Santas y Mártires

A small family mess that has to do with a pornographic novel and a race for the Senate makes Moran Gabor, dilettante, bon vivant, factory of aphorisms, intimate enemy of his enemies and intellectual who feels that the muses have abandoned him, end up as screenwriter of a Roman film shot in
that Madrid of the sixties that became a great Hollywood set and in which the Yankees and the powerful had carte blanche for all the pleasures that ordinary Spaniards were prohibited from. That city that at first seems gray and boring ends up leading him to an abyss of impossible divas, muses of Parisian cabarets, ephebes with a happy life, marquises with an even happier life, disoriented folklore and tyrannical producers, all of them at a crucial moment in their lives. lives and determined to cling to a straw with a name and surname: Moran Gabor.

With a prose that seems to have macerated for decades and the sparkling dialogues that were already in Calypso (for which Santas y mártires works as a spin off), Rafael de Jaime Juliá has created a story that sometimes seems to be from Capote and others from Berlanga in which collides characters typical of a screwball comedy and others worthy of a grotesque. It doesn’t seem written here and it doesn’t seem written now, but it resonates powerfully at any time and place for its vindication of the power of the word, its plea for intuition and its firm and necessary defense of pleasures and beauty, whether by hustlers or marquises, either in palaces or in taverns.

William Alonso