The love story of Mario Benedetti and his wife Luz Lopez was released in theaters in Spain, Mexico and Brazil with the documentary Benedetti: sixty years with Luzwhich reviews the life of the Uruguayan poet after his marriage.
The film reconstructs the sixty-year relationship between the writer and his wife, through interviews, unpublished documents and testimonies from friends of the couple, among them those of Cuban singer-songwriters. Silvio Rodriguez and Pablo Milanés or the former Uruguayan president Jose Mujica.
The relationship, as if taken from “those fairy tales between teenagers who are neighbors, between one house and the other,” was marked from its beginnings by a “magical charm,” explained the director of the documentary. Andres Varela.
Mario and Luz met when they were teenagers through his parents, a biochemist and a rentier who had become friends thanks to their shared love of art. “Mario enters Luz’s family and creates a place of comfort, as a friend first and as a partner later,” says Varela, who believes that Luz stimulated the “curiosity” of the writer, who had to leave school at the age of 14 to help his family financially, but he was always a great self-taught person.
In addition to being his greatest inspiration – he dedicated nearly forty works to him -, from the beginning of the relationship, Luz acted as Benedetti’s great economic, literary and vital support: a work that, with the critical and sales success of the fifties, only intensified.
“When Mario finds recognition there is a very great gesture of generosity on the part of Luz, who gives up part of her life to accompany Mario. She never intended to be a recognized artist or to make a living from that, but she gives up her artistic possibilities to accompany him loyally,” says the director.
The film details how, often, The salary that Luz received as a customs official was Benedetti’s only financial support.who between 1973 and 1985 was exiled in four different countries – Argentina, Peru, Cuba and Spain – due to threats from the Uruguayan civil-military dictatorship.
The writer and his wife remained separated for most of that time, a situation even more difficult due to the advanced age of their mothers, of whom Luz had to take care of herself in the forced absence of her husband.
The return of democracy to Uruguay was also that of Benedetti, who agreed with Luz that from that moment on they would spend half a year in Montevideo and half a year in Madrid. This arrangement was maintained for nearly two decades and was only broken when Luz was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, a disease that took its toll on her memory and that Benedetti lived as a “tragedy”.
“When death brings with it the oblivion of the person you love and whom you are devotedly accompanying in their last moments and that person does not know who you are… And it was the person who accompanied you throughout your life and suddenly you accompany that… I think that Mario was not prepared for that,” summarizes Varela.
Luz died in 2006 -three years before Mario-, but her “gigantic and definitive” influence still lives on in Benedetti’s narrative and, by extension, in universal literature and in the hearts of millions of readers around the world.
Source: EFE
