I have been getting up early for many years to write these chronicles that sometimes (like now) have appeared in the first two newspapers of my life, LA PROVINCIA and EL DÍA, but that in other times only appeared in the latter, which is where I first had a typewriter. I had it?
I remember that when Ernesto Salcedo, the mythical director of the beginnings of this night owl profession, received me in his baroque office on Valentín Sanz street, in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, he asked me what I missed in La Tarde, the evening newspaper and full of bohemians in which I published at the time, thanks, by the way, I always say, to the generosity first of Elfidio Alonso and then of Alfonso García-Ramos, another of my unforgettable legends.
Salcedo never gave stitch without thread, so that question should have its crumb, that I did not look for, because you answer the directors and that’s it. I told him, then, that what I missed the most was that I had no place to sit there, no typewriter, no safe place to be, so I was a bum in the middle of tables crammed with old papers.
La Tarde was not only a newspaper, it was a place where great guys like the already mentioned Alfonso García-Ramos and the unusual Paco Pimentel sat down to write frantically, always with their butt hanging from their lower lip. Alfonso wrote about everything, politics, literature, local life, La Laguna, his beloved city, and Pimentel focused on the city of Santa Cruz, to locate his home in the eccentrics who once made this place peaceful that the capital of Tenerife was then a legacy of fantastic urban novels such as those of Charles Dickens.
Alfonso was very generous, he always invited me to go up with him in his green car with a long handbrake to the Colegio Mayor San Fernando, where I stayed pretending to study History, as well as Journalism, which is the only thing I could end up with as academic. When we arrived at the Colegio Mayor, that teacher whom I admired so much would grab the handbrake, pull it towards his shoulder and get ready to continue talking about the most diverse contemporary issues, among which was in the very first place the trip that the Che Guevara to liberate Latin America. He didn’t make it, you know, but his bloody defeat in Bolivia managed to increase the divinity to which we had elevated him.
Alfonso and Elfidio were very close and very close friends, I sometimes saw them together in La Laguna, Alfonso with his Spanish cape, and Elfidio invited him to be the presenter of the first Los Sabandeños concert. It was at the Ateneo de La Laguna, one of the places where I have felt the best in my life, and where we said goodbye, by the way, to the great doctor, and exceptional person, who was the socialist Alberto de Armas.
That concert, baptized by Alfonso, gave way to one of the longest feats of our times, Los Sabandeños. I saw them grow, triumph, dismember, reassemble, and I always found in the impressive longevity of the idea and the style a consequence of how Elfidio faces the commitments he adopts: as if he were examining himself with history, as if he were demonstrating, moreover, something that has been in his hands with memorable consequences: the dignity of island folklore as one of the fine arts.
So Salcedo asked me to tell him what he was missing in La Tarde that he could have in EL DÍA. At that moment he was in that office that smelled of wood in the old building on Calle del Norte, already called Valentín Sanz. Beside him was his Underwood typewriter open, and as is often the case in such circumstances I responded to the new director with something I had on hand. So I told him that he missed a typewriter. He told me that as soon as I joined the discipline of the new newspaper he would have one just for me.
That thing about it being “just for me” has its history, because it was never true in newsrooms that typewriters were for private use, and that’s how it happened in that newspaper that, a few days after my conversation with my new director, passed to be done near the Refinery, on Buenos Aires Avenue, next to where it works right now. At that time, the company Herederos de Leoncio Rodríguez had built a very functional headquarters, which is now occupied by Radiotelevisión Española, a neighbor of the company that has been Prensa Ibérica for some time, the consequence of the already legendary Canarian Press that opened in the islands with the brands LA PROVINCIA and DIARIO DE LAS PALMAS. The new building of EL DÍA is identical to the first one, and I was there recently wanting to sit down and write any chronicle.
In that new headquarters everything was recent and clean, also the typewriters, Olivetti green, large, mounted on iron calves with which we moved them from one side of the Newsroom to the other. A fellow veteran, Francisco Hernández, whom I don’t know why they called Pancho Pantera, had immobilized his, which was closed with a padlock, as a symbol of who was in charge.
I remember the way of sitting in front of the machines, and even of using them, of almost each one of the editorial colleagues, among whom I remember very clearly the manners in this regard of Mr. Luis Álvarez Cruz and Gilberto Alemán. Don Luis would come for a while, in the afternoon, and looking at the keyboard as if he were a friend (the section that I remember best of all the ones he invented was titled Hands on the keyboard) culminated the headlines of the interviews or notes that he brought from House.
I remember Don Luis’s last day at the Newsroom. He had Alzheimer’s, he didn’t know where he was, and his beloved daughter Olga, now also suffering from a similar illness, took him as if to say goodbye, waving from his back so that we would know that whatever her father said in that sad moment
Gilberto, by the way, was fast, he wrote as if he had to go, with one foot out of place, and he tore the folio off the keyboard and took it to workshops as if everything were urgent and cumulative.
Where did I sit? What about me. I never had a typewriter there, nor did I ask for one, because I was an itinerant in the Newsroom, as I have also been an itinerant in life. Now that I am writing these things I am going by plane to Fuerteventura, it is Saturday morning, when I always write these chronicles that I have been doing for LA PROVINCIA and EL DÍA for so many years…
And I do it at dawn, and it’s the first thing I do, because, like when I was a kid writing for both newspapers, I always thought that with anything I’d be late. Getting up early is, for me, synonymous with journalism, so here I am.
