Pilar de Valderrama Alday (27 September 1889 – 15 October 1979) was a Spanish poet and playwright identified with postmodernism.

[1] Pilar Valderrama, a member of Madrid's upper bourgeoisie, married Rafael Martínez Romarate at age 19.

Her work never brought her fame, but she became better known in 1981 when her identity was made public in relation to Machado's Guiomar (though some had intuited this as early as 1964).

In her selection of memories and evocations, a short tribute to her thoughts of Machado, there is one that includes an offer of the poet to include verses from Pilar in the libretto of La Lola se va a los puertos [es], a play written in collaboration with his brother Manuel (who probably convinced the lovesick poet to reconsider).

That year, a book by Concha Espina sought to discover its details, while protecting the identity of the person behind Guiomar.

[8] According to Pilar Valderrama, declared in several interviews, in March 1928 at age 38 she discovered her husband's infidelity and the suicide of his young lover.

According to the Machado biographers Miguel Pérez Ferrero [es] and José Luis Cano, the poet, at 52, fell in love from the first moment, even though Pilar warned that her married status could only permit an innocent friendship.

When they could not see each other, they agreed to keep an imaginary date at a fixed time by calling that moment of mutual spiritual communion "the third world" (Spanish: El tercer mundo), which Machado alluded to repeatedly in his letters and which was used by Pilar as the title of a theatrical work.

In 1935, Pilar used the insecurity of the streets in Madrid as a pretext to cancel their secret weekly meetings in the cafe of Cuatro Caminos, and thereafter only communicated by letter.

[9] The sonnet, written in Valencia, is seen by many as the last of his secret letters to Pilar, whom Machado supposed to still be a refugee in Estoril.

At the same time, much attention has been paid to the detail of a paper found in the poet's coat after his death, scribbled along with Shakespeare's phrase "to be or not to be" a last Alexandrine verse: "These blue days and this sun from childhood...", and a quatrain of Otras canciones a Guiomar (a la manera de Abel Martín y Juan de Mairena), corrected as follows: "And I will give you my song: / Sung of what is lost / with a green parrot / that recites it on your balcony".

In fact, after the military coup of 18 July 1936, Pilar returned to Spain, to a house that her husband's mother had in Palencia and to the estate "El Carrascal", next to Paredes de Nava, where she had hurried to "recover" (in her own words) properties as a landowner after the occupation of the area by Francoist troops.

Residing in Madrid again beginning in 1940, Pilar de Valderrama had the desire to confide in her friend Concha Espina, who discovered her relationship with Machado in 1950.

In that year, Concha Espina's book[5] identified her as a stranger to whom Machado directed the love letters that were made public there for the first time.

Memorias de mi vida appeared, most authoritative biographers of Antonio Machado unite in denouncing the literary and vital vampirism that Pilar Valderrama put in play.

[note 1][17][18] But in spite of the unhealthy expectation – the popular morbid interest – that the revelations of Concha Espina aroused in 1950 involving the "Guiomar case", the greatest impetus was born of the mixture of intelligence and love that seems to emanate from all the acts of Antonio Machado, in the literary as in the vital.