2023-05-28 15:43:35
Pedro Olea keeps an image of Antonio Gala in Bilbao. The writer leaving the López de Haro hotel and walking down the street followed by a flood of women “as if she were the Virgin of Fatima.” «In Bilbao he was a god». Olea knew Gala well. He adapted ‘Más allá del jardín’ for the cinema in 1996 and directed ‘Inés unbuttoned’ at the Arriaga in 2003, both a film and a play, starring Concha Velasco. «I had a very good relationship with him, he was very intelligent and had a very bad mood. ‘He didn’t take the cane for aesthetics, but for static’ », he used to say.
The Bilbao director accepted the offer of the producer Andrés Vicente Gómez to take his novel to the cinema with one condition: that Gala not appear in the filming or editing. ‘La pasión turca’ was recent, which the writer abhorred because Vicente Aranda changed the end of the book. “In ‘Más allá del jardín’, he did not like Concha Velasco for the role of a rich Andalusian lady, she preferred Catherine Deneuve,” recalls Olea. «At the first screening we were all scared. He finished and released: ‘I don’t know if it’s my novel or not, but it’s a great movie’ ».
In his book ‘Bilbao a escena’, theater critic Carlos Bacigalupe evokes a magical night that the Cordovan playwright lived in the city. During the performance of ‘La vieja señorita del paraíso’, the presence of Gala was announced in a colloquium as a special guest. The influx of public exceeded the capacity of the Ercilla hotel and 500 people went to the Astoria theater at two o’clock in the morning to listen to him. A Z car of the National Police asked what demonstration that was. Gala promised that he would never forget him.
Antonio Gala photographed in a Bilbao hotel in 1999.
His works always had a continuous presence on the Bilbao stages. Many of them he premiered here or arrived after two or three places. The author of ‘The Green Fields of Eden’ considered Bilbao “a talismanic city”. «When I talk about Bilbao I am like the folkloric: my heart swells. It is a fetish city for me because it brings me a lot of luck. I love Bilbao very much, although she also loves me”, she told Luis Gómez on the pages of this newspaper when, in 1997, she premiered ‘Café cantante’ at the Aste Nagusia, a black comedy with Nati Mistral and Ángeles Martín in in which corruption appeared as a backdrop. Provocative, he said that he left sad and that he had had “a very comfortable fuck in this city.”
Gala premiered key titles of her theatrical career on the Bilbao stages: ‘Petra Regalada’, ‘The Bird Cemetery’, ‘Seneca or the Benefit of the Doubt’, ‘Carmen, Carmen’… It brought her luck. «It is a superstition that I will not change. Why do I have to do it?» she wondered. «It’s like the story of that student who shows up for an exam with a certain tie and gets honors. He will go to all the exams with that tie until he is made a pingo ».
Antonio Gala receives the Silver Feather from the booksellers of Bizkaia in 1998.
In 1995, he won the Ercilla Award for a theatrical career and three years later the man who sold the most books in Spain received the Silver Feather from the Bizkaia Booksellers Association. «If one day I am a bullfighter, I will debut in Bilbao with the nickname of ‘El niño de la rosa’. I am better in Bilbao than in my own house; In my house I always stumble and slip, “he complimented.
In 2000, Antonio Gala chose Bilbao for the premiere of what he announced to be his last play, ‘Las manzanas del viernes’, with Concha Velasco. And he packed the Ayala for two weeks. Two years later, he premiered again at the Botxo with ‘Inés desabrochada’ and collected the Max de Honor at the Arriaga.
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