Contemplating Goya with Manuel de Lope
In December of 2009, Other Press publisher Judith Gurewich visited Spain to meet with Manuel de Lope about the forthcoming publication of his novel, The Wrong Blood. Here she describes encountering the author in his beloved Madrid, where he acted the role of tour guide and teacher to perfection.
To stand in front of Goya’s “The Charge of the Mamelukes” and “The Third of May 1808” in Madrid’s Prado, in the company of Manuel de Lope, is an experience that I will never forget. These poignant events of the Spanish rebellion against the forces of Napoleon at the Puerta del Sol, and the executions that followed the very next day in La Moncloa, were captured by Goya literally that very week. Like a journalist on the ground, explained Manuel, Goya selected just a few protagonists to convey the power of the whole scene, especially the defiance of the Spanish people who were only armed with knives, attacking fearlessly the turbaned horsemen that Napoleon had dragged from Algiers to fight his war. Goya was in a hurry to make his point, giving his paintings the impressionistic feel of a Cezanne or a Van Gogh, almost a hundred years too early.
I stood there in front of “The Charge of the Mamelukes,” fascinated and wary, for I knew that the executions of “The Third of May 1808” would be next. Since I was a child, I always closed my eyes when passing in front of that painting—it terrified me. The depiction of the man standing there with open arms about to be shot used to give me the shivers. I did not care that it was a masterpiece. Now I knew there was no escape. I warned Manuel of my anxiety. “Don’t you see,” he said, “that this man offers himself to death, he keeps his eyes open, he defies his executioners, he is not afraid, he is defiant, courageous, he is above those anonymous figures who have been designated to kill him.” That did it. To my amazement, my fear vanished and my heart filled with admiration for the hero, ashamed of my cowardliness—and also relieved. But there were more transformative moments to come.
In the Reina Sofia, Picasso himself became our interlocutor as we debated the merits of his “Guernica.” Manuel thought the painting slightly overrated, while I defended Picasso’s struggle to express at once the horrors of the civil war and its absurdity. Maybe his lack of smugness should be commended for a change, I suggested. I didn’t think I had it in me to say that about Picasso whose genius never really affected me much. A work by the wonderful cubist painter Juan Gris led Manuel to point to a famous label of an Anis bottle at the center of the painting, the very label that Malcolm Lowry talks about in Under the Volcano. One of Manuel’s favorites is Dali’s first painting, “Girl in the Window.” This could be an illustration, suggested Manuel, of Baudelaire’s poem “The Voyage.” Who would have guessed that Dali in his youth would have been so romantic! These are only a few of the small miracles that I saw through Manuel’s eyes. But this was a far cry from an art history course.
What I witnessed was the mind of a great writer at work: the art of keen observation, the knowledge of history, the analytic skill, the grasp of emotions and their connections to representation—all of it was coming together to make the paintings jump out of their canvases. I understood then why Manuel enjoys the company of artists, engineers, or traders. It is life and its mundane struggles that interest him. When we went for breakfast in a small cafeteria where they toast croissants and serve delicious coffee, he told me how he observes people’s ways, how they sit, talk, fold their arms on tables, how certain scenes impregnate him—such as a terrible accident we witnessed as we were crossing the street from the Prado, when a man fell from his motorcycle and was tenderly ministered to by an EMT nurse, an angel tending to the wounded man’s soul, not unlike the scene in a painting by Raphael we had admired just a few minutes before.
Manuel de Lope
My visit to Madrid held other surprises, such as the delicious casserole of mushrooms, hand picked in the countryside by Manuel himself, served with a memorable Beaujolais nouveau and a baguette to make a Frenchman ashamed. A walk in the old Madrid, where we passed in front of the houses of Cervantes and Lope de Vega, not to mention La Monclea, the very site of the executions of the third of May of 1808. As we reached the Plaza de Santa Ana, Manuel pointed to Hemingway’s regular bar, la Cerveceria Alemana. “ I knew quite well Antonio Ordonez, Hemingway’s favorite matador,” Manuel reminisced, admitting that he himself had been, once upon a time, an amateur of bull fights. I was also given a tour of Manuel’s covered market where I was introduced to his butcher, his fishmonger, and the nice lady who provides him with the best Spanish olive oil and wine vinegar (not balsamic, which he warned me is mediocre). Manuel is the cook of the household, since his wife works long hours as the president of the International Federation of Reproduction Rights, protecting authors against the threat of Google’s thefts.
De Lope is one of Spain’s most respected authors, having published more than twelve books. His first novel came out to great acclaim when he was only twenty-three years old and his success has never waned. Like so many young intellectuals of his generation, he was a revolutionary in his youth, first imprisoned by Franco for his political views and then escaping to France, Switzerland, and England, where he earned his keep by teaching Spanish, translating technical dictionaries for engineers, and writing novels. Now he lives in a beautiful penthouse in the center of Madrid, his walls covered with striking paintings, mainly by artists he knows. As fate would have it, one drawing by his friend, an artist named Oliver, hangs in the hall of my house in Cambridge. When Manuel came to visit me last year, he could not believe his eyes. “You see that bag in the corner of the drawing?” he asked me. “This is my bag!” Oliver was Manuel’s closest friend who he visited regularly in Paris. To find “his bag” in my house caused us to believe that some magic had infused the new bond between author and publisher. My visit to Madrid not only strengthened that bond but showed me how a real writer can transform his daily life into an esthetic and heartfelt experience, one that slides almost seamlessly from a painting in the Prado to a chat with the butcher to a lovingly prepared casserole to a glimpse of someone’s pain—and onto the pages of an unforgettable novel that I can’t wait to put into your hands.
–Judith Gurewich
Manuel de Lope will appear on a panel discussion at The Center for Fiction in New York on Wednesday, October 20. Click here for more info.
The Wrong Blood
How to Live
Mr. Toppit
A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear
