned off computer or a lonely sofa, I live with my memories and tell them that no, they will not pass.
Sitting down to write is only part of the writing process, because words hold many things that have to do with life, memories, conversations, cities, eyes, ears, lips and shoes. The path is made by walking and it is written with everything that has remained in us with each step within us. You have to sit down, of course, and it is advisable to respect a work discipline with its schedules and days. But it is essential that work truly mixes with life and that the job is a vocation. When he wrote his novels, Almudena tried to get into the intimacy of his characters to live the story inside, to go from dates and great events to the intimacy of a man or woman who fell in love, felt hopes or fears, shared ideas, failures or hopes, in their hearts and in their eyes. The writing ranged from collective events to the intimacy of human beings. When he wrote his articles for EL PAÍS, he almost always dominated the opposite direction, starting from a personal episode, a particular scene, an intimate event, to transcend and reach situations that defined collective life, the air of a society and a time.
Literature and history are inseparable because they arise from the life that makes and unmakes human beings. Almudena was trained at a time when studying or participating in the Madrid scene meant affirming freedom from the customs of the Franco dictatorship that had subjected Spain for many years. And freedom didn’t just mean voting every four years. It was about affirming a different, freer way of being a woman, a different way of living sexuality or writing about it, a desire to read forbidden books, to know the silenced stories, to share thoughts or to look for newspapers at the newsstand. The air of freedom that the appearance of EL PAÍS brought about made possible a new way of telling the news, a wish come true for journalism to be a decisive part of democracy, both when it comes to reporting and when it comes to expressing opinions. Years later, the writer who had investigated Lulu’s ages on the paths of a new sentimental education or that had inhabited the memory of clandestinity and the fight for democracy in The frozen heartshe felt proud to inherit Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s column in the newspaper to tell, from her own eyes, from her privacy, everything that aroused her opinions in the day-to-day life of Spanish reality. The discipline of putting words to current events and thinking things twice was part of his literature and his life.
A sensible woman, willing to think twice about what bringing a cat home means, but loyal to her feelings and ideals, became a columnist. Writing newspaper articles is a way to take everyday life seriously. We go to the market, we take our daughter to school, we have coffee with some friends, we go out to the movies, we prepare a trip, we read the newspapers and we feel that it is worth stopping to think, interpret things, give an opinion. Writing is living together, finding meaning in the need to love or criticize, to remember or imagine, to deny or propose. The relationship between writers and the press is very old and very fertile; it has nuanced the meaning of literature and the press in each historical context. Almudena’s memory is linked to books such as Malena is a tango name o Inés and joybut also to his weekly contributions to the newspaper. The values I had learned to inherit from the chosen history became an active part of our conversation about the present.
It is now four years since his death. I feel a special emotion when strangers greet me on the street and tell me that they miss Almudena, his novels and his newspaper articles. A collaboration is a date that is suddenly interrupted. But the poet Luis Rosales wrote that death does not interrupt anything. So I give thanks, I feel the affection alive, I tell myself that memory is part of life and I remember Almudena sitting in front of the computer, with Negrin on his legs.
*This text is the prologue written by Luis García Montero exclusively for ‘Four years without Almudena Grandes: memorable columns that return from the EL PAÍS archive‘, a selection of columns that cover more than two decades of collaboration between the writer and the newspaper.