When I arrive, punctual, to the appointment in the Alabardero tavern, in front of the door of artists of the Royal Theater in Madrid, Suárez has been waiting for a good time in a watchman with a glass of red wine and chatting with the photographer. It is one in the afternoon of a suffocating day, but the air conditioning does its job and the interviewable looks like a brush just out of the case: canet pants, white thread shirt, whose pocket appears a pen and the pin of some glasses close, and blue shoes that it will show, flirtatious, then. As a first measure, he warns of what awaits me. “My life is varied, everything you want, but I already know and get bored.” It will be him, because, live, his story sometimes hypnotizes and sometimes bars. What follows is just an attempt to catch the air of a conversation that, in addition, by a fatal technical mishap, the recorder only half records. “Investrate it, you will make me more interesting,” he recommends. I ignore him.
How would you appear to someone for the first time?
For me it is always all for the first time. With age, there is no time, there is not before or after.
Since when does that happen, there has been a milestone, a threshold?
I don’t know precisely. More than a threshold, it has been a stumble, suddenly. I didn’t even remember, because I don’t understand numbers, but suddenly, they begin to highlight that you are nonagenarian, and that to stumble, there was only one step. Something that might seem theoretical: that fast time passes, has become, to the 90s, the certainty that life is this moment, here and now. The before is memory, and afterwards, unknown. That’s why I give my drink.
From noon?
Yes, but not by optional prescription. I believe that I have survived my alcoholic friends of the cinema because I was doing sports and started drinking already smoking late. They invited me to meals of the new wavewhere everyone was very illustrious, except me, and I come to say: “No, thanks, I don’t smoke; no thanks, I don’t drink.” Until one day, at 33, with actor Maurice Ronet, in Paris, I took the first cup.
Wine?
It was not wine. Then, I went to “Johnnie Walker black label in short glass with water and without ice”, which is the only movie phrase that I know, because, of course, the levels of (Sam) Peckinpah and other cronies, were the ones that were and had to be understood. Now I just drink wine, but, come on, alcohol has never sat me badly. Bad to lose the papers. It was always the one who took those who went home, or the sidewalk in front.
The 33 of his first cup were the age of Christ when he died. Is there a signal?
Unfortunately I have no belief. Moreover, less and less. I don’t have time to believe in anything. And, above all, I don’t believe in God. No one, ever, nor the wise men of yesteryear, have answered me to the essential question. Everything is rodeos, metaphors. So, to know that I don’t know anything, I know too much.
And what is the essential question?
You have caught me. Well, I suppose it would be this, for what?, What is there later? And I suspect what happened to us before, because we have been dead a long time before birth.
His interviews could be published tomorrow, I tell him as a reader and journalist. Can I call you colleague?
It would be an honor, moreover, I propose it. We are in a certain way partners, because reality can be fiction, and fiction, reality, I don’t see the margins. And, yes, my interviews could be published tomorrow, I agree.
Is it worse to be vain or false modest?
What I do is that I do not lie. In that book there are sensations, a kind of innocence, amazement, stupor, a freshness that I fear having lost. And that is always in force.
Does one stop being a journalist?
No, one never ceases to be. Although I am a fiction man: I opted for her because I do not like the reality of wars and bombs, and still does not like me, what I would like to be again the interviewer. Of journalism, I like the interview. What I would like right now is to interview you. To the photographer, no, because then I have to take the photo and I want to be handsome.
And what would be your first question?
How difficult. It would be tempting to investigate, because of the private detective of the movies, but what I am passionate about the interview is what can arise in it, as in the sport: why did the ball enter by the left angle and, lying a centimeter beyond, I would have left out or post? Because that kind of vertigo of the encounter with the other, which also occurs with cinema. Or in art. That impressionism. That freshness. That getting carried away by the event.
What is needed to be a good interviewer?
Meet people. Want to meet her. That something happens. I like to select the victim among interesting people. Although it would also be very interesting to find someone who had no interest.
Anyone normal?
I would not call it normal. Everyone knows a lot about everything. (The mobile sounds. He takes it. And he apologizes) forgiveness, it is my daughter Silvia, the one who knows and the one who commands.
Do you send a lot?
Yes, because it is the one that understands technology, sometimes I have to resort to it. For example, look (the mobile shows me): When I open whatsapp, I get strange things, I have been invaded by the advertising phone, I get something called eyeo motaor something like that.
¿Meta?
That, and I haven’t put it for a long time (the photographer and I exploded out loud). Sorry, forgiveness, is that I got out of my soul. Well, not of the soul, but a little lower, but good.
What suggests artificial intelligence expression?
I find an intelligence that does not ask questions, reduce your data to answers and supplant thinking.
July 30 turns 91. Are you going to celebrate it?
Well, unfortunately, I have a trip to Asturias that I wanted to postpone, because I am writing, and it is my last redoubt, and I get a little laziness and the contubernio east of the birthdays, but I suspect that they will celebrate it there with me of the present body with me and I will be delighted to reunite the family.
It always grants the interviews in this restaurant. Is it your second home?
Yes, I am here for all the interviews because they treat me well, they are very friendly, it is close to home and to save my wife, hey, hey, Hélène, who comes I don’t know who and who worries.
Anne-Hélène Girard, her only woman. How does a relationship of so many years evolve?
They are 66, now. Well, paddling together. Surprisingly, I do not regret it. But it is true that the family, and let’s not say the four children, and the grandchildren … obviously I feel responsible, and I have affection, and we have been lucky, but … that but, those suspensive points, it is a ballast. A ballast to navigate thoughts, because you have to take them to fruition until they sail alone. That is undoubted. But, look, I didn’t like to say it, because I’ve never complained.
Can the family be at the same time a ballast and a lifeguard?
Of course. And, at this point, before the doubt, that the widow is Hélène.
What do you miss and what is more at this point?
What I miss is playing football as an interior left and scoring a goal that will enter with the left -handed by the right angle. More, nothing.
His book is called The sole of my shoes. Can I see the ones you have posts?
(He teaches them: Laces, blue or celestial or marine, chosen with care) these.
It gives me that he is a flirtatious man.
I like those who like.
They say that it is the man who did everything before. Do you feel more prophet or more heretic?
Nobody did anything first of all or before anyone else, everything is suddenly, and still will be. I am nothing like that. As soon as I have had the feeling of having reached something in some field, I have left whistling. There have been no answers to what I am looking for. But remove this, that Tonito is coming out.
It will not deny that your life is extraordinary.
Being the only one I have, I have no possible comparison.
Well, compared to the life of the men and women of their generation.
Every generation ends in degeneration.
And how is life, I say the moment?
I don’t want to stop time, but I will last a little more this.
Gonzalo lives
Painter, writer, filmmaker, journalist, actor, scout of soccer players. The life of Gonzalo Suárez (Oviedo, 90 years old) would give several seasons of a series, despite the fact that he limits himself to qualifying it as “Variopinta”. Son of a French professor whom the civil war caught classes in Madrid, and stepson of his mother’s second couple, footballer Helenio Herrera, Gonzalo did not go to school until he was 10 years old, but he recovered the lost time. After exile in Paris, in 1958 he arrived in Barcelona, where he exercised journalism under the pseudonym of Martin Girard, surname of his wife, Anne-Hélene, and published in The avant -garde y The universal news, among other newspapers the chronicles and interviews that now collects the book The sole of my shoes. To talk about his film career, with puppets as Rowing the wind y The detective and death; and literary, with books like To the intruder muse o The blue cemeteryanother piece would be needed.