When Antonio Gala became a scoundrel...

Antonio Gala was genius, wit, intelligence, sensitivity, grace, education, bad mood, culture, street, vice and virtue all together and scrambled.

He was also one of the most ingenious and funny men, over short distances, I have ever met. It jumped in the hand. He had a quickness to find the right answer, the timely or inopportune comment, the brightest and dirtiest observation.

He went from the sublime to the mud in seconds. I could leave you speechless

erto with its elegant rhetoric or make you laugh with a great occurrence. He had a naughty boy laugh, because sometimes that was him. We interviewed him on all the TV shows of

And he never disappointed. We even dedicate 13 programs to it -

, an impossible project in these times- to talk at length about the great themes: love, death, the meaning of life, the passage of time, power, money...

Quintero admired him deeply and whenever he started a new program he thought about

as one of his essential interviewees. I admired him, but I also feared him. He said he was a miura because he entered the rag no matter what you asked, and more than once with the interviewer's whirlwind included.

I have not laughed more than with the anecdotes of Gala -like when she tried to get the driver's license and a hundred more to which more surreal-. I didn't like it very much when it got gobbled, bombastic and a bit cheesy. I liked much more the

Scoundrel, merciless, destructive even of his own image, as shown in the last interview we did in 2013.

The press published that he was dying and Jesus decided that he could not leave this world without leaving us his living will in the form of an interview. We went to

to do the last interview in your

. Gala was superb, great. He shattered all myths, starting with his own, in an act of lucidity and enviable honesty. But Gala did not die. He continued to live and even survived

. Rest in peace, master.

(And don

He will answer me from the other side: "Don't call me master, I am very disgusted.")

*

is a poet and was the head screenwriter of Jesús Quintero.