La Casona de Tudanca, a unique bibliographic museum located in a Cantabrian mountain town, boasts of owning the manuscript of the novel “La familia de Pascual Duarte” by Camilo José Cela. The 200 square pages with which he wrote his first major work. But in reality, it’s not the original. Although it is written by the hand of the Galician writer, a few decades ago the Nobel Prize for Literature took his and left a copy, after a long political and judicial conflict in which Cantabria, at the request of Miguel Ángel Revilla, was about to name the novelist persona non grata. The indignation was such that a cultural official went so far as to propose burying the manuscript for posterity in a hidden place in the highest brañas of Sejos, so that it would not leave the autonomous community.
At first, the writer had some difficulty publishing “The Family of Pascual Duarte”. In the 1940s, José María de Cossío, an influential and closely related intellectual, found him a publisher. This, in gratitude, gave him the manuscript of the novel with a dedication: “To the greatest culprit that this has ever been published.” Cossío placed it in the library of his Cantabrian house, a mountain-style residence located in the town of Tudanca. A hidden place in the Polaciones Valley with fifty neighbors where he lived between May and October. A house visited by names from literature and culture like Miguel de Unamuno, Rafael Alberti, Gerardo Diego or Gregorio Marañón. There he received and preserved the manuscript with others by Miguel Hernández, Federico García Lorca and Jorge Guillén, in addition to more than 3,000 original texts and letters from Dámaso Alonso, Manuel Azaña, José María de Pereda and Unamuno himself , among others, in an imposing library of 25,000 volumes.
In the fall of 1961, the writer regretted his donation and wrote to Cossío to ask him to return it under the pretext of leaving it to his son, then aged 15, “for lack of a more substantial inheritance”. “The time has come for me to make you a very strange request which you will nevertheless be able to understand and even explain: Will you give me – or rather give to my son Camilo José Cela Conde – the original of ‘La familia by Pascual Duarte ‘ ? », he transferred.
Cossío replied to him from Tudanca a month later: “I have no reason to hide from you that I deeply do not like your request, and in this you can only see the extremely high esteem in which I have the manuscript and in which I have its author. , and a little also the vanity of manifesting a friendship which satisfies and honors me so much, by showing it to my friends,” he writes. So, he proposed a solution: that he allow him to have it in trust until his death “because I am approaching 70 years of age and I feel the inevitable call of the earth.” In exchange, he agreed to register recognition of the property in Cela Condé. “I would leave with the autograph a piece of my own handwriting indicating that I have such a manuscript on deposit and that it is the property of your son,” he explained in a letter.
The incident at the UIMP
But the role never came up. When the author of the encyclopedia “Los toros” died in 1977, the property of Cossío passed into the hands of the Government of Cantabria, then Provincial Council. No one has found any documentation supporting such an agreement. After two years of mourning, Cela decided to formally claim the manuscript after trying indirectly through some intermediaries, such as the minister Rodolfo Martín Villa himself. But the Provincial Council dragged its feet. The curator of the Casona de Tudanca, Rafael Gómez, assured in the press that no one ever heard Cossío speak of this promise, not even his closest collaborators: his personal secretary and the parish priest, nor his executor and friend Ignacio Aguilera, director of the Menéndez Pelayo Library. They all agreed that Cossío never had the will to return the manuscript. The newspapers also published that, apparently, Cela had as proof only a typed letter which only expressed an intention and this was strange, since Cossío always wrote his correspondence by hand.
The case ended up in court. Precisely at this moment of lack of agreement, during the summer of 1982, Cela visited the Menéndez Pelayo International University (UIMP) and publicly declared that the UCD of Cantabria “is a specimen of hysteria that has reached the sumum and the president of your Provincial Council is a profound abnormality.
“As long as Mr. Cela does not demonstrate through documents that this transfer that he claims on our part was the will of the admired Don José María, no document will leave the Tudanca house. You can now give me all kinds of tacos, that It distributes so easily wherever it goes, that I will not give in”, responded José Antonio Rodríguez, insulted, first president of Cantabria after the approval of the Statute of Autonomy of the Autonomous community. .
“You pee out of the urinal”
Cela’s comments sparked huge controversy. “With these subjects, even if they are candidates for the Nobel Prize, we must cut it short,” said in a statement the Regionalist Party of Cantabria (PRC) of Miguel Ángel Revilla, already a political protagonist at the time. . The RPC, then the third political force in the Assembly (today Autonomous Parliament), demanded that Camilo José Cela be declared an “undesirable person in Cantabria”. ADIC, the Association for the Defense of Interests of Cantabria, also addressed the writer in a statement: “If behind your words lies the bad mood caused by the refusal to give you the manuscript of your leader -work, we believe you “he pees out of the urinal.
Faced with the growing anger of the Cantabrians, Cela tried to back down. “You people from Santander got very nervous and made things crazy. I never intended to insult anyone, I simply made a diagnosis which a group of hysterics then interpreted in their own way,” he defended. Some time later, the writer and the president of Cantabria ended up making peace during a dinner in Madrid. The Galician apologized for the insults.
In 1983, the Court of First Instance of Santander ruled in favor of Cantabria, but Cela appealed to the Territorial Court of Burgos and obtained a favorable judgment. Given the possibility of the Community taking the matter to the Supreme Court, an initiative has been launched for an amicable settlement. The writer promised to rewrite the novel with his own hand. He did it precisely, on the same graph paper as a school notebook of 175 numbered pages divided into six notebooks, ensuring that it had the same lines and the same paragraphs – “and mistakes of ‘spelling if there was any, which is not the case’ – except that 48 years later – he warned – neither his handwriting nor his signature “could be the same”. It took him two months to finalize the order.
Pact between gentlemen
Thus, after nine years of disputes, an agreement was sealed within the office of the President of Cantabria, which was already another. Ángel Díaz de Entresotos gave the manuscript to Cela to copy. “This original, at the time of its writing, had not the slightest interest. It was simply the work of a boy who was 25 years old at the time,” he said as soon as he received these yellowed papers.
During all these years the manuscript was kept in the Casona de Tudanca, in this isolated environment, in the mountains, refuge where Cossío and his intellectual friends read and reflected without any other distraction than the contemplation of nature itself. The only time it came out was when the head of the house museum took it to the National Library, protected in its green leather case, where it was microfilmed. They also made photocopies of it, which are used by researchers who wish to work on it.
The author of “La colmena” kept his word and in 1991 another president, this time Juan Hormaechea, received the copy of the original from the one who, years later, crowned his literary career with the prize Nobel Prize in Literature, the writer who was on the verge of being persona non grata in Cantabria.
Along with the resolution of the dispute, the Círculo de Lectores published two facsimile editions of the two manuscripts of “The Family of Pascual Duarte”. Of the first, written in 1942, 980 numbered copies signed by Cela were distributed, and another 1,000 of the second, most of which were distributed to cultural institutions and universities.
The copy that Cantabria cherishes is also not exact to the original. Missing is the mark left by the ashes of Cela’s cigarette on the title of the novel, that day in 1941 when he began writing the first page of the novel that propelled him to fame. For its part, the original manuscript could not erase the seal of the Provincial Council that a methodical civil servant cheerfully affixed to the cover and the first page with bureaucratic naturalness.
Years later, they asked Cela’s son about the result: “Did your father give you the manuscript?” “He wouldn’t let me hold it in my hands for more than 30 seconds,” he replied.
