An imposing head, shaved and shiny, hands as large and gnarled as branches, wrote between smoke and mouthfuls of anise in a notebook full of erasures. It was aperitif time at the El Juco bar. The hubbub of conversations, the noise of the coffee machine and the music of the slot machine did not seem to distract the man who, seated at a table at the back of the premises, shook the ashes of the Ducados and reread a few sentences . Suddenly he looked up from the newspaper and two devil ears appeared, spread and pointed, a thick mustache that curved over his mouth, and almost vertical eyebrows that gave him a certain wicked look. Under this iron armor pulsated an immense sensitivity which oozed like a balm through his small, deep eyes. “He’s a poet,” they murmured respectfully at the bar when this energetic and strong man who seemed to reserve his words only for the paper, asked the waiter by name for another glass of Chinchón. The man with the voice of thunder and a lively genius that dissolved in tenderness.
All of Santander knew that the poet Pepe Hierro’s office was a table at Bar El Juco, a place located under the house where he lived, at number 20 Calle Cádiz. He wasn’t the only one. The poet liked to write between noise and smoke, between coffee and Chinchón. He also left his mark at Bar Los Ríos, near Bajada de La Encina, where he wrote a large part of the “Cuaderno de Nueva York”, one of the fundamental books of 20th century Spanish poetry that was a overwhelming bestseller, a colossal work.
In Madrid, he transformed the La Moderna bar into his poetic office, frequenting it daily while living in the capital. One day his children confessed that they never saw him write at home, only returning at mealtimes with a messy stack of pages under his arm. Pepe Hierro’s poetry was nourished by life and, there, among the people, at the bar, he kindly took care of everyone who approached him to sign a book for them. I used to add a quick drawing to each section. On the day of Hierro’s disappearance, the customers of El Juco, now converted into daily companions of the affable poet, hung a plaque and a photograph of him taken by Pedro Palazuelos on the table he occupied.
It is curious that such an intimate and profound text was written in measures. He once explained that when he was young he worked in a rubber boot factory where he spent ten hours a day breathing sulfur and operating a rubber grinding machine that made a hellish noise. “But my thoughts were free,” he explained. “I did gymnastics with the verses and each occurrence became a sonnet.” Perhaps this is why he always had the ability to illuminate poems without the need for silence.
At El Juco, he drank lightly watered anise Chichón, always in a glass, and smoked black tobacco, Ducados. He draws flowers and landscapes on paper napkins with a fine-tipped felt-tip pen, the edges of which he blurs with his fingers lightly moistened with a few drops of water or coffee.
In an interview, he recalled his beginnings as a writer, through the front door. At the age of 12, he won a short story competition at the Ateneo Popular de Santander where he learned French: “They said I didn’t write it; Since then, I have had a sort of Kafkaesque complex which means that one can say that I did something and that I cannot prove it,” he declared. Distrust did not prevent them from giving him the prize: a book by Gabriel Miró whose reading fascinated him.
The man who proclaimed joy as the right to exist had worked with his hands, which earned him special respect among people from all walks of life. “I am the freest slave,” he said. He held many jobs in factories and workshops. In Santander, Valencia and Madrid. He delivered firewood to houses, worked in a foundation, sold books to order, worked as a listman in the construction of the Sniace factory, wrote biographies on request for a penny a piece. “I had a strange common sense. I felt that my life was moving towards technology,” he once admitted. Thus, this boy, born in Madrid and from Santander since the age of two, began the career of experts who interrupted the civil war when he had to go to work.
At El Juco, he drank lightly watered anise Chichón, always in a glass, and smoked black tobacco, Ducados. He draws flowers and landscapes on paper napkins with a fine-tipped marker, blurring the edges with his fingers lightly moistened with a few drops of water or coffee.
He was an honest man who did everything possible to help bring food to the Republican prisoners, among whom was his own father. He was arrested at the end of the fighting and sent to prison. He was 17 years old. He was sentenced to twelve years and one day. With his extraordinary memory, he recited Federico García Lorca, Juan Ramón Jiménez and Rafael Alberti as a challenge in Franco’s prisons, he taught his companions to read and he even wrote on toilet paper.
The poet who found joy in pain, as one of his verses says, never spoke of it. But this does not justify the fact that two years ago the Santander City Council erased his stay in prison from the biography of the poet that it distributed in the city’s schools. Journalist Juan Cruz says there was no blood in his poetry, but rather an intimate cry. “Joy is knowing that we are alive,” Hierro himself said. And the awareness of living is more palpable in pain.
He was released after five years. He left carrying on his back “the stigmata of the vanquished”, in the words of his biographer, Jesús Marchamalo. “To Pedro Gómez Cantolla, boss of Proel, because he did not ask me where I came from”, the dedication that Hierro wrote when it was published in the poetry magazine shows the weight of his past in this Dictatorship Spain.
“I only know that he is a great poet,” the head of Santander’s summer courses responded years later when asked if Hierro gave Spanish courses for foreigners there. The truth is that he captivated the students. As the poet was usually unbuttoned, with his chest exposed, it bothered him to have to wear a tie to work as a professor, so every day, with tender rebellion, he pinned up a sprig of ivy that he picked from the garden on Las Campus llamas right down to the buttonhole of his jacket.
Santander residents who frequented El Juco attest to its natural character. An enemy of solemnity, he never boasted or mentioned the collection of particularly marked honors and awards in his later years.
It is said of him that he loved everything. The earth, children, plants, cooking, the sea, animals. “I have met few people as in love with life as he was,” said writer and friend Francisca Aguirre. He swam in the icy water of the Cantabrian Sea and recited verses while lying on the sand. He was passionate about speaking and living. For almost three decades he lived in strange silence and stopped publishing. He spent 27 years writing the poems for his book “Agenda”.
At that time he planted vines with his own hands on his farm “Naygua”, in the mountains of the Madrid municipality of Titulcia, where he organized grape harvests with a poetic recital, a festival of theater, music and words, and bottled his own wine. . In addition, the poet built another small refuge in Cantabria, on the beach of Portio, in Liancres. A shed without water or electricity, jokingly nicknamed “the minifundio” – a “poor man’s farm” which was a symbol – where he brought family and friends together and cooked for them.
Santander residents who frequented El Juco attest to its natural character. An enemy of solemnity, he never boasted or mentioned the collection of particularly marked honors and awards in his later years. The journalist Fernando Delgado says that when they told him that they had given him the prince of Asturias, “they caught him watering the plants in the editorial office of the Spanish National Radio.” There he worked for several years producing cultural programs, first as a collaborator and then as a staff member, and left a testimony of his particular morning liturgy. He would arrive at the editorial office, say hello and stand with his head against the wall, maintaining his vertical balance for a moment.
In recent years, he left the house with the “sky blue oxygen box” that helped him breathe and even, from time to time, he asked for a cigarette at the bar and took two deadly drags. He was a great reader who led to poetry, a vital river which in turn flowed into the eternal blue sea where part of his ashes dissolved. The others are preserved in the pantheon that the Santander cemetery reserves for its illustrious children. For the people of Santander who looked after him in this bar, at the orphans’ table where his absence was recorded, Pepe Hierro is the breath of tobacco and Chinchón. Ashes of nothing that one day were everything.
