If the writer Delibes taught me how to look, the actor Fernán-Gómez taught me how to listen.
For several years I had the privilege of being close to him and listening to him.
Listening to him tell, among many others, the story of Fernanda López, “the blonde”, his great-grandmother, from whom he inherited his hair colour and who came from Valdelaguna, a village near Chinchón, mine. And of Carolina Gómez, a seamstress, the grandmother who cared for his childhood just as Natividad López, with her needlework, cared for mine.
We exchanged and shared coincidences in many other stories.
Stories of survival, of absences, fears, hopes, dreams: of freedom, of “becoming someone”, of being — why not? — Jackie Cooper, “the one from Treasure Island”, and also a “writer of Salgari novels”.
Firm, proudly resolved in his melancholy, Fernando’s voice would sound as he recalled those times, as he recalled himself.
Echoes of Baroja, Galdós, Barea… wandered through that memory.
And through Fernando’s voice, I could also imagine the voices of his grandmother and mine, the distant voice of Carola, his mother; that of María, the illiterate maid who loved poetry; that of Florentina and her boyfriend’s “damn, what legs”.
The voice of the dreaming child, the young extra with his handful of dried chestnuts in his pocket, the young man in love and in a hurry, in such a hurry…
Many voices in a single voice.
I hope you will listen to me with the same, or a similar, emotion with which I listened to him,
the grandson of the seamstress,
the son of the actress.
José Sacristán
Approximate duration: 90 minutes
