“She was the javelin throwing champion and runner-up in Spain in tennis, directive of the Barcelona Soccer Clubwas the only Spanish woman photographer on the front lines of the Civil wara pioneer of feminism and anarchist”. This is how the writer defines Juan Manuel de Prada to the Catalan poet and reporter Ana María Martínez Sagi to whom he dedicates an extensive biography, entitled ‘The right to dream’, made up of more than 1,700 pages divided into two volumes, the result of five years of research.
The writer discovered it in the 90s reading a 1930 book by César González-Ruano entitled ‘Faces, masks and faces’. After finding few books with her signature and some journalistic publications, he located her in a Catalan town and dedicated ‘Las esquinas del aire’ to her in 2000. As a result of those meetings, she asked him to be the executor of her unpublished work and to published it 20 years after his death to not disturb and so that future generations would have more interest in a woman like her. “Preparing that publication I realized that there was many inconsistencies in the story that she had told me”, says Juan Manuel de Prada who gives visibility to both the lights and the shadows of this complex woman.
The trigger for her investigation was a poem she wrote evoking the moment she crossed the border into France. “She dates it to Agullana, a town located in La Junquera, and yet she had told me that she had crossed through Portbou and that there she had met Machado, which caught my attention and triggered my desire to know,” adds the Zamorano who has dedicated his doctoral thesis to this passionate character.
His curiosity has led him to visit physically more than 80 files distributed between Spain, France, the United States, Venezuela or Switzerland, some investigations that lead him to sentence that “even an anonymous life can be rebuilt”.
And it is that Ana María Martínez Sagi, born into a right-wing family, was a very famous woman in the 30s and as a result of her exile she passed into the most total anonymity and died “buried alive”specifies the last prize of the Letters of Castilla y León.
to his biographer sweetened aspects of his life “because of the personal affective pain that has to do with her desire for motherhood, her loneliness and her love failures and because she participates in dark and turbulent events in the Civil War and during the German occupation of France.” De Prada shares that in that France “it is an anarchist red that moves in a shadow zone, which is related to characters who are persecuted, such as Joaquín Ascaso, who was the president of the Aragon Regional Defense Council during the Civil War, an anarchist leader that the government of the Republic puts in search and capture and even asks for his extradition because they accuse him of stealing jewels in Aragon, a request that the Franco government renews”. However, when World War II ended, Martínez Sagi began to lead a “totally French” life.
Clothes from Zamora do not hurt either and affirms that she went to the United States “cheating the University of Illinois”, where she was a professor of Spanish and French since 1961, because “makes them believe that he has higher education when she had only studied until she was 14 years old”.
Ana María Martínez returned to Spain in 1978 permanently because achieves recognition of the right to a pension as a retiree by amnesty laws. Upon his return, she led a discreet life, she had no relationship with his mother, nor with his sister, nor with the friends who knew of his anarchist militancy. In her role as a writer, she tried to publish some books without success, which caused her, disenchanted, to opt for leading the life of an anonymous woman in a small town in Catalonia, in Moià, before moving to a residence where she died.
Difficulties
In his investigation, the man from Zamora has come across big obstacles. “When you know that by reaching the legacy of some people you can make discoveries but you cannot reach it because that person has not left a legacy when they died or their heirs have destroyed it or it is untraceable as happens to me with Marie-Thérèse’s letters and papers Eyquem, a French woman who was the general secretary of the French Socialist Party with whom she lived for 5 years and with whom I am sure she would later have an epistolary relationship”, laments the author of ‘The right to dream’.
“Deserves to be recovered”
Juan Manuel de Prada is now finalizing a book by Sagi that will be published in the coming months and has in mind to publish a poetry anthology from the Catalan “Beyond the fact that her life is truly amazing and spectacular, she is a great poet who deserves to be known and recovered,” confesses the biographer of this controversial woman who ended her days as an anonymous character. Previously, the Zamoran novelist has promoted the publication of ‘La voz sola’, a volume that brings together a selection of the Catalan poetics, part of it completely unpublished until then, and an anthology of his newspaper articles.