Central figure of the generation of the fifties, Ignacio Aldecoa (Vitoria, 1925-Madrid, 1969) had trained at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the University of Salamanca together with Carmen Martín Gaite, and once he settled in Madrid he frequented the gatherings of the Café Gijón and the Lion, where he became friends with Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Jesús Fernández Santos, Alfonso Sastre, José María de Quinto and Josefina Rodríguez. He married the latter in 1952 – she was also a writer and later founder of the Estilo school – but by then the charismatic and adventurous Aldecoa had already published two collections of poems and several short stories. “It was a voice different from the others,” wrote Martín Gaite in the beautiful text he dedicated to him.
The same year as his marriage, the author submitted a novel to censorship, afternoon city, that the researcher and professor of the Brooklyn College of the City University of New York Álex Alonso Nogueira found this summer in the Archive of the General Administration of Alcalá de Henares. Aldecoa submitted that 66-page novel to the Café Gijón prize, a prize launched by Fernando Fernán Gómez in 1949 and which, despite its prestige, did not always imply publication. In any case, Aldecoa’s work was a finalist, it did not win and a copy was only made known this summer.
Alonso’s research sought to explore Aldecoa’s relationship with censorship on the occasion of the writer’s centenary and the exhibition planned for the National Library of Madrid. In addition to that unpublished 1952 typescript by city of the eveningtheir research led to another unexpected discovery of the Aldecoa funds: a 306-page novel titled The big market and of which there is no news.
“It’s a great surprise,” explains Susana Aldecoa, the writer’s daughter, who was 15 when he died in 1969, by phone. “My mother was the great guardian of my father’s legacy and I have never heard any reference to this work. It is an unusual and wonderful discovery.”
The champion Ignacio Aldecoa, the craft of writing, that isOrganized by the National Library, Spanish Cultural Action and the Provincial Council of Navarra and curated by Professor José Ramón González, the recovered copy of the unpublished novel will be on display from 18 December to 14 June The big market found by Alonso in the censorship files. The other job, city of the eveningit is curated by experts in manuscript conservation.
Neither was published by Aldecoa, nor posthumously by his family. The author, however, used some extracts from those works in other stories. “city of the evening It is a short novel of 66 pages and one of its chapters, 15 pages long, was published in literary mail that same 1952″, explains the curator of the exhibition in a telephone conversation. “The copy now found by Alonso, currently being restored, features corrections by Aldecoa himself and received a recommendation from the censors in favor of its publication, but the writer never removed it.”
The case of the second work found by the Brooklyn College professor in Alcalá de Henares is more enigmatic. There was no trace of its existence. However, on June 16, 1953, as shown in the dossier, Aldecoa sent it to the authorities for approval. “According to the documentation, Lara should have published it on Planeta. Joaquín Úbeda, head of censorship, writes on June 26 that her departure is authorized, but this never happens,” says José Ramón González. That typescript was never collected. When he complained to the censors, this is how they responded to the writer, as reported in the dossier and recalled by Álex Alonso on the phone from New York.
It can be assumed that Aldecoa obtained a copy of his novel, since several copies were sent to the censors, and in 1954, the year of birth of Aldecoa’s daughter, a fragment of The big market in a collection of short novels by Ediciones Cid, where Santos Zunzunegui and Carmen Laforet have also published. That separately published excerpt was titled The market. A year later, in 1955, history Vespers of silence, which gave the title to an anthology of short stories published by Taurus, has recovered another fragment of that long unpublished and hitherto unknown novel. “The two excerpts, published as a short novel and as a short story, represent about 30% of the total work. It is a mystery why the entire novel was not published,” says González.
The action of The big market It is set between the end of 1945 and the beginning of 1946 in Madrid, explains the professor, and there are references to the Nuremberg trials. “Different stories intersect in the plot. There are the most disadvantaged sectors: a pit collector and his family, some garbage collectors and also two middle-class families that Aldecoa treats with irony.” Álex Alonso adds that this fragmentary style of the novel overlaps scenes in Lavapiés, Plaza de la Cebada, and the Manzanares River area.
The scholar from the University of Valladolid claims that in these pages found of The big market we find “the germ of Aldecoa’s entire narrative project”. The social realism and objective realism that will mark him and the authors of his circle is in his pages.: the characteristic characters of his stories, that sad post-war Spain and also the bourgeoisie that did business in those years. “This novel discovered by Aldecoa adds Echegaray Street by Marcial Suárez e The hive of Cela, in that current of urban narrative and in that neorealist moment”, underlines Álex Alonso.
“Ignacio Aldecoa is a miracle, something exceptional,” says the writer Elvira Navarro, who is participating, together with other authors, at the conference this week Story time. On the centenary of Ignacio Aldecoa, organized by the Carlos Edmundo de Ory Foundation of Cadiz. The author underlines the important role of the Basque author in a genre that has not received the same attention in Spain as in the Latin American tradition. In the end, Aldecoa distinguished himself above all as a writer of short stories in a few years in a Spain where the novel prevailed and still prevails. His work and his connection with cinema are also anomalous and interesting, and will also be presented in the December exhibition. The exhibition will coincide with that in the same venue dedicated to Aldecoa’s great friend, Carmen Martín Gaite, and the two will be connected by a space dedicated to that generation of the 1950s, of which Aldecoa was a fundamental member despite his premature death, at the age of 44, in 1969.
In the text that Martín Gaite dedicated to his great friend A warning: Ignacio Aldecoa has died, describes the creative potential that was then truncated: “So many stories of bandits, pirates, gypsies, bullfighters, civil guards, fishermen, gangsters, young people killed in fights, guerrillas; as many as he has known, told, read and imagined, as many as he has written and allowed to be written”.
