Larra and the most famous suicide… for love? A relative of the poet tells us the truth

February 13, 1837, 185 years ago today. Santa Clara Street, number 3, Madrid. Writer, journalist and poet Mariano Jose de Larra receives a visit from a woman named Dolores Armijo, who comes accompanied by her sister-in-law. When the two women leave the house, Larra takes a pistol, points it at her temple and shoots. She just executed suicide most famous in the history of our literaturea death that was always attributed to despair over unrequited love.

To understand how one of the most important figures in Spanish letters came to this dramatic end, we have contacted Jesús Miranda de Larra, fourth grandson of the writer (your mother was Larra’s great-great-granddaughter) and author of the book ‘Larra, biography of a desperate man’ (Aguilar).

At the time of his suicide, Mariano José de Larra was wearing two years separated from his wife, Josefa Wetoret. Since 1931, he was in love and had a relationship with Dolores Armijo. “He had truly fallen in love with her,” says her fourth grandson, Jesús Miranda de Larra. “Dolores was a free and modern woman. She was very different from Josefa, Larra’s wife, an industrious woman, from her house, who played the piano, who took care of the children, who sewed. Josefa was very good, but she did not satisfy Larra. Dolores, however, went to social gatherings, wrote poetry, was independent… That dazzled and enchanted Larra, of whom I can say that he was a good guy and that he was not a bad husband in spite of everything. With her wife he was affectionate and once they separated he worried and took care of her financially. What happened is that he lacked passion with her“, Explain.

According to Jesús Miranda de Larra, the suicide of the poet and writer It came at a time when he had been seeing everything black for some time. “His own newspaper, ‘El Español,’ had already censored some of his political articles that spoke of social change, more justice, freedom, more human rights. In addition, Larra had enlisted in the candidacy in the elections of 1936. He ran for Ávila and was elected deputy in the second round. He wanted to defend the people not only from the articles written about him, but from the seat and representing a moderate liberal party. But that was frustrated and his choice was annulled. He was 27 years old and a proud young man. He was one of the most widely read journalists, he was famous. And after the censorship of his own newspaper and this political failure, he found himself alone, ridiculous, humiliated and with the feeling that he could no longer change the social and political reality of a country that he did not like. He was a guy who loved Spain and at that time he was ashamed to be Spanish. That had to be horrible,” he says.. “My life is condemned to want to say what others do not want to hear”came to confess the romantic author at that time.

When Dolores Armijo visited Larra at his house on Santa Clara Street, he had not seen his lover for two and a half years because she had gone to Badajoz with her aunt and uncle in 1934 and then to Ávila, fleeing the scandal because her relationship with the poet had been made public. In all that time, Larra never visited her.

Drowned by the social and political reality of his country, and feeling like a man censored by his own newspaper, “Larra was excited” about that visit from Dolores after so much time apart, his descendant and biographer tells us. “With that visit, the remaining embers lit up in him a little,” he warns. But the meeting did not reach the port that Larra wanted. Quite the contrary. She broke up with him. “We could say that that was the drop that filled the glass already full of Larra. The percentage of motivation for love suicide is important because it occurred when Dolores showed up at his house to break up with him, ask him to return the love letters they had exchanged, and go to the Philippines with her husband to escape the scandal. . But it was not, far from it, the only reason for her death.

Regarding the personality of this outstanding poet of Spanish romanticism, Jesús Miranda de Larra assures that, although he was a loving man, “He wasn’t very womanizing. He was married at 20 and died at 27. He didn’t have much time. He could almost assure that he began to wake up shortly before he committed suicide ”.

“His physique was not wonderful either,” he adds. “I think Dolores fell in love with him halfway.” Larra defended true love above the conventions of the time. He didn’t need to marry Dolores in order to live a socially accepted relationship. He could not better express this conviction that two lovers do not need a signed piece of paper to experience their love freely and that their home can be anywhere in the world than with these verses that he included in his tragedy in verse, ‘Macías’, premiered in 1834: “The lovers are only the spouses / Their bond is love: which one is holier? / His temple the universe: wherever / the God hears them who has brought them together”.

Larra served Dolores on a platter the possibility of running away together. Their love was seal enough to become spouses. Any place in the universe could serve as a refuge to live as a true married couple without having to go through the altar. But Dolores did not want to consider this possibility.

Jesús Miranda de Larra also points out a certain amount of bitterness and introspection in the personality of Mariano José de Larra. Friends of his at the time, such as Mesonero Romanos, assured that he was not a very sociable man. “He went to gatherings and was very critical. He often left in a huff. it wasn’t very nice”, tells us his fourth grandson.

The somewhat taciturn point present in Larra’s way of being may have its roots in a childhood lived in the midst of the War of Independence “with a doctor father who worked constantly and a mother who perhaps detached herself a little from him. From the age of three he spent much of his time in boarding schools. In Bordeaux, in Paris and here in Madrid. He did not live with a family. She spent a lot of time alone and read a lot. She was formed more by reading than by studying. He did not get to study any career ”.

Jesús Miranda de Larra adds another episode lived in the poet’s adolescence that could mark him: “He fell in love with a young woman who later discovered that she was his father’s lover. This was a disappointment for him and was his first disappointment.

All this past could forge the man “ironic, unbelieving, skeptical, critical and taciturn” who he became.

Although today the way in which Mariano José de Larra decided to end his life is very striking, his descendant and biographer clarifies that “at that time suicides had risen 400% in Spain. The shot to the temple was the fashionable way out of frustration”. Despite this, Larra’s tragic death was a very shocking event in the society of his time.

The romantic literary world of Madrid received the news with real consternation and his funeral became a collective act of recognition in which, in addition to colleagues by profession, members of the aristocracy and those around the monarchy were not lacking.

“At a quarter to eight the night before yesterday, our distinguished writer Don Mariano José de Larra committed suicide with a gun, well known in the literary world for his many and precious productions, and whose loss will be eternally lamented by all who know how to appreciate our literary glories, which have acquired so much luster with the works of this unfortunate young man. We dare not out of delicacy to manifest the cause that has motivated this catastrophe. Knowing his many friends that his body was to be buried this morning in mercy burial, because none of his relatives had given any provision for it to be carried out with the decorum due to one of our first mills, they decided to pay for his burial and burial, which will take effect at four in the afternoon today, leaving the church of Santiago where he is deposited, accompanying him to his final resting place the literary youth of Madrid”, it could be read on February 15, 1837, in the newspaper ‘El Eco’, one of the most widely read of the time.

Today, the frock coat and shirt, still with traces of blood, by Mariano José de Larra can be seen on display at the Museum of Romanticism in Madrid. They were ceded by Jesús Miranda de Larra. Also in this museum is the pistol with which the poet and writer of romanticism is believed to have killed himself, curiously one day before Valentine’s Day.

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