That Quino has died is sad news. But there are sorrows that ennoble. That bring out the best in your shipwreck. Mafalda always shone with her own light under the waters, like the doubloons of a sunken pirate galleon, and gave us a treasure without an island, an indelible piece of childhood. A lucid Neverland.
I suppose it's no coincidence ---though it's also sad---, that Quino stopped drawing Mafalda, except for anniversaries and holidays, back in 1973. Those 70s that for many seemed so effervescent, so full of promises, for him already contained a warning knock. Franco hadn't even died for us yet and Quino already saw it coming. What? Well, what else could it be, Guille, what else could it be: everything.
I continue with my high-flying sorrows. It was sad that Covid-19 forced the suspension of the last edition of the Saló del Còmic de Barcelona, and it is a source of pride that in that suspended magic, the last great tribute to Mafalda remains floating. Fifty years of Mafalda in Spain, to which she arrived, precisely, through Barcelona. Mafalda entered our lives through Diagonal.
[subscribe_newsletter_esp]Esther Tusquets, the editor who brought her to us, was the niece of the priest Juan Tusquets, who was an advisor to Franco. But he was also the founder of a publishing house in Burgos and after the war created Lumen in Barcelona. He ended up selling it to his brother, Esther's father, a very well-to-do girl of the time, educated at the German School. Well, she was one of the first to throw herself headlong into publishing works by Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Alejandra Pizarnik…and the stories of Mafalda.
I've always been a fan. But I remember a classmate of mine from high school who literally drooled. It was like putting a Mafalda cartoon in front of her, and losing sight of the world. I know because one day I checked: I treacherously threw an entire book into her lap in the middle of Natural Sciences class. While she devoured page after page with her eyes, she didn't even notice how the teacher called her to the blackboard, politely at first, then shouting…
The funniest thing about the "scolding" that followed is that my friend tried to accuse me of being too "posh" to vibrate with Mafalda like her, who it's true came from a very humble neighborhood. But let it be known that I have never gone beyond the middle class. And lately, an increasingly tight middle, a balaclava-wearing middle, let's see if one day I gather the courage to rob a bank…
What I was getting at: Mafalda's stories were brought to us by the gauche divine, that great Barcelona gauche divine born from well-to-do families who, no matter how you look at it, must have gained something from the war. A little bit. But instead of reinventing the past, or denying their privileges, they knew how to turn them into a gateway for great collective dreams. They were the last great Catalan bourgeoisie of the spirit, not necessarily of money: Milena Busquets, Esther Tusquets' daughter, recounted in an unforgettable book ---También esto pasará (This Too Shall Pass), Alfaguara 2015--- that she and her mother went broke or were on the verge of it several times. For example, when they founded the RqueR publishing house together.
También esto pasará is a magnificent book, clean on the palate, with a powerful aftertaste. It was an instant hit that astonished the author herself, and I have always believed that it was partly due to arriving, like Mafalda, at the ideal moment: Quino's creation brought just the right amount of transgression to a Spain thirsty for freedoms, especially thirsty for irony. Milena Busquets managed to remind us of the not-so-distant ambition of our best elders, dragging us to step on tremendous, charming mines of nostalgia.
And Milena Busquets said, when asked what that gauche divine of generous well-to-do children was like, especially generous in beauty and talent, when an adolescent back on a Cadaqués beach could inspire a poem by Jaime Gil de Biedma: "The priority then was not to get rich, but to take risks with a certain passion for life. When money becomes the center of things, it's disgusting. Now we are more puritanical in all aspects: we lack passion and without passion, it's not worth living, even if you have money and are very protected."
Mafalda couldn't have said it better.