It is attributed to Black Roberto Fontanarrosa (1944-2007), Argentine cartoonist and writer, a phrase in homage to Diego Armando Maradona as captivating as it is grotesque: “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done with your life, it matters what you’ve done with ours.” According to the journalist and writer Leila Guerriero it is a message from the vampires. The good, translated into joy and hope on a football field, I kept for myself; the rest, drugs, obsessions, betrayals, all yours. The sentence, however, does not represent Fontanarosa. However, there is another less pompous, substantially simpler idea that goes like this: “I just wish my son that his friends smile when they see him arrive.” And it is this concept – that of authentic and disinterested friendship – that leads Joan Manuel Serrat to chat with EL PAÍS before the tribute to the Negro Fontanarrosa, organized this Monday by Casa America Catalunya as part of Latin American Humor Week.
“The best example of friendship is accompanying each other in a world of companions,” underlines Serrat. He and Joaquín Sabina had commissioned Fontanarrosa to design the logo Two birds with one stonethe world tour of the two Spanish singers. “El Negro was already very ill and didn’t know how to draw. So he called his friend Crist, also a cartoonist. And here I want to stop: they were such good friends that, when El Negro no longer knew how to draw, Crist, who knew how to imitate him, took it upon himself to make the drawings. This is friendship: going where the other cannot. He was a generous man; he accepted everyone’s affection without discussing it.”
Fontanarrosa was born in Rosario, for some the epicenter of Argentina, not because it governs politically or economically, but because Rosario residents grew up there. According to Jorge Valdano “the exaggerated way of being Argentine”. Valdano’s irony does not define Fontanarrosa, but, in some way, represents it. From publicist to cartoonist, as good a screenwriter as he was an excellent writer, a pioneer of football stories, El Negro was, above all, a fan of Rosario Central. And that football reigns supreme in Argentina is already known, even in the head of a genius like Negro Fontanarrosa.
It was the world of comics, with its memorable ones Pereyra toilet on the back cover of the Clarin newspaperwhich made Fontanarosa famous in Argentina. Literature has given him more global recognition. A recognition, in any case, never total for those who write about football. If not, ask Eduardo Galeano, best remembered for books like The open veins of Latin America OR Fire memorythat for Football in the sun and in the shade. “In his world and in his field, he was an extraordinary storyteller. He had no pretensions, nor did he need them to live. El Negro knew the fans very well”, develops Serrat about Fontanarrosa’s literature.
It was thanks to a football match that Serrat met Fontanarrosa. And it wasn’t the happiest day for Argentina, obviously not even for El Negro: the Albiceleste had just lost 0-1 against Belgium in the opening match of the 1982 World Cup, at Camp Nou. “It was an unfortunate day for the Argentine team. We met Menotti (César Luis, Argentina coach) and we ended up in a bar, a kind of bowling alley very popular with Argentinians. There, while he was hanging at one end of the bar, serious and sad like everyone else, our friendship began, which lasted until the end of his days”, recalls Serrat. A bond that took them from Barcelona to Buenos Aires, with an obligatory stop at the Mesa de los Galanes.
And Serrat, who has never felt like a stranger anywhere, much less would he have felt that way at that particular table, with its particular customs. “I participated in the Galanes Table. I sat down and was accepted as one of them”, explains the Catalan singer. The bar is called Cairo and is located in an enchanting corner of Rosario. But that’s the least of it. The important thing is tradition: since the mid-60s a group of friends has met every afternoon at the same table, in the same bar. The end? Chat about politics and football. The real end? Friendship
Today, more than 60 years later, the table seems frozen in time: always in the center of the room, always with the same setup, while the rest of the room keeps up with the times. The ritual was animated by Fontanarrosa together with his lifelong friends and, when the occasion required it, by a luxury guest, such as the singer Fito Páez, the writer Quino (creator of Mafalda) or a Catalan worshiped in Argentina as Serrat. “Gallants didn’t pass an exam like 17th or 18th century squires; each was different. I have no idea if that bohemian woman is dead or where she’s hiding. The only thing I know is that many of my friends are no longer here.”
Nostalgia doesn’t take over Serrat, on the contrary. “I think about the past with tenderness and gratitude, with the tranquility that is unrepeatable. The past and I are going on different paths: him on one side, me on the other. He is getting better and better and I am accumulating deficits”. Among his deficits is not a lack of memory. And there he was, once again – like last year in Rosario, this time in Barcelona – to talk about his friend. He did it smiling. What better tribute?
