‘Authors of words with Rosa’ He has an appointment at the home of Leticia Rodríguez de la Fuente, daughter of Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente, a born entrepreneur, traveler, self-taught and pioneer in everything she has done. She debuts as a writer with Touching earth (Espasa, 2023).

A book about botany, gardening and her own life while she contemplates the landscape while being herself again; Leticia. A first-person interview with a girl in whom, at the age of ten, the death of her father triggered, among other things, a hellish time.

“I felt like a monster was coming to visit me as soon as I turned off the light for eternity. Until one day I decided that it was in my head and that it would always lead me to a dead end,” he recalls.

And, he continues: “Assimilating it was much more unbearable than accepting the end. “I regained my sanity, but it took many years to understand that what that girl craved was stillness.”

A girl’s hands pruned dying geraniums in an attempt to rescue them from a certain end. A cleaning at the rhythm of scissors with infinite love, convinced that her work would give good results. “I have always carried that feeling with me. That was the beginning of something, but it took me many years to recover it,” she says.

For Rodríguez de la Fuente “time at certain levels of the human being does not exist. Landing has been a process of recovering myself. To the girl who was lost after my father’s death. The perception I have touching that land is that I have returned.”

Words and language are sometimes dangerous. She lost the essence, that part of the girl that had not been stained by life, by traumas, by demands, when she was calm and fine with what she was doing.

There are paths that seem to lead nowhere, they simply invite you to walk among the plants and enjoy nature, which is a lot. Which is all. “My path has been a process of personal emptying,” says the botanist.

Recognizes the writer of Touch the ground “When I was young I was very full of myself, and as I get older, I become emptied, to a point where I have realized that there is nothing to look for; nowhere to go. If we were able to understand it “We would be much happier.”

Leticia grows plants that are sustainable, because we have to go for the hair and not against the hair. “I didn’t want to cheat. Industrial farming does it all the time. I have to take advantage of the resources I have and the idiosyncrasies of the place to see what I can get.”

“Another important element is the profitability that the project that has to pay the expenses will give me. One, because I don’t have money, and then because I want it to be sustainable. If not we return to our consumerist and capitalist culture in which we do what we want. “Everything is possible, I force everything and I have immediate satisfaction.”

On that journey to her flower farm, Leticia tells me an anecdote that is not in the media. She, with that megalomaniacal and compulsive streak, had decided to set up a store right on the corner in front of her house, which is now Roberto Verino, but she twisted her foot, causing a sprain. A bad step. One misstep, that was the metaphor, and she did not continue with that project.

A short time later in the Antón Martín market there was a small stall in which it said: Felix Fishmonger and it was said: “this is another sign.” When the water bill arrived it was in the name of Félix Rodríguez, he couldn’t have been clearer. That was the place and the time.

“The flight of the falcon is very difficult,” reflects the businesswoman, “some of my projects have gone quite badly, others not so much. I have crashed many times, but everything I have wanted to do I have done.”

The death of his grandmother

The author remembers the moment her grandmother died, a moment in which she was not very well emotionally “I remember that I kissed her and hugged her, and I thought how lucky she is to be freed from all this. From all this theater that “I must have been very burned.”

But little by little he has recovered, gardening has allowed him to live and settle. “Working in my garden helps me look over the precipice of my emptiness without fear. We surround ourselves with noise constantly because we are terrified of looking over that precipice.. The good thing about gardening is the accompanied solitude.”

During this time Leticia has learned that “it is necessary to know how to be alone” and now can “affirm that the earth heals, cures”.

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