The Diplomat in Spain

Angel Manuel Ballesteros

Writer and diplomat

Certainly our diplomatic writers do not figure among the deities of a literary Olympus. But, on top of their outstanding level, this is it. And this is what we have to honour, at least so we should.

They are not in the places of honour that occupy our Gallic neighbours, from the Nobel Saint-John Perse to Paul Claudel, through the nationalized Romain Gary, who twice won the Goncourt presenting himself as a different person, in a tradition that starts from Stendhal , Chateaubriand, Lamartine, De Maistre, Gobineau… We have to remember Espronceda, although he exercised very little as secretary in The Hague, or go back to Quevedo.

Of course, if we were to dive into history, the Italians would invoke their unbeatable triad: Dante, Petrarca and Bocaccio. And even our language siblings, with the Nobel Prize winners Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Miguel Angel Asturias, overtake us in the almost magical line that Rubén Darío or Amado Nervo marked.

Our invariable triad, unanimously quoted, is limited to Varela, Foxá and Edgar Neville, a novelist, a poet and a comedian.

About Agustín de Foxá almost everything is already said, despite the immense wealth as exuberant personality that accumulates his short life of 53 years, but the 60th anniversary of his death, this June, is an inescapable, gratifying invitation to remember him.

As I said before, and because of its relevance, our triad must always be honoured and it is necessary to know everything about them in the name of culture, a supreme value also in diplomacy. Hence, if one of our ambassadors said that a good director of the Diplomatic School would be me, we can not congratulate that director who acknowledged in a conference that the very cultured partner of the Count of Berlanga del Duero, later renowned actress, also prepared Oppositions to diplomatic, which naturally is not serious but it does not look good if I allow, and more in these times of happy feminism at all costs where I, as appropriate, I put myself at the feet of our partners.

Great poet, almost Parnassian in his sublime Melancolía del atardecer (Melancholy of sunset); also to mention, although literarily minor, his Brindis a la Carrera (Toast to the Service): “I chose to join the service as a poet”; author of definitive words and concepts: ¨If you die Abdelaziz on the furrows of Spain, the poets of Castile will tell you in brave language: you also have your Spanish star of toasted skin¨; semipolitical atemporal: ¨if they tell you that I fell, I went to the position that I have there¨. And always singing to the foreign service, from his shoulder pads snowed with dandruff and with his heart: “with the crazy compass but fixed faith”, which could be taken by one of the most heartfelt and accurate definitions of the foreign service.

As an official, he had rather minor positions and was not very disciplined. I remember hearing that he was somewhat moved when he became minister (presumably in third grade, which entitles him to insist on the convenience of suppressing ranks leaving only the title of plenipotentiary minister, as perhaps the old office of the legate should have prevailed in the terminology on the most improper ambassador (one of whose first and confused etymologies, ambactus, refers to some type of servant) and include the denial of Vilallonga, with which we would have counted on having followed the instructions of his father to become diplomat. Another triad, that I put together in my Elegance, dandyism and diplomacy, with Neville and Villapadierna, of which we know that “he sat for a diplomat exam”.

Well, just to mention Vilallonga’s denial that Malaparte and Foxá, his cousin, knew each other in Finland as the people assure and all that my much-quoted and copied Tuscan about the coup d’état, and even improved, Hitler was not caricature of Mussolini but on the contrary, I maintain, says the count in Kaputt, The pìel or The traitor, ¨ is invented by my admired fabulador like Malraux, although the surprising thing is that if it had been true, the terms would have been similar¨.

Another day we will return to this curious episode.

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