2023-09-20 00:09:42
The history of ‘Behold the man‘Borja’s was worldwide, remember. In 2012, Cecilia Gimenez81 years old, tried to ‘restore’ a painting of Elías Martínez in a chapel in the Aragonese town, accidentally creating a monster like Miyazaki’s that went around the world and divided it between detractors and fans. A nightmare, because Cecilia was a discreet and devoted person, and she did it with the best of hearts. And the rest already know: now it is a true tourist phenomenon.
«In one week he had two anxiety attacks. She didn’t want to leave the house and it’s not known if she ate or not, my mother went there because she wouldn’t get out of bed and wouldn’t stop crying,” Marisa, Cecilia’s niece, who also spent some time with her at home, tells us. They also cleaned, took care of her son (who has cerebral palsy) and protected her from social media and television.
Would Cecilia change the past if she could? «The love that people showed her, in the end, replaced everything bad for her. She has no regrets, because she did it with great love and she had been doing it for 20 years. “She smudged it to paint it over her with the photograph she had.” And she stayed halfway, don’t forget. And the place had been neglected for decades: «In recent years there had been a water leak that had practically ruined the painting. The drawing she put on has nothing to do with how she really was. “Nobody was going to invest a penny in that chapel,” she says.
«In Borja, at first, they thought it was a hooligan. When they found out what was behind her and that she was my aunt, because people love her very much and know the life she has led, they began to defend her and went out of their way to ensure that no one hurt her,” Marisa recalls. In this way, between them, she didn’t find out anything. And she also denies that she has enriched herself with this, “nothing further.”
And eleven years later… to Las Vegas. This September 30 in the capital of the game there will be the world premiere of Andrew Flack’s opera ‘Behold the man: Cecilia Giménez‘, based on real events and of which some acts had been performed in various places, but, finally, it will be able to be seen in its entirety for the first time. And they want, if it goes well, to bring it to Spain and have it star in it. Antonio Banderas.
Marisa will fly there (paying for the tickets with her husband, of course) to see the premiere. For his part, the author and librettist of the piece, Andrew Flackand the composer, Paul Fowler, they previously traveled to Borja to meet Cecilia. The painter caused Flack a lot of tenderness; he looked at her as she looked at her mother. And that tenderness is maintained in the work, which has its licenses: «For example, Cecilia has a son who has no health problems. And the original painter here is dead, but the ghost is a participant, and he had had a hat shop… he has big differences. But the images and videos are all from Borja, the publicity will be extraordinary.
Why has it taken so long for the entire opera to be released, if there has been news of it since 2016? The intrastory deserves a small aside. On the one hand, because it is a very expensive project: a good orchestra, actors… And, throughout these years, some acts have been performed in Borja itself, in North Carolina or Arizona. «In Spain, you know, they are all problems. When they couldn’t get money for production, they needed something else. If you release this in the United States and it is a success, in Spain they will want to do it later.
And, on the other hand, for the priest. The premiere was going to take place in Borja. But the story they tell, which is partly invented, mixes a theme from which they preferred to distance themselves. «The priest who was there at one time got into trouble, the poor man ended up in jail with false accusations. He was a super generous man who gave money to everyone and they wanted to extort him. They accused him of keeping money from an inheritance or something, but it turned out to be a lie. And the priest who appears in the opera, let’s say, also keeps the money for the repair of the painting that the mayor gives him and talks to a parishioner… Those who made it in Borja, who were the choir here, did not want to cause problems for the man . And then in Zaragoza the price went completely down.
Cecilia’s anguish lasted a year. During that time, she refused to see the painting. She couldn’t handle it and it made her cry. «She is very religious and she saw it as an insult to her God. ‘Look at what I’ve done to you’, like a serious offense towards him,” says Marisa. But after a year, a cuplé singer from Zaragoza, Corita Viamonte, quite recognized, came to see her and told her: ‘You’re going to come in with me.’ And he took her arm and put her inside her. And from there, better. Now, since she has senile dementia, she sees her ‘Ecce Homo’ as beautiful. You show him a photo of the original and he says: ‘How ugly it was, now it’s worth more.’ Because she doesn’t remember anything bad, only the good. She has completely forgotten everything. “It’s a beautiful story because it seems like a story.”
Currently, he lives in a residence, with his 65-year-old son who has cerebral palsy. She also had another who died totally deformed from degenerative muscular dystrophy at age 20. «She never saw her children in harm’s way. She saw them as the most handsome of all. She never saw them deformed. And now she is like hers, another son of hers that she has to protect, that people laugh at and no one can laugh because she is hers ‘Ecce Homo’. She told you about it as something miraculous: ‘This is a miracle, Marisica, that Jesus sent me for having dedicated so many years to fixing… ‘Now he is going to know you, the whole world.’ And I told him: ‘Well, if I wanted to reward you, you might as well have gotten La Primitiva instead of this.’ And we laughed.
Now he is happy because he has invented his story and so it is phenomenal. Apart from Jesus Christ, or the Virgin of Mercy, think until it was a commission from the City Council. “Her son’s intelligence is intact, and he is also very smart, and he looks at her thinking: ‘Come on, my mother, if you only knew…’.” The Calvary. “And now that she knows I’m going to Las Vegas, she’s like, ‘You’re already gone…’ every day. And I tell him not yet,” says the niece. It will be exciting when she shows you videos of the premiere.
«Although the ending was happy, the beginning was very sad. The other day Corita Viamonte, the one I told you about before, came to pay tribute to him. And I saw her sing. And I asked my mother: had you ever heard your aunt sing? And not. Now I see her happier. She has been a woman like tris… Let’s see, happy within her misfortune. Because she has had a very hard life. She was very happy with her children and she would never have changed them. She would never have changed one bit of her life just to meet her children. And she is not a great painter but she was not that bad, she did exhibitions and sold her paintings. She wouldn’t be such a bad painter either. The thing is that this was staining the wall to draw on it but, then, she didn’t have time, because, obviously, they wouldn’t let her touch it. She said ‘please’ and they didn’t want to. But at least she said, ‘I’ll pay for the arrangement.’ And neither. Because she had already triumphed and they realized that she was losing.
[Se estima que han pasado por el santuario de Borja a ver el ‘Ecce Homo’ alrededor de 300.000 personas de 130 países desde 2012, con un ritmo actual de 11.000 visitantes al año]
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