Carmen Martín Gaite in Virginia

As I thought about my relationship with Carmiña—the nearly 20 years that I interacted with her in Charlottesville, New York, Washington, Madrid, and El Boalo—I thought that two observations might be a welcome counterpoint to my colleagues’ more scholarly interventions.

First, I can’t help but acknowledge—and remind you—that Carmen Martín Gaite’s very first literary passions included not the young girls of her childhood (recounted so movingly in Retahílas) or the looming ghosts of Franco (who creep out of The Back Room to challenge and puzzle the mature novelist) or even the 1950s repressed lovers who populate Usos amorosos de la postguerra española.

No, Martín Gaite’s original inspirations were folks like Melchor de Macanaz or Luis Vidal y Villalba. And, indeed, one of her major and enduring studies is the extraordinary Usos amorosos del dieciocho en España from 1972. In Cuadernos de todo she tells us:

Acabamos de pasar Galapagar, antes de llegar a Villalba. De repente he revivido la escena del piquete que Floridablanca mandó a esperar al extraño prisionero Luis Vidal y Villalba, que venía de Londres. La exploración de su equipaje. Tengo la suerte de recordar esta historia como si fuera verdadera y actual, como si me hubiera pasado a mí. …

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Pedro Álvarez de Miranda has done a better job than I can do here in his article in Insula on Martín Gaite’s interest in the eighteenth century, but I can point out that she herself included the following statement in her typed (on onionskin, 1982) curriculum vitae (which she often referred to as her “ridículum vitae”): “En 1972, sin embargo, tras una larga etapa de total abandono de la Universidad, decide doctorarse y lo hace por la de Madrid con su tesis ‘Lenguaje y estilo amoroso en los textos del siglo XVIII español’, dirigida por don Alonso Zamora Vicente”.

She never lost interest in her beloved “siglo XVIII”.

Second, we had invited Martín Gaite to be Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia during the fall semester of 1982 (we called her in Madrid in January, and, rather amazingly, she accepted on the spot). Flying from Madrid to Charlottesville was not particularly easy at the time, and when Carmen stepped off the plane in Virginia that hot evening of the 30th of August, it became immediately apparent (to her and to the airline personnel) that she was not in Charlottesville at all, but in Richmond. (She was not unaware that baches could occur: in a letter she wrote to me on 18 June 1982 she confessed, “Yo, como nunca he dejado de ser una chica de provincias, estoy algo nerviosa con este viaje a un sitio desconocido y lejano”.)

A quick scurry got her back on the plane and to her final destination, where she arrived late in the night and completely frazzled. Our plan was to keep her overnight until we could get her settled in the apartment she was sharing with our Spanish House students. But Carmen was inconsolable, exhausted, and cranky until my wife pulled out a sewing kit crammed with colored threads, needles, thimbles, pins, scissors, buttons, and other gewgaws. As though a cone of tranquility had suddenly descended on Carmiña, she became mesmerized and transformed into a charming, giggly young girl, touching each item in the kit lovingly as though remembering good times past. And of course, now when I reread the first scene from El cuarto de atrás, I realize the magical powers that the cesta de costura had on Martín Gaite the child and on Martín Gaite the adult:

Sigo bajando los ojos. Más libros, formando dos paredes encima del radiador, y entre ellas, sujetándolas, la cesta de costura que fue de la abuela Rosario. Casi no cierra de puro llena, no puedo comprender cómo caben dentro tantas cosas; siempre acudo a ella en casos de perplejidad, aquí acaba viniendo a parar todo, seguro que, al abrirla, me acordaré de lo que venía a buscar. Tiro de una...