Fernando Lazaro Carreter | That man who wanted to be from Buenos Aires

2023-04-17 12:25:27

In Spanish literary life there was a rare Aragonese who always wanted to be from Buenos Aires. He was, in life, one of the most influential personalities this country had, who used it to celebrate literature, to improve the language, to fix and give splendor to a dictionary that could not rest as if it were old. .

Now, when his centenary has come to an end, his precise centenary, that of his birth, which occurred last Thursday, many of us realized that few remember him, many have forgotten about him, or at least they have had the clock at odd hours like to take care as God commands of the one who ordered to shut up until the Spanish language was better heard.

Oblivion is full of words that he himself polished so that they would not be lost. Words of life, of theater, of literature, of journalism, and words of oblivion. Oblivion is full of words, and also of the words that come together in the name of Fernando Lázaro Carreter.

He had an imposing authority, which had prevailed even in his voice, his way of walking, clinging to life and things, his way of listening to the radio and telling it, of referring to soccer and other sports to explain why he was It was necessary to listen to everything so that the language could live differently in the words of the people.

Forgetting about Fernando Lázaro Carreter must be taken as a mortal sin

It was his own activity, night and day, and although he was an intellectual, a man forced by his own knowledge to be a lookout for this prosody, he was also imaginative and cordial. Listening was his job, and ruling on what caused him curiosity or scandal was one of the matters of his power as a linguist who told us erroneous journalists where else we had been wrong when using Cervantes in vain.

Forgetting Fernando Lázaro Carreter should be taken as a mortal sin for those who remember what he did at the Language Academy, which he helped to exist even in the rocky times when the Government (that of Felipe González) had to resort to the rescue because here the language was not always taken seriously. Not now.

And that radically serious man had the guts and the vital risk to become a statesman (he was a state councilor for this reason) who forced him to focus on that common good that is to speak well.

He was twice director of that House of words, and it was not because power took him, or not just, but because the scope of his purpose took years to consolidate, until the Academy of today began to be his and that of the others. Until now, when the centenary of a figure occurs that, to be honest, I never thought anyone would forget.

Forgetting Fernando Lázaro Carreter, and having the academy and journalism do it at the same time, is a feat that can only be understood either because memory was lost in Spain or because it is faded, in the hands of haste, that greyhound that stars the journey to the nothingness of oblivion in which the great men of whom we know nothing live because we are to other things, or we are to nothing.

Fernando Lazaro Carreter. He weighed like a big man, he had the shoulders to carry a hundredweight of books or ideas, and he walked slowly.

At the end of his time, attacked by pain that made him inmate of physiotherapy one day and the next, he was a man who needed affection and joy, and sometimes he would say, by phone, that you go see him, then take him to one of the restaurants in the north of Madrid and that, if it came up, to be invited to talk about anything and not just the academic words that he cared for as part of a garden commissioned by the Spanish history of good letters. That was when he spoke of Buenos Aires as if he had dreamed it.

Already his own name is as long as a king’s birthday. It was, in life, and perhaps a little after death, required to make him say praises or speeches, because it was a well-endowed word, language and prose, and had an impressive prestige that newspapers or institutions that also boasted of they used their passion for knowledge to illustrate themselves as educated or cultivated, as an acting part of the Spanish language.

Then, the oblivion, this oblivion that last Thursday, that designated day, was celebrated by a town in Madrid, Villanueva de la Cañada, where the Fernando Lázaro Carreter library is located, which he was so pleased to inaugurate precisely on December 13, 2022.

They remember him there, there, among those woods that will always seem recent, of which he felt proud as he felt proud of the books that would house that timeless place that is a library.

They called him, he said, from that library, there he went, and he stayed inside among those recent volumes, like someone who is assaulted by the nature of the future in which his own name now takes refuge. He died in 2004. He was born in Zaragoza, that was his roots, and he was a university and high school professor.

Charo López, his countrywoman, told me when I reminded him that his friend, and his teacher, was turning one hundred years old and few had remembered) that he always told her, in Salamanca classes, that she “was expelled” from class…

That was when he spoke of Buenos Aires like someone who dreamed it

In 2003, that friend who was also, for Lázaro Carreter, the theater and cinema that mattered so much to him, presented with others a new version of his ‘Dart in the word’, the ‘dictionary’ of faults and recriminations that he gave us. dedicated to journalists in memorable series of denunciations, kind but powerful, of what those of us who write in the newspapers did or do wrong…

In that 2003 photograph there is Charo, with his teacher, and with others who accompanied them precisely to the only place where now, on the centenary of his death, they have remembered that man who loved Buenos Aires, and who never went to Buenos Aires. airs…

On the edge of the precipice in which the years are reflected, I asked Lázaro at his house, in the last interview I did with him, when I already knew that that wise man was also a big boy in pain, if there was anything he wanted to do…

He looked at me with eyes that looked like the melancholy ferocity of a child who dreams of rectifying the past. Then he told me that what he would have wanted to do in his life was to have been from Buenos Aires. That flash was a letter to the future, and there was no future.

He died shortly after, without having made that trip. Now this farewell invokes that city of Borges and Lázaro as if, from Villanueva de la Cañada or from Aragón, Don Fernando received a telegram that gave him the address to which he once wanted to go. The dream is already a hundred years old and not even Borges is there to welcome it to the space in which he wanted to live the nature of his hope.