Alberto Anaut | Alberto Anaut, factory of ideas

2023-07-10 18:03:25

Damn Monday, damn life that admits death. AND now Alberto Anaut has diedwho seemed unbreakable, a genius who created a factory of ideas, La Fábrica, so that culture and books would not fall asleep in Spain.

With a generosity that was the consequence of his personality and his inventiveness, he created among us the Eñe Festival, and made that common and eccentric letter of the alphabet the very center of the personal commitment, and immediately collective, to improve the relationship of life with the arts that he cultivated, in addition to the noble craftsmanship of journalism, where I met him. Nor can we forget that he was the founder of Matador, an unusual magazine for the most intelligent future, considered cult, which brought together the most important creators of the 20th century.

In this facet, The country, he was my teacher in curiosity, and in questions. Not even what was evident could cope with his scrutiny capacity, since he sought, in that trade, in all those he approached, the perfection that he wanted in art. In this last field he was also a genius who I investigated to the point of exhaustion, but he decided with the speed of a boy. Always.

Nothing was foreign to him in those various matters that deserved his passion and patience. The creation of Eñe, like that of La Fábrica, had collective ambition, so that in both hemispheres of the world that he wanted he was open to collaboration with others. He was not discursive, his speech went inside, and he also exercised it by listening. He would sit in front of you, inquire about the idea that inhabited you and immediately, if that idea was fertile or open to him, he was immediately with you carrying it out.

One recent day I told him and his partner Luis Posada, who like all his family now cries for the future without him, that there was a literary supplement in Argentina, that of the daily Clarion, which was called Ñ as its already veteran festival, and which was also celebrating its birthday.

There was no need for more alerts, immediately there were those who took this boat that he piloted in contact with the most important cultural magazine in America, and the meeting was a success. As Benedetti told Viglieti one day, when he told the poet that he composed songs, Anaut was full of “energy for coincidences”and where there was a possibility of walking with another, or with others, there he was always, at first commanding and then seeing command.

Always available

Spain, the Spanish language, so that America too, live from these energies; and Anaut’s energy was paramount, very first, in this universe in which ideas spread because of the insults that envy and ideologies carry within. At no time in my life, even when we were colleagues from the same newsroom, did I see in Anaut even an ounce of the pettiness that sometimes inhabits us journalists. And as a creator of culture, and as a person, he was always available to say yes even if he finally told you no, that he didn’t see it.

It is so unusual for me that now I have to write his name in the past tense, Alberto Anaut, it is so horrible that this Monday he behaved with him as hell behaves with life, that everything he says about this loss corresponds to rage to see the fertility of life broken.

Anaut way un inventor of the culture. An unusual energy to create and what I am crying about now is a huge loss for the worlds of books, art and thought. An incredible engine that hopefully will not stop ringing because ideas do not die, they are there, as a joyful inheritance that the light of the well-illuminated leaves us.