On one occasion, in the living room of her home in Madrid, our dear friend Leddys — sadly no longer with us, a Cuban woman of Catalan origin who had been exiled to Miami because of the Castro dictatorship and who eventually settled in the capital of the kingdom —, when I mentioned to her that I would be travelling to Vienna at the end of August for a psychology conference, it must have been spring at the time, uttered one of those phrases that I always found deeply endearing: “Duchesses do not return to Vienna until the second half of September.”

Leddys was an expert on the history of European monarchies, though especially on that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and she knew the subject so intimately that she referred to members of the former royal families by the nicknames or diminutives they used amongst themselves.

She had developed such familiarity with all those imperial “relatives”, some of them rather distant indeed, that within her inner universe she felt herself to be one of them.

And she expressed none of this with arrogance, nor in any affected manner; it had become something entirely natural to her, the consequence of countless hours devoted to reading and researching that aristocratic world, to the point where she perceived it as an extension of her everyday reality.

As for me, the first time I watched À bout de souffle, one of my films, particularly that moment when Jean Seberg appears selling the New York Herald Tribune along the Champs-Élysées in Paris, I immediately understood that all those hours spent reading, watching documentaries, films, and listening to music connected with that city had suddenly acquired profound meaning.

There I was, projected into that rogue played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, casually conversing with the young woman with whom he is about to fall deeply in love.

And there too was that enduring youthfulness which never entirely leaves us, despite the passing years, along with that sense of lightness — entirely removed from melodrama — through which life unfolds when we allow it to, and which becomes so much easier when we surrender ourselves to it.

To devote hours to Franz Joseph I of Austria, or to the intellectuals who frequented the Café de Flore in Paris during the existentialist years, or to the pyramids of Egypt, or to the origins of rock music, or to the French Impressionists, or…

It is a way of cultivating the spirit so that, when one encounters the appropriate circumstance — a nocturnal walk through the Austrian capital, for instance — the soul may blossom and one begins to perceive far more than postcards or empty photographs intended for Instagram.

To educate oneself culturally is one of the finest ways of strengthening oneself internally, and of experiencing existence in a far more intense and meaningful way.

Culture does not require university degrees, but rather the willingness to know, to delve deeper, to dedicate time, and above all, not to remain trapped within clichés, stereotypes, fashions, or excessively popular distractions.

Leddys was Borgesian (in the sense of Borges); she inhabited her own universe and, in some way, regarded society as mere scenery, since many of its features had ceased to resonate with her altogether.

Perhaps it is unnecessary to go quite that far, but distancing oneself from so much triviality, so many commonplaces, so much senseless polarisation, so much victimhood and hysteria, in order to gradually construct one’s own inner imaginative world, is an excellent way of preserving a solid mental and existential footing.

The duchesses, sadly, no longer return to Vienna once summer ends, but one can still, despite the age of pragmatism, continue travelling to other cities and other eras simply by closing one’s eyes.

And the truth is that age matters very little if one can still fall in love, over and over again, with that blonde American girl who cries out “New York Herald Tribune!” in an era when freedom was just beginning, and when we had not yet come to live beneath the suffocating weight imposed by the fragile of spirit.

Damián Ruiz
Barcelona, June 2026
www.damianruiz.eu