Celia Cantero
Cartagena, Feb 19 (EFE).- Poet María Teresa Cervantes (Cartagena, 1931), author of more than twenty collections of poems, three novels and four essays, maintains the restlessness that led him in 1963 to an attic on rue Bréa, on the left bank of the Seine.
She needs to write and she continues to do so every day, since she was a child, and she hides her surprise when she asks about her work method. “I take notes by hand on paper when an idea comes to me, which is constantly, and then I develop it on the computer,” a laptop installed on his small wooden desk in the apartment in Cartagena where he settled on his return from Germany with retirement, in 2003.
“Twenty years have passed since then and it seems like yesterday,” this woman recalls aloud, who led a revolution at home when she decided to go study French Literature at the Sorbonne and ran into initial opposition from her parents, a virtuoso of the piano and a councilor from the Cartagena city council who understood his young daughter’s concern thanks to the intermediation made on her behalf by the then mayor of the port city, Miguel Hernández.
“They cried a lot, but then they accepted it and lived it with pride. My mother thought that in Paris they would rape me, that there were people attacking me in the streets, that they would devour me…, but despite the fact that I have always been and felt free, and that I always dreamed of living outside of Spain, I have never been adventurous, but rather cautious, and I have watched people’s faces a lot”, she points out by way of advice.
He lived in May 1968 in the French capital and learned from that revolt the different way of looking at the reality of the French and Spanish. According to her regrets, the passing of the years and the non-existence of borders have not clarified the differences because, for her, one lives here “with a lowered gaze”.
His country lacks impetus to mobilize in the face of injustices and problems. “The tapas have some poetry and they are very good, I love going out for tapas! -he jokes- but something more needs to be done, I think”, and regarding this lack of involvement, he criticizes the passivity of young people, who live “half”, and that of adults “who do not listen to what they have to say, what is much”.
He believes that “you cannot live on illusions, but on realities, and there are many people who live on the moon, without maturing, because the passing of the years does not always bring maturity…”, and he is annoyed by the passivity and conformism of the “tapeo”, which he reiterates as a metaphor.
“A revolution like in 1968 is necessary for Spain to wake up from lethargy. In Paris I met unruly, brave young people, driven by a superior instinct, and here I see lethargy; and I defend disorder and revolution because I believe that disorder leads to social stability.
The only Spaniard at the Sorbonne in those years because the scarce migration of women to the French capital during the Franco regime was of young women dedicated to domestic service, Cervantes explains in detail the first dawn with cars on fire in the sixth district of Paris, the courage of the students who questioned the teachers in the classroom and their teaching commitment, who progressively joined the student protests along with other labor and social groups.
“There were rallies at the Sorbonne, classes were suspended and a general strike was reached, and that revolution, even having bad things, was necessary because the people raised their heads. We never had a problem feeling free to ask, to ask daring questions and to put teachers on the ropes, and they answered, while in Spain there was and is submission ”, he explains.
María Teresa Cervantes married a Bulgarian doctor whom she abandoned barely a year after the wedding because he would not let her be “me”. “The best thing I did in my life was abandon it because I wanted to change my mentality, and I never allowed it. We must all stop being obedient when we reach the age of majority, I have always been clear about that, and I have always wanted to keep my fullness ”.
She is sorry not to have had children, but understands that thanks to not being a mother she was able to separate from her husband because “otherwise it would have been different”, she thinks, and stresses that she “would have liked to be a mother, but not feel like a prisoner, and that I put it first.”
In fact, she has always been guided by the maxim of “owning” herself and clarifies: “freedom opens your eyes, makes you see the world in a different way, and you and no one else but you should be the owner of yourself.” himself”, he defends at all costs.
Recognized with the Bronze Medal of Arts, Letters and Sciences of Paris, among many other awards, and translated into French, German, English and Arabic, this poetess lives surrounded by painting, her other great passion, although already abandoned, a multitude of photos of his parents and siblings, and of his youth, especially with writer and thinker friends in Le Domme, Au Père or Montparnasse cafés, and hundreds of books arranged on shelves and stacked on numerous tables.
He likes calm and flees from the crowd, as he explained in the interview with EFE, and he needs to get close to the sea from time to time and sit for a long time to contemplate its blue color, which has been a constant in his work. “The blue of the sea and the blue of the sky take me far…”.
He reads daily and likes the classics and also contemporary authors, although it is obvious to quote one. “The only thing I need in reading is for it to convey a new life message to me,” he says confidently as he walks slowly towards the office to show the small room where he works.
During numerous moments of the interview, María Teresa Cervantes intersperses reflections on her religiosity, on the passing of time or on death, which she is not afraid of but is not in “any hurry” to learn about, and she mixes them with verses from improvised poems and with others by Becquer, Manrique or Juan Ramón Jiménez, his favorite author since childhood.
“I have not wasted time in life, I am and I have been free, nothing scares me, and only eternity impresses me”, affirms this petite woman with a kind smile and profuse conversation. “What is eternity? For believers it is heaven, hell or purgatory, but… will it be a sea at the bottom of the sea? In life we are subject to time, which is why the word eternity has always impressed me”.
Although she evokes her years in Bonn less, she assures that she was very happy in the old German capital and that she was lucky to be able to renew three-year contracts as a Spanish language teacher in the Westphalia region for three decades, although she prefers to continue reading in French rather than in German and even in their mother tongue.
Grateful for having lived her youth in Paris and Bonn, María Teresa Cervantes tells EFE that she is not nostalgic, although she knows that feeling very closely from her relationship with thousands of families forced to leave Spain in search of prosperity. “My situation was different, voluntary.”
She says that she has always been the “stray sheep”, that she has little relationship with her friends from before because “everyone is dead, or almost”, and that it saddens her not to have had more and better relationships with other women.
She shared moments with other authors such as María Cegarra, the poet from La Union with the first degree in chemistry in Spain, and with Carmen Conde, also born in Cartagena and the first member of the Royal Spanish Academy, but the latter was “very proud and a horse runaway, and we had little relationship.”
In November he will be 92 years old. “I am fine, and I am happy, but I realize that there is a lot of smallness, a lot of foolishness, people who believe they are models for others, who live with a narrow mind and who do not admit that they speak freely”, and that stuns.
