Málaga (EFE).- The retired Rubén Acedo has gone ahead of the National Library and has acquired an unpublished manuscript of the Nobel Prize winner for Literature José Echegaray that had remained for two decades in the house of a Huelva antique dealer without anyone being interested in it, a document that he keeps in a secret place and does not even “think of selling,” he has assured EFE.
On February 2, an article published in “El País” put Acedo, an 85-year-old Basque who lives between Malaga and Caracas, on the trail of this original, a theatrical comedy entitled “Don Fernando el Llamado”, that Echegaray wrote in 1904, five months before winning the Nobel.
That same day, Rubén Acedo, who is an early riser, contacted the antiques dealer Marta Micaela Fernández de Navarrete by phone, who sells books and documents electronically from her home in Puebla de Guzmán (Huelva), and quickly reached an agreement to buy the manuscript for 2,200 euros.
Although the price he had seen published in the press was 1,600 euros, which he thought was “very affordable”, Acedo agreed without question to pay those 600 more euros for the work. “Those things for me are not bargained for,” he says in an interview with EFE.
“I sent her the money, she sent me the manuscript and two or three days later she already had it at home,” explains this retiree, who was faster than the National Library of Spain (BNE) to get hold of the work. The institution contacted the antiques dealer “within a few hours” of reading the news in the press, but the bookstore reported that it had already been sold.
“I figured out how to find the antiques dealer and I was effective: I called the town hall, they gave me her phone number, I called her and we negotiated, as simple as that. The opportunity presented itself to me and I took it urgently, ”says the new owner of the manuscript, which he has kept in a secret place.
Although he is not a collector, Rubén Acedo wanted to buy the work because its story caught his attention “enormously” and because he was “very interested in the author, an important person in the history of Spain” such as Echegaray, who in addition to being a playwright was an engineer, politician and mathematician.
A “deviled” letter
Acedo is enthusiastic about the acquisition of the book, which has a hundred pages, and has already begun to read it, with the help of a magnifying glass, because the print is small, not without some difficulty.
And it is that Echegaray had “a devilish handwriting,” says Acedo, who patiently tries to decipher each word of the author, although some of them resist him. “I understand a lot and I can reconstruct a lot,” jokes the old man, who doesn’t rule out signing up for a graphology course to make it easier for him to complete the words he doesn’t understand.
“It’s costing me, but I’m going to manage to read it. Often you have to use logic to understand what it says,” says the retiree, who as a teacher who has been in high school and university and founder of a school in Venezuela, where he emigrated to when he was young, is used to reading “all kinds of texts manuscripts”.
“You have to look for the morphology of the letter and in those words that you don’t understand, see the letter compared to another that you do understand, and go about completing, guessing, recreating, whatever you want to say, the words. It is a very slow way of reading, unique in all the time of my life, but I am very happy with it”, he relates.
Original saved “in a place in Malaga”
Acedo remarks, in any case, that the original is kept safe “in a place in Malaga” and that he works with a copy that he can touch and on which he makes his annotations. “The original is not handled, I respect that,” he emphasizes.
Once you have managed to read the manuscript, you still do not know where it will end up deposited. He is considering the possibility of continuing to keep it as “a family treasure”, but he is also considering taking it to the library of his school in Caracas, Yale College, or leaving it in the library of his hometown, Oteo, located in the mountains of Alava.
What Rubén Acedo is clear about is that the work is not for sale: “I have little life left and I don’t know what my children will do, maybe they think better than me, but I am not going to sell it because for me it is not a matter of money, it is a matter of having a historical relic from a country I love.”
Book Market Scrutiny
The National Library of Spain, therefore, will not have the possibility of acquiring Echegaray’s manuscript for now, despite having openly shown its interest in it.
Sources from the Acquisitions Department of this institution have told EFE that they were not aware of the existence of this document because “at no time did the bookstore contact” the BNE to offer it.
The BNE monitors what is released on the book market, both through the catalogs that come from the booksellers themselves and from the auction houses, but in this case “no news was received in this regard.”
The institution assures that it is always interested in rescuing works of this type to avoid the dispersal of documents and heritage, since this “is one of the main causes of their deterioration” and disappearance.
For this reason, when the BNE learns of a specimen of great patrimonial interest, it informs its owner to analyze the suitability and authenticity of the piece and initiate the purchase process.
This was done in the case of the Echegaray manuscript, although it had already been sold only a few hours before.
