Voces del Prado

Learning from Pérez Sánchez

Felícitas Martínez Pozuelo, Administrative Technician, 1971-2018

The Museum was very short staffed and needed people to work there. Also, there were no civil servants at that time, we were all contracted staff. It was at that point that I joined the permanent team. It was Pérez Sánchez who invited me as he didn’t have a secretary then, I think she was on maternity leave. So I decided to take charge of his office, from where I made myself responsible for his texts. From then on it was total collaboration.
He always treated me in the most courteous way and I really learned a great deal from him. For 15 years his unpublished texts passed through my hands. I was the first to read them. He read them then I was the one who deciphered his handwriting. I’ve read all his texts and I learned a great deal from him. It provided me with enormous experience for the future. What I do now are things that started with him. He answered the enquiries sent to the Museum. He received enquiries about paintings and so on, and for years I noted down his answers, then I typed the letters and he signed them. Who would have thought that years later, starting in 2003, I would be the one to receive the enquiries sent to the Museum. Since then I’ve been answering them to the sum of around 3,000 to 4,000 letters a year. I’ve retained a lot of valuable information from that period.
As I said, I learned every day. It’s been a huge lesson, an ongoing learning process that has lasted my entire life. Those periods proved extremely useful for this current one when I have to deal with issues of this kind.