A José Manuel Benítez Ariza, how could it be otherwise, I met him in a movie theater. But not in a movie either, but at the Teatro Falla, now occupied by the insidious murga of the carnivals, at the end of one of the films that were projected under the Scope Displays, back in 96: both have already passed? I had just read my Chalk Stripe (Pre-Texts), a novel that I bought by accident in the Seville Library Vertex, located then on Calle Mateos Gago, and where, and by chance, end up working a few years later. When the lights came up and the spectators sitting in the row of seats in front of me, I recognized immediately the subject, with parsimony, was leaving the room. He was the author of this first novel that had me so excited, or at least closely resembled the guy in the photo flap. Quickly process data in my head: Benítez Ariza was reminded that Cadiz, and that the novel betrayed his passion for cinema, so it was perfectly plausible that the man was who he really looked.
I was finishing the post with my brother Felix, or were about to do so, the first issue of a cultural supplement in a local weekly, and the excuse to interview, in case the reader fascinated fell short or rang a little weird to be then a little-known author, decided to deal with the courage of young enthusiastic and unabashed. I was surprised to meet someone so simple and humble as characters showing through that first novel and the commitment of a close encounter that had overtones of being a ritual formula. This interview, entitled enlightening - "The greatness of simplicity" - end up in the pages of the essential Clarín, that time had also landed in the now as invisible literary magazine world.
Since then, my meetings with Benitez Ariza were happening giving rise to a long friendship, despite the vicissitudes of work and the physical distance has been maintained over time, personally throwing some significant milestones, and never thank him enough, as its presentation, now almost ten years ago at the Teatro Principal de Sanlúcar of my first book, film Soup, his invitation to collaborate in the journal which coordinated for a while, The Round Book or put me in contact with the ineffable José Luis García Martín. Yesterday we
match in Cadiz in the making length of fog banks, remember those distant days, and I got to thinking that Benitez Ariza and I share quite a few common interests in narrative, especially our passion for film, I especially remember his wonderful collection of articles The imaginary life - and that tone of melancholy and nostalgia that we can not avoid writing . In this regard, as yesterday also reminded me of another great introducer, poet, and above all, a friend, Tomás Rodríguez Reyes, fog banks shares winter holidays and New Life the appreciation of personal memory in those years childhood and adolescence-eighties in my case, over seventy in
Benitez Ariza, which indelibly marked the adult we are today and that always makes us look back to rebuild the fabric of fiction. The diptych of José Manuel, who will by no-dig triptych delinquent and exquisite sensitivity in lost time and still kicking inside of us and sticks at each corner like a naughty child who does not want to stop playing with our memories. Whether it's a childhood burdened by a long convalescence - Winter Break - or a quiet affair populated adolescence and political upheavals - New Life - Benítez Ariza has, as the writer of these lines, the spirit made the recall, this Baudelaire spleen that traps us always with pen in hand or fingers on the keyboard. The protagonists of both novels, as Andrew and, perhaps, the Mario fog banks, have a lot of its author, while sometimes hard to distinguish, however that the facts being distorted, to adorn or reinvent thanks to the power of fable. This unbreakable alliance and indistinguishable from fact and fiction is another feature that unites us in this "profession? narrators, because I think you'll agree Benítez Ariza me that the disguise, dissimulation, is always the best friend when it comes to draw on the memories. The truth always hurts a little more. probably takes us to re-match in a literary event, but we will always have that "smoke" that will warn us of the presence of others, their achievements and efforts to be faithful to this melancholy glow.
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