Throughout my life as a journalist I have logically made many mistakes. In this case I mean the mistakes I used to make when I did an interview or a literary profile to any public character and had the habit of describing it physically in its less graceful part to the point of insisting on the most obvious defects. I now read at a great distance from time those portraits and interviews, I wonder how it was possible that I did not realize that aggression that indicated a degree of stupid arrogance of the journalist, that it is believed that everything is worth in order to find an image or a surprising metaphor.
Rereading at this point that I wrote with cheerful impunity according to the air of that time is something that fills me with stupor. I know very well that literature is diluted with the atmosphere of a certain time and neither, Faulkner nor could write what they wrote if they were subjected to the rigor of the social and politically correct today. The written and oral language is subject to a sanitary asepsis that has constrained it in a corset. I don’t know if this is good or bad. When writing, for example, that the man discovered the fire began to doubt because it could have been a woman who discovered it, as women would also be, perhaps, those who performed. In that case I am forced to change the word man As human. I ignore if this surveillance is used to push literature forward or backward.
With newly established democracy, I remember that in Congress the visit of, a man of state, former president of the French Government Council was received. I was sitting on the guest box and the time of verifying his presence in my parliamentary chronicle I wrote: “Above the railing, Edgar Faure’s hebraic nose appeared.” A great Dutch journalist, very friend, correspondent of the Dutch public television, and of a progressive newspaper of his country, told me: “In my newspaper that chronicle would not have published it to you and they would probably have shown you the exit door so that you would not write there.”
He was one of the literary, fun and intelligent characters to which I made a profile. To head the interview I wrote: “Happy, dressed in white, with open arms, the big one of Spain descends through the snail staircase with three chuchos lids in the calves and already in the lobby it gets rid of the courtesy risotes with the mouth full of tongue and the denture a little loose chestifting kindness.” Sitting in white armchairs in the gallery of his garden with a sound of water that fell from the cup sustained by a marble goddess, Luis Escobar began to tell hilarious things of his life with extraordinary grace and intelligence. In spite of everything, I insisted on describing it physically: “At that time the aristocrats had all a horse face and the crotch smelled them with lowered picadero with the woods of the East. Luis Escobar has since left the chin there down there, that blade of the blade that is shouting a Dutch lace gillage. There is something equine in his profile. In that it shows that it belongs to the aristocracy.
The Marquis refuted me: “It is a word that the aristocrats never use. We say society, lifelong friends, known families.” And if that were not enough I insisted on his physical description, that logically he did not forgave me: “Luis Escobar has a round tongue that occupies his whole mouth. The voice comes out of his nose with a hair of fleshy flutin. Once outside, already in the air, he picks it up with the lower lip in the tingling bear and absorbs it into the palate. Last syllables of each word, the last words of each sentence. Fun for whom, for the reader, for the journalist himself? I wonder. Of course to the protagonist he sat down to Horn burned and of course he withdrew my greeting.
On another occasion, to refer to a child who was born with serious physical and mental malformations. Shortly after I received a letter from an anonymous mother who apparently went through a similar problem warning me that until that moment I had read with pleasure, but that I would no longer do it. The letter ended up saying that her son was an angel full of love and taking care of that angel filled her with happiness. That simple letter was sufficient so that since then I saw the world in another way. When describing a person, highlighting and insisting in a physical defect is something that would no longer do, even if they would bleach me alive.
