Daniel Divinsky
09/30/2020 - 18:02
Clarín.com
Culture
When they met years ago at the Frankfurt Fair, José Saramago and Quino were silent for several minutes.
The one who broke the ice was the Portuguese: "Mafalda was my Philosophy teacher," he told her.
They had just notified him that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
And this morning a student of Umberto Eco called me and told me that the Italian told them that when he needed to relax he would read Hegel, but if he had to think he would read
Mafalda
.
However,
Quino
was a guy who did not believe Quino, in a typically non-Argentine attitude.
Quino died.
All the good people in the country and in the world will cry for it.
- Daniel Divinsky (@ DanielDivi1) September 30, 2020
When we started to edit it in De La Flor, in the 70s,
the first five volumes
, published by Jorge Álvarez
,
had already come out
.
At that time, every time a book came out, the distributors who took them to the newsstands
bribed the watchman
from the bookbinding shop to get them first: whoever had it sold more.
Over time began its revaluation by people of the highest level.
Of course Echo himself, "what matters is not what I think of
Mafalda
but what
Mafalda
thinks of me," he wrote.
But he was not aware of the importance of what he was doing and it seemed to him that the repercussion of
Mafalda
was excessive compared to his humorous pages, which he considered the core of his production.
An observer
Where did he get his ideas from?
She had enormous powers of observation, she was always on public transportation with a notebook;
There she listened to the phrases that seemed significant to her and wrote down;
eventually those phrases appeared in their works.
He said he couldn't draw;
in fact, he copied his Mafaldas, he said he envied Fontanarrosa because he could draw hands. For a long time he couldn't talk to the public, he was shy.
However, he never gave a stereotypical answer, he thought what he was going to say.
Once we went to Tucuman to sign and he was hoarse.
So in the conversation with the public I answered and he nodded or denied.
He was Chasman and I was Chirolita
.
Editorial.
Quino at the De La Flor stand in 2010. Photo Leandro Marchesi
The other is his ideology:
anti-religious, progressive, leftist
, anarchist family.
When
Mafalda
was used
for a message against abortion rights, she recently made a loud statement.
As she had done in the dictatorship when they wanted to use her drawings to defend the police.
I spoke with him
a month ago
on the phone, at times he would connect, he would not listen well, he would disconnect.
I was with him at the end of January, I brought him crumb sandwiches, which was one of his favorite foods, he told me about a dream.
Since Alicia died, his wife, who was half of him,
was sad
: every so often she said something funny, but she was not in a good mood.
This morning I wondered
what we were
, like an old joke from an old couple.
He was much more than an author whom I published in what was my editorial.
He was not a friend, like Fontanarrosa, to whom he could tell an intimacy.
It was not a second father, it was part of my life, it was an indescribable, profound, lasting bond.
* Daniel Divinsky is the former editor of Ediciones De La Flor
PK
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