Years from now, when Álvaro Pombo is no longer with us, his image and his speech at the 2025 Cervantes Prize ceremony will come back to our minds as a memory that will seem unreal. "It is impossible to be more disgusting than me," Pombo said of himself on the eve of the ceremony, as if he were a Greek philosopher. This morning in Alcalá, Pombo appeared in a wheelchair and with a black cap, exhausted but coquettish, rambling in appearance but ultimately overwhelmingly lucid, humorous yet poetic, triumphant yet fragile... The word fragile is important because fragility was the theme of Álvaro Pombo's Cervantes acceptance speech, a text read by his friend Mario Crespo as the author of Against Nature is barely hanging on. And the King, in his response to the speech, picked up on that thread: "We live in uncertain days that call for clarity; hard days - and for many, ominous days that demand kindness; days of confusion that require truth," said King Felipe.
"Fragility is the great theme that accompanies us throughout our lives and in our daily lives. Today, more than ever, it remains the great theme: fragility in the face of illness, loneliness, injustice, insecurity, lack of convictions, lost causes. Human fragility in the face of the most diverse institutions that seem not to protect one, in an increasingly unintelligible society," Pombo wrote for his Cervantes.
His speech aimed to explore a "phenomenology of fragility" in Cervantes, in his texts and books. First, fragility as a form of rebellion expressed in a sonnet by Miguel de Cervantes, "the best in Castilian literature," according to Álvaro Pombo. "I swear to God that this greatness frightens me," Cervantes wrote about an imperial tumult in Seville during the time of Philip II. Then, Pombo focused on Licenciado Vidriera, a character until now minor in the Exemplary Novels, who went mad with love and gave meaning to his surname, Vidriera, because there is nothing more prone to breaking than glass. In the face of love, we are also glass, and "glass is the opposite of victory."
At the end of Pombo's speech, Cervantes' fragility was no longer in his work but in his life: "Miguel de Cervantes was a profound and poor man, as Ortega y Gasset said. It is very possible that to achieve greatness in Spain, to overcome fragility, we all have to reach depth and poverty. There the enchantments will be undone. There the glass will finally break. There fragility will become strong. And the heroes will continue to traverse the empire of their unceasing word."
Additionally, at the beginning of his speech, Pombo boasted of coming from a family of Castilian farmers and quoted the Epistle of James: "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above." State representatives at the ceremony dressed in mourning as a sign of mourning for the death of Pope Francis.
The usual protocol for the Cervantes awards involves, before the winner's speech, the Minister of Culture of the Spanish Government giving another academic laudatio speech and King Felipe concluding the event with a warmer final praise. Both fulfilled their roles. The one absent from the ceremony was Pedro Sánchez, the Prime Minister who usually accompanies the Head of State on the great day of Hispanic Letters. Sources from the Moncloa Palace simply recalled that these absences are not unusual and that Mariano Rajoy was absent from the Cervantes awards in 2014 and 2017 (for Juan Goytisolo and Eduardo Mendoza) and he himself was absent from the 2022 ceremony (for Rafael Cadenas).
Well: at least Minister Ernest Urtasun gave a speech that went beyond the routine. He mentioned Mario Vargas Llosa, Cervantes Prize winner in 1995, and then allowed himself a very bullfighter-like embellishment by recognizing a beautiful dodecasyllable in the name of "Álvaro Pombo García de los Ríos." He mentioned James Joyce before any other quote and said that Pombo is explained with three words: "Silence, exile, and sagacity." Urtasun portrayed Pombo as an eccentric seeking the center and as a writer who creates beauty from family memory and intimate phrasing. "I am not from this city or any / I came by chance and will leave at night / here I have no cousins or ghosts" are verses by Pombo that Urtasun read in Alcalá de Henares.
Later, the minister placed the new Cervantes in the map of European literature, more than Spanish. Valle, Ortega Aranguren, Sartre, Rilke, Eliot, James, Greene, Murdoch... Finally, Urtasun explained that the new Cervantes is a writer in dialogue with women, a feminist in his own way.
King Felipe closed the Cervantes ceremony with a speech that addressed Pombo's work from an ethical standpoint, "his interest in kindness and truth." "I will start with kindness: the poetic and literary interest in kindness is surprising because one might say that evil - and I mean in the literary sense - offers more possibilities. Perhaps in this, Cervantes is a great precedent. What characterizes the morality of the knight-errant is 'undoing wrongs,' the fight for justice and helping the weak."
"Álvaro Pombo has commented that Dostoevsky tried throughout his life to tell the story of a good man, and he did not succeed despite his efforts. Pombo is not naive. He does not think everyone is good, but he believes it would be desirable if they were. In fact, he has portrayed evil characters in depth in some of his works, such as Insignificant Crimes, Against Nature, or The Exclaustrado, but he has always presented evil as a failure, as a missed opportunity, emphasizing the banality of evil. There is nothing grandiose in him. Instead, goodness seems to him unheard of, brilliant, the great creation."
The noise of a low-flying jet briefly interrupted the King in that pivotal moment of his speech. And the truth? "Álvaro Pombo has explained it: 'In my youth, I was convinced that truth was not a logical matter, a property of judgments, but the discovery of a reality that was almost always hidden.' The novel was also a way to tell the truth about human relationships, their loves, their hatreds. Literature has a mission of clarity, let's not forget. It consists of articulating the inarticulate, giving voice to confused feelings, confusing situations, confusing ideas that can lead to terrible outcomes."
A few minutes earlier, the King, accompanied by Queen Letizia, had pushed Álvaro Pombo's wheelchair. It was another tremendous moment, to remember.