I steal the degree scroll from Carmen Martín Gaite, who titled 'la tercera' of ABC in December 1969 when her friend Ignacio Aldecoa died. "This is a notice", for the readers who grew up with Delibes, for the language in which he wrote and for this country.
Delibes died in March, old and a little tired of his own old age. Death, however expected, is no less death.

In Delibes' work, death is the center of some of his best stories. In 'La mortaja' (1970) the Senderines wanders through the dam looking for financial aid to dress and shroud his father, in El camino (1950) David el Mochuelo manages to sneak into the grave of his friend Germán el Tiñoso a thrush hunted with a slingshot and in Cinco horas con Mario (1966) an obituary opens the book and Carmen, Mario's widow, begins her soliloquy and a small settling of scores with her husband. The dead are present in body, they were veiled at home and this familiarity with death, which comes suddenly, taught the living their truncated nature and that life had no turning back.

There is a real death that is a milestone in the biography of the writer from Valladolid, in 1974 Ángeles de Castro, his wife, died. In the photos that accompanied the interviews with Delibes, he usually appears in front of a portrait of her and if the reader looked closely, he could see how Delibes kept his wife's wedding ring hanging on the chain around his neck. Julián Marías wrote of Delibes' wife that she was a person who "with her mere presence lightened the heaviness of living". Both Miguel Delibes and Julián Marías outlived their wives and neither of them could get used to that absence. Marías recounted it in his memoirs, Una vida presente, and Delibes in the story Señora de rojo sobre fondo gris. Both belonged to the generation that suffered the war, a generation that looked at the world with lucidity.

In every true writer there is a first ethical obligation, to call things by their name and Delibes kept it all his life, the "simple speech", but also true. He named the fields, the choughs, the broom and the valleys, the thrushes. And, through his stories and his characters, he also spoke clearly of the lack of communication to which the modern world led, defended nature and warned us of misunderstood progress, false progressivism, environmentalism and other isms. His characters, humiliated and offended, will remain valid for those who know how to read for the clarity and beauty of the language in which they were written and for the fidelity that the author kept all his life to himself. May this good man rest in peace.