On Friday of this week Guillermo García Mayor will receive in Santa Cruz de Tenerife (Fundación Cajacanarias) one of the many tributes that are due to his personality and his work. Music will be the essence of this posthumous entertainment, since it is due to him, as to Jerónimo Saavedrawhich followed him in the indomitable destiny of death, that this archipelago, which they made the essence of a large island, was better, better said, better written, more musical and more just.
Guillermo’s absence is, for those of us who are journalists, a major drama, because he taught us arguments that would make the job better applied to citizen life, national or international, based on a premise that those of us who must never lose sight of. We use the pen to tell what happens and how it happens and to whom it happens. The premise of respect.
Guillermo was respectful at all times, and he forced us to always be respectful, based on his way of understanding life and not just his job. Although he mixed his pen with the obligations of denunciation to which journalism is committed, he always avoided being a vociferous and runaway professional. His conduct, as a newspaper writer, and also as their editor, had to do with that ethical conviction that forces silence and respect when the circumstances of what has just happened, or of what in reality, are not known. generally occurs.
These traits of his personality made him a civil reference for all generations, inside and outside the profession, since he united intelligence with criticism, and from that stage of the obligation to analyze sources and attitudes he explained to us that saying anything to pot soon is from hasty spectators.
It helped us, therefore, to learn about the dangers of derailing opinions, marked by subjectivity or mockery, and that is why I say that it was so important not only for journalists but also for society in general. We, the Canarians, who have always known how to understand to what extent the Islands are not a confinement but an open door, we owe it to people like him (now I remember, for example, Emilio Lledó, Alejandro Nieto, so many) to have expanded our way of seeing life that came to help us improve the intelligence, and the audacity, of living.
He was, and it is no small symbol of his character, a musician, who stripped himself of that profession as such to dedicate himself to stimulating the music of others. This feature of his biography is, from my point of view, very important, because it also explains the rhythm that he gave to journalism, his other vocation: it depends not only on the news, on what happens, on what happens when he does it. What happens is undesirable, but in the way of saying it, in the justice that resides in the words and that assists us in pursuit of good, when we look for them so as not to cause confusion and not when we find them, in a haze, to break the logical rhythm that requires reality.
I met him, or I remember him that way from the first times I saw him, sitting on the arm of a seat in LA PROVINCE; It seems to me that he already wore those characteristic glasses that accompanied his look so much. He was surrounded by people who he was making, with the director at the time, Paco Sardaña, the newspaper of those times, when almost everything was still prohibited, and they welcomed this journalist who was then a boy at the height of his dizziness. .
His way of receiving me, from him, from everyone, has never been erased from my mind, perhaps because one is always who one was in moments like this, when the teachers receive him and he does not know if the door is open, ajar or closed.
Later I saw him at the Mencey Hotel in Tenerife, when Spain was already emerging into democracy, and he was a veteran in the struggle of knowing everything not only about the job but also in this strange way of behaving part of the job, as if he were crossing out instead to build.
His laugh, the one I remember, was clean; His moral supply of irony never left behind the will to believe in others, to feel that we journalists also make mistakes and we must always have close by the trunk in which we keep the soul of the errata.
I later learned, from my own experience, of his discreet uses of generosity. And I always thought that all that, everything I knew about him because I lived it or because they told me, came from a musical, harmonious way, like a hug given in time to someone who needs your support to continue flying, or to land.
The nomenclature of this tribute that he now receives in Santa Cruz de Tenerife is a sum of his merits, in each of the branches with which he always appeared to us, helping to be us and better. Margarita Ramos, the president of the Caja foundation, Marta Chirino, who presides over the destinies of the legacy of her father, Martín Chirino, always so close to Guillermo, Rosario Álvarez (president of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Santa Cruz de Tenerife ), music since before he was born, and Tomás Marco, composer, director of the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, such a friend of his, are on the program along with Javier Moll, the president of the Prensa Ibérica group, whose generosity Guillermo counted on to demonstrate to the world of journalism, wherever it was, the nature of a profession that lives to demonstrate honesty and balance.
Traits that helped Guillermo García Alcalde make, of everything he touched, greater derivatives of friendship and music. I hope that music will always be the best destination of a well-made chronicle about a better world like the one deserved by the friend to whom we will never get used to saying goodbye.
