The recently published lectures and poems by the writer are an essential complement to her fiction and essays.

Carmen Martín Gaite (1925-2000) loved to talk, narrate out loud. The presence of another, the listener who watches and reacts or the hypothetical and ghostly reader, was the source of legitimacy of the story and its driving force, its determining cause and its ultimate destination. The spoken word acquired its full meaning if it was shared, and in that sharing it flowed, matched the rhythm and enthusiasm of the addressee to cradle or stir him up, to strike his emotional chords, persuade him or captivate him with the irresistible enchantment of the voice.

She wrote about this many times from 1966 (the date of her brief essay “La búsqueda de interlocutor”) and until her untimely death in 2000.  But of all that she has written, an unfinished essay (because it is endless) that she titled in 1983 “El cuento de nunca acabar,” subtitled “Apuntes sobre la narración, el amor y la mentira,” stands out for its beauty. Until then, the writer had hardly had to face a different and plural listener, that of the conference rooms, in whose thousand eyes it is impossible to scrutinize the reaction of complicity or disgust, of assent or disagreement. Since then, that expectant mass of people would often be her verbal dance partner.

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