Less than a decade ago, the name of Luisa Carnés and the title of her best novel, Tea Rooms. Mujeres obreras, only a handful of scholars (few) of the Spanish literature of the Second Republic knew them, and those who had delved into the ruptures of the Spanish exile. It wasn't in university literature programs, hardly anyone had read it.
In a few days, this name, Luisa Carnés, will parade every afternoon in the end credits of the new TVE telenovela, in the style of Amar en tiempos revueltos, because the public channel will premiere Salón de té La Moderna, a long-awaited serial based on the 1934 novel by Carnés. In addition, many high school students who have just started the year will find Tea Rooms as one of the required readings.
This journey, the definitive entry of Luisa Carnés into the canon of Spanish literature of the 20th century, has been as anomalous as it was inevitable. It is hardly surprising that a self-taught author, woman, communist and exile, one of Las Sinsombrero who were hidden by the usual payroll of the generation of 27, was relegated to oblivion. And it is equally unsurprising that it is now attracting enormous interest.
To begin with, what is TeaRooms. Mujeres oberas where does it come from? The book, a choral and introductory novel in which Carnés distilled her own experience as a waitress in a tea room in the center of Madrid (in the first edition, it was described as a “reportage novel ”) was the third one that the author would publish before the Civil War and exile cut off her path. The book has the form of a collective portrait and clear political intentions, a denunciation of the conditions of exploitation of those women who received three pesetas a month, an insufficient salary, and who also had to endure the double subordination to the 'amo, at home and at work. Matilde and the other waitresses in the tea room were the ones who served the snacks to the distinguished women who went to the Lyceum in Madrid and who appear in Elena Fortún's novels, although later the war and exile they reduced them all, the Carnés and the Fortún, to the same ostracism.
Published in 1934, Tea Rooms was not republished in Spain until 2014, in a tiny print run by Lance, the imprint of Madrid's old booksellers, and thanks to the zeal of a high school teacher and historian , Antonio Plaza, who knew the work of Carnés and was in contact with his family.
Two years later, in 2016, the critic and university professor David Becerra, another early admirer of Carnés' work, spoke about Tea Rooms to the editors of the Asturian label Hoja de Lata. "We got a copy of it and we were amazed by what it proposed, with the strength it had, with the validity of many of its approaches. We saw that Tea Rooms had a clear interest for a general public and then we contacted the family to obtain the rights", explains Daniel Álvarez, editor of Hoja de Lata. His intuition was not wrong. With the push of contemporary authors such as Marta Sanz, who in an epilogue says of her that "Carnés contradicts the axioms of a literature written to the dictates of power", demonstrating that a communist woman can write "better" than a " man who flaunts a neutrality that places him next to the gods" and that "a self-taught woman can write better than a university student from the Residencia de Estudiantes", Tea Rooms became one of the surprises of the fair of The Madrid book of 2016.
Since then, the label has made 15 more editions, including a commemorative one, and has sold around 25,000 copies. "Every year we have to reprint it, it's our long-seller. The canonization is being done correctly, without haste and without forcing. We are very grateful to the teachers who are including Luisa Carnés in the syllabus. Literature had a historical debt to her", concludes Álvarez.
One of these teachers is Rosa Linares, teacher of Spanish literature at the María de Molina high school in Madrid and co-author, with Guadalupe Jover, of a reading itinerary that she has shared on the networks and that was part of the writing of the Lomloe, the latest educational law. The idea is to start from Tea Rooms to talk about feminism and political commitment in the so-called Silver Age, the Civil War and Clara Campoamor, and then lead to other authors, such as Carmen Martín Gaite. "Last year, I offered the book in a second-year high school module, they could choose between Luces de bohemia and Tea Rooms and I was surprised that most chose Carnés," explains Linares. "The students, especially, told me that they felt like they were reading a contemporary novel. Ninety years have had to pass for a public to be born that understands the ethical and moral space from which Carnés wrote", he says. There were some gender differences in reading across the class. "The girls said to me: 'That's great, we always read men'. And the boys empathized a lot with the character of the waiter whose son is killed by the fascists in Italy, because he is one of the few important male characters in the novel." Will it help that TVE broadcast a series based on the book this year? "I don't know, if it was Netflix it would be something else. But it will certainly contribute to popularizing Carnés".
Valvanuz Vega, also a teacher, at the Jorge Manrique de Tres Cantos high school, in Madrid, has also incorporated it into her syllabus, and has broken with the inertia that leads many centers to always offer the same titles to students: "The way , La colmena, La casa de Pascual Duarte...", enumerates Vega. "I finished my degree in 1999 and I had teachers who in the 20th century only took me as far as Lorca", he complains. This explains why many of these professors have to face their own departments first, who are not very friendly to changes in the syllabus and who also did not get to study Carnés's work in their university years. The first time Vega ventured into Tea Rooms in the classroom, she clashed with a "very sanitary" group of high school sophomores who weren't enthusiastic about literature, but last year she took root in a group of high school arts students who were "very vindictive". "It made for an enormously rich debate in class, the students detected things that haven't changed that much. They were very interested in the abortion plot, which costs the life of one of the protagonists".
"Oh, imagine reading Tea Rooms in high school," commented the writer and journalist Anna Pacheco recently on X, the old Twitter. It was given to her "two Sant Jordi's ago" and she didn't read it until this year. "Despite being a work of fiction, the truth is that Tea Rooms can be read as a kind of ethnography of a distinguished tea room in Madrid. It is impossible not to realize that the author knows what she is talking about, she has worked on it. I was very impressed by the very fine look and how critical it is of the forms of domination towards the employer, the husband or God. There was no condescension, there was no worker essentialization", he points out. Although Pacheco has in mind what Alejandro Zambra says in No leer against compulsory reading in school, he also remembers having had "quite fascinating" literature teachers and is happy that students are now able to find this offer.
In the meantime, the family of Luisa Carnés herself, who gives X an account in her name, attends "stopped and grateful" to everything that is happening. Juan Ramón Puyol is the grandson of the writer, whom he barely remembers (he was two years old when the whole family suffered the traffic accident that claimed the life of Carnés in 1964) and dedicates himself body and soul to disseminating his grandmother's work, as his father asked before he died. "What the high school teachers are doing is revolutionary, to have the courage to intervene in the canon, to bring Luisa's work to the classrooms... it's a Copernican turn," says this retired photojournalist, who was born in 'exile, in Mexico, and arrived in Madrid in 1972, "dressed like a hippy, with bell-bottoms and fringed jackets".
The negotiation for the audiovisual adaptation of Tea Rooms has been long and complex. The family still hopes that a film can be made that is a more faithful adaptation of the novel. The series that will premiere very soon (there is no confirmed date yet, but it is known that it will be towards the end of September), co-produced by RTVE itself, Boomerang TV and the French Mediawan, will be different. By force, the screenwriters will have to invent new plots and characters to fill the many chapters that these serials last when they work well. "It's another level, another dimension", admits the author's grandson. “At least it will definitely take the work out of scholarly circles. The Madrid of the 1930s is fascinating and we are very curious to see what things they add to it and what things they recreate."
