2024-01-03 23:22:48
The Casa Panero Museum of Astorga, embroiled in controversy in recent months due to its temporary closure and its use as a “house of terror” in the last Halloween celebration, contains the turbulent history of a family of writers, at the head of which is the contradictory personality of the poet Leopoldo Panero (1909-1962). But within the walls of the building—acquired by the city council in the 1980s, restored and museumized in subsequent decades—there is much more. In its rooms rests the memory of Astorgan scholars such as the historian Luis Alonso Luengo, the ethnographer José María Luengo or the composer Evaristo Fernández Blanco. And also, in a room on the upper floor, a space dedicated to the Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892-1938). The reason for this tribute not only speaks of how the Spanish-American intellectual completely surrendered to communism, but also of the impact it had on Leopoldo Panero himself.
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“Leopoldo Panero was very impressed by meeting César Vallejo, both the person and the work,” describes someone who perhaps best knows the complex intra-history of the Peruvian poet’s stay that summer of 1931 in Astorga. Something difficult due to the scarcity of data that has left a fragile memory that is now rescued by Javier Huerta Calvo, professor of Spanish Literature and president of the association. Friends of Casa Panero de Astorga. Panero had met Vallejo in the late 1920s at the Madrid café Granja del Henar, whose gathering was organized by the playwright Ramón María del Valle Inclán. An intense relationship began there.
“Vallejo was a very pure communist who led by example, and whose personality contrasted with that of Pablo Neruda, who was nicknamed ‘armchair communist,’” says Huerta. Vallejo’s life journey – who never enjoyed a period of certain economic tranquility – took place flirting with poverty between his native Peru, the Paris of the avant-garde or the Spain of the Republic and the war. The fact is that a young Panero experienced “quite a stir” in those gatherings to which the poet attended. So much so that Leopoldo invited Vallejo to his house in Astorga, which he would visit during a brief stay that summer of 1931.
The Spanish-American intellectual, who had already published some of his most charismatic works such as The black heralds (1918) o Trilce (1922), landed in the Leonese city at a key moment in his life. He had just visited the Soviet Union on a trip that would be a turning point in his political thinking and in his own work: from those beginnings in the avant-garde currents to a writer completely won over for the communist cause, something that had not happened to other colleagues. of the literary world. An experience that would crystallize in the travel book Russia in 1931.
A visit that is difficult to forget
It may seem like an unimportant detail, but it proves that the meeting in Astorga left a significant mark on Leopoldo Panero. The Astorgano, who published a passionate review of Russia in 1931 in the Madrid newspaper El Sol, he was wearing—as stated—a badge with the hammer and sickle on the buttonhole of his jacket some time after his meeting with Vallejo. The anecdote does not fail to underline the changing, paradoxical character of Leopoldo Panero, practically unclassifiable. Because, what was the real political thought of that young promise of Spanish literature? “In some letters he sends to parents he seems to sympathize with the Socialist Party; In 1931 she became involved in the Second Republic and after meeting Vallejo she seemed to become more involved in communism,” says Javier Huerta. But there is more.
The political turbulence of that Spain on the verge of fratricidal conflict will take its toll. Huerta specifies that, with the arrival of the Civil War, Leopoldo Panero is accused of belonging to the International Red Relief, a social service promoted by the Communist International in 1922. The circumstances, the events, are chained, poisoned, until Panero is found. in prison in October 1936, from where he almost did not return alive. Leopoldo turned to an old acquaintance, Miguel de Unamuno, about whom he had published some articles in El Sol. Unamuno, already disgraced by then, let him know that there was nothing he could do to help him and, nevertheless, he gave his mother some advice. —Máxima Torbado was her son’s emissary—who would end up saving his life.
As the former rector of the University of Salamanca had suggested, Máxima went to visit Carmen Polo—General Franco’s wife and with whom she was related in some way—begging for the life of her son. The consequence: Leopoldo Panero would leave prison days later. Although that wasn’t all. “When Panero was released from prison in mid-November 1936, he was aware that if he continued down the same path, he would be arrested again, and that is the reason why he joined the army and in 1937 he joined the Falange.” , says the president of Amigos Casa Panero de Astorga. A history of countless contradictions: socialism, communism… Falange. And a striking destiny for those who had been involved, for example, in the recognized Pedagogical Missions of the Republic.
What happened to Vallejo
The experience in republican Spain was not favorable to César Vallejo, who tried to pave the way for his literature and improve his living conditions through different publications, in which he would even have the help of Federico García Lorca. Nothing prospered. The Peruvian poet would choose in 1932 to return to Paris with his fiancée, Georgette Philippart. Vallejo was seen again in Spain at the International Congress of Antifascist Writers, held in Valencia, in July 1937. He was also part of the Ibero-American Committee for the Defense of the Republic, where he would clash with the personality of Pablo Neruda. Vallejo, who had wanted to place himself on the side of the most disadvantaged (heroes in the Spain of the civil war, he thought) would soon see his own end: he died on Good Friday 1938 in Paris.
Thus, while César Vallejo had embraced the most extreme communism, his admirer Leopoldo Panero had sided with the victors in Franco’s Spain. That did not prevent Panero from maintaining his admiration for the Peruvian, a feeling verifiable in two facts. In 1945, Leopoldo included some verses by Vallejo in an anthology of Latin American poetry. Three years later, a decade after the death of the author of Trilcehe would dedicate an elegy to him in his book of poems Written at every moment (1948).
An unfortunate ending
But the final fate was not kinder to Leopoldo Panero. “His premature death is directly related to the trauma of having confronted Pablo Neruda (he did so in the controversy Lost letter to Pablo Neruda 1956), a literary giant who at that time praised Stalin,” explains expert Javier Huerta. “Even those who had been insulted by Neruda reproached Panero for criticizing him,” adds Huerta. The Astorgano poet, immersed in confusion, died in 1962.
What memory remains, then, of that distant visit by Vallejo to Astorga in the summer of 1931? “Very little,” they acknowledge from the Amigos Casa Panero association. Among other things, because the Peruvian’s stay was not recorded in the press of the time. Or, at least, it is unknown. To date, Javier Huerta has not been able to access the only complete collection of one of the most important newspapers in the Leonese city, El Faro Astorgano, today inaccessible, in the hands of a local businessman. The memory, then, remains in the lines and verses that Leopoldo Panero dedicated to the poet and, currently, in one of the rooms of the Casa Panero in Astorga, temporarily closed.
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