Peridis has another name (José María Pérez) but this is his identifying mark. Cartoonist (his whole life in EL PAÍS) and artist of other themes (Romanesque, restoration, cultural heritage, friendship), he is like Kim of India, the friend of the whole world… He is originally from Aguilar de Campoo and from all the geography that he managed to bring together, for example, in Romanesque encyclopediawhose volumes are his pride. That encyclopedia, the memory of his parents, the passion he has for the newspaper of his life, make Peridis a national hero of the joy of storytelling. Here he talks about all this, as if he were drawing it, following the release of his fictionalized memoirs. (The treasure of the Fallen Convent, Espasa), which also coincides with the broadcast of the episode dedicated to him by the program In the palette, series on the great Spanish journalists (produced by RTVE together with LACOproductora, the audiovisual production house of PRISA, publishing house of EL PAÍS). In the early years of this newspaper, Peridis gave biscuits to the editors. That’s why it becomes difficult to treat you like the Style book from EL PAÍS…
Ask. He is a benefactor. But he argued with the boys. Once he felt that he had seriously injured someone.
Answer. Carlitos. We were playing and to say goodbye we insulted each other. So I got one cachoteja which fell on his temple.
Q. Do you remember many things?
R. Childhood is amazing. And I lived outside of that area a lot. Everything was stored there. Here are all the sensations, the atmosphere. The book tells it all. It’s an absolutely Proustian childhood. I returned to restore it and, in a certain sense, to relive it. And tell it. In other words, I am twice Proustian.
Q. He wrote it to meet that child.
R. Yes, yes. You always look in life for the child you were.
Q. And the look he had.
R. The key in life is to maintain the heart and appearance of the child you were. He’s the boy who was looking for friendship. I lived in the suburbs, we were the last house; I was looking for friends, it was like breathing. Wherever you go, the saying goes, make friends.
Q. His father also explained to him how important it was to deal with relatives.
R. Yes, with my uncle Laureano. That I should be grateful, my father wrote to me. My uncle was a very strict priest. He had suffered a lot during the war, in Santander. He was about to get hit. And this changed his character. My mother told me that when my uncle came to town he was in the loom. It was after Franco conquered Santander. My mother almost didn’t recognize him, without his cassock and dressed in a skeleton suit. As a young man he was very jovial, but the war changed his character.
Q. His father told him to take care of him. Is this a warning you’ve carried with you your whole life?
R. He told me he was grateful, that he had helped us a lot. He was the family’s benefactor. I arrived in Madrid and I needed a strict father. I had to build a future for myself and help move forward, like many emigrants. Whoever goes first is the beachhead.
Q. In Madrid, in the dark, he found a group of friends who saved his future.
R. I was already leaving my uncle’s house, I had found a job and suddenly, lost, I found myself in Via Arenal with two companions from the Marists of Palencia. They shouted “Pérez, Pérez, Pérez!” I’m lost, I told them. They took me to the employee’s home, in via Cadarso. It had a chapel, a film club, a gym, a teacher. The teacher was José Ramón, the one who created the caricatures years after the campaign that brought Felipe González to the presidency of the Government.
Q. How did you find yourself in this city?
R. I arrived in Madrid when the two millionth baby was born. The moment I added a little, she added more. We were two million inhabitants. An immense city. You just come from the city. The furthest point had been in Palencia. Madrid was big and gray and looked ugly, sad. It was a sad city, of survivors.
Q. How did it evolve? What is Madrid for you now?
R. Now it’s a fantastic city, a city that has grown. But then it had something that it still has now: the life of the neighborhoods and the neighborhood. People are called don and doña. And it was a place of opportunity. It was also Madrid’s turn to win the Five Cups. The stadium was near my uncle’s house and I saw Di Stéfano like here now, at this distance. In Palencia I had broadcast the Maristas games and here they gave me a pass to watch the training sessions. I switched to typing, accounting, to get a job as a pensucker.
Q. And he found a job.
R. In a fantastic place. In the Literary district, Quevedo street, Cervantes corner, in front of Lope de Vega’s house. But I wanted to be a cartoonist. And then I was also an architect. Architecture has been a very important part of my life.
Q. And why a caricaturist?
R. Because since I was a child I was good at drawing. I loved cartoons. A tailor in my city had one that Córdoba, famous at the time, had him make. With mask and without mask called his drawings. Bernabéu, Celia Gámez, Panizo, Chicote appeared there. All the famous people of the time.
Q. That passion forced him to watch.
R. What I’ve done all my life. And I started making albums of footballers. I fell in love with the joke with Cronos, who was a cartoonist of Brand, continuous line. The continuous line has fascinated me since I was a child.
Q. Many years in the cartoon and no one has ever felt offended.
R. Not so much. Tierno Galván got angry and said so in a book that I invited him to write. He shaved him if he was Galván and Tierno if he wasn’t. He didn’t like going out with a beard, so I killed Galván and just made Tierno, I didn’t want to make him angry. When there is a window like the cartoon of a national newspaper, especially if it is EL PAÍS, what matters most is not going out. If you leave you are in the First Division.
Q. By the way, what was the cutest caricature?
R. Felipe Gonzalez. In the Transition he was the closest. He was a social democrat, a European, a co-religionist of Olof Palme… Olof Palme, the one with the piggy bank for the freedom fighters in Spain, was the one I had the most devotion for. They killed him early, a fanatic killed him.
Q. EL PAÍS opened the door immediately…
R. From the first issue. Until today. This was my luck. Being there, too, when the Transition began. When Franco died I had already prepared to appear in a newspaper, because I had never stopped making comics. They accepted me Information, where there were Jesús de la Serna, Juan Luis Cebrián, Martín Prieto… They liked my drawings for their novelty. And I saw that EL PAÍS, a progressive liberal newspaper, was coming out. “This is my newspaper,” I said to myself.
Q. And he became a friend of the entire COUNTRY. He went in the afternoon with the gifts…
R. What could I do better than hand out Aguilar de Campoo biscuits like the one who distributes communion? I liked going to the editorial office, I was interested in what was done. I was a fan of the paper, as I was too Information… It was the most widely circulated newspaper at the time. He was conquering freedom of expression with forced marches.
Q. How has your idea of journalists changed?
R. I looked at them with admiration. We were a group that at that moment was fighting to conquer spaces of freedom. And journalism had to conquer that place, which is that of freedom of thought. Then I saw myself on a ship that would conquer some Americas that was freedom. And even those who were there were my age.
Q. How do you identify this moment in your country?
R. It is a dangerous time because it can open a dark retracement. Apparently, not violent, but violating the rights and freedoms gained. It’s a moment that doesn’t help politics. We are living in a moment of dismantling, of humiliation, because scandals demoralize society and are now quite widespread. This moment reminds me of what Ortega y Gasset said: “It’s not this, it’s not this.”
Q. The future?
R. We have already made the transition. It’s up to the young people. They don’t have many opportunities and many are left behind. They do not have access to housing. Economic well-being does not reach them. There is uncertainty. Today we live in uncertain times.
Q. At the end of his book he has a sentence that recalls a title by Knut Hamsun, The ultimate joy. What, Peridis, is the ultimate joy?
R. There is no ultimate joy… I am open to whatever joy comes to me. The last joy is the first joy.
