The reminiscences of Martín Caparrós, within the voice of the author and his buddies | Culture | EUROtoday

It is just not unusual in Madrid that the terraces wait, with background music, to interrupt the afternoon and the company come to drink the primary beer. But the tables that on Saturday rested within the gentle of the auditorium of the Madrid Athenaeum, with Sabina, Serrat and Brazsens within the background, didn’t watch for any prospects. It was a tailor-made terrace for Martín Caparrós, author, journalist, collaborator of this newspaper and lately awarded the International Journalism Award Manu Leguineche Chair. And in it he met with a bunch of buddies – 29 – to learn, within the shelter of the threatening clouds, fragments of his newest e book, in a tribute they’ve referred to as Mopi. Some time with Martín Caparrós and his buddies.

In the wicker chairs organized within the type all through 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, within the distance, Manuel Vicent.

The thought of ​​placing them collectively – and to direct the tribute – was by the journalist Edu Galán, the results 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 defined minutes earlier than, plunged into preparations. And it isn’t troublesome to imagine. While the author additionally refined particulars along with his workforce minutes earlier than beginning, the chums, novelists, journalists, actors, musicians, gathered and acknowledged in an adjoining room of the cultural heart. Some performed the piano and the remainder talked about movie, theater, life. Of what they absolutely communicate within the bars that frequent.

At midday, the agreed time, the heterogeneous group took the stage to the rhythm of the Rolling Stones to grab the chairs that awaited and opening the best way to the Argentine who obtained a powerful ovation of his buddies and the general public as quickly as he enters. “They have gathered mistakenly around me and in this place that has a huge weight for me,” stated Caparrós to start out. And the reeds quickly arrived on the tables whereas the chums, one after the other, learn fragments of First of all (Random House, 2024), that e book of 664 pages that got here out of the “stupid urgency, an obvious”, of the author for writing his memoirs after being identified with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ELA).

Through everybody’s voices, the lifetime of Caparrós handed. From its start, when the world was, “as always, such a strange place. Of poor as rats and extreme optimisms”, to the start of his previous age – “being old is to hate that life as an old man and wish to last” -, by his youth: “He fought against an enemy who feared and perceived powerful.” A dull lifetime of what has been one of many nice chroniclers of America and the hero of narrative journalism. His fingers have written of prostituted kids in Sri Lanka, starvation in Niger, the trans neighborhood in Juchitán (Mexico), the horror of the dictatorship of their nation and of so many different tales for 50 years of occupation.

Events that inevitably populate a reminiscence that the author scratches in his e book. In the Athenaeum there was discuss of militancy, exiles, Perón, a sexual encounter with the author Juan José Saer, the loneliness that Caparrós shared for a few minutes with Jorge Rafael Videla, the bloodthirsty Argentine dictator, whereas he trotted and the journalist requested: “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 have been cheerful and laughing moments – essentially the most – but additionally a few of deep breaths and lengthy silences. There was discuss of the dying of his grandfather or the suicide try of his father, simply as the author proposes to depart his dwelling, and for which Caparrós felt a form of accountability. “That summer my father Antonio killed himself […] a number of pills was taken and left a manuscript paper next to the bed […] I was alive. We called the ambulance, they took it, they washed his stomach, they revived it. His suicide had not worked and one could think that, an expert psychiatrist, he had decided that it was […] But you could also think that no, that I had really tried, that I did it because I was leaving: the coincidence in time was excessive, ”Carlos Alberdi learn.

That was the afternoon. Of the tales that sprout when the lifetime of a trometrotarmate is traveled – or curious nothing extra. Some shared with invited buddies, equivalent to an anégdeta of Caparrós with Manuel Vicent, learn by Vicent himself. And simply because it started, it ended: with one other nourished ovation, the tears of some, and the phrases 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 within the background already by a cane to the opposite aspect.