It was my first plane trip, I was seventeen years old and my mother was not so worried about the risks of the trip because I was going to collect my first serious money as an amateur journalist for my collaborations in LA PROVINCIA.
EL DÍA, which was my newspaper in Tenerife, like Aire Libre or La Tarde had been, paid me as an amateur, that is, nothing or little. In the case of EL DÍA, the director and the manager waited for me to be determined to pay me seriously. But THE PROVINCE was serious about paying me, they provided me with a plane trip so that I could spend a day and a half in Las Palmas and they immediately received me in the building on Murga street.
There I found a very relaxed newsroom, its chief editors, who seemed numerous to me, were in white shirt sleeves, sat on the edge of the seats and put their feet on the table, something that only Gilberto dared to do in EL DÍA German.
They seemed to me like those in North American movies about journalists, carefree and jokers, as if they were having fun in a job that until then I had believed belonged to rather circumspect individuals, because that was the realm of the spirits that dominated the newspaper at the time. in whose writing I was habitual, but not fixed.
Until the director, Paco Sardaña, pointed out to me that the managing director, the man who commanded that ship of controlled lunatics that was a newspaper, was waiting for me in his place, in the part of the building on Calle Murga. Tomaso Hernández Pulido, who recently died of longevity in Las Palmas, was behind his big table, or it seemed to me the biggest table he had ever seen in a newspaper. He received me seated, attentive and receptive, he asked me what led me, so young, to these aspirations as a journalist, and finally he told me that what you work for pays for, so here was the envelope with which LA PROVINCIA fulfilled its commitment to keep me close and pay me. It was the first serious money he received from a newspaper, because inside that envelope you could feel the density of the content.
I was afraid of losing the envelope, because a long day awaited me, perhaps until dawn, and money is usually lost by the devil of the night. I returned to the newsroom, with the envelope kept as if under a lock, colleagues took me to lunch, including a journalist named Ramada, who invited me with others to answer questions about the job and how I exercised it in EL DÍA. Their curiosity, and those of their companions, had the purpose of comparing some ways with others, since they must have harbored the suspicion, which I did not deny them, that in THE PROVINCE there was a healthy relaxation in the face of the circumspection that, at that time and also later, it dominated in my home journal. It was the first time that those responsible for a newspaper invited me to lunch, and I was surprised that there were already those who treated me like an adult journalist who could give the time of their lives to talk about a job that has never ceased to raise more questions. what answers
After that meeting with those who seemed to me experts in managing a newsroom, I returned to the newspaper and had the opportunity to fulfill a curiosity that gave me the strangest of assignments that the director of the newspaper, Paco Sardaña, had given me. This was a cordial man, who did not speak for the sake of talking, and who a month ago suggested that I go to Hoya Fría, with my camera, to cover the swearing-in of the flag of the recruits of the last replacement, among whom there were numerous boys from Gran Canary.
When I went to his office to say goodbye to Sardaña, I asked him, out of curiosity, why he had asked me to record, from that oath, especially the faces of the recruits. He responded to me:
–Because each recruit has many relatives and everyone will want to have a souvenir newspaper of that moment in the lives of their relatives.
The night of Las Palmas was a poem of thousands of single verses, and I enjoyed it that time together with a unique and very good photographer, Juan Antonio de Juan, who spoke as if he were in perpetual silence but who knew everything about the journalist’s job and the job of avoiding the dangers of the night, making it a source of perpetual joy, as if I were living, in this case with me, one of the exciting pages of Three Sad Tigers, by Guillermo Cabrera Infante.
It was a potential night, as Elfidio Alonso once said of a certain night in Santa Cruz, and the next day I returned to Tenerife, always keeping the envelope like a cloth of gold. When I got home I gave it to my mother, who opened it with the skill of someone looking for a remedy, and so I saw her counting one by one the bills that Tomaso had given me in that brown envelope. “Juanillo,” my mother told me, “there are sixteen thousand pesetas here.”
Surely to my bad I never gave importance to money, which I have needed so much in almost all stages of my life, but I must say that I never considered that this was the only satisfaction that journalism gave me, because this is a glorious job that It has given me the opportunity, for example in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, to meet formidable people, very dear teachers, among whom are those who received me that day in Las Palmas, among whom I think I glimpse the smiling figure, understanding, intelligent and sagacious of one of the great journalists, and of the great people, who has this job that is sometimes dark but always bright. That figure is that of Guillermo García-Alcalde, to whom, although he may not know it, I have been dedicating these memoirs for a long time, since I know that he is one of those who read them with the greatest generosity.
