EL HIJO DE LA CÓMICA

If the writer Delibes taught me how to look, the comedian Fernán-Gómez taught me how to listen. For several years, I had the privilege of being close to him and listening. Listening to him tell, among others, the story of Fernanda López, “la rubia,” his great-grandmother, from whom he inherited his hair colour, and who came from Valdelaguna, a village near Chinchón—my village. And of Carolina Gómez, a seamstress, the grandmother who cared for his childhood, just as Natividad López, “her labours,” cared for mine.

We exchanged and shared similarities in so many stories. Stories of survival, of absence, fears, hopes, dreams: of freedom, of “becoming someone,” of being—why not?—Jackie Cooper, “the one from *Treasure Island*,” and also “a writer of Salgari novels.”

Fernando’s voice, firm and proudly resolved in its melancholy, would sound out as he remembered those times, as he remembered himself. Echoes of Baroja, Galdós, Barea… wandered through that memory. Also, through Fernando’s memories, came the voices of his grandmother and mine, of distant Carola, his mother, of María, the illiterate maid fond of poetry, of Florentina and her boyfriend’s “joder qué piernas.” The voice of a dreaming child, of the eager young actor with a pocketful of dried chestnuts, of the hurried, love-struck young man… Voices in a single voice.

I trust you will listen to me with the same—or at least similar—emotion with which I listened to him.

The grandson of the seamstress.
The son of the actress.
José Sacristán.