Matilde de la Torre

The figure to which the Tribute section in 2021 It's Matilde de la Torre. The Study Center Montañeses wanted to take advantage of the presence in Santander of Úrsula Álvarez Gutierrez, descendant - like that- of the Gutiérrez Cueto family and arrival from Peru more than a year ago with the intention of investigating the history of its ancestors, to ask for some pages that tell us about your illustrious relative.

The Gutiérrez clan of the Torre became the Gutiérrez Cueto family, has been relevant since the middle of the 19th century, first in the press with the founding and direction of The Bee Mountaineer, Santiago and Them, Santander Commerce y The Atlantic to, without abandoning journalism, also stand out in others Antonio brothers fields, Domingo, Enrique and Fernando Gutiérrez Cueto, each one shining in their respective sphere; a glow that spread in the following generations to the world of art with María Blanchard or Antonio Quirós and that of literature with Matilde de la Torre, Consuelo Bergés and, now, Ursula Alvarez.

MATILDE DE LA TORRE LIVED

“…to those who live, even if they die.”

Mario Benedetti.

It can be said without lying that Matilde de la Torre (Cabezón de la Sal, 14/March/1884 – Mexico City, 19/March/1946) learned to walk, to speak and read at the same time learned to subtract. During her childhood Matilde lost three of her friends to death. five brothers. When Matilde was twelve years old, his mother, Ana Gutierrez Cueto, died. The following year, unimaginable domestic neglect killed his brother Eduardo and his uncle Cástor when the family cook mistook the poison for rats with flour. Was your father, one of his uncles or his atavistic propensity who pointed out libraries as a refuge from the unappealable? Out what out, Matilde found shelter in the desire to know since she was a child.

Matilde's adolescence coincided with decline of his country as a power. The loss of its colonies marked a generation of spanish, but it marked Matilde more. Matilde knew every detail of the Ninety-Eight Disaster not only because his uncles were journalists but because your favorite, the merchant sailor Don Fernando Gutiérrez Cueto, remained caught in the Cuban War and played a very important role for Spain. Matilde saw Uncle Fernando return without a boat, hurt, furious and admitting defeated that human nature will never cease to disappoint us.

three years later, Matilde's father died. what For a very short time it was a well-established family with a father, mother and six children, ended in two orphaned teenagers protected by an inheritance not immense but sufficient. Captain Don Fernando took charge of Matilde and his brother Carlos and for all practical purposes he was father and protector of both.

According to biographer Carmen Calderón, Uncle Fernando donated the land for the construction of a small and beautiful theater in Cabezón of the Salt. In it, Matilde was Dramatic Director, choreographer and even actress in scenarios painted by his first cousin María Gutiérrez Blanchard, in the most magical time that Cabezón de la Sal has ever lived. Inspired by him, Maria painted a painting that he called Garden of Curious Ladies and there is almost no doubt that will represent the garden of Matilde's house, a place that decades later was destroyed without respect for one of the greatest intelligences of Cantabria nor by one of its most representative families.

Matilde did not have a formal academic education. It What the family knows is that she was homeschooled by her elders., tutors private and everything else she learned by reading alone, sitting on some branch the trees in your garden. His artistic and intellectual concerns were genetics. His mother and aunts loved music and the piano, most of his uncles wrote, His entire family was polyglot and loved books.. They encouraged Matilde's curiosity and despite the time in which she lived, was a relatively free girl, who went on horseback from Cabezón de la Sal to Molledo, Quotes and Mazcuerras scandalizing some old gossips. Your family, numerous and bizarre, It was all the company that Matilde had as a child, teenager and young. Matilda, the girl, is described as elegant, high and slender; brave, smart and smiling. The writer Concha Espina, married with a first cousin of Matilde's mother, I gave him to read his writings before to publish them and both were friends with only one important difference in that time, the religious theme, according to Josefina de la Serna (and to anyone who studies both lives). Matilde was leaning more towards disbelief or agnostic who became a faithful devotee, whether by own conclusions or by having grew up listening to and reading his uncle Domingo Gutiérrez Cueto, lawyer, journalist, writer and politician of the Reform Republican Party. In any case, by love to Concha, the young Matilde sang the Salve during the month of May in Cabezón de la Sal and from the first Sunday in June she was not seen again in the church.

Matilde knew love and it was not as one tells it or two people and they repeat as many. She and one of her first cousins fell in love as children, not as adults nor for a short time. They grew up together and being kids they loved each other well. When they grew up, that love changed like life changes. life, How people and circumstances change. The marriage, what is took place in Peru, It was a mere couple of signatures in the civil registry, tax by the brothers Fernando and Sixto Gutiérrez Cueto who believed they were doing what was correct in the year one thousand nine hundred and thirteen. That marriage ended just arrived in Mollendo (Arequipa) the first ship heading to Europe and Matilde took.

As stated by his biographer Carmen Calderón, is logical to think that the failed marriage was a determining moment in the Matilda's life. It is evident that this was when she used the eyes to see which happened a lot beyond your intimate environment. That vision hurt him, how it had hurt his older. And just like them before her and their minors after her, Matilde tried to explain life by writing it.

Graphic World, 13/March/1918

The first of his books, titled Garden of curious ladies, in a nod to his cousin María, It is an epistolary between a old woman and her two nephews. Like almost any writing, lends itself to different interpretations. There are those who believe that Matilde captured her old vision of life in the words of the old woman and her new perspective in the ideas of the nephews. I think it's about Matilde talking to herself and reflecting. «The triumph of the women is not about imitating men... Because if we tell them: are you man? Well me too!, we have not done anything...We are not equal..."The old woman in the book explains what What would you do if the devil offered you a pact?:

…I would not ask for anything specific but what I was needed according to the circumstances of my life...that is to say, that I I would ask for everything. -And what is it all, my lady?- Well sir...everything...is nothing! determined! …look you, lord of satan, first of all excuse me because not even I I understand myself. I wish to be happy and unhappy because of happiness. Know of the triumphs of love and in addition to its misfortunes... I wish to marry and live with, of, in, by, without love...and I also want to rage...and, if it doesn't seem bad to you, I wish to have a very ardent faith and die in a Carmelite convent... and above all everything, and after and before everything, I want to live intensely...to love and to want and hate and hate me... have you understood something, illustrious and sulfurous visitor? 

The old woman ends up declaring: «It seems to me that the women of now and those of the past and those who will come after us, They will only seek their happiness in the way that is within their reach..» of society, politics and power, the old woman thinks:

«…Man is not a slave by art or virtue of any law or right written, but by the hitherto universal law of economic conditions...A my old and pearly judgment, universal suffrage is nothing more than a true calamity for the citizen. Not because the idea itself isn't beautiful., but because Humanity is not mature for such beauties…It is a utopia set in action…So that suffrage could be the free expression of will, will be precise condition that the citizen be free and...he is not usually free. …For managing your house you only trust yourself, because you know arithmetic and you have good sense, to take care of you in an illness, you call the doctor medicine, man of lights and science... and to manage, care and govern human society calls all the sheep in the bunch?…»

One of his phrases that catches my attention the most is:«No I want to pass after death as an absolutely nondescript being, neutral and grayish, that everything he accomplished consisted of being born, get bored conscientiously and die after making a will…No, no. »The life of Matilde de la Torre is anything but anodyne and until today it is dear and hated, despite how little is known about the human being Matilde.

During the twenties Matilde fulfilled the tradition familiar with writing newspaper articles about all topics and materialized two desires. Torre Academy opened, of which it has been said that fulfilled Plato's maxim: «If together "You have a garden at the library and you don't lack anything." The Torre Academy operated in its own home and gathered boys of both sexes. Without academic method and pure common sense, Matilde opened the doors to the desire of know and his students learned to think playing in that immortal garden and reading in the library that no longer exists, but it existed. His other great triumph and almost at the same time, was the founding of the Orfeón Voces Cántabras. Matilda won forever the title of researcher, resurrector and disseminator of Cantabrian folklore and he did it solely for love of his land.  Many years after his death, the giant Joseph Ramón Saiz Viadero edited and prefaced The Mountain in England, one compilation of articles written by Matilde about the experiences of Orfeón on his travels. The Mountain in England It is a delight that exposes Like few of her works, the tenderness and humanity of a woman who lived.

Matilde published her second book eleven years later that the first, when his name already had important intellectual credit. If tried Don Quixote, king of Spain, an essay on the disaster 98 and the period that followed. In it he affirms that the evil of Spain was the gold of America and that having been great does not mean having been rich. «…Spain has been relegated in the concert European to the inferior place that he occupies today for having abandoned the follies of Don Quixote to follow the diminished ambition of Sancho Panza..." Evidently Orteguiana, Matilde insisted on the need to Europeanize her country. two years later he published The Agora, a political analysis, in it he pointed out the lack of citizenship as one of the most serious problems in their country. The Agora It came to light at the end of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, when the majority of Spanish intellectuals wondered if it was possible to return to the system old rotary power. Shortly after, Matilde entered politics.

Freedom, 13/December/1933

What happened after that is part of the history of Spain. Matilde did not die abandoned as was once said and even it was written. Matilde died surrounded by the love of her loved ones., his brother, your first cousin Germán and his niece Mireya (son and granddaughter of Javier Gutiérrez Cueto), in addition to his Spanish friends in Mexico. Just like their elders did before her, Matilde wrote until her death. Maybe it's time to collect his hundreds or possibly thousands of articles to try to understand the mind and the heart of a woman who lived supported by the desire to know.

“History is a mysterious path that is only traveled once and it cannot be investigated whether 'what was' could 'cease to be'.”  Phrase by Matilde de la Torre, extracted from the article "Political Code II", published on April thirteenth, one thousand nine hundred and thirty of the newspaper The Cantabrian, from Santander.

Úrsula Álvarez Gutiérrez

Santander, 27 February 2021

If when reviewing the sources on which I base this article you notice the name of José Ramón Saiz Viadero repeated to infinity, It is because her magical love for Aunt Matilde resurrected her and the Gutiérrez Cueto family of the twenty-first century spread throughout Spain and on both sides of the Atlantic we thank her with all our hearts.. for us, José Ramón is a giant, or more specifically, The Giant of Alegrilla: https://www.amoramares.works/post/el-gigante-de-alegrilla-un-cuento-para-ramón

I investigate the life of our family during the 19th and 20th centuries. My goal is to publish a collection of stories based on their brave lives at the end of the year.. Our reasons are read in: https://www.amoramares.works/ancestro, https://www.amoramares.works/post/sixtina y https://www.amoramares.works/post/el-intelectual-la-divina-providencia-y-los-hermanos-carajo-sixtina-4

Fuentes:

  • Memories, conversations and correspondence from my family.
  • Matilde de la Torre and her time, by Carmen Calderon. Tantin Editions, 1984. Gift from the giant José Ramón Saiz Viadero.
  • Garden of curious ladies, by Matilde de la Torre. Cover of Caesar Abin. Mundo Latino Editorial. Juan Pueyo printing press, Madrid, 1917. Facilitated by the Madrid Women's Library.
  • Don Quixote, king of Spain, by Matilde de la Torre. Preliminary study by Antonio Martínez Cerezo. Foreword by Ciriaco Pérez Bustamante. Cantabria 4 stations. Publications service of the University of Cantabria. Santander, 2000.
  • The Agora, by Matilde de la Torre. Critical edition by Antonio Martínez Cerezo. Edited by the Ministry of Culture and Sports, Government of Cantabria. Project by Antonio Martínez Cerezo, 2001.
  • Shadow seas, Stamp of Asturias, by Matilde de la Torre. North Ibero-American Editions. Paris, 1940. Santander Municipal Library.
  • Shadow seas, Prints of Asturias, by Matilde de la Torre. Edition, introduction and notes by José Ramón Saiz Viadero, 2006. Giant's Gift.
  • Women, Republic, Civil War and repression in Cantabria, by José Ramón Saiz Viadero. Book Edition. General Directorate of Culture of the Government of Cantabria, 2016.  
  • Women of Cantabria in republican exile, by José Ramón Saiz Viadero and Patricia Gómez Camus. Book Edition, 2020.
  • Digitized editions of newspapers of the time. Link provided by the giant José Ramón Saiz Viadero. https://prensahistorica.mcu.es/es/consulta/busqueda.do
  • my mother's life, Thorn Shell, by Josefina de la Serna. Culture Section, Biographies Series. Novels and Stories Collection. Spanish Teaching Editorial, S.A. Santander Municipal Library.
  • Nostalgic evocation of Matilde de la Torre, by J.R.. Viadero Size. Giant's Gift.
  • Matilda of the tower, an athenaetic spirit, of J. R. Viadero Size. Giant's Gift.

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