He had a scathing, flamboyant sense of humour, inherited from his grandfather Muñoz Sica, steeped in Wenceslao and Campa, but with that touch of bad temper that comes from a prominent writing tradition, from Quevedo to Jardel via Lara. He had a noble attitude and gesture … Politely, the conversation was interesting, long and full of a touch of humour. He had big ears – when he ran for president of Real Madrid he refused to pin them on advertising posters – he had fine hands and a sharp nose, and above all he had the special style that is the highest ambition of any literary career; It is this state of grace, in the double sense of spark and luminous inspiration, that transforms the writer into the artist of the word. Because Alfonso Ossia was an artist, yes, and such an incomparable artist that he lacked the second line due to the sheer existential impossibility of approaching his talent and elegance.
He was a monarchist without being a rabble-rouser, and a liberal of the sort the old British Tories had followed before they allowed themselves to be drawn into authoritarian populism. He was a dapper dandy who was able to allow himself to be killed rather than give up his good dress and grooming; In his Treatise on Good Manners he left a humorous pictorial record of the standards of education and civility lost in the decline of the aristocratic spirit. He was irreverent in his pure freedom, and sometimes lacking, though never sour, and still less impertinent, for vulgarity seemed to him the gravest of sins; More than one complaint was made against him because he took his hand in satirizing some contemporary heroes. He won almost all of them and the few convictions he received were seen as an inevitable tax due to a growing lack of “fair play” to accommodate the ridicule. He never negotiated an adjective, nor a metaphor, nor the subject of an article that did not arise from his sovereign will.
Etta wanted to kill him, another tribute to his independence of judgment that cost him living under guard for many years without letting fear keep him from receiving the threat of the jokes as well. For him, as for many of the genre’s greats, humor was crucial; A smile is better than a laugh, a slanted joke is better than a naughty joke. He had an amazing memory, so full of superstitions and exaggerations that only an intelligent reader could distinguish between invented testimony and real testimony; That was one of his best clever tricks. He knew how to make fun of himself without contract, and to this end he created a very successful character – the Marquis of Sotuancho, a ridiculous hidalgo “of corrupt origin” – with whom he painted traditional pictures of his class and era. The time of a Spain in which we can recognize ourselves in its transformation only by accepting the grotesque image which Osea brings back to us daily and which it shows in its mirror.
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