In October of last year my wife and I paid our last visit to our old friend Vicente Aleixandre, in that dark suburban house, formerly Velintonia 3, where he had lived for so many years, interrupted only by its partial destruction in the last stages of the Civil War. It was then in the front line for the defence of Madrid. Now, to our taxi driver's confusion, the street had recently been renamed after the poet himself. The house was now Vicente Aleixandre 3. It was many years since our first visit. Then, in 1956, he had still been living in official isolation, a writer unmentioned in the licensed Press. Now he was honoured as the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1977. He was the great old man of Spanish letters, to whom the King and Queen had brought his Nobel medal, since he was not strong enough to go to Stockholm to receive it. But renown had not affected his innate modesty.

Don Vicente at eighty-six was already very weak on that October morning. He was to die six weeks later. But he welcomed us as ever. His voice was indistinct, and he had physically sunk into himself. Nevertheless we talked for half an hour, remembering past visits and, as always, he dropped in an occasional phrase from his very scant English. He spoke with enthusiasm of the younger poets whom I must read: Colinas and Siles. 'I still manage to keep up ...