The Algerian writer living in France, Albert Camus, and the Spanish actress naturalized as French, María Caseres, met in March 1944 at the home of the ethnographer Michel Leiris.
However, they reunited on June 6, the day of the Normandy landings. From then on, they became lovers.
She was 21. He had just turned 30 and was married to Francine Faure, a mathematician and pianist who had been trapped in Oran, Algeria, for a couple of years due to the German occupation.
However, at the end of 1944, Francine returns. Then, Maria decides to leave and Camus writes her a heartbreaking letter in which he says goodbye to her, asking her to “don’t forget to be great.”
María never forgot: she studied drama and later forged a wonderful career as a theater actress. She was admired by Sartre, Koltès, and Copi. She was nicknamed the "great lady of 20th-century theater." She was vibrant, free, and daring. She was decorated with the French Legion of Honor, and the Galician theater awards now bear her name.
While Maria focused on her, Francine and Camus became parents to twins, Jean and Catherine.
But a few years later, María and Camus meet again; they never stopped thinking about each other, so they make “an irrevocable decision”: to love each other for the rest of their lives, even if it is only as… lovers.
For more than a decade, they met in different countries but also spent long periods apart, which is why they exchanged 865 letters, in which all their feelings, past and present, are expressed in the words "present."
I remember being moved to tears by the first letters I read. It seemed like a deep, free, understanding love that knew how to do what I've never learned: wait.
“I love you, I admire you, I desire you, and I will wait for you a lifetime with the same calm and passionate love. Do not doubt anything, your certainty can be total and secure. Live, work, become even greater, be beautiful to me from time to time, in the solitude of your room, and let us wait for this spring, when I will have you again, kissing you at last as I would like to do at this moment.”
“Don't retreat unless you have to. Live, be dazzling and curious, seek beauty, read what you like, and when the pause comes, turn to me, for I will always be turned to you.”
But nothing is ever so idyllic. Human beings are also the shadows that make us up:
“Do you know what it means to a loving person who is dying of absolute need to come home every night to imagine scenes of intimacy, even affection, taking place elsewhere? Do you know what it means to me to imagine you saying, 'Francine, could you please turn on the lamp?' It drives me crazy.” He writes a jealous, wounded Maria, who yearns for the everyday life she will never have, because yes, although it may sound strange, all or almost all of us women who were once lovers suffer imagining the other person and their wife in everyday life, not in intimacy.
Camus's guilt also appears for cheating on his wife, a sick woman who, obviously, already knew of Maria's existence:
“A heart of your quality is poorly able to defend itself against suffering. I wish you would ask me for anything difficult and exhausting: to work in a mine, to climb the Himalayas, to care for lepers, but you don't ask me for anything, only that I love you, and you don't even ask me for that because you're so sure of it. You know I love you. I feel miserable for hurting you like this.”
But he also blames him for not letting Maria, who accepted and then rejected two marriage proposals, live her love life differently:
“I am preventing you from finding a free and fruitful love without these servitudes that I will always have (…) Even so, my truest and most instinctive wish is that, after me, no man would touch you again. But who am I to ask for that?”
Maria jumps from anger to compassion, from longing to resignation: “It makes me so sad when I think of Francine and you. Take care of her and give yourself to her completely. I'll wait for you… For now, forget me. Live, fight, settle into the life you're given, make those around you happy, fear nothing.”
And yes, in reality, he always expected it: “I thought about the children I could have had… Sometimes I think about them, about our children, with painful melancholy… but I want them much less as my children than as your children, as our children.”
However, Camus never left Francine's side. In fact, in 1957, he traveled with her to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. But as soon as he arrived in Stockholm, he sent a telegram to Maria:
"I'm kissing you like I could melt all the snow in Sweden. I've never missed you so much."
How can you be physically next to one person and mentally with another?
In 1959, while Maria spends Christmas alone, sad, listening to Edith Piaf, longing to see “her skirts and Camus’s jackets on the same rack”, he goes on a trip with Francine and the children, but promises to look for her upon his return:
“I’m so happy to see you again that writing this makes me laugh.”
And… that was his last letter. On January 4, 1960, the car in which Camus was returning to Paris to see his Maria crashed into a tree, and he died instantly.
Many years later, Camus's daughter, Catherine, wanted to meet María Casares. They met at a hotel in Nice, where they drank hot chocolate and spoke openly:
“My mother was ill, and abandoning her would have been dishonorable. Then there was my brother and me. Before she died, my mother told us, 'I have no regrets about your father. He was never mediocre.' But we all know that my father's true love was always Maria.”, Catherine explained.
Some time later, Maria called Catherine to ask her permission to sell her father's love letters because she was in desperate need of money.
Catherine decided to buy them and keep them in a bag for 30 years:
"In 2016, I thought no one would remember María Caseres and the wonderful woman she was. Their letters make the earth seem larger, the space brighter, the air lighter simply because they existed.
Catherine loved her mother and hated that her father made her suffer beyond imagination. But she also knew that her father loved Maria and suffered terribly being away from her.
Complex, isn't it? It seems that adulthood brings us new understandings, and loyalties are no longer the same. Cheers!
By: Jessica Dos Santos /Instagram: Jessidossantos13
Tell me your story, write it however you like, together we shape it and share it. In life, spreading the different forms of love is always necessary: lasultimasnoticiasdelamor@gmail.com
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