From October 22 to December 22 we will be able to enjoy the great exhibition entitled The Machados, family portrait, curated by Alfonso Guerra, coordinated by Eva Diaz Perez and inaugurated by the king Felipe VI. It is located in what was the Artillery Factory, on Avenida Eduardo Dato, bordering the bullfighting neighborhood of San Bernardo. In it we can feel the human and divine dimensions of one of the most important literary sagas –if not the most important– of our literature. The culmination of it are the brothers Manuel y Antonio, but that basket was made with the wicker of his father, patron of Andalusian folklore, and even with that of his grandparents, Antonio —scourge of bandits and smugglers when he was provincial governor— and Cyprian.
The portrait flamenco This family is presided over by Cipriana, with her hair tied back, her hands in her lap and a serene and, at the same time, confident look: “the woman of the stories”. That is what they called her in Llerena, province of Badajoz, when she lived there with her family, the Machados having been forced nomads since the times of times. There she has a park named after her – when will she be in Seville?
But Cipriana - niece of Agustin Duran, the first director of the National Library and author of the first Romancero, with which the Machado brothers learned to read—was from Seville and lived and died with Sevillian spirit, even if the Grim Reaper caught her in Madrid. And she left Sevillian spirit in the world, that “these blue days and this sun of childhood” suck from that voice and that tenderness that Elena Cipriana Alvarez Duran —that was the name of Antonio and Manuel's grandmother, the mother of Demophilus—, over the years, I would give birth to and raise so many things, so many memories of what was lost and it was time to rescue, to take them out of the old trunk of memory, so that they would reach the new generations intact.
Cipriana wrote and drew - always culture and freedom in the house with the brazier and the shelves full of books - but her passion was the old ballads and the old verses of the town, to which she dedicated a large part of her life. The first scholar of the flamenco Of which we have more or less certain news, the first lyrics that the "singers" made accompanied by their knuckles on the table or the guitar, to spice up the primitive dances, all grandparents of our flamenco Demófilo satisfies his mother's work compiling ballads, tongue twisters, sayings and couplets, and then brings his work to light.
At night, when her grandchildren Manuel, Antonio, Joaquín, Francisco and José Machado—who took up the paintbrushes after seeing their grandmother with them in her hands so many times—could not sleep, she would sit at the foot of their beds and tell them stories and recite old verses that sounded new in the children's ears in her voice.
—Grandma, tell us something, so we don't fall asleep.
And there went the grandmother, leaving her wicker rocking chair behind to tuck in her grandchildren, dim the lamp and tell them things from their whole lives, rescued from oblivion, so they could fall asleep. They were spoken lullabies, lullabies, little lullabies, in a low voice, very quietly, with great poise and care.
«These were bad times for female poetry, at the end of the 19th century, and since it was difficult for her to sign her studies and her works with her own name, she did so under the pseudonym of “the woman of the stories”. Woman first. Stories and tales lost and recovered in their place, each one in the drawer of the dresser that corresponded to it»
His son, Demophilus, wrote to Aniceto Sela, a native of Asturias and rector of the University of Oviedo: “[My mother] has collected sixty stories, seventy verses, ninety-five tongue twisters, traditions, popular explanations of place names, jokes, wedding, burial and baptism customs, traditions of mines and hermitages in Llerena; in short, the true folklore of Llerena.”
Verses, traditions, songs… things from the village that interested the matriarch of a family that combined the cultured and the popular, that took both languages to the highest levels of literature. And it is true that the essence, the origin, is found where it is: at the family table, in that corner where tradition becomes the reality of the absolute present.
These were bad times for female poetry, the end of the 19th century, and since it was difficult for her to sign her studies and her works with her own name, she did so under the pseudonym of “the woman of the stories”. Woman first. Stories and tales lost and recovered in their place, each one in the drawer of the dresser that corresponded to it. She also founded the Llerena Folklore Society, Also known as Regianense, and stepped forward with the courage of those who know that the truth is on their side, that what they do is useful and that what they live is worthwhile.
From here —and from the intellectual mind of his father, Antonio Machado and Nunez, a Cadiz native and freethinker, Darwinist, convinced Krausist and buried in the Civil Cemetery of Madrid— drank and sucked Antonio Machado Alvarez, Demophile, and this thread was the one he left to his children so that they could continue pulling the skein and collecting the fishing line, remembering the lights of Seville's childhood and the sonorous endings with the perfect definition: ...and Seville, so that it would sound in the voice of Juan Peña The Lebrijano and to the beat of the tailcoat of Eli Parrilla.
With her hair tied back, her hands on her lap and a serene look, Cipriana presides over a family portrait that we can glimpse every day from the border of the San Bernardo neighborhood of Seville.
* First of four installments. To be continued.
