Today, April 23, when I write this, we pay tribute to the tool that has lit the light of thoughts and imagination. It is no coincidence that totalitarianism and deceit have identified him as an irreconcilable enemy. They are loyal friends and providential companions in loneliness.
This column is subject to a standardized length, a commitment that, for once, allow me to evade, but writing about books and readings is an inexhaustible wealth.
My life is an uninterrupted walk through books. Childhood received stories from grandparents orally, a distraction from days in bed due to measles, mumps or chickenpox. Those stories that began with once upon a time, and ended with they lived happily, opened the ardor for reading.
I headed towards her when I was a few years older. I delved into comics about hilarious characters and their circumstances. At the head, Mortadelo and Filemón, or the bellboy Sacarino, Stakhanovite producers of crazy madness and entanglements. With them, a supporting cast that passed through Carpanta, and his insatiable desire, or Rigoberto Picaporte, a large bachelor, a desperate romantic on the lookout for the curruquita girl’s yes.
From those characters drawn in the buffoonish caricature of grotesque and tragic Spain, I moved on to the Apollonian figure of flawless heroes, evocative of the Manichean epic of the times. The plot required a script with no more tones, racist prejudices aside, than white or black. There were Captain Trueno, Jabato, the Warrior of the Mask or the unequal couple, with pedophile suggestions and explicit fascist counterethics, by Roberto Alcázar and Pedrín.
Without abandoning the drawing I delved into almost the idolatry, which is still alive, of Tintin and Captain Haddock, along with the corporate competition of Professor Tornasol, the hilarious Hernández and Fernández (Dupond and Dupont in the original) and the hero’s pet, Snowy . This character, foreign to the national environment, helped me understand more complex personalities and a way of life unimaginable in my environment. The police role of the stiff stick and tent in these parts changed to that of the journalist in solving mysteries. Deduction versus systematic repression. Of course, I don’t remember Tintin in a single vignette next to the reporter’s instrument: the typewriter.
The adventures continued in novel format. The Three Musketeers, Michael Strogoff, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, many more, took me to the babbling of reasoning exclusively through the lyrics.
That initiation put in my hands the first novel that expressed real life. It was The Search, by Pío Baroja. The experience led to a literary baptism, a fall from the horse, the beginning of an apostolate in favor of that four-letter wonder verb: reading. It was the sublimation of an adolescence that turned into youth with the compass of fictions about antiheroes, unknown until then.
It was already a matter of continuing and not stopping. The novel was followed by the essay, the play, the history manual. Poetry is the pending subject. I like hearing it, but reading it…It’s hard for me. I do not know how to do it. I get lost in a labyrinth of words and concepts that hint at distance in my reading comprehension. Maybe because it is a manifestation of the soul and in those depths I suffocate. It is difficult for me to travel in this genre with the imagination that is my faithful comrade in other narratives. The lexical juggling of Machado, Hernández, Juan Ramón, Leopoldo Panero sounds like music to me, but they don’t quite penetrate with that shaking that I feel with the prose and with the architecture of the characters.
I recognize myself as a late reader of Don Quixote. I enjoyed reading the reduced versions that we read at school in high school days of memoirs, Latin verses and litanies. In my early youth I made two attempts. I didn’t get very far. It was the allegory of a dish that is difficult to digest, of not yet feeling ready to savor a book predestined to transform lifestyles and moods.
I was grateful for that wait, because I approached it during a period of happy maturation. I want to do like that friend, committed to rereading it every five years. He is ready to return to my hands and the path of my eyes. And I am sure that I will renew that first-time feeling when I close the book: feeling like I have mastered the difficult and uneven adventure of reading.
The challenge of the chair is in Ulysses, by James Joyce. Several frustrated attempts at the first change. I will go to the challenge again… I don’t know when.
ANGEL ALONSO
