It is not strange in Madrid that the terraces wait, with background music, to break the afternoon and the guests come to drink the first beer. But the tables that on Saturday rested in the light of the auditorium of the Madrid Athenaeum, with Sabina, Serrat and Brazsens in the background, did not wait for any customers. It was a tailored terrace for Martín Caparrós, writer, journalist, collaborator of this newspaper and recently awarded the International Journalism Award Manu Leguineche Chair. And in it he met with a group of friends – 29 – to read, in the shelter of the threatening clouds, fragments of his latest book, in a tribute they have called Mopi. A while with Martín Caparrós and his friends.
In the wicker chairs arranged in the form throughout the stage, they sat down: Mar Abad, Darío Adanti, Miguel Aguilar, Carlos Alberdi, Juan Diego Botto, Jorge Carrión, Carlos Cué, Montserrat Domínguez, María Jesús Espinosa, Rodrigo Fresán, Soledad Gallego-Díz, Enric González, Fernando González ‘Gonzáz’ Gonzo ‘ Half—, Manuel Jabois, Antonio Lucas, Marta Nebot, Pere Ortín, Marta Peirano, Javier del Pino, Manolo Solo, Alejo Stivel, Juan Villoro, Fernando Rapa, Miguel Fill, Olga Rodríguez, Ana Romero, Maruja Torres and, in the distance, Manuel Vicent.
The idea of putting them together – and to direct the tribute – was by the journalist Edu Galán, the result of the “admiration and affection” that the Argentine has. “It arose like all good ideas, in a bar. This is really an excuse for a posterior farra, to take something later. That is the only objective,” Galán explained minutes before, plunged into preparations. And it is not difficult to believe. While the writer also refined details with his team minutes before starting, the friends, novelists, journalists, actors, musicians, gathered and recognized in an adjoining room of the cultural center. Some played the piano and the rest talked about film, theater, life. Of what they surely speak in the bars that frequent.
At noon, the agreed time, the heterogeneous group took the stage to the rhythm of the Rolling Stones to seize the chairs that awaited and opening the way to the Argentine who received a strong ovation of his friends and the public as soon as he entered. “They have gathered mistakenly around me and in this place that has a huge weight for me,” said Caparrós to start. And the reeds soon arrived at the tables while the friends, one by one, read fragments of First of all (Random House, 2024), that book of 664 pages that came out of the “stupid urgency, an obvious”, of the writer for writing his memoirs after being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ELA).
Through everyone’s voices, the life of Caparrós passed. From its birth, when the world was, “as always, such a strange place. Of poor as rats and extreme optimisms”, to the beginning of his old age – “being old is to hate that life as an old man and wish to last” -, through his youth: “He fought against an enemy who feared and perceived powerful.” A lifeless life of what has been one of the great chroniclers of America and the hero of narrative journalism. His hands have written of prostituted children in Sri Lanka, hunger in Niger, the trans community in Juchitán (Mexico), the horror of the dictatorship in their country and of so many other stories for 50 years of profession.
Events that inevitably populate a memory that the writer scratches in his book. In the Athenaeum there was talk of militancy, exiles, Perón, a sexual encounter with the writer Juan José Saer, the loneliness that Caparrós shared for a couple of minutes with Jorge Rafael Videla, the bloodthirsty Argentine dictator, while he trotted and the journalist asked: “But he does not worry about being like that in a public place, he is not afraid?” Onion nanaswhich was then a “thirty -year -old macarra and adjusted green velvet pants, open shirt on the chest, silver chain of thick links, boots with metal tips, a lot of gomina.”
There were cheerful and laughing moments – the most – but also some of deep breaths and long silences. There was talk of the death of his grandfather or the suicide attempt of his father, just as the writer proposes to leave his home, and for which Caparrós felt a kind of responsibility. “That summer my father Antonio killed himself (…) a number of pills was taken and left a manuscript paper next to the bed (…) he was alive. We called the ambulance, they took it, washed his stomach, revived it. His suicide had not worked and one could think that, an expert psychiatrist, he had decided that it was so (…) but he could also think that he had not tried to Because I was leaving: the coincidence in time was excessive, ”read Carlos Alberdi.
That was the afternoon. Of the stories that sprout when the life of a trometrotarmate is traveled – or curious nothing more. Some shared with invited friends, such as an anégdeta of Caparrós with Manuel Vicent, read by Vicent himself. And just as it began, it ended: with another nourished ovation, the tears of some, and the words of the Hispanic-Argentine. “It is not usually fear that defines my phrases, but today the emotion makes me fear and tremble whole. Thank you very much, colleagues, thank you very much, my dear ones. They have given me congratulations of that which, when it occurs, never falls into oblivion.” Applause, kisses, hugs, The band from Ana Belén in the background already by a cane to the other side.