The cartoonist Santiago Sequeiros, in Madrid's Gran Vía on Monday, March 22. Álvaro García
La Mala Pena by Santiago Sequeiros (Buenos Aires, 49 years old), the invented city and the real event, began with the transfer of his family from Vigo to Seville.
Nor had the Galician experience been comfortable for the adolescent, so accustomed to moving behind his father's professional destinies that his dominant sensation was permanent dislocation.
In the Andalusian institute the city where his comics take place was invented, a gloomy and suffocating Macondo, while equally gloomy things happened to him in secret.
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In
Romeo Muerte
(Reservoir books), the comic he has just published, he returns to it, the fictional and the real drive that fuels it.
Processions of Nazarenes parade under a rain of olive pomace in a city shocked by the murder of Mama Grande, its mayor, a crime attributed to a former circus performer.
There are the characters from those comics from the nineties that made Sequeiros both a promise and a cursed man:
Ambigú
,
Nostromo quebranto
and
To Apeirón.
If sales were limited, the cult was overwhelming.
Some awards from the Barcelona International Comic Fair, the US Society for News Design or the Annecy International Animated Film Festival (France) seemed to underpin the future.
A mirage.
“I wanted to live off the comic, but I made it to the end of the party.
I published in professional magazines that were beginning to sink and stopped paying ”.
He kept the La Mala Pena cartoons to himself.
"The background of La Mala Pena", he says during a face-to-face interview in Madrid, "is a representation of my psyche and it works the way my psyche works, to which I am adding things."
His psyche has changed a lot in the last 25 years as his alcoholism evolved, so decisive that the cartoonist structures his life according to the stages of his addiction.
“When a person gets drunk, it's you and the drink and then everything that surrounds you: friends, work and money, which never is because you drink it.
Then you start to put aside the things that complicate your relationship with alcohol ... that your family interferes, because you organize to get fired and avoid responsibility, you begin to imagine that alcohol is your partner ... A lot of mental traps.
In the end the cup and you are already too many people.
The logical thing would be to stop drinking, but no, you keep drinking and you disappear, you stop drawing, you stop thinking, I could not even see a whole movie and there what remains is insomnia, pure and simple disease.
There are people who continue like this, end up on the street insane and others who commit suicide.
My idea was to get out of the way at once, I was very clear that I wanted to kill myself by drinking.
I really was going where I wanted. "
"Why did you want to go there?"
-You run away from life.
What happens is that later you find that, when you want to kill yourself, you discover that you do not tolerate the fact of disappearing, your mind does not tolerate it, in my case.
I had no problem except that from one year to the next they were going to kick me out of the rental apartment because I had almost no money, but my parents had died, I thought no one was going to miss me and even if they missed me, I was same…
Sketch of the character of Romeo, from the Sequeiros notebook.
In that last year in which he wished and feared death, Sequeiros drank vodka and orange as soon as he woke up at dawn tormented by need - he learned that it was the only thing he could drink at that time in the movie
Leaving Las Vegas,
where Nicolas Cage he kills himself with highs.
He stopped drawing, vegetated.
On that determined path to the end, he was surprised by the fear of ceasing to live, which led him to his third attempt to give up alcohol.
This time at home with the help of his ex-wife and the pharmacology he already knew from two failed attempts at clinics.
“Alcoholics don't want to stop drinking, what they want is to stop having problems with alcohol, which is why relapses are so frequent.
The time it worked for me was because I made the other attempts and also because I was about to clap the previous year and found the motivation: I do not tolerate disappearance, I am condemned to live.
In the clinics I had learned what to take in order not to have a
delirium tremens
or a heart attack and, after a week, you are a shit, but you have passed the monkey ”.
There were previous moments in which the cartoonist approached the abyss like the nights he slept in the Madrid metro.
He stumbled through the floors of colleagues for years until an essay by José Luis Sampedro,
El mercado y la globalización
, saved him from the street in 2002. The book, illustrated by Sequeiros, which would also accompany the writer in
The Mongols in Bagdad
(2003 ), remained for 18 months as the best-selling non-fiction title.
An economic respite that allowed the cartoonist to pay a deposit for a rental and buy a computer.
Then he began to collaborate with
El Mundo
, where he continues to publish, while delving into the exclusive universe of the addict, until reaching that end point where he only wanted to drink until he died.
Sketches by Sequeiros for the comic 'Dead Romeo'.
Next October he will be a decade sober.
Since 2015 he lives in Carboneras, a town facing the sea in the Levante of Almeria.
“I am 10 years older than I should be, they are like on loan.
I use it to relativize situations.
They are 10 years in which I have been well ”.
His new status made him rethink
Dead Romeo
, a kind of ghost comic that had been expected since the nineties and that had not yet arrived.
“I did one last rewrite a year after I stopped drinking, I had intensive therapy for three years.
The rehabilitation of an alcoholic takes a lifetime, and to know if it will work out for you.
The perspective changes.
All the self-delusions that I had written in my notes I saw for what they were, you see that you have covered things with a wrap, that you delve into one aspect to avoid the other ”.
The tattoos on his hands summarize his biographical journey.
On the right a heart of Mary with sores, daggers, vulvas and claws.
"A self-portrait of the host," he says, "a guy with a breastplate in front of the feminine."
On the left the flames have become roots.
The heart is no longer armored.
The dream world that Sequeiros draws in black and white with no gaps for escape requires an effort.
“It requires a fairly strong immersion capacity, they are dense materials and people like chewed things.
My comics require the involvement of the reader.
I try to understand my own comics when I write, I understand that there are people who feel lost in front of them ”.
Plan more deliveries of La Mala Pena, that fictional city that is also a living will where old demons still lurk.
Covers of one of Sequeiros' workbooks.