EL HIJO DE LA CÓMICA

If the writer Delibes taught me how to look, the comic Fernán-Gómez taught me how to listen. For a few years I had the privilege of being close to him and listening to him. Listening to him, among other things, the story of Fernanda López, "the redhead", his great-grandmother, from whom he inherited his hair color and who was from Valdelaguna, a village next to Chinchón, mine. And of Carolina Gómez, seamstress, the grandmother who took care of his childhood like Natividad López, the housework, took care of mine. We exchanged and shared coincidences in so many stories. Stories of survival, of absences, fears, hopes, dreams: of freedom, of "becoming someone", of being why not? Jackie Cooper, "the boy from Treasure Island", and also "Salgari's novel writer". Firm, proudly resolved in his melancholy, Fernando's voice sounded when recalling those times, when remembering. Echoes of Baroja, Galdós, Barea... wandered through that memory. Also, through Fernando's, I could hear the voices of his grandmother and of mine, the distant one of Carola, his mother, the one of María, the illiterate maid fond of poetry, the one of Florentina and the "damn your feet" of his fiancé. The voice of the dreaming boy, the one of the deserving one with his handful of chestnuts in his pocket, the one of the young lover and in a hurry, in a great hurry... Voices in a single voice. I trust that you will listen to him with the same or similar emotion with which I listened to him, the seamstress's grandson, the comic's son.