On August 29, one hundred and fifty years have passed since the birth of Manuel Machado, whose luck – very bad – occasionally found itself in Burgos, no less than on July 18, 1936. There he was isolated, with his wife, Eulalia Cáceres. . , until the Francoists accused him, after a miserable denunciation, of being an addict to the Popular Front. They put him in prison, where he was from October 30 to November 1, and from which he got out thanks to the ecclesiastical influences skillfully manipulated by his pious wife. Immediately afterwards, some “Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius” were prepared for him, and from there he left with an abandoned soul. He also received an unexpected visit from José María Pemán, who told him something like, my boy, come with us, we need one of the two Machados for our cause, and we will make you a member of the Royal Academy in the blink of an eye. eye. . This is indeed what happened in an improvised headquarters in San Sebastián, in 1938, while Antonio was traveling his painful path of exile, from Valencia to Collioure, from ethical coherence to death. And he would never occupy his rightful place in the Academy.
The questions that many have long asked range from perplexity to disbelief to disaffection. How did this good modernist poet and fervent republican become a follower of national Catholicism? How did the author of the lyrics of the anthem of the Second Republic, in 1931, co-founder of the “Friends of the Soviet Union” in 1933, make this ideological leap of one hundred and eighty degrees? Of course, the left never forgave him and several attempts to recover the eldest of the Machado family failed. However, he always had great admirers, and not all on the right. Of course, he also had the misfortune that his younger brother eclipsed him, certainly in terms of moral stature, but also aesthetically. In the latter case, they never competed and Manuel nobly admitted the superiority of his beloved brother.
