"He was able to write while he watched that the rabbit was not passed to the casserole he had put in the fire . " This is how the journalist José Martí Gómez evokes Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. They worked together in the magazine Please, together with Juan Marsé. “Typing was faster in his brain than typing in the typewriter. It was at that time as it always was: shy, silent, generous, ironic and not very talkative. Manolo laughed at himself assuming that throughout his life he had had a series of personal failures: he wanted to be the first dancer of the Boshoi, center forward of Barça, Pope to see if God exists and general secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR to know if the revolution exists, ”adds Martí Gómez.

Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1939-2003) is still there through his novels, his articles, his interviews, his books of poems, his articles on politics, urban planning or Barça. There is always a reissue as an excuse to appreciate your intelligence, your spark, your humor. The hipster look. 40 years of journalism, pleasure, revolt and humor (Random House) is the last. The book houses a good assortment of articles on everything imaginable that Francesc Salgado has chosen, which recalls that Manolo (as his relatives knew him) wrote about 8,000 articles .

MVM also multiplied. It was Vázquez Montalbán and also Manolo the Empecinado, Baroness d'Orcy, Carlos I of Spain and V of Germany , Manolín de Tarascón, El Bizco de Lepanto, Ricardo Bambi, Serer or not Serer ... «To each journalistic bacatazo, and they were many with censorship, Manolo repeated 'We are surrounded', but continued, ”says Martí Gómez.

One of MVM's first interviews was with Juan Marsé , who had just been a finalist in the Short Library with Enclosed Prize with a single toy . Montalbán is 21 years old and Marsé, 27. The meeting was on November 26, 1960. For that text, which was published in National Solidarity, known by the Soli, he collected 150 pesetas. Thus it began: «Rovira Square and its surroundings have the color of these Parisian areas, static and unimaginable outside the calm of an afternoon, of a sky between clean and dirty, of clear air and of a small world of tramways, walkers, vendors of newspapers and couples between laughter and sadness. In one of these streets, the one dedicated to one Marti and at number 104, lives Juan Marsé, twenty-seven years of age, a novelist jeweler profession, and a single state. Juan Marsé has in the photographs a hard air that reality denies to leave it in a certain gesture of thoughtful resignation ». Title of that text: Juan Marsé, the novelist locked up with a single toy. Subtitle: Jeweler until three in the afternoon, novelist from three to nine.

MVM was shrewd, funny and ironic . He was the son of "dressmaker who worked at home and a hat seller and collector of burial insurance premiums," among other trades, as confessed to French hispanist Georges Tyras in Memory Geometries. Conversations with Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (Zoela editions). With a Continental typewriter that his father gave him, he began typing perhaps "because you don't like external reality and create a new one with words, with the fragility of words."

«We lived in a flat of 50 square meters, without light, in the street Bottle» of the Raval of Barcelona. It was there that he forged his sentimental education among couplets of Rafael de León who listened on the radio and the conscience of having seen his father for the first time in a prison where he served five years of sentence. “ I was born in the tail of the fled army / I stayed in the light of the sentry / and I borrowed air and water / in neighborhoods that were left over, ” reads by way of autobiography in his poem Prague .

With those wicks and after studying Journalism and Philosophy and Letters (at the same time, of course) he braided and traced a sentimental Chronicle of Spain in the Triunfo magazine (directed by José Ángel Ezcurra) that capitalized him on the journalistic map . There were five reports that were published in 1969; his tone was this: «And that gypsy young man whose name was Manolo Caracol and sang a horny zambra to a young dancer, almost as gypsy as he was called Lola Flores, still far from being the Lola of Spain. The girl of fire called her the people and when she dismembered there was an erotic commotion in Celtiberia ».

Manolo also published in Avui, Interviú, La Reppublica, La Calle, Tele / eXpres, El Periódico de Catalunya, El País ... No one can predict what he had written or said about Procés, nor what adjectives he would have dedicated to Messi (he did not reach to watch it play) or to Vox. But we can read what he thought of Neruda, Tarradellas, Chavela Vargas, the Southern Cone, Nixón ... What did Manolo not write about?

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