I receive a letter from María España, a widow from Francisco Umbral, who says: “Dear Vicent: I love to greet you and tell you that among the photos I took in another time I have found a yours in which you are handsome, as always. What a shame that there are no longer so many friends.
The last edition of Mortal and pink I will send you.
An article in which you quote Paco with admiration and affection has appeared in the country a few days ago. He loved you and admired you too. The truth is that you will be an exceptional group of writers. And also handsome. ”
These affectionate words express a feeling that has returned me to a past that although today seems golden and frosted by time, includes an extraordinary book and the tragedy of the death of a son. I remember that time that I found a threshold in the elevator of the Clinic of La Concepción. I was going to visit a friend operated from the heart and threshold had hospitalized there to her five -year -old son, sick of leukemia. I was totally dejected. Without asking anything, he told me that he had no salvation. He then referred to a lady who, knowing about the case, approached a hospital hall to comfort him and told her that God was infinitely merciful. Umbral replied: “Well, with my son he is behaving like a bastard.” The death of his son skewed came to him while writing Mortal and pink, The book through which it will go down in history, so that death was in between the liric and free angel he had in each fingertips with which the Olivetti machine and the harsh reality were happily crushed without lyricisms as it is.
The laughs of those nights at the Picardías restaurant where we imagined the next number of Wolf brother They had been left behind. Having shared the laughter between dish and dish with Chumy Chúmez, with Summers, with Perich, with Forges and PAHO, the broken one, was a privilege. In those threshold donorship he spoke deep with an evil irony, Cándido moved between Kant and the corner castañera, José Luís Coll always found a way to twist the neck to a word. Among all that troop only threshold he believed that he would go down in history and was willing to do anything to get it.
To move on to posterity you have to first become a character. It is not worth writing, painting, dancing, singing, running and making laugh better than anyone. You need to provide your person with an aura that makes you your own ghost. Ramón Gómez de la Serna read articles aloud from a trapeze artist or loins of an elephant in the Price circus; González Ruano had settled it cursed with long nailers to hide a dark past; Camilo José Cela was trying to releasing carpetovetonic animals, who in the end did not even scare the closing nuns; Josep Pla imagined that he was a cosmopolitan Payés and alternated the bow tie with the beret; Francisco Umbral wore that red scarf that lowered him along the black coat of enthallated velvet with which he was invested with Baudelaire, by Marcel Proust, of Oscar Wilde, according to seasonal fashion.
I wanted to be a writer inside and out. He spent half a day feeding his figure and the other average destroying it. But posterity is very casquivana. It can happen that threshold, after having made the Castilian dance like nobody, if you have bleeding in thousands of articles, having dictated the fashion of journalism, it can go down in history for having said: “I have come to talk about my book”, an aodine phrase that today repeats from politicians to the bishops, from the bankers to any pintamonas. You will not go down in history if you do not become a source of anecdotes that make your work forget.
Francisco Umbral wanted to demonstrate that in literature everything is lawful, nothing is good or bad, whenever he is well written. The first qualitative leap gave it threshold when Vergés, at the request of Delibes, opened the pages of the magazine Destinationwhere Josep Pla, Perucho, Álvaro Cunqueiro and Néstor Luján had highlighted the bar of a journalism with censorship. Threshold measured with them without disadvantage. There was a second jump, when Juan Luis Cebrián, the director of the newspaper El País, recently founded, called him to write a social chronicle. It was the journalistic and literary success of the transition.
He created a chronicle chronicle, full of bubbles, of high literary style, with a freedom and a lack of admirable respect for language, urban forms, politics. He arrived threshold disguised as a writer to any Sarao and people spoke to him with phrases made to him in the hope of being cited with his name in bold the next day. Then came the hatred of the political flags to the media and everything fell. I open the book Mortal and pink And read: “Having bitten the broken shout of your life”. And I see death riding the lyric.