During the grand gala of the La Vanguardia awards, in the Oval Room of the National Museum of Art of Catalonia, set with a midnight blue light, two women looked at each other with wide open eyes. Sitting next to each other, it was not necessary to listen to their conversation to understand that they understood each other, since their faces conveyed attention and happiness, qualities that help define charm. Because Queen Letizia and Lita Cabellut, despite their differences, are united by that twist of fate that transformed their lives and shaped their identity.
Cabellut, recognized today as one of the most valued contemporary artists, had her life changed at the age of twelve. Born in a gypsy family from Sariñena, she was raised in the Raval and spurred by the cruelty of poverty, which deprived her of going to school. There must have been something revealing in her gaze for Paquita Llohis Serra, a cultured woman from El Masnou, to notice her.
“I am the fruit of other people's empathy,” says the artist. Paquita had the courage to adopt a twelve-year-old girl and give her the opportunity to develop. And today I think that intelligence is equivalent to discovering and acting through empathy.” One day, the adoptive mother took the girl to the Prado Museum, where Lita began to tremble, enraptured. There, without having yet learned to read and write, her mother asked her if she would want to be an artist when she grew up. To which she responded that she wanted to “be a painter.”
When private drawing teachers could no longer teach her, they sent her to the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. There she would study the classical masters, and would work on her style, halfway between figuration and abstraction, questioning her roots. She understood that the material is only the skin of art, in the manner of Goya, and began to look for the muscles, the arteries, the heart. His name has appeared for years, according to the Artprice meter, among the most sought-after living artists, a fact that has undoubtedly encouraged a troupe of adversaries to try to refute his mastery. The talent of a parvenu has always been disputed by the establishment.
It also happened to Letizia, whose story does not have the Dickensian overtones of Cabellut's life, but which could well fit into the stories of Jane Austen or Henry James. Love acted as a vital stimulus and her marriage was double: she married Philip VI and Spain, despite the fact that a sector of society rejected her. The bitterness already arose in its official announcement – that “let me talk” resignified today by feminism – and the constant rumors of aesthetic touch-ups, the distance with the King Emeritus and the rest of his in-laws or the height of his heels marked his stage as a princess. While the silver threads of her gray hair, her secularism or her gift for communicating have accompanied the nine years of her reign.
Lita said that, despite her life in Holland (since she was 19), her Spanish heritage has not left her. Not even the gypsy. She understands art as a collective fact, and in the process other hands intervene while a canvas is molded like a sculpture.
I have no doubt that Letizia preserves the journalist who loved her profession intact. Her prodigious memory allows her to retain names and data, ask about what she tends to forget, and take care of human details. At the end of dinner, Lita came to our table to look for her daughter, Marta. “The Queen wants to meet you,” she told him. Marta was also adopted, although she and her mother, who never forgot the heartbeat of love between broken glass, are like two drops of water.
