ANNE PLANTAZEN
The one and only Maria Cazares
translated by Yannis Strigos
ed.. Pataki, 2022, p. 287.

Absolutely devoted to the theater, she is recognized, she triumphs. At the same time, despite fierce resistance, she submits to her love for Camus.

“She didn’t go through so many trials to fully submit to universal goodwill and availability.” “She” is Maria Cazares, “everyone” is Albert Camus. His good will is that they should be together, live this precious love that they feel, share days, nights, moments, dream of a common life, full of only the two of them. Camus’ accessibility is defined, changeable, dependent on marriage and family life, which he intends to maintain, not disturb, protected from passion, self-affirmation, the presence of Cazares. Now it is known – after the reversal of the correspondence they exchanged for fifteen years, almost as long as their relationship lasted – their relationship, a cannibalistic coexistence for both of them, full of tension, impulse, paranoia, addiction, love. .

Ann Plantazin decides to recreate Cazares’ life in a cinematic way. We meet her at the age of twelve, hunched over her mother, waiting for the train that will take them to the safety of France after the establishment of Franco’s dictatorship. And we watch her grow, become independent, struggle to integrate and accept, remain attached to a deep, essential, unbreakable relationship with her mother, to admiration, respect and love that remain unchanged for her father. Gradually, the path of Cazares to the legend is revealed. Absolutely devoted to the theater, she is recognized, held, triumphant. Her life acquires the brilliance and originality of a truly great actress who tames difficult roles, surrenders to the stage, and submits to art. She submits, despite violent resistance, to her love for Camus. He claims the first role in his life, but cannot have it. They part, and she is carried away for many years, furiously avoiding even a chance meeting with him, just a sudden, unexpected meeting between them will become a new starting point, which will end only with his death.

How does Camus, a genius, a unique, absolute intellectual greatness, maintain such an extremely conservative behavior that leads him to a parallel life with Cazares and many other women, refusing to divorce? The answer would be given years later by his daughter, saying that her father wanted in this way to respect, by remaining, the word he gave to the woman he married. And Cazares? An uncontrollable, independent, undisciplined woman, moreover, with a stormy love life, agrees to the role of a hidden and at the same time such an open mistress? We are full of contradictions, and this is the beauty, the disappointment, the truth of each of us. As did she. She learns that love is enough for her, Camus teaches her to live in the present, not to ask for obligations and prospects, to be content with the fact that dawn finds them together, traveling around Venice.

No aspect of Cazares’ life was left unexplained in Plantazin’s book. She is a beloved daughter, Vitolinia for her father, a mainstay for her beautiful, elegant, incomprehensible mother, a girl who lives the unconventional, complicated life of her parents, who pretend to be a couple and die, leaving her tragically lonely and inconsolable. She is a passionate actress, completely devoted to roles, on the theater stage, on film sets, in radio recordings. But most of all, this is a woman in love who is trying to avoid her catalytic emotions in order to maintain what she defines as self-respect, pride, dignity. He won’t make it. She will exchange everything for the love of Camus, who adores her, is frankly jealous of her, offers her his life, writing to her that she is the meaning of life.

The sable fur coat that her mother brought with her into exile would be a spectacular, sparkling coat in social life, on cold Parisian nights it would cover her in a dream. Of the earth with which Camus was covered, she asked to bring her a handful. Now she was all alone.