Everyone wanted to be Ossia except Ossia, who wanted to be Jardel. Or Mihura, or Mingoti, or Kamba, or all of them at the same time, alternately and successively. Because in it all the column’s genealogical lines will die: the line of intelligence, the line of lineage. … That humor and style. The conventional, the moral and the satirical. Maybe that’s why it’s because the genre, for some, got into our bones, like a lullaby, and that that rattle appears today like poison in the marrow. And from here emerges the idea, slow as the heart of a dead horse, but with the violence of a clown on the beach of La Concha. Old but clean shoes. Accordingly.
On those pillars, intimate buildings were built, intellectual hubs and a base from which to look at the world and mock it, which is another form of lamentation. We learned that what is more important than what was said is the place from which it was said, i.e. the pause, the necessity of escaping pedantry and arrogance, and the obstacle of contempt for the first foam to reach true aristocracy, which is intelligent, secretive, and vulgar recklessness.
As a child, I read it as someone discovering a new world. Because this was not a joke, nor a story, nor a speech; It was written neither as a joke nor entirely seriously. But she sparkled, dazzled in tone, and infused with a biting wit that, like everything worthwhile, came out with a distinct sense of ease. Suddenly I realized that it was possible to say what you wanted, that you could talk about love or politics or a couple of old men looking out to sea in Oyambre, because there was a job in being yourself, as long as you were able to express yourself by shaking off the dust of mediocrity and rising on the shoulders of giants towards the top of the mainmast. And from there, like Rodrigo de Triana, tell the reader that you have seen the Earth. It’s not a big deal either.
I have never seen anyone more gifted in this column: rhythm, look, beauty; Culture, style and bad mood. UssÃa had it all: the initial idea, the perfect development, the finishing punch; Topic, approach, point of view. You can agree with him or not, for me it is completely accidental. Because I went to Ossia happy and inclined to reverence. It was a matter of changing the big subject for the small one, the haughty look of the professor in Lazzarello’s hungry face and the vulgar intellectual desire set against the conniving reluctance of the friend. There are traits of nobility in all this, a clear sense of honour, and above all, a deep commitment to oneself, as if one were an artistic bullfighter and a central striker, the literary and Gulf atmosphere, the contempt for victors and vanquished. Above all, there is one struggle, which is talent. Alfonso Ossia, the bravest of the artistic bullfighters, is gone; The most artistic of the brave bullfighters. rest in peace.