Voces del Prado

A special visitor

Conchi Montero Velasco, General Services Assistant, 1970-2014

Among the important figures who have passed through the cafeteria I remember Rafael Alberti, who was really marvelous, a really lovely person. When he came down for coffee, he would sit at a table and signal to me to come over to serve him. I don’t know why. He ordered coffee if he came down early in the morning, or a beer if he came down later. He’d arrive, sit down at the table and I’d serve him whatever he’d ordered. Then he would turn to his notebooks; sometimes he would draw and sometimes he would write. When I went up to the exhibition halls, he lost contact with me. When he saw me for the first time in the halls it was by coincidence and he said that he’d gone on other occasions to the cafeteria and had looked for me. And he told me “When I come back again, I’ll ask for you”. And every time he came, he would ask for me at the door: “What hall is Conchi Montero working in?” They told him the hall I was in and he would come and see me. Given that we had to supervise the paintings, sometimes he would walk around with me and he said to me “What a lovely job this is, Conchi”. I told him that I was delighted to be at the Prado and he replied, “And with good reason, because this is a real treasure!”. Sometimes he’d say “Look at that picture there; you can’t see it properly in that position; they should have positioned it better because here it doesn’t have the light it deserves; but if that’s what they’ve decided, well they’re the experts”. That was the comment he made: “They’re the experts”.
Alberti told me that he loved coming to the Prado. “For me, the Prado is part of my life”, he would say. I remember that on one of our walks I said to him “Don Rafael, I don’t have your autograph”. And he said “You don’t have my autograph? Not to worry, I’ll give it to you here right now”. We took another turn around the hall and then he sat down on a bench. He began to draw something, like he’d done on other occasions. After a while he called me over and he’d drawn me a dove in different colors. I was amazed. And he added “So that you have a little something to remember me by”. He dedicated it to me by writing “For Conchi Montero from Rafael Alberti, Museo del Prado”, and I think he dated it “1983”. Two or three years went by and, without me saying anything to him (because he’d already given me a picture), he gave me a sketch of a cockerel. I think it was in 1985 when he sketched me the cockerel. I’ve got the pictures at home, framed like two treasures.