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 their ancestors, to ask you for a few pages that tell us about your illustrious relative.

The Gutiérrez de la clan Tower became the Gutiérrez Cueto family, has been relevant since the middle of the XIX century, first in the press with the founding and management of The bee mountaineer, Santiago and them, The Santander Trade and The Atlantic for, without abandoning journalism, also stand out in others fields the Antonio brothers, Sunday, Enrique and Fernando Gutierrez Cueto, shining each one in its respective sphere; a glow that spread 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 she learned to subtract. During her childhood, Matilde lost three of her friends to death. of her five brothers. When Matilde was twelve years old, his mother, Ana Gutierrez Cueto, he died. The next year, unimaginable domestic neglect killed his brother Eduardo and his uncle Castor 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 the libraries as a refuge before the unappealable? out what outside, Matilde found shelter in the desire to know since she was a child.

Matilde's adolescence coincided with the decline of her country as a power. The loss of their colonies marked a generation of Spaniards, but Matilde was marked more. Matilde knew every detail of the Ninety-Eight Disaster not only because her uncles were journalists but because hers favorite, the merchant marine Don Fernando Gutiérrez Cueto, stayed caught up in the Cuban War and played an outstanding 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. Which for a very short time it was a well-constituted family with a father, mother and six children, ended in two orphaned adolescents protected by an inheritance not huge but enough. Captain Don Fernando took care of Matilde and her brother Carlos hers and for all practical purposes he was the father and protector of both.

According to biographer Carmen Calderón, Uncle Fernando donated the land for the construction of a tiny and precious theater in Cabezón of the Salt. In it, Matilde was Dramatic Director, choreographer and even actress in scenes painted by her cousin María Gutiérrez Blanchard, in it most magical time that Cabezón de la Sal has lived. inspired by him, Mary I paint a picture that she called Garden of Curious Ladies and it is almost certain that she will represent the garden of Matilde's house, a place that decades later was destroyed without respect by one of the greatest intelligences in Cantabria or by one of its most representative families.

Matilde did not have a formal academic education. It What the family knows is that she was educated at home by her elders., tutors private and everything else she learned by reading alone, sitting on a branch the trees in your garden. His artistic and intellectual concerns were genetic. His mother and aunts loved music and the piano., most of his uncles wrote, his entire family was multilingual and loved books. Them encouraged Matilde's curiosity and despite the time in which she lived, It was a relatively free girl, who was riding from Cabezón de la Sal to Molledo, Comillas and Mazcuerras scandalizing some old gossips. His family, numerous and quirky, It was all the company that Matilde had as a child, teenager and young. Matilda, Girl, is described as elegant, tall 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 they were both friends with the only major difference in that time, the religious theme, according to Josefina de la Serna (Already anyone who studies both lives). Matilde leaned more towards incredulous or agnostic that made faithful devotee, either by own conclusions or by having grown up listening to and reading his uncle Domingo Gutiérrez Cueto, attorney, journalist, writer and politician of the Republican Reform Party. In any case, for love to shell, the young Matilde sang the Salve during the month of May in Cabezón de la Sal and from the first Sunday in June she did not see her again in 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 with children, not adults or for a short time. They grew up together and being boys they loved each other well. When they grew up that love changed as the life, how people and circumstances change. the wedding, That carried out 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 the right thing in the year nineteen hundred and thirteen. That marriage just ended came to Mollendo (Arequipa) the first ship bound for Europe and Matilde I take.

As stated by her biographer Carmen Calderón, is logical to think that the failed marriage was a determining moment in the matilde's life. It is evident that it was then that she used the eyes to see what happened a lot beyond your intimate environment. That vision hurt, how he had hurt his greater. And just as they before her and her minors after her, Matilde tried to explain life by writing it down.

Graphic world, 13/march/1918

The first of his books, titulado Garden of curious ladies, in a nod to his cousin María, is an epistolary between a old woman and hers two nephews. like almost any writing, lends itself to different interpretations. There are those who believe that Matilde embodied her old vision of the life in the words of the old woman and her new perspective on the ideas of the nephews. I think it is about Matilde talking to herself and pondering. "The Triumph of the women is not in imitating men... Because if we tell them: You are man? Well me too!, we have not done anything… We are not the same…»The old woman in the book explains what she would do if the devil offered her a pact:

…I would not ask for anything determined but what was necessary according to the circumstances of my life... that is to say, that I I would ask for everything. -And what is all, my lady?- Well sir...everything...it's nothing certain! …see you, lord of satan, First of all excuse me because neither I I understand myself. I want to be happy and miserable because of happiness. Know of the triumphs of love and in addition to its misfortunes ... I want to marry and live with, of, in, by, without love... and I also want to rage... and, if you don't mind, I want 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… want and be want and hate and hate me... have you understood something, illustrious and sulfurous visitor? 

The old woman ends by 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 the society, politics and the can, 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 is not beautiful in itself, otherwise because Humanity is not ripe for such beauties…it is a utopia set in action… For the vote to be the free expression of the will, will be precise condition that the citizen be free and... is not usually free. …To manage your house you only trust yourself, because you know arithmetic and you have good sense, to take care of you in illness, you call the doctor in medicine, man of lights and science... and to manage, take care and govern the humane society you call all the sheep of the bunch?…»

One of his phrases that most catches my attention is:"Not I want to pass after death as an absolutely nondescript being, neutral and grayish, that all he accomplished was to be born, get bored conscientiously and die after making a will…No, no." Matilde de la Torre's life is anything but nondescript and to this day is Dear and hated, despite how little is known about the human being Matilde.

During the twenties Matilde fulfilled the tradition family of writing newspaper articles on all topics and she materialized two desires. Opened the Torre Academy, of which it has been said that fulfilled Plato's maxim: «Yes together You have a garden in the library and you lack nothing.» The Torre Academy operated in his own home and brought together boys of both sexes. Without academic method and pure common sense, Matilde opened the doors to the desire to knowledge and her students learned to think by 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, reviver and promoter of Cantabrian folklore and she did it solely out of love for her land.  many years after his death, the giant joseph Ramón Saiz Viadero edited and prefaced The Mountain in England, a compilation of articles written by Matilde about the experiences of Orfeón in his travels. The Mountain in England it is a delight that exposes like few of his works, the tenderness and humanity of a woman who lived.

Matilde published her second book eleven years later than the first, when his name already had an important intellectual credit. I know I try to 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 concert European to the inferior place that he occupies today for having abandoned the follies of Don Quixote to follow the waning ambition of Sancho Panza…» Obviously orteguiana, Matilde insisted on the need to Europeanize her country. Two years later published The Agora, a political analysis, in it he pointed out the lack of citizenship as one of the most serious problems of his country. The Agora came to light at the end of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, when most of Spanish intellectuals wondered if it was possible to return to the system rotary power antique. Shortly after, Matilde entered politics.

Freedom, 13/December/1933

What happened thereafter 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 family, his brother, his 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 of one thousand nine hundred and thirty of the newspaper El Cantábrico, de Santander.

Ursula Alvarez Gutierrez

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 by the end of the year. Our reasons are read in: https://www.amoramares.works/ancestro, https://www.amoramares.works/post/sixtina and https://www.amoramares.works/post/el-intelectual-la-divina-providencia-y-los-hermanos-carajo-sixtina-4

Sources:

  • Souvenirs, conversations and correspondence from my family.
  • Matilde de la Torre and her time, by Carmen Calderon. editions Tantín, 1984. Gift of the giant José Ramón Saiz Viadero.
  • Curious Ladies' Garden, by Matilde de la Torre. Cover of César Abin. Editorial Mundo Latino. Juan Pueyo Printing, Madrid, 1917. Provided 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 seasons. Publications service of the University of Cantabria. Santander, 2000.
  • The Agora, by Matilde de la Torre. Critical edition of Antonio Martínez Cerezo. Edited by the Ministry of Culture and Sports, Government of Cantabria. Project by Antonio Martínez Cerezo, 2001.
  • Seas in shadow, Asturias print, by Matilde de la Torre. Iberoamerican North Editions. Paris, 1940. Santander Municipal Library.
  • Seas in shadow, Asturias prints, by Matilde de la Torre. Edition, introduction and notes by José Ramón Saiz Viadero, 2006. Giant's Gift.
  • Woman, Republic, Civil War and repression in Cantabria, by José Ramón Saiz Viadero. Books Edition. General Directorate of Culture of the Government of Cantabria, 2016.  
  • Cantabrian women in republican exile, by José Ramón Saiz Viadero and Patricia Gómez Camus. Books Edition, 2020.
  • Digitized editions of the 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, Shell Thorn, by Josefina de la Serna. Culture Section, Biographies Series. Novels and Stories Collection. Editorial Teaching Spanish, S.A. Santander Municipal Library.
  • Nostalgic evocation of Matilde de la Torre, the J.R. Saiz Viadero. Giant's Gift.
  • Matilde de la Torre, an Atheneist spirit, by J. R. Saiz Viadero. Giant's Gift.

Views: 3138