Drawing takes the floor by Diana B. Wechsler
For Fito, this first work in Madrid in collaboration with María Teresa, Cervantes and Oscar Mara, with a strong embrace, Carlos Alonso, Madrid, 1978.
to carry on with their lives and to further their resistance work until 1963, when they would settle in Rome. They would meet again in that city from the 70’s on. In one capital city or another, the Alberti-León home was a meeting point for artists and intellectuals. The networks established over so many years were activated when the time came to leave Buenos Aires. Alonso returned to Rome in 1976 with Teresa—his wife—and his newborn son. There they spent Sundays with other exiles, Spaniards, Latin Americans and friends from Italy.1 Around 1977 this scene begins to unravel. María Teresa and Rafael return to Spain. Some time later Alonso and those close to him would also choose the same route. Madrid would now become the new meeting point. And María Teresa’s book would be the “first work” in that city. It was through The Soldier Who Taught Us How to Speak, drawing Cervantes, that Alonso would take up words again in some way. The image that the writer assigned to the poet overlaps with that of portraits from that era while at the same time—and this is the most interesting point—with that of hundreds of
Things that are spoken and those that are hushed, silence and words turn into fertile terms in which to conceive of an editorial project where Carlos Alonso and Oscar Mara are interrelated as co-illustrators of María Teresa León’s biographic novel, The Soldier Who Taught Us How to Speak. The text in question is ingenious and seductive, where the intersecting path between work and author is the point of departure for its structure—Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and Don Quixote—and it is written with the personal aim of vindicating word and language as sites of identity. The manuscript reaches the publishing house during Spain’s democratic transition period. Spain could now receive those she had expelled, María Teresa León among them. There were also others, who, like Carlos Alonso, would have to go into exile. In different ways, exile penetrates this work, which—developed as a collaboration—reunites María Teresa León and Carlos Alonso once again. They had met in Buenos Aires, during the era of the Republicans’ exile. Rafael Alberti and María Teresa had chosen the Río de la Plata metropolis as the place
A 172 B