Antonio Machado at the Royal Spanish Academy: "Welcome, Antonio, to your home."

This afternoon, the Royal Spanish Academy hosted an unusual event in its history, an evocative and theatrical moment, both sad and joyful. Actor José Sacristán read the unfinished speech that Antonio Machado wrote for admission to the RAE between 1929 and 1932 , which he never presented in public. Sacristán not only read the text, but also represented Machado in an almost formal ceremony, which, in turn, recreated the day that never happened, the day on which the Sevillian poet should have entered the Royal Spanish Academy.

To complete this play, playwright and academic Juan Mayorga wrote the traditional laudatio that responds to the speeches of the new academics. It was his own text, but it was also a performance and a fiction because Mayorga wrote in the first-person voice of José Martínez Ruiz, Azorín, the academic who brought Machado to the doors of the RAE (Royal Academy of Fine Arts). And beforehand, Santiago Muñoz Machado, the director of the Academy, explained the significance of the event for his home. Muñoz Machado referred to the poet's "illustrious gift of evoking dreams." "This afternoon we dream again of his admission."

"Machado is the most celebrated poet of the last 70 years, also the most beloved," Muñoz Machado also said.

What can we say about Machado's speech? First, it's long (40,000 characters) and begins with that kindly ironic tone we associate today with the adjective Machado, with a warm and ethical "vosotros." "Forgive me for taking more than four years to present myself before you. All that time has been necessary for me to overcome certain scruples of conscience. [...] I don't believe I possess the specific gifts of an academic. I'm not a humanist, nor a philologist, nor a scholar. I'm very weak in Latin, because a bad teacher made me hate it. I studied Greek with love, out of a desire to read Plato, but belatedly and, perhaps because of that, with little benefit. In short, my letters are poor, for although I have read a lot, my memory is weak and I have retained little. [...] But you made me an academic, and I mustn't insist."

Machado's text then spirals upward to become a complex essay on 19th-century poetry, viewed not from the perspective of literature but from the perspective of philosophy and its tension with the avant-garde. Machado referred to Proust and Joyce as poets, named Valéry and Guillén, cited Bergson and Kant, denounced the dominance of concepts "over the cordial sap" in the poetry of 1932, and spoke of "the emergence of multiple schools that were apparently arbitrary and absurd, but which all had, in the end, a common denominator: war on reason and sentiment." It is easy to recognize Machado in the final words and, at the same time, to be surprised by the radical nature of his means. "The cordial object and foundation of human fraternity"

Thus, Machado wrote his discourse against the dreams of reason and the anti-humanism of the avant-garde and totalitarian worlds. With that thread, Mayorga's discourse, in the role of Azorín, included Rubén Darío as a reference and the landscapes of Campos de Castilla as a theme and as a metaphor for the death of his beloved Leonor .

There was more: Joan Manuel Serrat , the singer who renewed Machado's popularity, sang Retrato , lost the thread for a few seconds and then made up for it with Coplas a la muerte de Don Guido and La saeta and gave an encore: Caminante no hay camino . And Alfonso Guerra, the curator of the Machado exhibition that premiered in Seville and can be seen since yesterday at the headquarters of the RAE, also said a few words to frame the life of the writer and his brother Manuel, a member of the Royal Academy like him.

The RAE Assembly Hall was packed with people, although there was no government representation. Francine Armengol , the Speaker of the Congress of Deputies, was the highest authority of the State. Infanta Margarita de Borbón, the Minister of Culture of the Community of Madrid, Marta Rivera de la Cruz, the former President of Extremadura, Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra, the Deputy Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, and the former Minister Íñigo Méndez de Vigo were all present at the event.