What a time of royal mourning. The queen of England, eternal, died on a Thursday and the following Sunday she left us Javier Marias, King of Redonda, no less eternal. The exquisite philosopher Julián Marías decided to register his son Javier with the old spelling of the jot, Xavier (the one that makes Mexico spelled with X and pronounced Mexico), hence the writer decided to recover it when he was crowned as Xavier I, when he rose as sovereign of Redonda, a Caribbean island that geographically belongs to Antigua and Barbuda and that (things of the Commonwealth) had Elizabeth II as sovereign and now her son Carlos. The story of how the writer from Madrid achieved that title is precious. More than anything it is a literary game, a beautiful fiction, about an islet inhabited only by seabirds. It has also enriched some of Marías’s books such as ‘Todas las almas’ and ‘Black back of time’.
Now with the deceased author, many of his readers wonder who will succeed him because basically the real activity of Marías was to impart titles of nobility to his friends and to some writers, filmmakers and artists particularly dear to him, in the case of Francis Ford Coppola, Ray Bradbury, JM Coetzee, Mario Vargas Llosa, Phillip Pullman and Colm Toíbin. Duchesses, very few, alas, Julia Navarro and the British essayist Marina Sarah Warner, among them. Juan Cruz was appointed commissioner of agitation and propaganda and apparently Javier Mariscal had the honor of designing the flag.
The kingdom also served Marías to create a publishing label, Reino de Redonda, which he founded together with his wife, Carmen López Mercader. “Perhaps the reign of Redonda has been an endeavor that Javier carried out alone but the publishing house was a project shared with his wife & rdquor ;, explains María Lynch of the Casanovas & Lynch agency that handles the rights of the writer and as well as those of the two rare authors who preceded Marías on the throne of Redonda, MP Shield and John Gawsworth, although the former is very close to entering the public domain. For the agent, the succession is in the hands of the provisions that the author would have left, but also in the widow’s will to give continuity to a stamp that was above all a reflection of the personal tastes and obsessions of the writer in a catalog that now around 40 titles, at an average of one or two titles a year.
I had a successor in mind
A very close member of the writer’s circle of friends makes a significant revelation: Marias did not leave leaving the throne vacant. “He already had a successor in mind,” he explains, “he was tired and wanted to give it up. That will possibly be revealed in the next few days. It is also very likely that the title will be cut off from the publisher.” Another of Marías’ great friends, the filmmaker Agustín Díaz Yanes, who met him at the Faculty of Philology – although the intimacy was consolidated when both were about 25 years old – was one of those notables who achieved a ducal title, in this case, that of Michelin, in honor of the director’s father who had been a bullfighter and he gave his passes under that bullfighting nickname. “I don’t see anyone other than Javier acting as king of Redonda -explains the director- because it was he who made that story universally known, it was very much his, even though he hadn’t created it. As a king, he was a hard worker, something that does not abound among royalty & rdquor ;.
From “serious joke & rdquor; qualifies the reign of Xavier I another member of his most intimate circle, the poet and narrator Luis Antonio de Villena, who recently made public in ‘El Mundo’ a recent note sent by the author in which he commented on the need to appoint a successor. “Although he always put a lot of energy into the project, lately he was tired and I guess the idea haunted him. It was not easy to make the choice, firstly because he needed someone to give the profile, which was important, and even more important, that the person who committed himself to her did so with the same commitment as him, who even risked money out of pocket with the publisher & rdquor ;. Both Villena and Díaz Yanes agree that Marías was not thinking of a near end. “Both he and I were very superstitious and we just didn’t talk about it & rdquor ;, says the director.
Does the comment of the letter sent to Villena hide the intention of giving the scepter to the friend? Villena, Duke of Malmundo, does not think so: “I did not interpret it that way at all. I wouldn’t mind but I don’t have the availability or the enormous dedication that Javier put into it and honestly I don’t think any of the dukes have it & rdquor ;.
A fairytale
Related news
The creation of the kingdom of Redonda dates back to the 19th century in what seems like the beginning of an old fairy tale. A Caribbean shipping magnate with eight daughters wanted a son. When he achieved it, he couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate than to buy the little boy an islet near Antigua, discovered in his day by Christopher Columbus, and crown his son as king of the place. Shortly after, the British decided to annex the island upon discovering that there was aluminum phosphate there. The legal tug-of-war between the crown and Shiel went on for decades until finally Queen Victoria agreed to was named king on condition that the title be empty of content. Shiel became an estimable writer of fantastic literature – whoever has read ‘The Purple Cloud’ does not forget it – and, without descendants, and the title passed to another even more forgotten writer.John Gawsworth, who also became the executor of the work of his predecessor and began the custom of distributing titles among the Anglo-Saxon intelligentsia. That is how Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller and Dylan Thomas were named dukes and Redonda.
Drunk to ‘delirium tremens’ and beset by debt, Gawsworth sold his title several times for a glass of wine to the owners of the pups he frequented and in the end, much more sober, gave the honor to John Wynne-Tysson, the third king of Redonda. When he read ‘All Souls’, a book in which the sad story of Gawsworth is told, he decided to abdicate in it because the position caused him many headaches since the innkeepers demanded the purchased rights from him. Giving them to a Spaniard was a master move since Marías internationalized the story and coined the legend. Can a fantasy kingdom survive without the presence of the person who, although he did not invent it, gave him a category letter? Time will tell. In the meantime place your bets: Will the distinction return to England or will it remain in Hispanic lands, as the discoverer of those lands in the West, Christopher Columbus, would have wished?