In the summer of 1929, my aunt Zarita Nahon, a philologist and teacher of languages, traveled from Biarritz to Hendaye, en route to Tangier to collect the medieval Spanish balladry, lost in Spain but still extant in the coastal cities of Morocco, for the anthropologist Franz Boas. She was making a detour to visit Miguel de Unamuno—scholar, poet, and philosopher—who had chosen Hendaye ville, as poor and barren as Hendaye plage was rich and elegant, for his exile.

Walking through the dirty streets, crowded with poorly dressed women and children and smelling of frying oil, she found it inconceivable that this great writer could have been expelled from his position as rector of the historic Spanish university at Salamanca, because of his opposition to Alfonso XIII and his prime minister, Primo de Rivera. Unamuno loved Spain as a patriot, a champion of personal and intellectual liberty, not as a political partisan. What could he be doing in this drab little town? Had he buried himself in his books, looking sadly and hopelessly to Spain? His letters to my aunt had given her no clue.

Miguel de Unamuno had been condemned to 16 years in prison for lèse majesté, a sentence that was never carried out, and taken on 24-hour notice under guard to Fuerteventura island—”a bit of the Sahara in the Atlantic Ocean,” he had described it. The Spanish government had suggested to him that he could easily escape to Portugal, but he refused, preferring the dignity of exile. “If I return to Spain,” he would tell my aunt, “it will be to accuse.”

At the end of a cobbled street, the Avenue Pierre Loti, my aunt found Unamuno’s house—a small, green-shuttered cottage surrounded by a tidy garden. There a bright-eyed Spanish maid told her, “No, el señor Unamuno no está. He is in the cafe. Oh, he does not return until night. El cafe Central, on the square. It is not hard to find.” The cafe was dirty, dark, disreputable, and very noisy. The noise came from a table where Unamuno—powerful, wiry, blue-eyed, and tanned—was arguing with a half-dozen men in work clothes—intellectual and proletarian in debate. On seeing my aunt, Unamuno said a few words to his worker friends, who quickly moved to other tables. Then, almost without prelude, he launched into a discourse on my ancestors, who had written their books and sung their songs in Toledo, and stood in the court of the Catholic kings until the Inquisition drove them out of a Spain they never forgot.

My aunt, who held court in a New York apartment until she died quietly at age. 102, remembered that “Unamuno’s eyes never left mine. When Don Miguel spoke to you, he did not talk at you but into you. He was most interested not in what he was saying but in what you were thinking and feeling, and how you reacted to his words. He loved people as much as he loved ideas.”

My aunt Zarita was more interested in Unamuno’s views about the coming revolution in Spain, about America, about what he was doing, than about her ancestors. She knew all about them. When she mentioned America, he laughed. “Every summer, a man brings over a caravan of teachers to Hendaye,” he said. “Recently I took occasion to ask them about some American writers—Parkman, Henry Adams, others. They did not know of them. That puzzled me.” He could not understand how teachers, entrusted with the education of the young, could be ignorant of their own writers, their own culture. And he was amused because he realized that all they knew of him was what the guide told them. “Ten minutes with a philosopher named Oo-na-moo-no,” he parodied, “and then we will look at a church.”

When my aunt referred to King Alfonso, Unamuno made a small gesture. “Es un bucólico, y más, un mentiroso“—he is a bumpkin, and more, a liar. “He never tells the truth, or if he does it is because he does not know that it is the truth. But after all, he is a Hapsburg, a foreigner.” (The pun then current among anti-monarchists was that Alfonso was Spain’s Bourbonic plague.) As for Primo de Rivera, who tried too ineptly to save the monarchy, “he hasn’t many ideas and he is un envidioso“—an envious man. “That is a very Spanish trait.” He thought for a moment and then added, “The French attribute all our troubles to le clergé. Le clergé! But it would be more correct to say the military. Is there anything more stupid, more pompous, in all of Spain than the military?”

“How is it, Don Miguel,” my aunt asked, “that a professor of Greek literature should have political convictions strong enough to arouse Alfonso and Rivera?”

“I have no political program. But the national problem, the regeneration of Spain, concerns many of us. I am not interested in legal or state remedies. With Ganivet, I go directly to the people, to the race and its spirit. To renew their ideas, to burn those ideas into their souls, to spiritualize them—that is what I would do, what I am trying to do even here in Hendaye,” said the author of El sentimiento trdgico de la vida.

“Utopia?” my aunt murmured.

“Yes! Utopia!” he said emphatically. “We need Utopias and Utopians. They are the salt of the spirit.”

He was quiet for a moment, then he said, “Conversation is more fruitful than meditation. The reactions of those with whom I talk force me to adjust to them or to resist them. I am stimulated by provocation or dissent.” What he missed most in his exile, he told my aunt, was la pared—the wall against which he could throw his ideas and watch them rebound. “I remember one day walking, with a friend and discussing some topic. He pressed me with his objections. I answered him and then shouted gleefully, ‘What a good answer I’ve given you! How exact! How to the point.’

“My friend laughed at what he thought was my vanity. But, you see, my answer had surprised me. La pared. ‘The fact is,’ I said to my friend, ‘that what I just said to you is as new to me as it is to you. I must have had the solution in mind, but it was vague and confused. Just making the effort to overcome your objections made it take form and reveal itself to me.’

“In our written work as well as in conversation,” he continued, “we repeat ourselves. Don’t you think that the successive works of a great writer often happen to be no more than successive editions, more or less altered, of the same book? The more original a writer is and the more he probes within, the more he repeats himself. The greatest geniuses have been people of few and simple ideas, expressed in superb form. So any book—whether it be a novel, an essay, or a poem—is only the same fundamental thought developed in multiple forms. And so a writer, in his attempt to transmit that central thought, goes on encircling it more and more, finding new forms of expression and searching for the most exact. When this writer, any writer, has found the most permanent form, he survives.”

When my aunt, who had read much of Unamuno’s writings, confessed to a lack of familiarity with his poetry, Don Miguel was a little hurt. Poetry, he said, was his greatest passion. In his poems, he felt, he had expressed the richest and most intimate part of himself, of his sensibility and spirit. Almost sadly, he deplored the fame that had come from his other work. And diffidently, a slight flush on his face, he took a small notebook from his pocket.

“I am preparing a cancionero,” he said. “May I read you this poem that I just wrote?”

“The strong, quixotic, combative Miguel de Unamuno,” my aunt recalled years later, “disappeared and the mystic took his place.”

He read delicately, the emotion surging through the rhythms of Spanish verse. He read another poem and another, ending with the evocation of the painting of Christ by Velázquez that hangs in the Prado. That painting he considered the highest artistic expression of Catholicism, of “that Christ who is always dying but never dies.” He allowed my aunt to take down a few of the verses, and she remembered one of them when she stood before the Velázquez Christ in the Prado:

O es que una nube negra de los cielos

ese negror le dió a tu cabellera

de nazareno, cual de mústio sáuce

de una noche sin luna sobre el río . . .

In Salvador de Madariaga’s somewhat romanticized translation:

Or was it then that’a black cloud from Heaven

Such blackness gave to your Nazarene’s hair.

As of a languid willow o’er the river

Brooding in moonless night?

They were interrupted by an affectionate “Que tal, Don Miguel” from a student who had come to talk to him. Don Miguel stood up to give him an abrazo and my aunt left. Two years later, the royal car of Alfonso XIII passed through Hendaye carrying into exile the Hapsburg dynasty. Miguel de Unamuno returned to a Spain that did not share his vision and that in five years would be torn by civil war.

There is a footnote. Decades later, my aunt Zarita turned over to me what she had set down of that conversation with Unamuno and a few of his letters. I gave her a copy of his Cancionero, the deeply moving poems he had written in celebration of his love of Spain and of the Catholic Christ—a small paperbound book I had picked up in some bookstall, I do not remember where. She turned the pages slowly, reading, and then she looked up at me with a lovely smile.

“He must have remembered,” she said. “I told him of those old Spanish ballads, the romances, which I was planning to collect in Tangier. I told him how my mother sang them to me when I was a child. And here it is—’la voz de Estrella.'” My grandmother Estrella had sung them to me as well.