Javier Aranda Luna: Antonio Machado, the poet of dizzying clarity

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Every year they reach the In the small town of Collioure, nestled in the Eastern Pyrenees, an average of 500 letters are sent. Each one is duly stamped and has the exact address. The recipient is the same, and the senders know that he will never read them, or even open the envelopes, because he is dead. This doesn't seem to matter to them, because every year they, their children, or their grandchildren continue this epistolary ritual.

Collioure has no more than 2,700 inhabitants, and almost none of them write or receive paper letters. Email has solved their messaging needs, but they know that the old-fashioned postal service will continue to deliver their payments, account statements, and official requests in those stamped envelopes that, for young people, are a kind of echo of the past.

Antonio Machado died in that small French town of intense blues nestled on the shores of the Mediterranean on February 22, 1939. Of the 25 days he spent at the Quintana Hotel, he left only one to visit the beach. He is the recipient of the letters that continue to arrive ever since.

On the day of her death, her brother José found a crumpled piece of paper in her coat pocket with this verse: "These blue days and this childhood sun ." His mother died three days later.

Reaching Collioure was quite a feat during the Spanish Civil War. For the fascists... and for Machado himself. The poet Rafael Alberti tried to convince him to leave Madrid, as his life was in danger. But the author of Cantares , an active member of the Republic, refused. He was only convinced when, accompanied by León Felipe, they reiterated the need for his departure. From Madrid, he moved to Valencia, from there to Barcelona, and shortly after, into exile.

The crossing into France, to the coastal town of Collioure, was, without hyperbole, epic. The Spaniards fleeing fascism, while waiting in line to cross the border, dug holes in the sand and covered themselves with blankets to sleep.

The writer Corpus Barga accompanied the Machado family on the final stretch of their escape. He was the one who intervened to allow the poet passage at the border crossing. Not only that, he had to carry Machado's mother to the hotel because the journey had left them exhausted.

The poet's death spread rapidly. Exiles in Paris flocked to Colliere to pay their respects. Militiamen from the Second Cavalry Brigade carried the coffin, which was covered with a Republican flag. He was buried in the tomb of a friend who was in charge of the Quintana Hotel, and when the family needed a niche, several exiles, including the cellist Pablo Casals, acquired another tomb for the poet and his mother.

Since his death in 1939, Antonio Machado has become a symbol of exile. The Antonio Machado Foundation in Collioure is responsible for classifying, archiving, and safeguarding the average of 500 letters they receive annually from around the world. The correspondence arrives in sealed envelopes or postcards. The poet's figure is so powerful that some of them, placed in the mailbox next to his tomb, ask for wishes like a secular saint.

Now that July 26 marks the 150th anniversary of Antonio Machado's birth, it is still surprising that he was, and continues to be, the poet of the two Spains: the one that prays and yawns, old and gambler, rowdy and sad , and the implacable and redeeming one that dawns with an axe in its avenging hand, the Spain of rage and the idea . The antipodes appropriated the poet: the Communist Party made him its own, although he was never a communist, and the cynical Francoists published his poems, except for those he dedicated to the war and the execution of García Lorca.

Prose and poetry, life and work, merge naturally in the figure of Antonio Machado, notes Octavio Paz. Reading him is like delving into endless transparency: into a self-reflecting consciousness . The aesthetic of immense smallness predominated in him: universes fit into a couplet .

Some claim that the singer Joan Manuel Serrat universalized the Sevillian poet. I don't think so. The opposite could even be argued. In any case, the conjunction of a superb singer and a brilliant poet has coincided, fortunately for everyone.

Machado, the self-absorbed, Paz said, knows that he can only reveal himself in another. In a contrary who is a complement: the poet in the philosopher, the lover in absence, the solitary in the crowd, the prisoner of the self in the you of the beloved or in the we of the people .

His clarity, as Paz intended, remains dizzying . The letters he received at his grave in Collioure commemorate him, but also the hundreds who were in the concentration camps and whose bodies were never found. The others who were him.