Antonio Gala’s house (1987-2020)

“La Baltasara… La Baltasara… He would say it as if it were a sacred invocation that replenished his mouth and soul. La Baltasara, he would repeat, as if we could pick from the air what the word meant to him. He would repeat it whenever he was stressed with work or the city and started to feel suffocated in his house in Madrid. La Baltasara, on Cuesta de Los Valientes street, away from all the noise and people he didn’t want to see or hear.”

Elsa López, narrator, poet and director of the Antonio Gala Foundation from 2002 until 2006, summarised exquisitely what La Baltasara meant to Gala: an invocation. A mantra, if we succumb to Eastern meditation. A place to fall into the writer’s rituals, some of them sensory, as Elsa explains in this excerpt: “the gardens with the scent of rosemary, lavender, jasmine and night jasmine that Antonio would make us smell every time we passed by it.”

Blue wisteria on the patio and in the ranch, a small garden with rosemary and myrtle, eucalyptus trees that guard the resting place of Antonio’s dogs, in a tidy row... A memorial to his loved companions. Immortalised in one of his books: Charlas con Troylo

What did Gala do in this house, besides living? Elsa replies: “Write, write and write; entire chapters of his next novels, letters, fragments of his memoirs and the odd poem.” Write El manuscrito carmesí (1990), his first incursion into novel writing, for which he won the prestigious award Premio Planeta that year. Reread Don Quixote, or Rilke, Teresa de Jesús…

But its days as residence were always numbered, every year. “La Baltasara was summer, heat, light, the childhood he needed to recover with everything that had lacked in it. I knew it. Those were all the things the house gave to him,” remembers the poet from La Palma island. After the summer months, the host and his guests -including Elsa- would head back to the autumn and winter of adulthood. Back to their duties and responsibilities.

Because Antonio Gala baptised this breathtaking place as a tribute to a Spanish actress from the Golden Age: Francisca Baltasara.

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Antonio Gala’s house (1987-2020)

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