“I belong to that group of people who, after the ill-fated September 11, 2022, wake up every Sunday with the disappointment of not being able to read JM in PS.” JM is Javier Marías and PS is EL PAÍS, the newspaper where he has worked since February 2003. Author of The heart is so white, He died on a day in 2022 and is now remembered by one of his great friends.
The phrase, expanded at the end of this page, was written by film director Agustín Díaz Yanes. Three years after the author’s death The return of black timeAlfaguara Publishing House, where he has published his books since 1996, is publishing his latest texts Ghost area, Which was the usual title of his section on Albilad Weekly. This current installment, the author’s last, is titled Thus thirty years passed.
Marias died on the day Díaz Llanes, one of his best friends, remembers. He was 70 years old. Shortly before that, on January 7, 2021, he published the column Still far from a thousand, In which he explains to his editor at the time, Belinda Sayley, why he was motivated by the newspaper’s desire to commemorate the 900 columns he wrote. He said: What if we wait for the thousandth column? Then he summed it up by saying: “But since it will take a few more years to achieve this, and I do not know whether I will continue that time without moving or in the world (I take this opportunity to wish Almudena Grandes a speedy and complete recovery from the illness of which you told us), I have decided to ‘celebrate’ these 900, who are in fact 1,309 if you add those from the previous stage.”
There were and still are many who came to El País in search of texts and controversies that presented the considerations that Marías made about national and international life. What he considered, not just a testimony, but also the result of his imagination, aroused controversy, emotion and joy. His death was unexpected, and was mourned by legions of readers in Spain and the world.
Three years after his death, Alfaguara highlights the essence of his gift to help understand the world we live in, through this newspaper. He came to El Pais in circumstances that are now remembered by the director who welcomed him here, Jesús Ceberio, who held the position between 1993 and 2006. Since his appointment, he has wanted to integrate him into the team of regular collaborators. “He wrote on Sunday ABC And I thought this would be his place. I told him, accompanied by Ángeles García, his friend, and then culture editor, at the restaurant he always frequented, Julian de Tolosa. He was already publishing in Alfaguara. It seemed natural for him to come with us, as we were from the same publishing group as his. On the contrary, he told me, I would have been better off competing: “You don’t have to put all your eggs in one basket.” He felt comfortable in ABC. We continued our regular relationship, to which Angeles joined. He was the one who would call me later to come to El Pais. ABC I refused a column and he wanted to come with us and with the same column. ABC He felt himself anti-clerical. He felt censored and decided to cancel his collaborations there. Its integration was fast and almost instantaneous. He was a person who radically defended his views. “He was very sharp in his attitudes and was not flattering.”
Javier Moreno (director of the newspaper in two phases, from 2006 to 2014 and from 2020 to 2021) used to, like Ceberio, have dinner at the Marias restaurant in Julian de Tolosa, his place at night and noon. “We always ate there… He ordered a steak, and I, who did not eat meat, also ordered a steak. We drank wine, and there were wonderful conversations, where Goyo Rodriguez Ramos, then in charge of Albilad Weekly. He sometimes threatened to stop writing the column. He said he had nothing more to say, and that readers did not care one bit about what he wrote… What he said was essential to public discussion. He fought the feeling himself, but that threat never materialized. He was actually looking for affection, and the newspaper was never lavish in distributing affection. Our conversations were between friends: I told him about problems from the newspaper and he told me about his own, and in both cases they also talked about their health. I ended up understanding that my role was to listen. He has spoken out many times in his columns, criticizing what is happening and criticizing the newspaper, which is also reflected in what he published here. He represented what the newspaper wanted to be: a critical, independent voice. It was like an editorial the newspaper could cover. He was very funny, very curious and loved by BASE readers. He was our most important columnist at that time, along with Mario (Vargas Llosa).”
Julia Lozan, of El País newspaper, worked with him from 1994 to 2009. “Every Monday I received a fax of his column as soon as I sat down. He was a very educated person, almost so… His typewriter once broke down. He didn’t want an electric machine or a computer for anything in the world! I went to the workshops to prevent interference in correcting his texts. One time he got into a fight with (journalist) Bonifacio de la Cuadra because saw a He – she Where it should be there You. I would eat with a flower-like lapel. He was very detailed, he was when my husband died, when he wrote his mother’s memories… and he did not diminish the work of others. I once told him that I loved him Crushes, His narration. ‘truly? Did you really like it? I was the only one who had a home phone in Syria, in case something happened. “I never used it.”
Belinda Sayle was his last interlocutor Albilad Weekly. “He was very methodical and disciplined…On rare occasions we suggested topics, such as the time when he completed his 900 columns. Another occasion was when the magazine was dedicated to reviewing the events of the year, such as the end of 2020, the year of the pandemic. This column began as follows: ‘Not long ago – perhaps in 2018 – I made a comparison between the years of this century and corresponding years in the past, and admitted how bad everything had been. For us, I was saddened that I had not suffered anything comparable to World War I and the 1918-1920 influenza, which killed between 50 and 100 million people, and we could not have imagined that something similar to that pandemic would hit the world in 2020. His columns were a mixture of topics of general interest and issues that concerned him personally. He points out that Marias used to send September’s first text in July. This was the case in his recent column in EL PAÍS. His death was on September 11.
Pilar Reyes, his editor, says that Marías’s writings were born “from the person (the citizen, the writer). He was a very clear and authentic conscience, speaking from the most extreme freedom, and helped to see the world with other eyes. He did everything in the column: we knew his passions and phobias, he gave us his political and social opinions, he wrote stories… If for him literature was fiction, then essay writing was a space for thought, style and criticism, not just immediate reflection.” From current events I knew it was widely read (I witnessed people’s gratitude for it. the ZOna’s ghost) He was aware of his responsibility. There was never triviality or cliché in his texts, he forced himself to think of something different always and with large doses of humour… He set aside one day a week to write the column and he always kept one day off, for whatever reason. That day was sacred to him… Every two years we published a volume collecting all the texts from that period. This was shorter and we didn’t want it to be that way. Javier Marías died on September 11, 2022, when his last column was titled The truest love for art, On another of his great interests and professions: translation.” The cover of the book is a painting by C. Ecksburg, from 1845. “We wanted to follow his aesthetic, and think about what he would have liked. We saw this in great detail with his partner Carme Lopez Mercader. “This was our way of paying tribute to him.”
The death of Javier Marías was a devastation for literature, for readers, for his countless friends, for his wife Carmi… Agustín Díaz Llanes said it this way: “I belong to that group of people who, after the ill-fated September 11, 2022, wake up every Sunday disappointed that they cannot read JM in PS. The only possibility to fill this void, in my opinion, is to re-read one of his published articles every Sunday.”