The figures

Frau Wallies never leaves the house without her old white pram. Weighed down with ladders and assorted binoculars, she has been keeping watch in Valladolid for days. What is she looking for? She is awaiting the arrival of the angels!
Today is the day they will show their faces, the angels, here on the Calle de Jorge Guillén. Frau Wallies knows them well, the winged ones who once lived here in Valladolid and forged their careers. Many have departed, but have sent their words out into the world. Frau Wallies is also a writer, if not such a renowned one; she records her observations in a little notebook, and she gives the winged creatures names: Biding-Scribe, The Lonely Rose, Lecturer-Angel.

She has been looking for a particular angel for many years now, the one who should really be lying in her pram...
The Lecturer-Angel has the biggest wings! He always has his microphone to hand and likes to talk about beauty and the perfect form – for a poem or for society. He likes to listen to himself. Yet he was soon muted in Spain. He left the country in protest, like many others at the time, and was no longer heard. Forty years of silence. But his longing for a life in his home country was never muted. From town to town through the world / while the happy years / sprout from my roots / my deep Valladolid.(Jorge Guillén, 1893-1984)
Opposite him stands Biding-Scribe, who has not long been an angel but already has huge wings. Biding-Scribe stayed in Valladolid his whole life and continued to write even when this didn’t make things easy for him; he was born here and died here.
 

He was tough and wrestled with every word. His novels gave disadvantaged people a voice – children, the elderly and the disenfranchised. Frau Wallies calls him ‘Biding-Scribe the unbending’! He always wrote with a pen; never with a typewriter or a computer. ‘Machines make the heart cold,’ he said. While he was still a human being Biding-Scribe already had contact with angels; Ángeles was his wife and his inspiration. Frau Wallies is certain she will soon see them both together. (Miguel Delibes, 1920-2010)

The angel The Lonely Rose has her portable typewriter on her at all times, wherever she appears – always with roses in her hair. She fought against injustice in Spain, left her country and wrote in exile to conquer her loneliness. Her typewriter and books were her only friends. Her books were not published in her home country; no-one wanted her. Living abroad she was forced into jobbing writing and translation to keep her head above water. But exile and loneliness neither broke her nor silenced her. (Rosa Chacel 1898-1994)

Frau Wallies is very excited, because today she hopes to see the angel Vision-Transmission for the first time, an ancient and venerable female angel from the sixteenth century. Frau Wallies gave her this name on account of the many apparitions she experienced and recorded during her life as a Carmelite sister. She wanted to free people of their fear of an overpowering God, to establish him as a friend of humanity. To date her effervescent fountain of words and wisdom has inspired 13,000 sisters, who have answered her call in every continent, led to the founding of countless continents and resulted in translations of her work into around twenty-five languages.
In Valladolid too Vision-Transmission founded a convent. It exists to this day. (Teresa von Ávila, 1515-1582)

  

The angel True-to-Word will also make an appearance. Using a little rope and pulley he will deliver the people of Valladolid some unusual mail: his translation of the Song of Solomon from the Old Testament. Frau Wallies’s face may go a little red. In the sixteenth century the people did not just go red, they sent True-to-Word straight to prison, here in Valladolid, for four and a half years – just because he felt bound to the truth of the word of God. The bible in Spanish translation was acceptable – but strictly without erotica! The ways of the church are sometimes strange; True-to-Word was after all an Augustine monk. Frau Wallies intends to keep an eye on him. (Fray Luis de Léon, 1528-1591)
The Unnamed Angel always wanted to write. Again and again a new sheet, but the page stayed empty and ended up in the waste paper basket. How many of his heroes remained unnamed? How many stories were never concluded? How much paper screwed up and tossed away? He would have loved to work with the written word and use it to change the world. But he never succeeded. Again and again he let himself be discouraged, lacking the willpower; the willpower to bring a story into the world, to make a name for himself.

Herr Zwiebler, a firm acquaintance of Frau Wallies, is also on the look-out for angels in Valladolid today. With an eccentric funnel-like apparatus he climbs towards the angels on his ladder and captures their voices. And what do they want to tell us? We just have to listen carefully – not only with our ears, with our eyes too...