Alfredo Valenzuela I Sevilla, (EFE) of a femme fatale and a cursed writer whose complete works are brought together now, two years after the centenary of her death.
Born in Viña del Mar (Chile) in 1893 and died in Paris in 1921, Teresa Wilms called herself Teresa de la Cruz and accompanied her signature with a Cross to further scandalize society, which she defied by divorcing, escaping from the convent in the that her family locked her up and jumping over the aristocracy among which she was educated.
In his 28 years of life, after fleeing Chile, he had time to visit the artistic gatherings in Madrid and Paris and become one of the most curious characters in the memoirs of authors such as Rafael Cansinos Assens and César González Ruano, in addition to building “ one of the most beautiful and fascinating works of the latest Hispanic modernism and the dawn of the avant-garde”.
Marriage at 17 without parental consent
With these words describe their work the poets and professors María Ángeles Pérez López and Mayte Martín Ramiro, responsible for the edition in a single volume of almost five hundred pages of the “Complete Works” of Teresa Wilms Montt and who, as an example of the validity of His work and the vigor with which it has been rescued in recent years have provided the numerous doctoral theses and critical works that it has deserved.
In Chile at the beginning of the century, she married at the age of 17 without the consent of her parents, who disowned her, and later her husband took her two daughters from her, whom she was barely able to see again, which constituted her greatest suffering, for which he ended up taking his own life after several attempts.
Teresa Wilms visited Seville, Córdoba and Granada and if in Paris she met André Breton, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst and Arthur Ruibinstein, in Madrid literary gatherings she became friends with Ramón Gómez de la Serna, the Machado brothers, Benavente, Guillermo de Torre and Enrique Gómez Carrillo, who in 1918 wrote about her in the Madrid press.
“This woman who carries the curse of her beauty on her back is nothing but a writer, a great writer who, if she were a man and had beards, would be part of all the Academies and would wear all the decorations.”
Teresa Wilms, “Teresa of the Cross”
The first to rescue the work of Teresa Wilms, in 1944, was Juan Ramón Jiménez, who wrote that she had a “strange voice charged with centuries and youth” and appreciated in her prose “simply natural and strange, at the same time” a certain mysticism, with which he justified the pseudonym “Teresa de la Cruz”.
The editors of these “Complete Works” agree that the work of Teresa Wilms “has been overshadowed by the physical beauty” of the author. And that her own figure “has been romanticized because of suicide.” At the same time that her addictions to alcohol, morphine and other drugs built a “stormy biography” or a “legendary biography” that in no way helped to assess the quality of her literary work.
A literary work made up of stories, diaries, prose poems and unclassifiable books such as the one entitled “Anuarí” dedicated to the 19-year-old Horacio Ramos Mejía, whose suicide he witnessed and who cut his wrists when she rejected him. . EFE