He made fun of everything. And she used to joke about his own death. Especially, after in 2001, she was encouraged to tell on her radio program, The parking machine, who had contracted HIV. “What is the height of a state?” she then asked him. Fernando Pena to his listeners. “Being allergic to AZT,” they responded from the table. And then everyone laughed. Because, even in the worst moments, he felt that he had to laugh. And because, despite his adversity, he thought he still had a long way to go.
However, in 2004 and after pneumonia, the multifaceted actor announced that he had decided to stop drinking the cocktail that helped him live with the disease. “Of course I care about dying, but I care more about living well.”he had said then, tired of the adverse effects of the medication. And he discontinued his treatment. Finally, on June 17, 2009, at just 46 years of age, he died from liver cancer aggravated by his general condition at the Fleming Institute in Belgrano.
Son of sports journalist José Pepe Grief and the actress María José Malena Mendizabal, Fernando was born on January 31, 1963 at midnight in Montevideo, Uruguay. “Uncomfortable day, uncomfortable hour, inopportune, as always”, he himself would say in his biography. And I would add some details worthy of a soap opera, since as his parents explained, they conceived him in Paris, in the middle of their honeymoon, but there they decided to separate when her mother discovered infidelity on the part of her partner. .
Thus, Peña grew up in a house that his mother rented in the Carrasco area, while his father, who often traveled to Argentina for work, visited him on Fridays. In 1970, he moved to Buenos Aires with part of his family and began studying at the Saint Andrew’s School. His first jobs were as an English teacher and riding instructor. Until he started working as a flight attendant at American Airlines and, in 1994, a very particular passenger discovered him and changed his life: Lalo Mir.
The thing is that Fernando could not control his innate ability to embody different characters. And, when he was speaking through the plane’s loudspeaker like the Cuban Milagros Lopez, the announcer asked to meet him. She thought she was a stewardess, but she ran into him. And that’s how, shortly after, Peña ended up making his debut in Tutti Frutti, FM del Plata. Although it took a long time before the public knew that, behind the voice of this Caribbean woman she came to have her own program, The tropical pathon Radio del Plata, there was actually this man.
Little by little, the characters that came out of Peña’s imagination began to multiply. This is how they saw the light Martín Revoira Lynch, Roberto Flores, La Mega, Palito, Mario Modesto Savino, Delia Dora de Fernández, Dick Alfredo and Rafael Oreste Porelorti, among others. They were his “creatures.” And they were capable of interacting with each other and even interrupting each other as if not even their own creator could control them. In fact, if it had not been for Hugo Guerrero Marthineitz, who urged him to say that he was the one behind all of them, perhaps Fernando would never have whitewashed him. Although he had deprived himself of the possibility of taking them to the theater, as he did later, with works such as Schizophrenia either Dirtamong many others.
Some found it funny, others aggressive. He was, without a doubt, a provocateur, although he denied that word. And not everyone was prepared for his brazenness. In fact, COMFER got tired of fining him for his on-air outbursts on both Metro and Rock & Pop. When he felt overwhelmed, he used to escape to rest in a five-star hotel. He also dedicated himself to writing, a bit looking for a way to let off steam. He published three books: People like one, Thanks for flying with me and Don’t you dare read this?. He liked to spend time with his dogs. He spoke openly about his addictions. He kept the ashes of his mother, who died in ’97, in an urn that he used daily. And he used to try to decipher the mysteries of love and heartbreak in therapy.
“Buddha was once asked what surprised him most about humanity. And his answer was: ‘Men, who lose their health to collect money and then lose money to regain their health, and who, by thinking anxiously about the future, forget the present in such a way that they end up not living in either the present or the present. the future. They live as if they were never going to die and they die as if they had never lived,’” he once said.
Until the week before his departure, Peña hosted his Metro 95.1 radio show from his home. And, a month earlier, he had been starring Dialogue between a prostitute and her clienta work that he dedicated every night to his mother and grandmother, Gloria Bayardowho had acted with Mirtha Legrand in The third kiss and had instilled in him a passion for poets like Federico García Lorca and Juan Ramon Jimenez. “Without art, I would have been a sad bastard,” she commented after each performance.
She knew that she had been infected in 1987, because her boyfriend had HIV. But her health problems only began in 2000 and on more than one occasion it was complicated. “People who live passionately die young. I imagine my suicide like this: I’m going to go in the car, at 80 kilometers per hour, happy and distracted, and I’m going to take a pillar in front of me,” she said when her illness was still under control. And, when they detected terminal cancer, she decided that his “legacy” was going to be to dramatize death. That’s why he wanted his farewell to be fun, so that no one cried and everyone laughed. And so it was: his remains were laid to rest in the Buenos Aires Legislature, where there was electronic music, millions of sequins and a bottle of whiskey next to the coffin.
