Let’s imagine a world, a different country in which geniuses like Carlos Saura, inventors of universes, creators of lives that did not exist, of music that had been mistreated before them, of drama that had been obliterated… Let’s imagine that creators dedicated to art in all its versions they would have received in life and in full the applause or the place that this Aragonese without harnesses deserved beforein a country that now, when there will be no silence but congratulations, weeps for him, applauds him or misses him…
Let’s imagine a different country that is not really Spain but a utopia or the foreigner that would have let him do it, feted by his genius, which has the influences of Goya or Picasso behind it, and they would have dedicated him in that improbable country, like an island of celluloid, painting and photography, a space for young people to study their work, from nonsense to genius or fantasy. Let’s imagine that she had had a place for her to understand why he stubbornly became all music, as if he had a personal commitment to musical sentiment as his seventh sense of spirit.
Let’s imagine Carlos Saura and see him in his house in Medium Collar, a few steps from the train that brought him to Madrid; in his room of relics and cameras always ready are his photographs and his self-portraits, and also his jokes; In the TV room there is an incomparable treasure of film and photography books, from here he watches how his dogs and other animals evolve.
Everything is great outside of that room where he gives interviews or reads or writes his books, his novels, but behind it, next to where the kitchen and lunch are, there is a huge table where he exhibits for himself or for those who come the paintings that he prepares for the successive exhibitions, of painting, of photos, as if he had torn the calendar and his age was a mirage in the almanac.
Sometimes, you don’t have to imagine it, he would go out to eat with his daughter Annawho was his guardian angel, or with his son Antonio, or at least I myself enjoyed some of those outings, once in the middle of the fog, gripped by the cold of Collado in winter and, furthermore, comforted with the wine that he drank to add color to the stew. One of those times we talked about this country and the war, the one he went through, the one that brought fear to the body of his entire family. This country had not recovered from those perverse reasonings that brought death, and also the death of Lorca, which was being one of his most important projects. He told me, regarding that war and this time that he observed from the corner of the world: “I have lived through the war and it terrifies me that there will be another in Spain”.
He had lived it in Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona, ”because my father was secretary of the Minister of Finance of the Republic.” She traveled with the republican army, “I have seen the bombings and houses broken, people hanging… I have seen death in war, except in Valencia, where there was a haven of peace.” By then Manuela Mena, former mayor of Madrid, had expressed fears similar to hers, and for this reason Saura told me: “I have lived through the war and it terrifies me and the possibility of another one frightens me… I know it is brewing, on that I agree with Manuela Ore. It’s fading a bit. You have to be very careful, you have to stop that. As soon as the right and the left begin to move, or the Church and the Army do, I am terrified of what could happen”.
He trusted “that the intelligent people of this country” would agree “so that this does not happen”. It’s over, he told me, “and the Spanish war was a brutal fight between brothers.” That dastardly specter of the past is found in many of his films, in his documentaries, in his photography, in the diverse art that kept him going, until the end, as if he always had an encounter with a world that did not resemble the one he was waiting for. it represented blood, murder and hate.
“When you stop, you’re dead,” he also told me, speaking of health, and therefore of the undecided future. Around, in the house, he had his life, he worked singing, looking at the clouds, imitating the hesitations of dogs, always waiting for the change of seasons to give him a song to be both a farmer and an actor, a man. laughing and also marked by an implacable fight against banality.
I looked at the death (he suffered from pneumonia shortly before the age of 89) “with a certain naturalness, although I don’t want to die”. That time when we had to talk about that final space that she looked at from the side, she was preparing his work on Lorca, another story reason to escape the ghost of war. “I really like the kind of childish soul of him, dazzled by the things that are happening. It is very interesting that homosexual relationship that he has with several people who contribute a lot to him. I don’t care if he fell in love with a woman or a man. But that feeling of always being linked to a love, a passion… I like that about Lorca. And then his commitment to the left and to Spanish life, being also a religious man… But they shot him, and that’s it, they killed him… At 38 years old. The Spanish war is enormously cruel. On both sides, although obviously more on the fascist side”.
That murder of Lorca seemed unforgivable to him. He said it like that, like someone who is extracting from his memory other dramas that seemed to him, his hand gripping the chair, life spinning in his memory, about to get up to look for a painting, a book, a piece of music, something that bring him back to today’s world. “Unfortunately,” he had told me again, “I don’t believe in immortality; I would like to, but we are animals and we have a limit in life, we disappear and that’s it. Perhaps we are a kind of essay on a human being that someone invented, as Dostoevsky said.
A hand that is a mystery underlined in intense black what he told me about death, and now that I reread it I see him, already traveling through the heavens, saying those words or others that, upon reaching in the air his true nature of strangeness or drama, have been the true essence of his work and his hope, of his joyful and at the same time elusive nature, the way of being a genius who should have had, since his childhood, since the damn war, a room more generous where to deposit his enormous capacity as an artist.
But he was born in this country, and to this country he gave him everything he could, although elusive reason never paid attention to him that now it will be an enormous hubbub, of applause and glory, which no longer reaches him where time has taken him. air of time So much energy, so much love for what he did. A biography that alternated intelligence and torment, the infinite voice, the odd image, of a rabidly contemporary artist.