Next week biographer Amparo Ayora and the manager of the Castellón de la Plana cemetery will take charge of the mortal remains of the writer Concha Alós in Montjuïc, which rest in niche 3833 of Agrupació 7, via Sant Jordi, of this cemetery .
In Castellón they will remain in a warehouse while the tomb that the city offers her is finished, as the beginning of a series of tributes on the occasion of her centenary, to the author born in Valencia in 1922, who spent her formative years in Castellón and died in the 2011 after a long process of Alzheimer's.
Amparo Ayora, a retired professor from the Jaume I University, author of the biography Las guerras de Concha Alós (2015), where she delves into the writer's relationship with the Valencian town, has spent a long time studying the work of this novelist of the generation of the 50s, has helped the researchers of his figure (there are doctoral theses underway in Italy, France and Spain) and since 2017 promotes this transfer. She convinced the mayoress Amparo Marco to promote it and also the singer Maria del Mar Bonet, owner of the grave, to facilitate it.
Concha Alós passed away without family members being known (although Ayora has recently located a stepsister). Very few people attended her funeral, among them the Mallorcan photographer Toni Catany, now deceased, who with the well-known interpreter and her brother Joan Ramon Bonet took care of the expenses, contracting the payment of the niche until the year 2031. An act that It honors them, and a lot.
Alós's relationship with Mallorca was intense. She moved to the island in 1948 with her husband, the journalist and poet Eliseo Feijoó, deputy director of the newspaper Baleares, where the writer Juan Bonet, father of Maria del Mar, served as editor-in-chief; hence the relationship between families.
The singer recalls that Concha “was a very close friend of my parents and she often came to the house; I have memories of her since I was little. She did not have children and she was always very affectionate with us. In Barcelona I continued to treat her and it has been an honor for me to be able to accompany her until the end. She was an admirable woman, author of a very interesting, feminist work that deserves recognition. We couldn't allow her to go to a charnel house. We took charge of her grave as a sign of the great esteem we had for her, and that we did not want to forget her. It has been an honor for me to be able to accompany her until the end. And I am very grateful to Amparo Ayora and the mayoress for the work they are doing; It is nice that Castellón defends her as she deserved ”.
In the Mallorca of the 50s, the writer participated in her first literary contests. There she also met a young promise, Baltasar Porcel, who worked as a night corrector in the Balearic Islands. "When my brother and I were older, Baltasar began to come to the house, younger than Concha, also a good friend of my father. They begin to see each other and a friendship develops that turns into something more serious. My parents helped Concha and Baltasar to be together", recalls Maria del Mar Bonet.
With her marriage to Feijoo already badly damaged, Alós began a relationship with Porcel that both carried on clandestinely (adultery in 1959 is still typified in the Penal Code). The complexity of the situation precipitates the transfer of both to Barcelona, where for two decades they share a home in Vallvidrera.
The 60s are the years of consolidation of Concha Alós. She wins twice, in 1962 and in 1964, the Planeta prize; She had to give up the first one when it was learned that the award-winning novel was contracted by another label. In a wave of social realism, titles like The Dwarfs, The Bonfires, The Red Horse or The Madam earn him a reputation. Her break with Porcel in 1970 coincides with her literary evolution towards approaches to fantastic imagination.
"When Baltasar and Concha separated, Toni and I, although we continued to have a good relationship with Porcel, we probably became more friends with her," explains Maria del Mar Bonet.
When the above signer was working in the Porcel archive for a book about the author's youth, he found a letter from Alós to his now ex-partner, in an envelope labeled "open in case of death", where he expressed his desire to be cremated after his death. She now tells me that they have considered complying with that will now, but that the passage of time has made it unnecessary, by reducing the remains.
The publishing house La Navaja Suiza has recently begun to recover the narrative work of Concha Alós, with the book of short stories Rey de gatos and the aforementioned Los enanos. Those responsible for the Madrid label place her production in the orbit of contemporary authors such as Carmen Laforet, Ana María Matute or Carmen Martín Gaite, although noting that "she wove her way apart from generations, ordinary ones, of illustrious exiles in a cosmopolitan Barcelona that was not yours" (this last statement is debatable, since Alós lived Barcelona's literary life very intensely).
Does it make sense to move to Castellón, important in her life but not her hometown (although Ayora assures that she was taken there by her mother when she was a few months old), the remains of a writer who developed the fundamental part of her career in Barcelona, where did he live fifty years? I do not have an answer to this question, but I do believe that a serious and valuable initiative, such as that of Amparo Ayora and the Castellón city council, deserves all the support to pay homage and bring back to light this remarkable figure, today half-forgotten but in the process of Recovery.
