He was a legendary man who left behind an immense legacy that now stars in an extraordinary book, ‘Destino y memoria. One hundred years of Jorge Semprún’
The last time I saw Jorge Semprún went to talk about his autobiography, which was like a huge extraordinary trunk, from which stories came and went that would have killed another person from fear or cowardice. On that occasion it was about, at his house in the center of Paris, near the restaurant where he always took his friends to lunch, he would talk about Santiago Carrilloto see if he would once and for all explain what happened between them, how their time together was built and broken.
He was sincere, but elusive, and the journalist took notes of everything he said, because it was perhaps the first time that he felt he had to speak openly about that friend who was his boss and finally became part of a past that he did not renounce, but from which he escaped like a soul carried by the devil. “Guilty? “I have my idea, and I think he was not right.”
At the end of the conversation it was time for lunch. The photographer Daniel Mordzinski She went down with him to the room where he had his going out clothes, and where he slept, and took the opportunity to ask him to lie down on the bed, as if he were playing dead, Mordzinski likes those poses. Daniel returned happy from the pose and the photograph, and there we waited for Jorge to go upstairs to go outside, it was cold.
It was as if Semprún, who was also such an actor, was staging his own death. The chance of bones and flesh and life became some time later (more than a year after the interview, and the pose), when Semprún died on June 7, 2011in a premonition of whose origin and possibility we learned as soon as the author of Writing and life He came back from his room, dressed to go out, with that black turtleneck sweater that went so well with his airy but snowy hair. At that moment on the man’s face there was the bitter declaration of stupor. He said, “It’s impossible. I can’t. I can’t go out or anything.”
I looked at the stains on his hands, the stupor on his face, his eyes cowed by pain. I noticed, in the elegance with which he had prepared to go out into the street and the moment in which he declared himself useless to take a step, the man’s collapse, his sadness. The bones, the flesh, the look, everything was saying goodbye, and he couldn’t take it anymore, nor did he speak. And we left slowly, as if he was leaving with us and staying.
man of legend
This legendary man became more seriously ill and little by little his extraordinary life faded away. But he remained firm, with life and enthusiasm, to commemorate, some time later, the end of the captivity in Buchenwaldwhere he went to say goodbye, on April 11, 2010, to the most serious episode of his life, captivity in the Nazi concentration camp.
He left behind an immense legacy of courage and controversy, which now stars, for example, in an extraordinary book that Tusquets, his Spanish publishing house, has just published, with the title Destiny and memory. One hundred years of Jorge Semprún, whose edition is due to Mayka Lahoz. There Semprún appears, on the cover, between a boy and an adult, looking at nothing, settled in a wooden chair, his hair white, that turtleneck sweater, his mouth closed and without laughter.
He was a man who laughed, and he was also grim and mysterious, a secret agent of post-world war communism.
He was a man who laughed, and was also frowning and mysterious, a secret agent of post-world war communism, a clandestine in his country, Spain, a convict in Buchenwald, a screenwriter, a writer, a dissident of the most brutal communisma debater, a friend of a few friends (from Yves Montand and Fernando Claudín to Javier Pradera and Beatriz de Moura and Toni López, its unforgettable editors) who loved it with the respect that is due to heroes, and also to misunderstood heroes.
After that meeting in Paris, when it seemed that Semprún would say goodbye to that existence as a combatant, on April 11, 2010, 65 years after the end of the tragedy that was the Buchenwald concentration camp, gave his last speech. He had arrived, supported by the cane that relieved his pain, in the expectation of those who were survivors like him to celebrate that day in which a jeep from the German army, “around five in the afternoon”, appeared at the entrance of that concentration camp to announce, to the joy of the prisoners, that the war had ended.
Life and tragedy
He recounted that joy right there, again, in the middle of the frozen noon. Then he would celebrate with his former companions in captivity the certain fact that life brought them that tragedy, but that time had still given them the opportunity for the last toast. It would be with wine, Spanish perhaps.
It was the last time I saw him laugh. Before, he had exploded before the frozen, attentive, overwhelmed audience in these words: “For the last time, on April 11, neither resigned to dying nor anguished by death, but furious, extraordinarily irritated by the idea that soon he would no longer be “I will be here, in the middle of the beauty of the world or, on the contrary, in its grayish dullness – which in this specific case are the same thing -, for the last time, I will say what I have to say.”
Clandestine in his country, Parisian in soul and heart that was clearly Spanish, he accepted to be Minister of Culture in the country where he was born.
That was the highlight of his public life, his voice powerful even in the face of the ruins of the bad intelligence of the world he fought, Nazi imperialism, human evil. Exiled from Spain, writer of his own defeats or civil adventures (The writer or life, The long journey, Federico Sánchez says goodbye to you), clandestine in his country, Parisian in soul and with a purely Spanish heart, he accepted to be Minister of Culture in the country where he was born, he walked through these streets of Madrid to reconcile himself with those walls in which he lived fleeing from Franco and the police, he met again with communist friendship (Ángel González, Javier Pradera, Juan García Hortelano), he lived his dissidence, accompanied by Fernando Claudín, and he was Spanish and French at the same time although, in the pain and in that desolate setting of Buchwnwald, his turn was Spanish, like his soul, or like that moment when, returning from his room, and about his suffering, he told Mordzinski and this journalist that he couldn’t take it anymore, his desire to walk had already ended with that pain.
But months later, on April 11, 2010, Jorge Semprun He appeared, pale but smiling, at the exit from the Berlin airport to meet again with the friends who were his companions in stupor in the concentration camp. They asked him if he remembered them. He knew their names, he greeted them carefully, the one who came from Seville, the one who still lived in Murcia, a bricklayer from Pola de Siero; They knew their prisoner numbers, and he also knew by heart the identification that many of them carried as a weight on the memory that he had been born in a Europe without mercy.
“It’s exciting,” Semprún told me, “to be here.” Although I don’t know if I leave here younger or older, seeing those who survived with me.” I asked him if, as proposed in his most famous title, we had to choose between memory and lifeand he told me, always with those eyes that, at that point in his experience and his journey, seemed tearful like those of a lost child: “Writing is staying in the memory of death”. And then, as if he received the impulse of a Castilian spring, radically Madrid, that Semprún who seemed made of history and struggle or renunciations, told me, raising his voice, and then laughing out loud: “Now, let them take away what danced!”