Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Nonfiction
The True-Life Story of Mari Carmen Flores Aizpuru, Partner and Lover to Famed Spanish Abstract Painter Bonifacio Alfonso.
In 1964, as Spain was thirty years deep under the rule of Francoism, a poor painter came to sit at the table of a well-heeled couple who owned a popular fish and tackle shop in San Sebastian. He’d gotten to know them making modest publicity for their store and they had come to like him. Every week for a year he joined the couple at their lunch table over cod with salsa verde or marmitako. They told stories, laughed, and became good friends.
One day, the painter told the husband, “I can’t come anymore. I’m in love with your wife.” When the husband related the story with shock to his wife, she shook her head in surprise. But inside her, a siren went off.
She loved her husband and they had a pleasant, happy life. The morning of their marriage, they had skipped the traditional fasting required for communion at their Catholic wedding ceremony, feasted like rebels in the Donastian woods on a lunch of croquetas con bacalao and merluza a la vasca and had gone swimming in the bay just before the church ceremony. He was wealthy, respectable, and he loved and cared for her.
Despite all of this, she realized that she, too, had fallen in love – with the humble painter.
She tried to wish it away with no success. She went to stay at a farm, hoping the passion would subside. Nothing worked. All she could think of and hope for was the tall, broad-shouldered, messy-haired, roman-nosed, half-gypsy, one-time bullfighter, occasional-jazzman turned painter. Eventually she told her husband and they agreed she must seek out the man she’d fallen in love with. She left with only the clothes on her back.
When she boarded the train to go to him, her mother spat at her, hissing the word salvaje – savage – at her daughter for leaving her marriage and running off with a broke, eccentric, and unreliable man.
Her name was Mari Carmen Flores Aizpuru, known simply to all who knew her as Flores. And he, Bonifacio Alfonso, also known simply by his first names, became the love of her life.
Bonifacio would later become a key player in Spain’s burgeoning abstract art scene, alongside the likes of Antonio Saura, Gerardo Rueda, Manolo Millares, Eusebio Sempere, and Gustavo Torner. But they didn’t know it that first night they spent together in Bilbao, where she watched him paint from the bed in a boarding house room. She didn’t know yet the journey that awaited her. She knew only she had left everything behind and in a single day, was forever changed in who she knew herself to be. Someone who would choose love over safety, who would risk everything for an uncertain but authentic life with a man she loved.
Shortly thereafter, their lives took a turn. After years of living on the margins, in 1967 Bonifacio sold his first painting to a well-known philanthropist of the arts, Fernando Zóbel, who had recently founded the Spanish Abstract Art Museum in Cuenca. An abstract scene was exploding there, and Zóbel encouraged the new couple to relocate so Bonifacio could focus on his painting with other contemporaries. The mountain town was not far from Madrid, and was known for its iconic “hanging houses,” the casas colgadas similar to the one where Flores would spend the next 50 years of her life.
Together they became central figures in the burgeoning Cuenca art community. This wasn’t just any art community: these were Spain’s most renowned painters, who to this day are unparalleled in post-war abstract art. The circle of Spanish painters Bonifacio joined was formed in rebellion to the oppressive Franco regime.
They lived without speaking of Franco. To speak of Franco was risky. But their art spoke volumes. Franco’s men had murdered Bonifacio’s father in Bilbao and imprisoned Flores’ father; like most people, they lived in fear of Franco’s repressive, authoritarian rule. Still they resisted – and as they did, they created art that bore witness to Spain’s journey.
Bonifacio was mercurial, a heavy drinker who lived hard and played hard. Flores saw beyond his demons. For her, he was a door between worlds. He revealed a new universe to her, brought her into life, woke her to art and passion. He understood she was as radical and unbound by rules as he was, at a time when Spain lived under the brutal rule of a brutal dictator.
As Bonifacio began to experience success, his paintings were presented by premier galleries and museums across Spain and beyond, featured in exhibits and collections in Madrid, Oslo, Paris, Stuttgart, Amsterdam and London. Antonio Saura, who ultimately achieved greater commercial success, was known to have hung Bonifacio’s work in his home. Bonifacio was considered the painter’s painter.
All the while Flores was by his side. They could not marry because divorce was not permitted under Franco, so they remained legally bound to their prior spouses, Yvonne and Mariano. But their love story was an act of defiance neither could refuse.
For Bonifacio, Flores was his refuge and home. Although she was not an artist and always saw herself as just a homemaker, she fed Bonifacio and the artists he created alongside. Flores was often seen bringing tortilla de patatas or jamon iberico to the band of artists he ran with, then sitting quietly at the back of the room, listening as they swapped stories and methods. The painters loved Flores as one of their own. Gustavo Torner, Antonio Saura and Zobel often ate at her table and dedicated work to her.
Flores began cleaning hotel rooms to pay for Bonifacio’s canvases and paints, and eventually purchased his art studio with her humble salary.
Maybe it was around then she began to wear her white apron. Her bata. The apron she wore everywhere. The one she’d be wearing when I met her 35 years later.
We were unlikely friends. To start, she was 43 years my senior. I didn’t know Spanish when we met, so we spoke French together. She had learned French by watching foreign films that she and her first husband crossed the border to see, because they were forbidden in Spain. So we spoke halting French at first, till my Spanish caught up. We began by lingering in the stairwell when she’d bring me bacalao al ajo arriero or arroz con pollo. After we sat outside my door talking for three hours one day, she finally invited me inside her home, one floor down from the studio I rented from her.
Behind a smaller-than-usual door was a steep and uneven set of stairs that led to a room filled with priceless paintings and other works of art. A simple slab of wood supported by sawhorses was covered in art books and mementos Bonifacio had sent her over the years since they separated. When I entered her apartment I realized with astonishment: this woman who cleaned my one-room apartment each day was at the vortex of a cultural explosion of abstract artists. Her apartment, unbeknownst to the outside world, was a living testimonial to their creation.
Their work was bold: abstract figures that evoked bodies buried under canvases, mouths agape, bulls charging. Bonifacio was often compared to the American painter William de Kooning. Their art – and Flores herself – seemed to say: “No, this is not how life is. Life is for us to declare. Life is not what the dictator says. What the dictator says is not truth.” It was not safe to speak those words, but they were creating art that conveyed them. As Bonifacio was often quoted as saying, “A painting is good when there is struggle. Painting is always a great adventure of life or death, where you can win or lose. Painting isn’t only a question of aesthetic or decorative art: It’s something that forms part of life, it’s expression, testimony, permanency, and much love.”
Over time, our lunches became a weekly refuge for me. Far from home and unfulfilled teaching English to Spanish children, I was unhappy in almost every way, except when I was with Flores. With her, time ceased to exist. She sang to me in her native Euskera, most of which had left her after Franco had forbidden it to be spoken or taught. The songs remained, and she sang them for me over Sunday meals in her kitchen as we drank champagne and mopped up chipirones en su tinta with hunks of crusty bread. I’ve never eaten a better meal than the ones she served me and never been more at home at a table than I was at hers.
Eventually Flores began inviting me to her most sacred walk each week: the descent from old town to the downtown fishmonger, owned by a Basque man who would call her when the fish was good or when it wasn’t to say, come down now, Flores, you’ll die for this fish, or don’t bother, it’s all crap coming out of there this week. On the basis of those calls we would take our walks. Flores extolled the virtues of the Cantabrian Sea where, she said, the fish have to work harder: The Cantabrian fish have to fight for their lives. Their flesh isn’t soggy. They have to work for it. They taste better that way.
During our walks and lunches, I learned that Flores had left school at eight years old, when Franco’s men came for her father. With her husband in jail, her mother needed an extra set of hands in the bar. While Flores could read, she struggled and often called herself illiterate. Yet she was fundamentally curious about the world, about politics, about art and how it had the possibility to transform our existence.
She worked for 20 years at the Posada San Jose, the hotel in Cuenca that became well known for its hospitality under her watchful eye. Her title was gobernante or hotel governess, but she was much more. According to her best friend and Posada owner, Jenny Morter, Flores was the first to arrive and the last to leave each day. She made the most incredible bed you’ve ever seen. Guests would ask if the staff ironed the sheets after putting them on the bed because there wasn’t a wrinkle on them. She did this work with unparalleled grace and elegance. Everything – every linen, every table setting, every cider they served mattered to her. And she taught these methods to the staff with precision. It was no wonder the famous came to stay – flamenco dancers, politicians, journalists, and celebrities. When they left for the day she would look around the room to see what she could learn of them. She noticed the clothes they wore. She remembered the post cards they collected. She would look for what she could bring to their room the next day, a flower or a fresh piece of fruit – something that would acknowledge them for who they were and what mattered to them.
Flores was committed to living a life that moved her. Well into her seventies she told me, “All the other women my age are scared out of their wits, in their little easy chairs, they don’t want to see a movie that might be awkward, they don’t want to lose themselves in music, they don’t want to be moved; emotionally they’re just parked in one place, like mushrooms. But not me. I still love, I still desire.”
After 22 years by Bonifacio’s side, he left her unexpectedly in 1986. He wanted, he’d said, to spend more time painting in solitude at his studio up the hill from their home in Cuenca and in Madrid. Weeks went by without Flores realizing Bonifacio wasn’t coming home. It was left to Bonifacio’s friend, Antonio Pérez, contemporary critic and founder of the renowned Antonio Pérez Foundation, to break the news: Bonifacio had left her for another woman. Flores was devastated and spent years grieving. The community embraced her but could not mend her broken heart.
To heal, Flores began to walk in the mountains with her dogs. She walked. Then walked some more. Each time she came back with color in her cheeks and a desire to live a little more. She began to consider the immensity of nature and that the task before her was to open herself, and not to let her pain overtake her:
“I realized that I was alone and that I had to fight for myself. That something was happening to me that no one could help me with. That I had to solve it for myself. I didn’t know if I should stay in Cuenca, or San Sebastian or go to Madrid. I had the sense that I had nothing in the world. And I said to myself, I have my house. I have to overcome what has happened to me here, in this setting, if it’s the last thing I do. Whatever it costs me. And I did it. I began…to love myself.”
By the time I arrived at her little flat in Spain a little over a decade later, she’d mostly made peace with that heartbreak and she and Bonifacio had reconnected. He would call the landline we shared every couple of weeks. In his tobacco-tinged voice he’d yell out, “Flores? Can you hear me?” I’d yell down to Flores through the stairwell and she’d get on the phone and laugh as she always did, saying to that old twin flame, as if no time at all had passed, “Hey you. What’s up?”
Though she was the very walls that their canvases hung from, Flores’ contributions to this cultural resistance movement have not been recognized. Flores eschewed the public limelight: she didn’t go to openings, didn’t appear at exhibitions by his side, holding a glass of wine for the cameras; she didn’t need that kind of public persona or fanfare. She was also too busy doing the work of women – cleaning his studio as he was heading to an opening, preparing his favorite meals, tending to their home.
Her story is one that is familiar to many women who gave their all to a movement or a man.
As Adrienne Rich wrote, women like Flores “abnegated power for love,” so Bonifacio could soar to the heights that history will remember him for. When he had gone, she carved for herself the monastic life of a conscientious objector who lived by the rules that mattered to her:
Everyone deserves a bed. And should also know how to make one. Towels dry best in the moonlight. It’s ok to place plants in front of paintings if that’s where the light is best. Take good care of the workers in your life, the butchers, the fishmongers, the grocery store staff, the room cleaners, the janitors. Be clear-eyed about who is actually in power and what means they use to maintain it. Pay attention to what those around you need, then surprise them with small offerings. Homemade olive oil cake. A flower in a vase. When it’s been a tough day, turn off the lights, open the windows and let the music smooth you in the dark. Follow your heart—above all, even if it turns your life upside down.
Bonifacio died in 2011. His paintings still hang in the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art and Pérez’s Foundation alongside a photo of Flores and Bonifacio at his lithograph press, her with her silver hair, in her white bata – her attention given entirely to his creation. That’s the only trace of Flores’ 22 years at Bonifacio’s side.
In the final chapter of her life, Flores cared for los ancianos – the elders of her community. She washed dishes, shelled peas, cooked for friends, and tended to a small but loving social circle. She took care of rose geraniums and kept her home sparkling clean.
Flores spent her last year on the planet in quarantine in her apartment. She had Covid, then recovered. She dealt with increasing dementia as the year wore on. After a year already laden with death, Flores died in her sleep, on December 30th of 2020.
Despite the raging pandemic and a freezing blizzard that swept through central Spain, dozens came to pay their respects. After her funeral service at the Cuenca Cathedral on January 11, her ashes were taken to the San Isidro cemetery, up the hill from her home. The remains of Fernando Zóbel, Antonio Saura, and Bonifacio lay not far from her final resting place. As the socially-distanced ceremony came to a close, one mourner raised his phone with Edith Piaf’s Non, je ne regrette rien anthem playing, just as the sun peeked through the clouds for the first time in days.
Her resistance may have been of the quiet sort. But beneath the heavy hand of the Catholic church and an authoritarian dictator, she chose her life. Alongside Bonifacio and his canvases, she chose her life. And heartbroken in love, she chose her life. In that context, choosing one’s own life was nothing less than a radical triumph.
I can hear her in the kitchen now, clad in her white bata, silver hair piled on her head, clapping her hands together with purpose, Hala!
Feel that air coming in from the mountains.
Let’s go for a walk.
Vámonos, this life is ours.
Devora is a regular public speaker at industry events and her TedX on the Future of Shopping and Retail has been viewed over 225,000 times. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, daughter and ornery cat.