The cartoonist Quino, with a statue of Mafalda in Oviedo in 2014.paco Paredes
The most international and most translated graphic humorist in the Spanish language has died;
and perhaps also the most endearing: Joaquín Salvador Lavado,
Quino.
He was born on July 17, 1932 in Mendoza (Argentina), and was therefore 88 years old.
He now resided in that same city, cared for by his nephews since he moved there in November 2017 after his wife, Alicia Colombo, died.
Quino's name will be forever linked to the most famous of his characters: Mafalda;
the girl was wise and responsive.
Joaquín Lavado's parents were Spaniards from Fuengirola (Málaga) and emigrated to Argentina in the 1930s.
The humble family lived in a somewhat closed circle, to the point that the boy Quino spoke in Andalusian until his first six years.
Quino: "The boys were my best readers"
The death of his father surprised him with only 14, and he tempered that absence with the ghostly apparitions that he believed he saw from time to time.
Even after he married Alicia, his father would appear to him, smoking ("he still ignored that smoking is not good"), and he looked proudly at the cartoonist because the boy had not done so badly.
Quino used to recall these visions: "They were very pleasant appearances."
Joaquín Salvador Lavado immediately wanted to be a cartoonist.
He decided as a child, at the age of three, when an uncle of his, a graphic designer, to entertain him and his brothers, began to draw pictures for them.
He was amazed at all the things that could come out of a pencil.
Later he would study Fine Arts at the University of Cuyo.
He did not finish, but he managed to absorb the basic concepts of drawing and proportions.
Birth of Mafalda
An initial job as an advertising draftsman led him to create Mafalda in 1962 thanks to washing machines and refrigerators.
Quino was commissioned to advertise that consisted of producing comic strips for newspapers in which the life of a family using Mandsfield appliances was shown in drawings.
And from that phonetic sequence came the name Mafalda.
The newspapers rejected that publicity, because it was confused with their own content, and the characters created by Quino for the assignment remained in the bedroom.
However, he recovered them in 1964, no longer commercially, and thus the most successful strip in history in the Spanish language emerged in the Buenos Aires newspaper Primera plana, which would later be published in newspapers around the world.
Later, the books that included those scenes would sell millions of copies and would be translated into French, English, Japanese, Chinese…, into more than 30 languages.
Mafalda also went to the cinema, with a 75-minute feature film made in Argentina, in which the characters reproduced in sound language the writings that their creator had given them.
But Quino was not satisfied, because when he left the premiere he heard some say: "But that's not Mafalda's voice!"
So he transferred it to silent movies.
The following experiences, led by the great Juan Padrón, a Cuban animation specialist, no longer had dialogues.
They were new jokes based on the scenes themselves.
In this way, Mafalda offered the audience the voice that everyone would have imagined.
Of that gang (Manolito, Susanita, Libertad, Guille ...), Quino always had his favorite son in the naive idealist Felipe, throughout his life.
In 1973, nine years and 1,928 strips after its creation, Quino decided that he would no longer draw Mafalda, exhausted by the character himself and by the tyranny of the daily delivery to the newspaper.
And then began an even more ambitious creation, with meticulous, detailed, equally brilliant drawings that often showed the oppression of the powerful and the intelligent gaze of the downtrodden.
El País Semanal published these cartoons in the 1990s.
In one of them you can see a lady offering coffee to her guests while a girl plays among them.
And the hostess clarifies: “She is the baby of humble people around here.
And we buy her the clothes and the toys because we love her as if she were family ”.
The little clothes the girl wears is the uniform of a maid with a cap, and around her you can see those toys, also in the right size for her age: a broom, an iron, a feather duster and a mop.
His books continued to be sold by the hundreds of thousands (for example, his marvelous Powerful, Overbearing and Powerless, Quinoterapia, Gente en su Sitio, What unpresentable present! Or I did not go), but competing in the collective memory with those of Mafalda and with the thousands of key rings, notebooks, stickers, badges and towels that reproduce your image;
and with the affection that that character had unleashed in millions of people.
Spanish nationality
Quino always felt his Andalusian origin, and in 1977 he tried to manage dual nationality at the Spanish consulate in Milan (the city where he went into exile during the Argentine dictatorship and where the office that manages his rights for all of Europe was located).
But he was attended by a very unfriendly civil servant, who asked him: "And at your age, do you want to become Spanish now?"
He replied: "No, it had occurred to me before, but then Franco was there."
So he gave up, after 45 years.
He tried it again in 1990, already in Madrid, in the courts of Pradillo Street, at 57. On that occasion he went to the end, although the process seemed very cold.
Another civil servant, somewhat kinder, only told her, after asking for her information: "Sign here."
And signed.
He had dreamed of a solemn act in which the national anthem would be heard and before a Constitution with felt covers on which he could lay his hand while saying: "Yes, I swear."
In any case, and since it was January 5, he told the official, to improve the weather: "You have given me a nice gift from Reyes."
But not for those.
She replied: "Within two weeks you can collect your Spanish birth certificate and then your national identity document."
So he went out into the street, entered a bookstore, bought a Constitution and swore it in by himself.
Shortly after, in 1992, he received a great tribute in Madrid, by the Society of the V Centennial of Discovery, which consisted of the installation of a spectacular tent inside which you could tour the school of Mafalda and his friends, watch the movies who starred in and observed life-size all the dolls designed by Quino and built by Manolo Marín.
It is not surprising that, years later, all those characters, forgotten in a warehouse, perished in a fire.
His destiny was marked.
Manolo Marín was a Fallas artist.
Later, Quino and his wife, Alicia Colombo, a chemist with an academic training, looked for a flat in Madrid: "I already know more or less the areas, but not their ideologies," he commented to those who wanted to help him.
They bought it and have used it during their stays in Spain.
The last one, on the occasion of the presentation in Oviedo of the 2014 Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities. Since then, he has not set foot in the country of his parents.
Bad health
Quino was already moving around in a wheelchair and suffered from vision problems due to glaucoma diagnosed a decade ago.
He had no luck with health.
During the 1990s, he underwent six surgical operations in just 10 years.
In 2006 he stopped drawing regularly.
In 2019 he was almost blind.
The death in September 2017 of Alicia Colombo, his eternal companion, his representative and general delegate for the world, a year older than him, coincided with his stage of more marked physical decline;
he left Buenos Aires in November of that year and returned to his native Mendoza;
always cared for by close family and friends.
Alicia and Quino did not want to have children.
The great genius of humor was very pessimistic about it: "It is a bad shit to bring someone here without having asked," he told EL PAÍS in 1990, after thirty years of marriage.
And I used to repeat it.
When he was told that after all he had not done so badly - as his father warned him when he appeared after his death - Quino replied: "It has not gone bad for me, but I have had bad leg with health ”.
Mafalda did not return
Despite the pleas, pleas and juicy proposals he received to resuscitate Mafalda, he always refused to do so (except for some social cause: from Unicef, from the League for World Health, for a prevention campaign against the coronavirus ..., and to explain the Organic Law of the Right to Education, the LODE, commissioned by the Spanish Socialist Government in 1986).
On many other occasions, his creation was rarely used for ideas that he did not share;
for example, an anti-abortion campaign in Argentina.
Quino's death will continue to leave us some unknowns.
What is her last name Mafalda?
It is not known.
Her father in the drawings did not even have a first name ... The mother did: Raquel.
And above all, what would have happened now if ...?
At a dinner he attended in Oviedo with some friends shortly before receiving the 2014 Prince of Asturias, one of the guests asked him if today Mafalda's parents are divorced.
Without waiting for an answer, an interesting debate was opened about it, with deep psychological reflections.
Finally, everyone looked at Quino waiting for the final answer.
And he said: "I don't know ..., for me it's just two drawings ...".
They also asked him sometimes in private what that wise girl would be like today, and he answered that she was probably already dead because she would have been one of the disappeared from the Argentine military dictatorship.
Quino drank coffee without sugar, disagreed with the new cuisine because the portions were too small, and he loved La Rioja wine as much as Mafalda hated soup.
And he loved flamenco, which linked him so much with his parents and his childhood: “If I listen to the folk music of Mendoza, my land, I like it, I'm not saying no.
But what really excites me is flamenco.
It is something that I feel like little ants inside my veins.
That is why I have always known that I am Spanish and I have always said that I am Spanish ”.
He gladly attended parties and friends' birthdays, with endless fidelity.
He looked sad, perhaps because he listened a lot;
but inside he was smiling.
I admired Forges, Peridis, Schultz, Perich, Mingote, Summers, Chummy-Chummez, Gila, Gallego and Rey, Puebla ...
And he was very happy during his days in the Principality in 2014, full of tributes for the Prince of Asturias Award.
Especially, in that act of the Philharmonic Theater of Oviedo, with a final ovation of five minutes.
And also with a detail that will remain forever in that city: the life-size reproduction of Mafalda that has been photographed since then with eternal patience in Campo de San Francisco park with anyone waiting their turn to sit with her.
He lived that trip as a farewell to Spain and the friends he left on this side of his double homeland.
He had already said goodbye to some a year before, because he did not imagine that he would have to return.
His old republican spirit, as he confessed to the heat of a glass of Rioja in a restaurant near Gran Vía, raised certain concerns about the 2014 award that King Felipe VI would give him, but he gladly accepted it because he came from a democratic Spain .
Later, after those days in Asturias, he raved about the conversation and the human warmth offered him by Don Felipe and Doña Letizia, whom he would always praise from then on and who, back in Argentina, did not hesitate to transmit his affection whenever he could.
He was anti-monarchical, but also a person of integrity.