Memory
Text and selection of content: José Colmeiro
The ethics of resistance
Memory – individual, collective, historical- is a fundamental element of MVM’s thought and writing that can be said to permeate and structure his entire work in all the varied genres he cultivated, starting with poetry (whose first collection bears the title Memoria y deseo), journalism and essays (both his “sentimental chronicles” and his essays on La Pasionaria, Franco), and his novels, especially the trilogy of the “ética de la resistencia”, anchored in a project of recovery of collective memory. His writings can be understood as a series of “messages in a bottle to posterity” (El pianista).
Selection of texts
“Why was the recovery of memory important for the construction of this democratic city? Because one of the keys to Franco’s lasting victory and his lasting installation in power was the destruction of everything that the critical vanguard of the country had signified and the annulment of the memory of its passage through history and culture. We must add the real dead of the civil war, the reprisals in the post-war period, the fugitives, the exiles and the moles – not only the one who hid in his house, but the mole who renounced his identity and who even lost his memory. The memory of the defeated was forbidden, within a cultural operation to erase the identity of the antagonist. (…)
In every cultural exercise there is a continual proposal and tension between memory and desire. Memory is that novel that we all tell ourselves with the help of others and that most of us don’t write down, although we often hear people say: If I told you, you could turn it into a novel! There lies buried what we think we know about ourselves and others. Personal memory and collective memory.”
Perfils Catalans: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (in Catalan with subtitles in Spanish). Tranquilo produccions to TVE, 26 min. 1: 15-7: 25.
Cycle «El intelectual y su memoria»: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. University of Granada. 5:05-8:30.
And I saw her dead in the river/as the water swept her away /oh, my heart, she looked like a rose!/oh, my heart, a very white rose! (A song about consumption [tuberculosis] that Conchita Piquer sang).
“They wore overcoats with a lot of shoulder padding, large lapels, a lot of weight, over bodies that were no less strange, with a lot of bone or fat, a heavy moustache or a big chest. They talked a lot. They kept quiet a lot. But above all they strove to forget as much as they could, and the right of survival of their reasons for surviving was the best automatic therapy that they could use. In summer, in the working-class neighbourhoods, it was very easy to see them wearing t-shirts, worn sleeveless t-shirts, transparent after so many washes, even with holes like windows open to the miserly fresh air. They talked about the war, about what they had done and had not done in the war, they talked about the present and current Second World War, of what the winners of the war had done and would do. They talked about Manolete, about Pepe Luis Vázquez, about Amparo Rivelles, about Lina Yegros, about Indalecio Prieto, about Roosevelt, about Rommel, about the Pasionaria… They talked about their brother in France, in Mexico or with a very good job in the Spanish Bank of Credit. They sang. They sang songs that were slow and long, not yet open to the voracious appetite of the disc jockey. Pasodobles… Suspiros de España… or that song:
I was twenty years old / and he was twice my age / there were nights on his forehead/and clarity on mine And in the school the children recited by heart: Spain is my fatherland/and the fatherland of my race/You look toward the New World/on the Old World you turn your back.
In 1939 a black Cuban singer arrived in Spain, not knowing that he would become the voice of triviality as a way for a people to vent their frustrations, a triviality that, precisely in 1939, had the sad air of the nocturne.
When in silence the mysterious night/silently shrouds the city with its cloak/the echo of your voice calls me to you/and I do nothing but remember.
This was the first song that Antonio Machín sang. Its echo survives over those shipwrecked people, who in the long queues strove heroically to survive.
The past torments me, how far away from me you are…
… Antonio Machín’s song went on, like a landscape; that melody served as a farewell (any melody serves as a farewell) and, indeed, one bade farewell to something every day. Something was dying in every Spaniard day in day out in the early forties: the smile of victory, faith, hope…and above everyone there was left a macabre currency of survival.”
“The pianist was disorientated, nor did he hear Andrés´s attempts to help him get his bearings with the four points of the compass.”
“Although I suppose that you, don Alberto, are just passing through; as soon as you get a piano and get your life back on track, you’ll be gone from this street and you’ll never come back. And with me it’s much the same, although I have been here since I was a child, my father died in this house, my nephew was born here, I have lived the best and worst years of our lives, I know the neighbours, almost all of them were on the losing side in the war and carry the post-war on their backs like a dead man. When I was in the concentration camp I thought I smelled the bacallaneria, the aroma of dried cod left to soak, of spicy olives in the basins with garlic, lemon, herbs, paprika or herbalism, lemon verbena and chamomile, or el Rapido, the smell of leather, of rubber heels, dairy, bakery, of the pub, a smell between wine and vinegar; I even longed for the smell of metal polishers or the esparto grass of the espadrille shop on the corner. Before the war, El Musclaire sometimes came to the pub, a very gifted amateur singer who even made his debut at the Liceo opera house; he had a fine voice, like Lázaro, but lost it due to his heavy drinking. El Musclaire would sing for hours and hours, and people would request songs from the balconies and ask him to sing. In these neighbourhoods people are always on the balcony to see how little passes through their streets and decorate it as a foretaste of the desired garden: geraniums, carnations, asparagus, whatever grows in these little sunny streets, and go down to the passage of the percheron draught horses to pick up their dung to fertilise the soil of the plant pots. My mother had told me a thousand times: “wherever I go, there will go my plants, except to the cemetery.” Do you know La Carbonera? She is a dark, disheveled woman who sells coal almost in the doorway opposite ours. Her daughter is a student or a nurse by now. If you hear them talk about one another you will hear many criticisms, petty opinions of small lives, but they recognise each other when they see each other on the street, in shops, on balconies, and feel safe around each other, as it reassures you to return home or to a landscape that also knows you. And we all know that we always have one foot on our neck, which foot doesn’t matter, and you just have to look at the amount of generosity they still have left. In the mornings this street is filled with little old men who can barely drag the pianola, or singers you feel sorry for who sing songs in Catalan, if there are no guards nearby or the Machaquito, the Machaquito pinchaúvas, the gypsy who fixes the cheap umbrellas, as he says, with all his boys, and from these balconies a rain of small change begins to fall of nickel ten cent coins. I would like to know how to write like Vargas Vila or Fernández Flórez or Blasco Ibáñez to tell all this, because nobody will ever tell it and these people will die when their time comes to die, I don’t know if you may ever have thought about it. To know how to express oneself, to know how to put down on paper what you think and feel is like being able to send messages in a bottle to posterity. Each neighbourhood should have at least one poet and one chronicler so that many years from now, in some special museums, people will be able to relive through memory.”
“How is it possible that they tell us that Galíndez is of no interest when a work by Manuel de Dios Unanue has just been published, and published in New York no less, by a certain Editorial Cupre, located at 123-60 83 Ave. Suite 5 F, Kew Gardens, NY 11415, and printed in the Dominican Republic, I suppose because it works out cheaper? I suspect that Unanue’s study will have been ignored, but it is the most complete inventory that has been made to date of the Galíndez case, from the perspective, still confused, that he was an anti-communist agent working for the FBI and the CIA, as much as an agent of the Basque nationalists. Unanue’s book shows that the Galíndez case is alive, as are the most interesting testimonies that were constructed to “explain” his disappearance: both the Porter report and the sinister Ernst report. It’s true that Galíndez is not talked about, surprisingly, not even in Spain after the death of Franco and the arrival of democracy, and that indeed fits into that thesis on post-modern ethics that those sons of bitches are asking me for, and forgive me for having been infected by the very healthy Spanish custom of using swear words. Isn’t Galíndez’s fall into oblivion a consequence of that all-pervasive desire for ahistoricism, that wants to dispense with the moral sanction of the historical? In the Basque Country, the forgetting of Galíndez is due to the inconvenience of his real management as a bag man for the money that went from the US State Department to the PNV [Basque Nationalist Party] or the money collected by the PNV among sympathetic North American and Latin American circles. It is also due to the still confused relationship of Galíndez with the FBI and the CIA, since his time in Santo Domingo, although I see this part of the story more and more clearly, and Galíndez did nothing but accept Aguirre’s advice in a disciplined manner. You may not know who Aguirre was, but you know who Reagan is and you know that it is unthinkable, for example, that North would have got involved in Irangate without Reagan knowing, or am I mistaken? But the fact that Galíndez is discreetly omitted does not take away from his value as an example to follow, what’s more, it increases it. Why don’t people want to recover Galíndez? Have there not been enough cases of brutality, of State terrorism in Latin America to think that it is not archaeology?”
You had followed from the corner of your eye and of your ear the trial of Luciano Rincón, who signed with the pseudonym Luis Ramírez the book Francisco Franco: Historia de un mesianismo. Published by El Ruedo Ibérico, a publisher in exile in París, it was the first attempt to interpret his psychopathology of power. Published in 1964, it took time to identify the author and put him on trial, but he was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment, while you continued imagining out of the corner of your eye and your ear that book that was a warning of destruction of your memory. Do you know what became of that book, still under the impression of Grimau’s murder?: «Franco has turned Spain into a Tower of Babel in which the only ones who are understood are those who don’t speak: the dead.” On the one hand, you feared the test of writing and remembered too accurately facts that could move you in your old age, such as those scenes in films that hurt you and you no longer dared to watch. But how many Luis Ramirezes waited crouching for you to die, to knock you off the pedestals of memory?”
“DEFINITELY NOTHING WAS LEFT OF APRIL-poor Rose of April the cruellest month/drawn of death -hypothesis of death-/ between my hands your cold face confirmed/the silence to which you take my memory-memory of my childhood and your post-war/your youth attacked by the dogs of History/my youth aggressor of your life instinct/red Rose/of April the cruellest month engenders desires on the dead land mixture/memory and I wish while it destroys Aprils/as if they were a promise of eternity/but the traveller/who flees sooner or later stops/when the hypothesis of the face of death-is manifest in the limits of the first/homeland/the small country of your reticulated body/like a photograph submerged in the memory of an April morning -or was it an afternoon?-/ from which you would never have deserved to return/flee in pursuit of a theory of flight-return in time to question the drawing/ of death/if it were only yellow paper/sweet woodworm console/white saxophone rust/of lead/or imaginary adventure beyond/ the points of the compass people/dressed up in moiré carnival costumes/mauve eaten by moths of the night/If it were scarefish scribble on the blank page of bottomless seas/ where to anchor fear and forgetfulness /if it were a female or a male clown/four clowns disguised as fugitives/rotten border of insufficient skin/if it were foam of sunken faces.”
“THE DRAUGHTSMAN WOULD HAVE CAUGHT THE FACE/OF DEATH/but you are you broken April Rose/the one who answers the moral loneliness of the stars/the one who confirms the unhappy outcome of the escapes/the one that takes my memory leaves my desires/adrift on the opaque seas of winter/islands of chimera from which you will never/receive my written excuses/between two wearinesses/definitely nothing was left of April/its shadow was your shadow/my journey ended in your death/poor rose of April, the cruellest month/History lies Life lies/for others now/memory and desire your hands useless/to recognise my submerged faces/never again will l leave you in your wooden corner/you will travel with me until my death/broken April rose self-absorbed/like an alphabet of defoliated memories/by the implacable logic of calendars/between the pages of all that I have written/the vanquished futures will find your shadow/blurred in petty usury/words/incapable of being silence shout approximate drawing/of the face of death/nothing/nothing remained of April not even the right/to miss it.”
“The uselessness of history as an instrument of teaching and knowledge for the present has been one of the most constant and widely-used theoretical and ideological confabulations of the last two decades. Memory and utopia are discredited at the same time, and they are not two antagonistic poles; to deny the one and the other has the same intention. The discrediting of memory means that it is unnecessary to recall the causes of the current effects. The important thing is the effects. Ask yourself why the world is badly made or why there is disorder. Why are Moroccans drowning in the Straits of Gibraltar trying to reach Europe? Why are there Somalis dying of hunger and the armies of the North mobilise to bring them sandwiches? Or why has this blatant division been reached between a small stronghold of Popperian open societies and an immense majority of stratified and closed societies? To ask what is the reason for these effects would mean finding a historical culpability for their causes. No-one is interested in memory or the role of history, or utopia, because in the name of an imperfect future it reveals the imperfections of the present and because many ferocious acts, many aggressions have been committed in its name.”
The demonstration is about to disperse. La Bonafini, the mother and leader, wields a megaphone and draws the political conclusion of the meeting: we will return so that our children are not erased from the memory of infamy. They were alive when they took them away from us. They must come back alive. In other towns around the world, other mothers are looking for their children. The barbarity of the system never ends. Carvalho and Alma cross the street that separates the demonstrators from the door of the Casa Rosada. Carvalho summons up all the images he has stored of one of the most famous government buildings in the world.”
“Why was the recovery of memory important for the construction of this democratic city? Because one of the keys to Franco’s lasting victory and his lasting installation in power was the destruction of everything that the critical vanguard of the country had signified and the annulment of the memory of its passage through history and culture. We must add the real dead of the civil war, the reprisals in the post-war period, the fugitives, the exiles and the moles – not only the one who hid in his house, but the mole who renounced his identity and who even lost his memory. The memory of the defeated was forbidden, within a cultural operation to erase the identity of the antagonist. (…)
In every cultural exercise there is a continual proposal and tension between memory and desire. Memory is that novel that we all tell ourselves with the help of others and that most of us don’t write down, although we often hear people say: If I told you, you could turn it into a novel! There lies buried what we think we know about ourselves and others. Personal memory and collective memory.”
Perfils Catalans: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (in Catalan with subtitles in Spanish). Tranquilo produccions to TVE, 26 min. 1: 15-7: 25.
Cycle «El intelectual y su memoria»: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. University of Granada. 5:05-8:30.
And I saw her dead in the river/as the water swept her away /oh, my heart, she looked like a rose!/oh, my heart, a very white rose! (A song about consumption [tuberculosis] that Conchita Piquer sang).
“They wore overcoats with a lot of shoulder padding, large lapels, a lot of weight, over bodies that were no less strange, with a lot of bone or fat, a heavy moustache or a big chest. They talked a lot. They kept quiet a lot. But above all they strove to forget as much as they could, and the right of survival of their reasons for surviving was the best automatic therapy that they could use. In summer, in the working-class neighbourhoods, it was very easy to see them wearing t-shirts, worn sleeveless t-shirts, transparent after so many washes, even with holes like windows open to the miserly fresh air. They talked about the war, about what they had done and had not done in the war, they talked about the present and current Second World War, of what the winners of the war had done and would do. They talked about Manolete, about Pepe Luis Vázquez, about Amparo Rivelles, about Lina Yegros, about Indalecio Prieto, about Roosevelt, about Rommel, about the Pasionaria… They talked about their brother in France, in Mexico or with a very good job in the Spanish Bank of Credit. They sang. They sang songs that were slow and long, not yet open to the voracious appetite of the disc jockey. Pasodobles… Suspiros de España… or that song:
I was twenty years old / and he was twice my age / there were nights on his forehead/and clarity on mine And in the school the children recited by heart: Spain is my fatherland/and the fatherland of my race/You look toward the New World/on the Old World you turn your back.
In 1939 a black Cuban singer arrived in Spain, not knowing that he would become the voice of triviality as a way for a people to vent their frustrations, a triviality that, precisely in 1939, had the sad air of the nocturne.
When in silence the mysterious night/silently shrouds the city with its cloak/the echo of your voice calls me to you/and I do nothing but remember.
This was the first song that Antonio Machín sang. Its echo survives over those shipwrecked people, who in the long queues strove heroically to survive.
The past torments me, how far away from me you are…
… Antonio Machín’s song went on, like a landscape; that melody served as a farewell (any melody serves as a farewell) and, indeed, one bade farewell to something every day. Something was dying in every Spaniard day in day out in the early forties: the smile of victory, faith, hope…and above everyone there was left a macabre currency of survival.”
“The pianist was disorientated, nor did he hear Andrés´s attempts to help him get his bearings with the four points of the compass.”
“Although I suppose that you, don Alberto, are just passing through; as soon as you get a piano and get your life back on track, you’ll be gone from this street and you’ll never come back. And with me it’s much the same, although I have been here since I was a child, my father died in this house, my nephew was born here, I have lived the best and worst years of our lives, I know the neighbours, almost all of them were on the losing side in the war and carry the post-war on their backs like a dead man. When I was in the concentration camp I thought I smelled the bacallaneria, the aroma of dried cod left to soak, of spicy olives in the basins with garlic, lemon, herbs, paprika or herbalism, lemon verbena and chamomile, or el Rapido, the smell of leather, of rubber heels, dairy, bakery, of the pub, a smell between wine and vinegar; I even longed for the smell of metal polishers or the esparto grass of the espadrille shop on the corner. Before the war, El Musclaire sometimes came to the pub, a very gifted amateur singer who even made his debut at the Liceo opera house; he had a fine voice, like Lázaro, but lost it due to his heavy drinking. El Musclaire would sing for hours and hours, and people would request songs from the balconies and ask him to sing. In these neighbourhoods people are always on the balcony to see how little passes through their streets and decorate it as a foretaste of the desired garden: geraniums, carnations, asparagus, whatever grows in these little sunny streets, and go down to the passage of the percheron draught horses to pick up their dung to fertilise the soil of the plant pots. My mother had told me a thousand times: “wherever I go, there will go my plants, except to the cemetery.” Do you know La Carbonera? She is a dark, disheveled woman who sells coal almost in the doorway opposite ours. Her daughter is a student or a nurse by now. If you hear them talk about one another you will hear many criticisms, petty opinions of small lives, but they recognise each other when they see each other on the street, in shops, on balconies, and feel safe around each other, as it reassures you to return home or to a landscape that also knows you. And we all know that we always have one foot on our neck, which foot doesn’t matter, and you just have to look at the amount of generosity they still have left. In the mornings this street is filled with little old men who can barely drag the pianola, or singers you feel sorry for who sing songs in Catalan, if there are no guards nearby or the Machaquito, the Machaquito pinchaúvas, the gypsy who fixes the cheap umbrellas, as he says, with all his boys, and from these balconies a rain of small change begins to fall of nickel ten cent coins. I would like to know how to write like Vargas Vila or Fernández Flórez or Blasco Ibáñez to tell all this, because nobody will ever tell it and these people will die when their time comes to die, I don’t know if you may ever have thought about it. To know how to express oneself, to know how to put down on paper what you think and feel is like being able to send messages in a bottle to posterity. Each neighbourhood should have at least one poet and one chronicler so that many years from now, in some special museums, people will be able to relive through memory.”
“How is it possible that they tell us that Galíndez is of no interest when a work by Manuel de Dios Unanue has just been published, and published in New York no less, by a certain Editorial Cupre, located at 123-60 83 Ave. Suite 5 F, Kew Gardens, NY 11415, and printed in the Dominican Republic, I suppose because it works out cheaper? I suspect that Unanue’s study will have been ignored, but it is the most complete inventory that has been made to date of the Galíndez case, from the perspective, still confused, that he was an anti-communist agent working for the FBI and the CIA, as much as an agent of the Basque nationalists. Unanue’s book shows that the Galíndez case is alive, as are the most interesting testimonies that were constructed to “explain” his disappearance: both the Porter report and the sinister Ernst report. It’s true that Galíndez is not talked about, surprisingly, not even in Spain after the death of Franco and the arrival of democracy, and that indeed fits into that thesis on post-modern ethics that those sons of bitches are asking me for, and forgive me for having been infected by the very healthy Spanish custom of using swear words. Isn’t Galíndez’s fall into oblivion a consequence of that all-pervasive desire for ahistoricism, that wants to dispense with the moral sanction of the historical? In the Basque Country, the forgetting of Galíndez is due to the inconvenience of his real management as a bag man for the money that went from the US State Department to the PNV [Basque Nationalist Party] or the money collected by the PNV among sympathetic North American and Latin American circles. It is also due to the still confused relationship of Galíndez with the FBI and the CIA, since his time in Santo Domingo, although I see this part of the story more and more clearly, and Galíndez did nothing but accept Aguirre’s advice in a disciplined manner. You may not know who Aguirre was, but you know who Reagan is and you know that it is unthinkable, for example, that North would have got involved in Irangate without Reagan knowing, or am I mistaken? But the fact that Galíndez is discreetly omitted does not take away from his value as an example to follow, what’s more, it increases it. Why don’t people want to recover Galíndez? Have there not been enough cases of brutality, of State terrorism in Latin America to think that it is not archaeology?”
You had followed from the corner of your eye and of your ear the trial of Luciano Rincón, who signed with the pseudonym Luis Ramírez the book Francisco Franco: Historia de un mesianismo. Published by El Ruedo Ibérico, a publisher in exile in París, it was the first attempt to interpret his psychopathology of power. Published in 1964, it took time to identify the author and put him on trial, but he was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment, while you continued imagining out of the corner of your eye and your ear that book that was a warning of destruction of your memory. Do you know what became of that book, still under the impression of Grimau’s murder?: «Franco has turned Spain into a Tower of Babel in which the only ones who are understood are those who don’t speak: the dead.” On the one hand, you feared the test of writing and remembered too accurately facts that could move you in your old age, such as those scenes in films that hurt you and you no longer dared to watch. But how many Luis Ramirezes waited crouching for you to die, to knock you off the pedestals of memory?”
“DEFINITELY NOTHING WAS LEFT OF APRIL-poor Rose of April the cruellest month/drawn of death -hypothesis of death-/ between my hands your cold face confirmed/the silence to which you take my memory-memory of my childhood and your post-war/your youth attacked by the dogs of History/my youth aggressor of your life instinct/red Rose/of April the cruellest month engenders desires on the dead land mixture/memory and I wish while it destroys Aprils/as if they were a promise of eternity/but the traveller/who flees sooner or later stops/when the hypothesis of the face of death-is manifest in the limits of the first/homeland/the small country of your reticulated body/like a photograph submerged in the memory of an April morning -or was it an afternoon?-/ from which you would never have deserved to return/flee in pursuit of a theory of flight-return in time to question the drawing/ of death/if it were only yellow paper/sweet woodworm console/white saxophone rust/of lead/or imaginary adventure beyond/ the points of the compass people/dressed up in moiré carnival costumes/mauve eaten by moths of the night/If it were scarefish scribble on the blank page of bottomless seas/ where to anchor fear and forgetfulness /if it were a female or a male clown/four clowns disguised as fugitives/rotten border of insufficient skin/if it were foam of sunken faces.”
“THE DRAUGHTSMAN WOULD HAVE CAUGHT THE FACE/OF DEATH/but you are you broken April Rose/the one who answers the moral loneliness of the stars/the one who confirms the unhappy outcome of the escapes/the one that takes my memory leaves my desires/adrift on the opaque seas of winter/islands of chimera from which you will never/receive my written excuses/between two wearinesses/definitely nothing was left of April/its shadow was your shadow/my journey ended in your death/poor rose of April, the cruellest month/History lies Life lies/for others now/memory and desire your hands useless/to recognise my submerged faces/never again will l leave you in your wooden corner/you will travel with me until my death/broken April rose self-absorbed/like an alphabet of defoliated memories/by the implacable logic of calendars/between the pages of all that I have written/the vanquished futures will find your shadow/blurred in petty usury/words/incapable of being silence shout approximate drawing/of the face of death/nothing/nothing remained of April not even the right/to miss it.”
“The uselessness of history as an instrument of teaching and knowledge for the present has been one of the most constant and widely-used theoretical and ideological confabulations of the last two decades. Memory and utopia are discredited at the same time, and they are not two antagonistic poles; to deny the one and the other has the same intention. The discrediting of memory means that it is unnecessary to recall the causes of the current effects. The important thing is the effects. Ask yourself why the world is badly made or why there is disorder. Why are Moroccans drowning in the Straits of Gibraltar trying to reach Europe? Why are there Somalis dying of hunger and the armies of the North mobilise to bring them sandwiches? Or why has this blatant division been reached between a small stronghold of Popperian open societies and an immense majority of stratified and closed societies? To ask what is the reason for these effects would mean finding a historical culpability for their causes. No-one is interested in memory or the role of history, or utopia, because in the name of an imperfect future it reveals the imperfections of the present and because many ferocious acts, many aggressions have been committed in its name.”
The demonstration is about to disperse. La Bonafini, the mother and leader, wields a megaphone and draws the political conclusion of the meeting: we will return so that our children are not erased from the memory of infamy. They were alive when they took them away from us. They must come back alive. In other towns around the world, other mothers are looking for their children. The barbarity of the system never ends. Carvalho and Alma cross the street that separates the demonstrators from the door of the Casa Rosada. Carvalho summons up all the images he has stored of one of the most famous government buildings in the world.”
Contributions
Memory
Flor de Nit. Dagoll Dagom. Ciutat del desig, ciutat de la memòria (song).
«Bolero o sobre la recuperación de los barrios históricos en las ciudades con vocación postmoderna». Short story included in Barcelona, un dia. Barcelona: Alfaguara, 1998.
“Sobre la memoria de la oposición antifranquista.” El País (26 October 1988): 36.
Interview with Leonardo Padura: “Reivindicación de la memoria. Entrevista con Manuel Vázquez Montalbán”, Quimera 106-107 (1991): 47-53.
Marta Beatriz Ferrari, “La ciudad de la memoria. En torno a “Praga” de Manuel Vázquez Montalbán” (PDF)
- Francesc Arroyo. «Entre la vida y la historia». El País Libros (20 February 1986): 12.
- Francesc Arroyo. «La última narración de Vázquez Montalbán, un paseo por la memoria de la guerra civil». El País (21 March 1985): 26.
- Joseba Gabilondo. «Olvidar a Galíndez: Violencia, otredad y memoria histórica en la globalización hispano-atlántica». Manuel Vázquez Montalbán: El compromiso con la memoria. Ed. and introduction: José F. Colmeiro. Woodbridge. Tamesis (2007), 159-183.
- Luis Martín-Cabrera «El No-Lugar: una lectura transatlántica de la memoria en Galíndez de Manuel Vázquez Montalbán». Revista de estudios hispánicos: 40, 3, (2006), 537-61.
- Anne-Sophie Owczarczak. «Manuel Vázquez Montalbán: La memoria más allá del silencio durante el franquismo» (PDF).
- Mónica Beatriz Musci. «Viajes, exilio y memoria en Milenio de Manuel Vázquez Montalbán».
- Joan Pere Tous. «Canción para después de una guerra: Música popular y memoria cultural en la poesía de Manuel Vázquez Montalbán». Vanguardia española e intermedialidad: Artes escénicas, cine y radio. Ed. Mechthild Albert. Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert (2005), 331-351.
- Wadda C. Rios-Font. «Quinteto de Buenos Aires: La educación sentimental de Pepe Carvalho». MVM. Cuadernos de Estudios Manuel Vázquez Montalbán: 5.1 (2020), 98-126.
- Georges Tyras. «Entre memoria y deseo: La poética de la huida en la obra de Vázquez Montalbán». Manuel Vázquez Montalbán: El compromiso con la memoria. Ed. and introduction: José F. Colmeiro. Woodbridge. Tamesis (2007), 105-116.
- José María Izquierdo. «Memoria y deseo. La poesía de Manuel Vázquez Montalbán». Romansk Forum: 6 (1997), 47-74.
- José Colmeiro. «Dissonant Voices: Memory and Counter-Memory in Manuel Vazquez Montalban’s Autobiografía del general Franco». Studies in 20th century literatura: 21.2 (1997), 337-360.
- Vernon, Kathleen M. «Memoria histórica y cultura popular: Vázquez Montalbán y la resistencia española». Manuel Vázquez Montalbán: El compromiso con la memoria. Ed. and introduction: José F. Colmeiro. Woodbridge. Tamesis (2007), 21-33.