Rosa Chacel's frustrating secret: "The cost was very high"

“I realize that it's logical that, if I've resisted infidelity for so many years, there's no reason why I shouldn't continue resisting it. Everything that's happening only magnifies the past and shows me that I lived it with a cowardice that could only have resulted in this. If in 1927 I had reacted appropriately to the most egregious [infidelity], the following ones wouldn't have been possible. But I didn't dare,” Rosa Chacel (1898-1994) laments to her husband, the painter Timoteo Pérez, Timo, fed up with him making fun of her.

Faced with such a decisive situation, one might think that the relationship between the two had reached its end. However, Anna Caballé, who has just published Íntima Atlántida (Taurus), her biography of the writer, explains to La Vanguardia that, "as was also the case with Simone de Beauvoir, both women being of great personality, they lived in a time when a man's support was needed to make their way. Chacel believed she needed the support of a spouse and to maintain, at least in appearance, her marriage. Although the cost was very high, because what we are unable to face in our lives ends up ruling us."

If in 1927 I had reacted appropriately to the most egregious [infidelity], the following ones would not have been possible." Rosa Chacel

Although an invisible thread and a proper marriage kept them together, even in moments of distance, Chacel would never forgive Timo for his evasive tenderness or his infidelities. She reproached him for them a thousand times throughout her life, even though, at the beginning of their union, she had been able to accept the affairs as part of a new code of love that in the 1920s demanded freedom and tolerance. But as time went on and the number of women increased, the writer began to grow weary. Especially when one of his loved ones, even if only briefly, was her sister Blanca.

“I don't think they were lovers. All we know is that there was a flirtation between Timo and the younger sister. I'm convinced that young Blanca fell in love with him, a man whom women liked very much: he was shy and inspired protection. And she followed him throughout Timo's journey as head of the protection of Artistic Heritage, from Madrid to Geneva,” the biographer notes.

He found the most important woman in his life during his exile in Brazil: Lea Pentagna. “She was very different from Chacel, almost his opposite. A family woman, without any artistic pretensions, kind, from a wealthy family, and deeply in love with Timo until the very end. The relationship between the two was like damage control: they avoided, as far as I know, a head-on confrontation.” When Timo died, Chacel wrote his biography and left Pentagna out of it, despite the fact they maintained a stable relationship of almost 40 years. She didn't read the manuscript because, by the time it was published, she was already blind.

“Revelation, the magnification of the flesh, was what excluded me: one could play with beauty, until the person, the three singular persons: I, he, she, entered into the game,” Chacel would observe in his novel Natural Sciences .

As Caballé details in her book, this situation generated numerous contradictions for the author of La sinrazón , such as sending her son Carlos to a very expensive school in Buenos Aires. “Why did she do it? Probably to annoy Timo and make him have to carry the high cost of boarding school from Rio,” the biographer opines. Chacel would reflect: “Timo’s sacrifice, his life entirely dependent on the struggle for money, and me, meanwhile, writing pure literature.”

The writer kept her marital reality a secret. Even in her diaries, she avoided discussing the subject, which ultimately determined her entire life. “The urge to speak, to express the most unspeakable things that occurred in her intimacy, and the urge to remain silent, preserving the secret, her secret, from prying eyes and the censure that her revelations could generate,” Caballé summarizes in her prologue.

Chacel didn't just feel "unhappy" on a personal level, due to the circumstances described. The same thing happened to her professionally, given the belated recognition of her work. Her first novel, One Way Station , published in 1930, wasn't as successful as she had hoped, and she championed it until the end of her life, despite the fact that "it never manages to reach the reader." However, she felt that, with this novel, "she had anticipated the French nouveau roman by at least twenty years, and she desperately wanted recognition for her literary precocity."

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This yearning for prominence throughout her career likely stemmed from her childhood. "My theory is that being an only child—her sister was born when she was already 16—and not going to school, always living in a world of adults, where she was the only girl and also celebrated by everyone, gave her a perception that later, when she came out into the world, she would have a hard time recognizing as her own."

Teresa , her second novel, also wasn't as successful as she expected. "But that was because the timing wasn't on her side. She finished it at the beginning of '36. There wasn't enough time for it to be published. And when it was published in Buenos Aires in 1941, it wasn't very well understood. Teresa Mancha's figure was unknown in Argentina. But over the years, it became a success. It's her most readable novel, by far."

The revelation, the magnification of the flesh, was what excluded me: with beauty one could play.” Rosa Chacel

The grief and disappointment over her personal life and the failure of her work dissipated when she received the first letter from Ana María Moix in September 1965. “Her world opened up to her when she saw a young woman so interested in her after reading Teresa. Chacel was 67 at the time.” Ana María Moix herself also keeps in her archive the correspondence she exchanged with the woman she considered her literary role model. “That friendship would be followed by that of Gimferrer, who was of great importance during her recovery in Seix Barral, and Guillermo Carnero.”

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These names, which eventually became fundamental pillars, encouraged her to return to Spain, where, in her later years, she ended up enjoying recognition. Why then, at that sweet moment, did she publish her diaries, in which she criticized those who had helped her so much, even going so far as to call her son an ass? "She didn't gauge the effect they would have," Caballé is convinced, speculating that with their publication, she lost her chance of winning the Cervantes Prize. Today, she emphasizes, these texts allow readers to understand their complexity and gain perspective on "a life of uncertainty."