BRACHICITO

Things get old, as life goes by. Pablo Neruda, who was a fleeting visitor to Tenerife, where he was received with joy and information by his colleagues from Gaceta de Arte, who would later become figures in the island’s cultural renaissance inspired by what the Architects’ Association did, has a verse that I have stressed on many occasions – things break in the house, although nobody really breaks them, simply “things broke”. Vases, paintings, motorways, or papers are broken, and memory is also broken, it is stripped bare, someone tramples on it, or perhaps time tramples on it.

However, on this visit to the Association, which in 1972 was a novelty in the city and in the islands, newly built, still smelling as new as the Christmas toys used to smell new, I found that although memories and facts, dreams and impulses had been broken, the Association itself, its handiwork, its different departments, its offices, the walls so well designed, like the rest of the building, by Vicente Saavedra and Javier Díaz-Llanos (some of us called them Saavedra Díaz-Llanos, as if they were one and the same), seemed immune to the passage of time.

I entered, without permission, some of these rooms, and there I felt that not even the smell had changed its course. Everything seemed to have been kept as if for a resurrection, or else it had been sheltered by the good visible materials so that time would do the building as little harm as possible.

The companions who gave me the tour, Carlos Saavedra – Vicente’s architect son – and Carlos A.

Schwartz, my friend then and always after, who together with Vicente and the others promoted those first fertile activities, then took me to the Association’s library. We were joined by José Luis Fajardo, an artist who has enriched his life around the world, who was present at those art meetings in the seventies with those friends and with artists of his quality and of his time, from the Canary Islands, mainland Spain and abroad.

The library was being improved by two young men in whom I saw reincarnated boys from back then who are probably now my years old, or maybe not so old. But these were boys, still digging life. They were working with books that had been donated to the very sober, powerful library. Those books must also have come from people of our generation, because each one of them had covers (by Alberto Corazón, for example) that kept the air of the time when we were progressive readers, who alternated the envious learning of architecture (those of us who didn’t know how to have been architects) with the reading of politics that then, at the beginning of the seventies, was allowed in a Spain that was losing the painful fuzz of the dictatorship.

Today’s library, neat, favoured by the light coming from the ravine, looks like a combination of decades. The young librarians, with their blue gloves, taking care of the past as if it were made of glass, cleaning the covers and the interiors, suddenly transmitted to me the spirit of those years when we felt that the Architects’ Association smelled new, like recent dreams.

So, I went out into the street remembering, in addition to everything that came to mind as I listened to the painter and the architects’ talk, some of the events that the aforementioned architects had been involved in during the good old times while the idea of the

great exhibition of Street Sculpture was being developed. And I don’t know why it came to my mind a visit paid by some architects, led by Juan Julio Fernández, to the García Sanabria Park, the trees of which seemed at some point to be part of the ensemble that ended up being the enormous sculptural legacy. Uruguayan gardener Leandro Silva, who was leading the walk, began to identify trees, with their characteristics and origins. I was taking notes for my article that day, and I noticed that, when the specialist hesitated, Juan Julio, who had at that time and would later have a great passion for the erudition that comes with the precise name of things, reminded Leonardo of the exact name of the tree which he could not remember.

“It’s a brachicito”, said the then young architect. And I wrote it down in such a way that I will never forget either the name or the moment, brachicito, just as I will never forget the night when Rubens Henríquez, then president of the Association (only he could be, what an extraordinary man) took Joan Miró and Josep Lluís Sert to eat viejas at my unforgettable friend Poleo’s Caseta de Madera.

Juan Cruz Ruiz