The funeral for Carmen Sevilla coincides with her birthday: next Monday

The name of Carmen Sevilla suddenly booms again on the televisions. The war between magazines and heartfelt programs, bloodier since the arrival of Ana Rosa Quintana in the afternoons and the subsequent landslide, turns almost any joke into an object of desire to be incorporated into the content. Who can contain themselves in the face of the succulent family war that is coming?

The exacerbated competition forces the first swords of the pink kingdom to stretch headlines like the one ABC launched this Wednesday: “No one collects Carmen Sevilla’s ashes 105 days after her cremation.” The subsequent deployment of information, the versions, the nuances, reactions, anniversaries prepared with such a hanger and the debates of the all-rounders who fill the sets enhance the little matter until it competes in number of hours with the barbarism unleashed in the Middle East.

It all starts because a niece of Carmen Sevilla named Elena goes to the funeral home where her famous aunt was cremated to collect a part of the ashes as a memory of the presenter of the Telecoupon y Neighborhood Cinema. So, it is assumed that somewhat indignant with Augusto Algueró, the artist’s only son, leaks to a newspaper that Carmen’s ashes are still there after being tipped off by an indiscreet worker. Then, Elena herself is dispatched with The confidential to warm up her moment of glory and of course promote the funeral that she has organized without Augusto.

Later the versions begin: what if it is a lie, what if it is true, what if there is no right, what if one has spoken “with those around him”, what if Rappel says it is false, what if Parada does not believe anything… And so we are, with poor Carmen Sevilla resurrected three months after she died and a decade after she herself hardly knew how great she was. And she was many things: very beautiful, funny, hard-working and a good mother. Carmen Sevilla marked more than an era. There were several. But in all of them she showed her affable character, which had little to do with the insatiable desire for television controversies, ephemeral but very intense. Almost more than when she broke up with the father of her son or she married Vicente Patuel to go to the countryside with the sheep.

It is much more tender to remember his figure. Carmen Sevilla triumphed as a singer for twenty years but a couple of generations remember her more in the mature version of her as a presenter, with her notorious lapses in the Telecoupon or marking your personality in front of neighborhood cinema on TVE.

Carmen Sevilla would have turned 92 next Monday (and not 93, as stated in the biographies). The most mature of her will remember her as an actress; Whether it was her playing openly without revealing herself in the seventies or much earlier: in her golden years she worked with Jorge Negrete, Luis Mariano, Vittorio de Sica, Nicholas Ray or Charlton Heston. But now what remains seems to be the family fight over Carmen Sevilla’s ashes, because, according to some versions, they are still in the funeral home, or because her nieces have made a reliquary with part of her remains. The truth is that there is a deadline to collect them and it has not expired yet.

All in all, three months after the death of Carmen Sevilla, one of the topics that feeds the pinkish underworld is the great anger of family and friends of the star. Will we see the niece on a set, will she come in by phone? And in Big Brother?

His only son, Augusto Algueró, had already been widely criticized for refusing to hold any homage or mass funeral, at the level of one of those characters who are visited by the Kings when they die and have a funeral chapel in sacred places such as the Spanish theater (if it is Madrid), where thousands of people parade for many hours to say goodbye. But Augustus did not want to. Perhaps the son of the famous composer already considered years ago that his mother was gone even though he was still on Earth. Another person in the family may disagree with that decision but Augusto is the only son.

Elena, daughter of Pepe García Galisteo, one of Carmen Sevilla’s brothers, does not seem to get along too well with her cousin Augusto. In fact, she hardly seems to have a relationship. However, she asked him for a locket with part of those ashes so that she could join them with those of her father or spread them around Marbella, an alleged wish that her aunt expressed to her when she was well. Augustus agreed and some ashes were set aside for this purpose. Elena and her sister picked them up at the Pozuelo funeral home, where Carmen was cremated. One of the funeral service employees committed the alleged indiscretion of revealing to people other than the deceased’s son that the ashes had not yet been collected by Augusto Algueró. And from there the information went to a newspaper.

Next Monday, Carmen Sevilla’s birthday, the artist’s ‘snitch’ nieces have prepared a mass in the San Francisco de Borja church on Serrano street in Madrid. They have not had time to proclaim to the four winds that they have invited their cousin Augusto Algueró (they have invited the son of the deceased to the funeral of her mother).