Relatives, friends, senior government officials and numerous travelers participated in the ceremony to remember with many emotions the author of Las edades de Lulú or Malena es un nombre de tango, among her best-known novels.
Starting this Friday, the facility will be called Estación de Madrid-Puerta de Atocha-Almudena Grandes, after the display of a huge white cloth in the garden on which the name of the person who was designated as Favorite Daughter of Madrid, where she was born, could be read. in 1960 and passed away in 2021.
“The days are in a hurry when they look with you for Monday clothes at the Atocha station and the summer sea in plastic flowers,” recited her widower and current president of the Cervantes Institute, the poet Luis García Montero.
One of the legends of Spanish song, Miguel Ríos, joined the symbolic reunion with Almudena Grandes, National Narrative Award winner in 2018 and honorary patron of the Film Academy Foundation.
“Only poets can conjugate this nonsense, feel joy and sorrow at the same time,” said Ríos, after singing a cappella the poem “Oración” by García Montero.
A sympathizer of the United Left and of progressive currents, she was not praised by either the City Council or the Community of Madrid, dominated by leaders of the conservative Popular Party, who declined to attend the event and expressed reservations both to the posthumous title of Favorite Daughter, and to the new name to Atocha.
She became a leftist by reading, she confessed in 2010 and since she never bit her tongue, according to those who knew her, she affirmed that Spain had become an insensitive society, full of people indifferent to the suffering of others, plunged into the mirage of consumerism and materialism.
Thus, he vindicated the idea of returning to live with dignity, “like our grandparents”, in his novel Los besos en el pan (2015).
The Minister of Transport, Raquel Sánchez, highlighted the contribution to literature and progress in Spain of the writer who “is the best ambassador for the city of Madrid”.
‘There is no society that advances by turning its back on the past. There is no society that prospers by closing its eyes to the suffering of those who paved the road with their blood, their bones and their tears. There is no future without the repudiation of the horrifying, without the memory of what happened,’ reflected the minister.
It seemed like a comment directed without hindrance to the leaders of the Community and the City Council of the Spanish capital, who were deleted from the act.
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