Concha Alós, two-time Planeta prize winner, marked by exes and saved by friends

PalmaLet's do an exercise. If we refer to Concha Alós, who recognizes this name? And to introduce her, which title sounds more familiar: that of former partner of the writer and journalist Baltasar Porcel or that of double winner of the Planeta prize in the midst of Francoism (a merit that she alone holds, by the way). The moment of change she had to live through, the sexist punishment, and her Alzheimer's contributed to the fact that today we still do not study Alós the same way as her contemporaries of the Mid-Century Generation –that of the 50s or the Children of the War–, such as Carmen Martín Gaite, Ana María Matute, and Carmen Laforet, and much less than them, Camilo José Cela, Juan Marsé, and the Goytisolo brothers. Alós was born in Valencia in 1922, lived in Palma in the 50s, and died in Barcelona in 2011, where she would have ended up buried in a mass grave if it hadn't been for the fact that she had a very good friend: Maria del Mar Bonet.

“Concha was a friend of my parents and used to come to our house. She was not a mother, and it was as if my brother and I were her children. Later, in 1960, she left for Barcelona, where she lived with Baltasar Porcel. And when I went there to study ceramics, we would see each other at her place –first, in Vallvidrera and later, in Gràcia– with Toni Catany, of whom she ended up being even closer friends, actually,” the artist recalls. “We were also united by painter and writer friends from the Barcelona scene of that time. It was a state of affairs that was part of the time we had to live through: the death of Franco, the path toward democracy, the Transition…”, Bonet points out. In common, however, they also had censorship: “It was everywhere. The people who painted, who wrote, who made songs knew it, but we had our strategies.”

When both were still living in Palma, the singer's parents were a great support for Alós regarding the separation from her husband, Eliseo Feijóo, director of the newspaper Baleares, where he was a colleague of Joan Bonet. Alós arrived in Mallorca with Feijóo in 1948 and, a decade later, left him to start a relationship with Baltasar Porcel –who also worked at the newspaper as a proofreader–, at a time when divorce was not legal and adultery was a crime. “She fought to make a life for herself and get out of that marriage. She was able to do it that way: she separated and left, but he made it very difficult for her,” explains Bonet, who still remembers with joy the moment she saw the writer walk through the door with Porcel. Alós was nine years younger than her ex-husband, but 15 years older than her new partner, and that also influenced the relationship: “Concha helped him a great deal in the publishing world. She had a background as a writer who was getting published,” he clarifies.

“She was a very cultured and very advanced person. She had a perspective that we still need today. I do not understand how, awarded as she was, at a time when it was not common as a woman, more justice was not done to her as a writer,” the artist denounces. “Her separation took its toll on her and afterwards she suffered from a very long illness, which left her without friends. When she died, Toni Catany and I found out that they wanted to bury her in a mass grave, and we did everything necessary so that she would be buried all alone,” he states.

Concha Alós reached a historic milestone and, even now, her trajectory seems inseparable from her sentimental life and the men who accompanied her, as often happens with female figures. For this reason, her biographer, the retired professor from the Jaume I University Amparo Ayora, has taken it upon herself to ensure she has a history of her own that turns her into almost a feat. “She came from a working-class, republican family, from the lowest social stratum. Her mother and her grandmother were prostitutes. And the man who gave her his surname was not her biological father,” says Ayora. According to the researcher, it was her intelligence that catapulted her: she started by writing chronicles and articles for the newspaper Baleares, about fashion and parades, and ended up being a two-time winner of the Planeta award. Although the first time, with Los enanos (1962), the award was challenged because Plaza & Janés claimed the rights—Alós had submitted the manuscript to the publisher and at first they rejected it for having ideas that were too socialist—, two years later she won it officially with Las hogueras (1964).

Writer and feminist in the 50s

Along with her life, Ayora has researched her work, framed within the genre of social realism: “The realist novel serves as a historical document. It was very faithful: it uses exact locations and the names of real people”. All of this has provided her with enough knowledge to reflect on the decline of her figure: “The main reason that explains it is the fact of being a woman and speaking as clearly as she did –on topics such as female desire, abortion, and prostitution. The change in literary fashions also affected her: they reproached her for writing in a commercial way, for Planeta, and that Alzheimer's had affected her –even though it did not manifest until she was 90. But a key figure in her decline was Porcel, for whom she had translated books into Spanish and had acted as a literary agent, introducing him to everyone. He not only left her –to pair up with Maria-Àngels Roque–, but after separating, they stopped asking her for collaborations and she did not write again for La Vanguardia, where he held a lot of power. The articles were a source of money for her and, even, she fell into financial difficulties. Concha went from being at every fair, signing at Galerías Preciados, and being a prize juror to disappearing from the literary scene”.

Ayora highlights the weight of sexism in her life: “All her city changes are marked by her relationships with men. She leaves Valencia for Castelló due to a job change for her mother's husband. After marrying Eliseo Feijóo, she goes to Mallorca because he is transferred. And, finally, she ends up in Barcelona because of Baltasar.” Nevertheless, we find the feminist discourse both in her books and in her life story: “It is as if she were saying ‘life has hit me so many times that I have learned to defend myself all on my own’,” maintains the researcher, who has accompanied her like another friend from a distance, but across time, and who was the last one to rescue her completely. Once the concession for the niche that Maria del Mar and Joan Ramon Bonet had secured for her expired—and on the verge of ending up in a mass grave again—Ayora made the necessary arrangements with the Castelló City Council so that Concha Alós's remains would end up in the place where she grew up. Thanks to her, since 2022, it is possible to visit her grave at the city's Old Cemetery, which has been turned into a small memorial.

Cultural Alzheimer's

The genealogy of women like Concha Alós would not be possible without friends like Maria del Mar Bonet or researchers like Amparo Ayora, but neither without new generations of writers who keep her legacy alive, as Llucia Ramis has done. For the 2024 reissue of Las hogueras –on the 60th anniversary of its publication–, Seix Barral commissioned the prologue from Ramis, who had already championed Alós's figure on a TV3 program and in an article in La Vanguardia. “In Las hogueras everything is there: the identity of Mallorca, the language, mass tourism, elitism, the territory, female desire… And all this at a time when it was not spoken about. She had this perspective that continues to be relevant today,” points out Ramis, who describes this “cultural Alzheimer’s” towards Alós as a “lack of respect”.

“Memory has been respectful of Baltasar Porcel and not of Concha Alós. I believe that knowing nothing about her has made us know an incomplete Porcel and ignore that she was present in many aspects of his work,” she adds. “If we had given relevance to this work, perhaps things would have been different for women. It is as if we were always starting over,” laments the author, who attributes it “to the literary system” and also to the fact that “feminist works were belittled.” Be that as it may, Ramis clarifies that Alós has “a universal perspective,” only that “we are accustomed to the male perspective and voice,” and insists that she saw “what would be the great literary themes and still are.” “A writer can do two things: go down to posterity or transcend their time. And Concha transcended her time,” she concludes.

She published in Spanish, but taught in Catalan

Although Concha Alós only published in Spanish, her biographer, Amparo Ayora, ensures that she used Catalan in her day-to-day life. “She considered that she did not have enough training to write in Catalan, but she did translations from one language to the other,” she points out. Likewise, when she worked as a teacher in the 50s in Can Picafort and Santa Maria, “she had to teach classes in Catalan, in a mixture of dialects, because the poor children did not understand any Spanish at all.” Ayora's research will be published this autumn in book format under the title Las ciudades de Concha Alós, with the Valencian publisher Vincle.