with love or hate, but always with violence

You told me that as a child you asked magical beings to be bald because you hated the hairdressing ritual. Jorge… even that detail had destiny with you. I looked at your privileged naked skull and took the opportunity to tell you about the brave veins on your forehead: damn, I told myself, poems circulate there.

You were like a very large, mythological lizard.

A moth fatter than an apostle.

You functioned like a car on fire.

Your heart was like a wild boar: gigantic, brutal… I told you, you bought it for me. “And not without a certain ferocity when provoked,” you added.

You spoke like a man from the Golden Age, but when you were young you liked to go out with a hockey stick in case you had to dissuade bad guys from their plans. It was your hook! Damn life: you needed to be there. You already miss the old ladies on the subway when you put things in order if two idiots took their place. Until a while ago, the world was a fairer place and also a more fun place (that’s an almost impossible combination).

All truly glorious things have always been illegal.

It’s easier to be a rebel now, after having seen you serve as a professor: you were that guy at war with borders, religions and identities (that guy at war with limits, in a deep sense).

You spoke of Europe that was stillborn, of mummified Europe.

You were talking about Captain Thunder and then you were Captain Thunder. Jorge: you were, above all, a superhero. Your favorites got sad when you didn’t do the right thing, but that rarely happened.

You were soaked in Quevedo and Góngora. And Juvenal and Marcial. “I suppose that Nero and all the monsters of Rome are in me,” you commented to me, and you were so wide.

“Leading an intense life, phrases emerge on their own,” you explained to me another day. And I listened to you and went out to live so I could write. It’s not that for us writing was more important than life: it was just as important. It was life.

I remember your collection of tin soldiers. Those were your powers, what would he say? Cardinal Cisneros.

I remember that you reread Nietzsche. You liked it very much Thus spoke Zaratrustra.

I remember your mythical “ma’am, if you don’t like my face, change the channel” on RTVE.

I remember hearing “talking to the zoo animals / only I talk, they usually watch / sometimes I stay still in my shoes” and I felt less alone.

I remember that you didn’t have a television or refrigerator in your house in Asturias: you let the food cool on the terrace. “The groceries,” you said, and you prepared a stew based on chicken and pepper.

“Going out and drinking and whatever comes up” you called it “exposure to nightly revelry.” You were the funniest guy at all the parties. And the next day, the most melancholic boy in the city, expert in thinking about death. It always happens like that with the best.

You referred to sons of bitches as “satraps.”

You swam the Cantabrian sea because you adored the murderous seas.

You never had a license but you always drove. You never had a girlfriend but you always loved. Jorge, in reality you were never like the others. It didn’t come out.

You told me that one day, in the seventies, you got bored at an orgy (there was a very annoying Argentinian there who kept saying “hey, because the sexual problem, because the sexual problem…”, you got mad at him in a song with that title) and you left there with a beautiful girl.

You went to the beach in Gijón with its warm air to make paper airplanes with the pages torn out of El Mueble magazine.

You said that their planes were better than yours: they stayed in the air for a long time. You tried to imitate his style, without success. “She was great,” you remembered, your crazy fish eyes shining. In the morning you said goodbye at a churrería and the spell was broken. You didn’t see her again, Jorge, but sometimes you thought about her and those planes and the yellow light of time…

The heart is a strange animal;
He feels strange desires, he seeks strange company.
The heart is a strange animal;
He suffers strange customs and hears strange voices.

How well you wrote. What an awesome guy you were. Yours was life: from the flesh outward and from the flesh inward.

We believed a lot in dreams as a language. Understand me: your level was much higher because you wrote while sleeping. You pulled the thread of a dream and you got a song “warm from the subconscious.”

You dreamed that you could fly, that you just had to get horizontal to the ground line and a force was generated that made you rise. What a bird.

You live in the house of mystery
growing with the shadows above you,
You close your eyes and you’ve already hurt yourself,
If you leave, who am I going to play with?
I don’t know.

Ah, you had that playful responsibility. You had come into the world to play. You took the game very seriously. Big kid…cool kid.

You were a romantic and that’s why you never allowed yourself to get married.

You were a disobedient, a strange anarchist. You said that being left-wing “is confusing the possible with the desirable: it has its charm.” And you added: “On the other hand, the right does not disappoint: it is about achieving control and loot.”

You did entirely what you wanted, and that made you very handsome, more handsome than the handsome ones.

I remember telling you that you reminded me of that historical phrase from Pavese: “With love or hate, but always with violence.” You bought it for me.

I remember you saying that you didn’t live in Madrid because here you went to a party and they invited you to four others. You’ll see there, where you’re going… they’re not going to leave you alone.

It was great meeting you, Jorge.

“Little friends, walk during the day, the night is mine,” you liked to say. The entire starry night is now for you.