Every time we can get a more complete idea of the literary and journalistic world of women in Barcelona before the Civil War, which was important. With admirable creative women who challenged and broke conventions, jumped barriers and made their contribution to culture, decisively contributing to the modern image, which still endures, of that society. New research extends the group portrait.
The abundant bibliography on Mercè Rodoreda has recently been added, among others, to Maria-Àngels Cabré's studies on María Luz Morales and on literary Barcelona, that of Glòria Santa-Maria and Pilar Tur on Irene Polo, the anthology of chroniclers of Sergi Doria or Julià Guillamon's biography of Rosa Arquimbau. The right to dream, the monumental biography that Juan Manuel de Prada dedicates to the journalist and poet Ana María Martínez Sagi (1907-2000), is added to them with a very high note.
Prada (Baracaldo, 1970), author of an extensive narrative work, winner of the Planeta award in 1997 and Castilla y León de las Letras award, had already addressed the character in a testimonial book published twenty-two years ago, The corners of the air, first recovery effort of a figure that had been forgotten. It now impressively expands her perspective on Sagi (as she often signed), not only providing a flood of new documentation – some of which the writer left for her asking her to spend some time before releasing it – but also modifying your own point of view.
Continuing to investigate, Juan Manuel de Prada realized that the testimony she had given, to him and to people close to him, was not reliable; that he fantasized and modified numerous details of her trajectory. And in this sense, The Right to Dream is also presented as an original deconstruction of both Ana María's autobiographical account and the first book that Prada had dedicated to her.
Daughter of a football lover who was treasurer of Barça and friend of Joan Gamper, Ana María Martínez Sagi got along very well with her father, who died young, and on the other hand very badly with her mother, who was long-lived and one of whose actions it changed the existence of the daughter. The tenor Emilio Sagi-Barba was her uncle and the advertising man Victor Sagi was her second cousin.
With a precocious vocation, she began to collaborate before turning twenty in a Barcelona newspaper with a large circulation, Las Noticias, where as an all-terrain informant she would write about the most diverse social strata of the city in transformation, about sports issues, and very especially about the rising feminist claims.
He soon became involved with different professionals of the time, sometimes bordering on flirting, as happened with the essayist and critic for La Vanguardia Mario Verdaguer or with the anarchist ideologue Ángel Samblancat. In 1929 he published his first collection of poems, Caminos.
But it will be, already in the time of the Republic, a woman who raises a feeling that will constitute a dominant force throughout her entire career. She is Elisabeth Mulder, a poet and novelist of the upper bourgeoisie, with a mansion on Paseo de la Bonanova, a young widow who, after the death of her husband, is free to maintain a homosexual relationship with the discretion required by the times.
Juan Manuel de Prada, who was in the care of an anthology of her work, draws a complete portrait of this "arrogant, stubborn, sensitive and beautiful" writer, largely unassailable, whom another mutual friend, the future director of La Vanguardia María Luz Morales, called "the sphinx".
The days of fiery passion that Ana and Elisabeth spent together in Mallorca in 1932 stimulate Sagi's lyrical vein like nothing else and will remain fixed in her memory as a moment of unsurpassed vital peak, collected in collections of poems such as Canciones de la isla and Amor forbidden .
But it is Mulder who holds the reins of the relationship and who will put an end to it abruptly and early, when Ana María's mother, aware of the idyll, burns Elisabeth's letters – something that her daughter will never forgive her for – and shows up angrily in Sarrià tower threatening its owner with a scandal. Mulder freaks out; rupture occurs.
The contact between the two is maintained with many ups and downs over the years until a second and definitive goodbye; simple friendship and literary comments were not the soothing that Ana needed.
The sport attracts him powerfully. She is a Spanish women's javelin throwing champion, tennis player and skier, she is actively involved in the city's Club Femení i d'Esports. There she meets Swiss dancer and gymnast Elsy Longoni, whose “silky gold” she extols in a poem. She practices athletics and rowing.
In editorials and social gatherings, he is associated with the outstanding female figures of the moment: Arquimbau, Aurora Bertrana, Victor Català, Maria Teresa Vernet; he has some disagreements with Rodoreda and Anna Murià.
Very close to the president of Barça Josep Suñol, in whose newspaper La Rambla she collaborates writing in Catalan, she joined the club's Board of Directors for a time –and she is the first woman to do so–; she will be forced to resign due to her absence from meetings. This somewhat ephemeral step was recreated in the docudrama La Sagi, a Barça pioneer, directed by Francesc Escribano and Josep Serra Mateu for TV3. She also sends articles to the Madrid magazine Crónica.
During the Civil War, he came decisively closer to the anarchist universe and, for different publications, wrote chronicles of the Republican side, often attacking right-wing colleagues. She marches to the front and becomes a key figure in the newspaper published in Caspe Nuevo Aragón, and very close to the anarchist leader Joaquín Ascaso, denounced by his co-religionists for allegedly mismanaging the economy.
In texts published at the time and in his recollections of this time, Sagi – Prada tells us – tended to magnify and perhaps invent encounters with great characters with whom he had a very slight and perhaps null relationship, as occurs with García Lorca and Durruti, in what the biographer calls 'Forrest Gump syndrome'.
Also at that time, and in the years to follow, he spoke with heartbreak of the death "of his daughter Patricia", of which the biographer doubts that it really came to exist.
Prada notes that during this period he wears a militia uniform, carries belts and a pistol, drives ambulances and suffers several serious injuries: on his legs from grenade shells; in a serious car accident, and later in the bombardment by Italian aviation over Alcañiz, which left her in a coma and several days blind... she also continued her story with Elsy Longoni, turned into a reporter for war.
From the search for Prada in private correspondence and in the most remote French archives and records –not a few files from the Spanish exile were destroyed, he reveals–, as well as Swiss and American ones, the impression remains that, after the Civil War, dragged into the exiled from France, Sagi lived several lives in one, while entering a phase of strong narcissism and a fragile sense of reality.
The writer dismantles his alleged belonging to the French resistance, which he boasted about, and takes us into a spiral of flashbacks and flashforwards that illuminate his different relationships and the ways in which he was solving his economic crises; It always remains to us as a somewhat enigmatic question to know where he got the money.
During the Nazi occupation, she occupied different homes, dealt with the shady César González-Ruano –who had interviewed her in Madrid and anthologized a poem of hers– and wrote to Mercè Rodoreda, with whom she reestablished an admiring relationship, that “the Gestapo is stepping on my heels”, which is very doubtful. She will dedicate a beautiful poem to the tortured Joaquim Termes. In Paris, she deals with artists such as Antoni Clavé and Emili Grau Sala, and journalists such as Josep Maria Lladó and Sebastià Gasch.
One knowledge will be crucial, that of Marie-Thèrese Eyquem, like her a writer and activist in women's sports, who after having held positions of responsibility in the Vichy government has known how to recycle herself in liberated France. Eyquem cultivates "a sapphic cult of beauty, without masculine interference". They coexist until 1950; a police report calls them "notorious lesbians."
Characters as colorful as the writer-priest François Ducaud-Bourget parade through the literary salon of Eyquem, and Ana teaches Spanish to André Maurois. But the link between the two is turbulent and ends badly. Eyquem will recreate it under a pseudonym in a novel in which he defines Ana as a “half-witted, mediocre failed maniac”. She would culminate her career years later as national secretary of the French Socialist Party and trusted person of François Mitterrand.
At the end of the fifties and in 1964-65 Sagi resides in the picturesque and rural Montauoroux, with the photographer Ingeborg Ruben; they shared "very similar stories of misfortune and survival." He will later settle in the US, where he teaches at the University of Illinois – there he coincides with the philologist Antonio Tovar. He sends poems to magazines on the Peninsula, rants against the “gauche divine” and the “novísimos” and exhibits Spanish patriotism.
The writer makes untimely calls to her students, who consider her "a disturbed old woman." From 1969 she returns to Spain regularly, and will end her days in a residence in Santpedor, in Bages, where she receives the young Prada.
Today, his pre-war work as a journalist is in the spotlight, and his nine books of poetry are awaiting appreciation. Hers are truly exciting vicissitudes, full of energy but also typical of a woman "all wounded" (Mulder) and "inhabited by ghosts", with a frustrated longing for motherhood; an ambivalent profile that the author presents to us as adorned with “beautiful falsehoods”.
The complex journey that Juan Manuel de Prada proposes with a very vigorous narrative tone and quest structure requires the reader's continued attention but compensates by offering several non-fiction novels in one, with a storm of wonderful portraits of characters and environments of the 20th century.
After reading, the questions accumulate. Was she, with a pseudonym, the only Spanish photojournalist during the Civil War, as we are told? Did she really coincide with Antonio Machado in the retreat to France? At some point she was a neighbor of Picasso in Cannes, but did she get to know him? Did she participate in the artistic falsifications of the González-Ruano group, which led him to jail? And finally, is her work up to the intensity of her life?
Juan Manuel de Prada
The right to dream. Life and work of Ana María Martínez Sagi (two volumes)
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