Photo: Uly Martín
Today I sing of your profile and grace.
Of the maturity of your understanding.
(Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, Federico García Lorca)
Antonio Fernández Alba would have deserved a poet to be present in this sad ceremony of farewells, because his biographical and intellectual journey was a lyrical and artistic adventure. In a different century he would have perhaps been known as Antonio de Salamanca, because it was from his Castilian roots that he got the ascetic aplomb of his figure. Tall and slim, sheathed in gray suits tailored with precision, and with a Roman senator’s head that inspired respect before even starting to address a matter in his deep voice, he wielded his spiritual aristocracy with a generosity that did not exclude caustic criticism. At 96, short of his centenarian parents, Antonio left us on 7 May, comforted by his daughters but in the searing absence of his wife, a casualty of the pandemic.
Some will talk about his buildings, from the convents in Salamanca to the university works in half of Spain, and bring up the fortitude that combined his organic fidelities with the silent monumentality of his later years; others will speak of the devotion to history that came to the fore in his interventions on heritage sites, from the San Marcos Clerecía to the Enlightenment works in the Salón del Prado area, and remember his architectural dialogues with Villanueva, Hermosilla, or Sabatini; still others will praise his extraordinary teachings, which regenerated the Madrid school with ideas and forms, and retrieve from memory the chalk dust erased from blackboards where he abbreviated the outlines of El Escorial or the Alhambra; and there will be those who will enumerate his numerous writings, his severe articles, and the poetic, hermetically titled books, pretending that some of his lessons and his figure survives in the printed word; but I will here only write on his personal elegance, because “we came not to listen to the teacher but to see how he ties his sandals,” and the life example that Fernández Alba gave is a mark of his intellectual independence and his civic sensibility. Upon the death of his bullfighter friend, Lorca remembered him “with weeping words,” the same we want to use today.
Our steps crossed since my early times in the architecture school, when I was a young teacher in his chair; together we organized seminars at Menéndez Pelayo University in Toledo, Santander, or Seville; I went with him to the Ministry of Culture during Javier Solana’s brief but fertile tenure; some of his titles were published by Blume on my watch; we coincided at the sessions of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts; and all this while, my wife Maite and I enjoyed the friendship of Antonio and Enriqueta: a couple of exceptional refinement and spirit whose footprint now fades with their ashes, leaving no room for the false consolation of legacy and oeuvre, laying bare the fragility of existence and the inevitability of oblivion. “And I shall go. And the birds will remain, singing.”
