“Guernika, dammit?!”

There were two stages in the history of the relationship of the Architects’ Association with the then stupefied and tranquil city that Santa Cruz. It still is, or was again, because frankly the city of our lives never paid too much attention to major events. Events passed through it, the city passed through events, and the city continued to smell the sea air. It even let them take the sea away, which is now a line on the horizon preceded by tourist boats and containers.

At all times of life, as I have recounted on occasion, Santa Cruz has taken the attitude of the shopkeeper who represents it, as the great naturalist Alexander Humboldt said: “Santa Cruz is a shopkeeper who opens his shop and sits waiting for no one to come in”.

The first of those truly unforgettable events was when the architect Josep Lluís Sert, a republican who lived almost all his life in exile in the United States, and Joan Miró, a Catalan and Mallorcan, one of the great painters of XX-century Spain who, and this is a curiosity, is shown boxing with Francis Scott Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast, met here.

It was truly a huge celebration that filled organisers with pride – Rubens Enríquez, the dean, and Vicente Saavedra and Javier Díaz Llanos, who designed and finished this beautiful architecture that is still the building that welcomes Martín Chirino’s La Lady.

As some other coincidences that have marked my life, I saw how Chirino was making (designing, imagining, sculpting) that beautiful red, rotund silhouette, a metaphor for air in the city, placed with enormous elegance between the ravine and the road that was once called Rambla del General Franco. The sculpture was as if evoking two eras, one of which, is still a ravine, a very dry one, and the other is just called La Rambla. I cannot remember if Chirino gave his sculpture a title, and I am not so sure, in any case, that he had to, but it seems to me that it was following an idea of Mr Domingo Pérez Minik’s that we all ended up, including the sculptor, calling it La Lady, and that is why I have called this small series In the shade of Lady.

The second event that the Architects’ Association hosted to celebrate its opening was even more multitudinous because it was also accompanied by the great artistic and civic event that took place in the second part of the XX century in the city of Santa Cruz. The sculptures arrived, naturally on boats, and were scattered along the main streets and some adjacent ones, as if stories from other places or other times were beginning to emerge, told by artists of other languages as letters for us to enjoy or unravel. Many people were proud, including myself, I still am, and others were perplexed, because they did not expect that Santa Cruz, which looked like a pensioner in the sun, would wake up in this way to the modern and youthful era it was suddenly being given.

I followed that event as a journalist, just as I had followed the first one. I even wrote about it all for the BBC in London, much to the delight of Pérez Minik, such an anglophile, and I also told the readers of Triunfo, then an essential magazine for escaping the latent Francoism here too, what was going on among us. And, of course, I wrote texts and articles, even more than I should have, one might have thought at the time, for the newspaper El Día, where I was constantly developing a vocation that still haunts me.

For all these reasons, the Association, that is, Rubens Enríquez, was kind enough to take notice of me and give me a gift that I considered undeserved, but which he attributed to a community of professionals to whom he could not say no. The truth is that he chose to give it to me at one of those dinners we used to have at La Caseta de Madera to celebrate anything at the time. On that occasion, we were celebrating the presence, and the farewell, of those two special guests, Miró and Sert, who were conversing in their own language, Catalan, without paying much attention to my friend Rubens’s generous gesture.

The truth is that Rubens gave me that gift, which was an enormous painting covered by a thousand wrappings that I decided not to unwrap at the time. It seemed to me that I should rather go and ask Miró about the topic of the day, because for some reason the need was stirring in Spain to return to Spain, even in Franco’s time, and to Pablo Picasso, who was still alive in his French exile, the enormous tapestry representing the horrors of the war. So, I asked Miró if he could at least let me ask a question, to which he agreed while looking at one of the sea nets that decorated El Poleo’s beach bar.

So, I asked the master what he thought of that very painting, Guernica, by his friend Pablo Picasso. Guernica, by his friend Pablo Picasso. And raising his arms as if he were going to fly, the maestro answered me this and only this, thus proving that he was a man of rationing his words, even if he was too shy and smiling:

— Gernika? Gernika? Dammit!

Everyone laughed.

On returning home, I opened the present Rubens had given me. It was a screen-printed proof signed in pencil by its author, Joan Miró. Joan Miró, dammit!

Juan Cruz Ruiz