Mar de Marchis: nobody knew who she was, but everyone loved her

María Jesús Marhuenda Irastorza, known professionally as Mar de Marchis, was for a decade the most creative person in the Spanish press.

She is also the most elusive, fanciful, generous and crazy.

A true genius.

She founded and directed the cultural magazine

which in a reduced format was distributed for a time with this newspaper, and she was able to discover many talents who are now well-known names in journalism.

She died on Friday, May 27, from pneumonia.

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He was born in Santa Pola, Alicante, on January 5, 1968. He did not have an easy life and probably did not make life easy for those around him.

Around 2010, divorced with three children, after a few personal disasters and suffering from a fierce agoraphobia that prevented her from leaving the house, she began to become popular on some internet forums under a Japanese pseudonym.

Through the internet she recruited a group of people almost as peculiar as her and founded

first in digital format and then also in print.

The editorial staff of the magazine did not know her name or her face.

Only her Angel friend of hers, manager and practicality of

knew who she was.

In 2011, many of us began to receive calls from that voice that identified itself as Mar de Marchis.

He asked, he asked and he asked.

He was almost always convincing.

She also used to send highly suggestive photos of someone who was obviously not her.

I was a victim of that fantasy and then an accomplice.

She was amused by the rumors that circulated about her identity (she was a Syrian refugee with a burned face, an Italian millionaire daughter of a mobster, a daughter of Aznar, a man with a distorted voice, what do I know), but until the end of her life he was unable to expose himself publicly as he was.

Too bad: she was a woman of extraordinary intelligence and wit, as she demonstrated, represented this time by a black ball, on Twitter.

When a digital newspaper revealed his real identity, he suffered a profound crisis.

After a brief hospitalization, she took refuge in my house in Paris and, devastated, she continued to work almost every hour of the day.

Her brain had two right hemispheres: she couldn't be asked for logic, what she did was imagine, get on the phone and get someone to make her inventions come true.

For ten years I kept in constant contact with her.

I mean several daily phone conversations and lots of messages.

Without understanding her, I don't think I've ever understood myself so well with anyone.

On April 4, 2021, someone found her body on a sidewalk in the center of Rome, where she lived, and called an ambulance.

He had suffered a massive stroke that was followed by others.

She has remained in a coma ever since, hospitalized in a Roman hospital and later in a center in Mallorca.

She there she died on Friday morning.

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