Letizia after Urdangarin

On November 1, 2003, the Royal Household made the surprise announcement that Prince Felipe was to be engaged to Letizia Ortiz, a journalist. Six weeks later, EL PAÍS named the Princess of Asturias, along with Saddam Hussein, its personalities of the year. Saddam will hopefully be forgotten, and if he is remembered, it will be for his violence; Letizia will be remembered, if this country holds together, as the Queen of Spain.

For its end of year special, EL PAÍS asked me to write a pen portrait of the Prince's future wife. This was no easy task: the Royal Household had already put a protective wall around Letizia Ortiz. It was impossible to contact her directly: she had left her modest apartment in a working class district outside Madrid, and was now living in the Zarzuela Palace on the other side of the city. Nevertheless, the challenge of trying to reconstruct the life of this young professional, whom most monarchists considered the least appropriate candidate to marry Prince Felipe and eventually assume the responsibilities of the highest office of state, proved too stimulating to turn down.

The gossip columnists were trailing the couple like bloodhounds

The bride-to-be uttered a rare phrase among royal couples: "Let me speak"

There was a lot of speculation about the possibility Letizia was pregnant

Felipe: "At some point they will criticize us, and they will be right"

I read a great many articles. Some bordered on libel, little more than a litany of insults presented as insight into a monarchy where the king has no court, and where the Crown has had to reinvent itself in accordance with the rules of democracy. The supposed experts were clearly troubled by the idea that a young woman, a commoner, a divorcee, no less, was to join the Royal Family. There were no end of rumors about her time in Mexico, about her failed marriage, about possible lovers - all attempts at character assassination.

Letizia and her family: the attacks on her maternal grandparents, simply because they came from humble origins, or the pressure put on her mother and her sisters, one of whom died tragically, and who have never attempted to take advantage of their sudden and unsought-after fame. More than one commentator on Spain's close-knit aristocracy expressed the supposedly widespread disappointment that the prince could have fallen for a young woman from the middle classes.

Back in December 2003, Letizia had only recently abandoned her career as a journalist, and so it was relatively easy to find people who had worked with her. Her former colleagues helped me build up a credible picture of a woman committed to her profession: a perfectionist; a vocational journalist; obsessive about her work, ambitious; somewhat nervous, alert; at times disarmingly frank; and with that understandable nervousness often found in attractive women who go through life trying to prove their intelligence.

When the article was published, it was criticized from both sides: there were those from the higher echelons of society who were unhappy that their real motives for disliking her had been put down in writing; while some Republicans wrote to me expressing their surprise that somebody like me could feel any sympathy toward the monarchy. Oh, Spain. And all for not having painted a sarcastic, bitter, or insulting picture of the young bride-to-be of Prince Felipe, and instead one that I believe was a reflection of the truth.

But it seems that at least my article was admired by Letizia herself, who, through a former colleague at RTVE state television, expressed her appreciation. We were invited to a dinner with the royal couple at the apartment of historian and academic Carmen Iglesias, the Prince's tutor, in Madrid's Austrias neighborhood. At the time, this was a secret, but it can now be told. The gossip columnists were trailing the royal couple like bloodhounds, and when we arrived at the apartment, there were already two paparazzi on guard outside. My memory of the dinner, astutely overseen by Iglesias, is of a somewhat stiff beginning that gradually relaxed to a degree that neither I, nor my husband, would ever have imagined possible. As we walked back home afterwards, we shared, perhaps somewhat naively, the feeling that we had been in the presence of two people who loved each other, but who would forever be prisoners of a destiny written by others.

Letizia was all too aware of the importance that would be given to each and every word she spoke from the moment of her first encounter with the press: on the morning that the engagement was announced, the couple's respective gifts were on display; the bride-to-be, with a degree of spontaneity and naturalness that would soon disappear, uttered that most common of expressions among any couple, but so uncommon among royal couples: "Let me speak." It was the last time that Letizia would ask to be allowed to speak in public.

We do not know if the decision was sudden and traumatic, or taken over time, but a woman who had spoken to millions on a daily basis as a television news presenter learned to be the silent consort in public life, with the accompanying sacrifice that this must have supposed for somebody used to giving her opinion.

The next occasion I had to meet the royal couple was in New York. In reality, I had seen the pair before, on the day of their wedding, but as everybody knows, royal weddings are much more enjoyable when watched on television. Of that day, I remember the image of them being no larger than the size of those brides and grooms made of plastic that adorn the top flight of wedding cakes.

After a year of marriage, the royal couple made their first trip to the United States, appearing in public at a gala held in New York's Waldorf Astoria hotel, the Cervantes Institute, and the United Nations. It was so touching to see Letizia make sure that her public appearances were productive and professional, and how frustrated she was that the media only seemed interested in which dress she had worn for which occasion. I suspect that this discrepancy on the part of those who judge her will always have been unpleasant for her. Those who assess her on the same basis as fashion victims like the Queen of Jordan show little understanding of just what sort of woman Letizia is. Her way of dressing shows that, for her, clothes are at the service of the occasion, not the other way round. That said, she has clearly made an effort over the years to soften the angular features of her face, accentuated by the extreme slimness typical of people of a nervous disposition.

When Letizia asked her future husband "Let me speak," she was attempting to tell the assembled journalists of her admiration for the queen, the figure that she had decided to take as an example. She will have learnt something from the person who will be her predecessor (if all goes according to plan): to remain silent without appearing to be doing so, to be silent while giving the impression that she is taking part, to remain silent while smiling and appearing interested, and to keep her opinion largely to herself, except among small, intimate gatherings.

One Saturday during that trip to New York, the royal couple went to see the musical 42nd Street, on Broadway. The unbearable cold of the air conditioning ended up forcing them out during the interval, which is when my cellphone rang - as I was leaving Almodóvar's Bad Education, as it happens. They suggested that we meet somewhere for a drink. As we were unknowns in that city, and had little idea how one reserves a table for the Prince and Princess of Spain, we decided to go to a restaurant that my husband and I often go to, and which many people visiting the Lincoln Center go to: Fiorello's. Yes, the same restaurant where Mario Vargas Llosa was dining with his family after visiting the opera on the day his Nobel Prize was announced. Fiorello's. A classic, where, miraculously, one is almost always able to find a table. We had a pizza, wine, and privacy. If anybody there recognized the prince, they pretended not to. A Mexican waiter asked if he was who he thought he was, and from that moment brought us our food faster than usual. That was all.

By this time there had already been much speculation about the possibility that the princess was pregnant, and I imagine she waited impatiently for the moment, her feelings a mix of hope and the pressure that she was subjected to. The media was already aware of her interest in the fourth estate; newspapers, the internet - what she was supposed to read, and what she was not supposed to read. The media tends to focus on her at her most vulnerable, and clearly saw her desire to behave beyond reproach and to attain the status of "true professional," a term that the king has used to describe Queen Sofía. That famous description, a way of recognizing the consort, while at the same time imposing a distance that has always seemed justified by rank, is absent in the new royal couple, who, more in keeping with the generation they belong to, work more closely together.

At least that's how it seemed to me when I saw them up close in that crowded and noisy New York restaurant, which due to its proximity to the Lincoln Center, also counts many music students among its customers. Letizia, the princess, was concerned about the criticism of her; perhaps a reflection of her condition as a journalist, as well as having not been born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Felipe, the prince, less concerned about public opinion, and more inclined to take life as it comes, said: "At some point they will criticize us, and they will be right." To me that seemed to reflect an intelligence and a tenderness that will surely protect him in a country where nothing can be ruled out.

Once again we said goodbye in the way that one says goodbye to somebody setting off on a difficult trip. We also encouraged them, jokingly of course, to try to disappear to some forgotten corner of New York during their stay. How easy it is to recommend freedom when one is free oneself.

At that time, of all the members of the Royal Family, the gossip pages were mainly concerned with Letizia: her clothes, her long-awaited pregnancy, her likely crises, her difficulties. The fact of the matter is that the gossip columnists and society-page writers did not let up until the Urdangarin affair reached such proportions that not even the worst of our newspapers could ignore it. There was a last-ditch attempt to push her into the limelight with the publication of photographs of her looking extremely thin on a recent trip to Chile, but eventually, the Urdangarin fiasco was simply unavoidable. The king's son-in-law, married to the Infanta Cristina, is being investigated after suspect accounting was uncovered at his not-for-profit Nóos Institute. Investigators believe Urdangarin and his business partner Diego Torres siphoned off millions of euros to overseas accounts through front companies by overcharging for tourism-sports events organized in conjunction with Popular Party administrations in the Balearic Islands and Valencia, and issuing invoices for work that was never carried out.

It is worth asking, and why not in public, if part of the reason why Cristina and Letizia so clearly failed to hit it off was in part due to the less-than-exemplary behavior of the Duke of Palma, and which was directly affecting the future of her husband, the prince.

It is strange that the king, when he met with the media on the occasion of the investiture of the new government last month, and following the praise for a Christmas speech in which we all understood that he was making a brave reference to the business dealings of his son-in-law, reproached the media for its tendency to personalize things: an absurd way to demolish what he had achieved. It is true that the monarchy still requires rites and gestures that seem somewhat unreal to the rest of us to survive, but given that it is a democracy that still depends on its diplomatic efforts and its conciliatory presence, there is really no need to be so alarmed about a future head of state who may not have saved democracy, but who studied at Georgetown, and who didn't marry a professional of the monarchy, but a professional journalist, and who chose her to work with him on a daily basis. For the moment, say those journalists who follow him closely, the presence of Letizia has been beneficial.