A World of forgers

Miguel de Unamuno said that he preferred talking to living authors will have to read, that he just read to the dead because he had no choice but to learn from them. In fact, Unamuno spoke only of himself, "because I have at hand? He argued. In one anecdote, probably apocryphal and as most attributed to him, the Basque writer one day walking with a friend and a third person who had just met while explaining his annoyance about needing eight hours of sleep, because he thought he that was a waste of time. The companion of his friend interrupted: "I sleep just six hours?. Angered by the intrusion of such Chiquilicuatre, the eminent and arrogant Don Miguel he snapped: "Surely it is true, sir, that you are awake more hours than me, but know that when I'm awake I'm a lot more than you?. The public figures are, therefore, as one believed or wanted to be. I remember Arthur St. Augustine journalist interviewed her once admired Patricia Higsmith, the author of disturbing masterpieces of suspense. The summary of what you think of the novelist did not dare to publish it as is: "A witch?, He said. Unamuno probably was right in preventing the quick read.

Journalists would be the first to show many contradictions between our work and reality. Even the Anglo-Saxon media, traditionally taken as serious, are full of forgers today. In recent years have been sacked from their jobs for failing to different truth Pulitzer Prizes, from the NBC reporter Peter Arnett in the USA Today reporter Jack Kelley, through false stories record holder Jason Blair of The New York Times . Lies in the press are not, however, something new. In the sixties in Germany found a bunker in which a Nazi soldier would have survived by eating canned for twenty years. After dozens of reports with photos, it was discovered that it was all a hoax. Twenty years later the same happened with a fake diaries of Adolf Hitler. The fraud was so well engineered that such prestigious international publications like Paris Match and Der Spiegel published stung as gullible and trickery. The fold, however, is another matter. For example, someone displays a public life of a freelance journalist and known after it has worked for the secret services of the former East Germany, as happened not long ago the famous international reporter Günter Wallraf, author of Head of Turkish and many other impressive research behind them, in which he posed as an arms dealer or the extreme right was introduced into the guts of the tabloid Bild Zeitung in order to denounce and handling information.

Something similar has happened posthumously left-wing British writer George Orwell. The celebrated author of futuristic fiction 1984 and Homage to Catalonia during our civil war known to hide who reported thirty-eight of his colleagues, describing some as "crypto?, To other" supporters? and finally a third group as "fellow travelers?. And all to no avail deserve the love of young Celia Kirwan. Of course, the novelist, died a few months later, wrote that "for 50 years, we all have the face we deserve?. Other Spanish writers, with less dramatic adventures, have had to live with the sins sambenito of alleged juvenile they denied or simply neglected. Thus, the Nobel Prize Camilo Jose Cela, impetuous, liberal alarmist in his life and writings, had to overcome their short-time food as a censor in the difficult early days of Franco. Josep Pla vitalist also was accused of being a spy sui generis for the military rebels in 1936, who was limited to telling the port movement he saw from his hotel in Marseille while exiled Catalan breakfast. No need to fool anyone, other writers barely moved from his home to tell what happened in ancient worlds of creation.

That was the case of the prolific Jules Verne constantly anchored in the living room of his house while he wrote from fantastic voyages beyond the confines of the earth, or Edgar Rice Burroughs, who placed all his novels about the imaginary and then Tarzan of the Apes film in? Africa, where he had never set foot. Already famous millionaire, someone asked if he wanted to go and once the African continent. "What for? ?, He answered with brutal honesty the writer: "Imagine how disappointed if you do not look anything like how I described?. That's it. For many people, what matters is not reality but appearance. That happened to Orson Welles, fascinated by the complex personality of Elmyr de Hory, the painter who lives in Mallorca with a pulquérrima forged from Matisse to Picasso accuracy without anyone noticing the deception for many years. In that game between appearance and reality emerged biopic F For Fake, regarded by some critics as a gem.

The worst, however, is apparently a social virtues that are lacking. That's what happened to the late President John F. Kennedy, glamorous Jackelin Bouvier married, which met his death after countless extramarital affairs, the most famous and renowned of them all with actress Marilyn Monroe. Passing a coy veil over the risky erotic adventures other members of his vast and still-powerful clan, famous athletes say they have had sex in situations similar findings have been characterized in some cases for its drama. For example, when the basketball star Magic Johnson announced he was HIV positive surfaced collective orgies of many stars in the NBA. Another basketball player also first class, Kobe Bryant, two years ago was subjected to trial for alleged rape of a girl in Denver, which cleared out. What about the very famous, unique and made white Michael Jackson, immersed in a long process of corruption of minors, which was saved by a whisker? In its day, the forerunner of the famous AIDS infected and died of the disease was Rock Hudson.

Then he unveiled a life of homosexual practices, so far from the infamous social point of view, and they were absolutely unthinkable who was considered one of Hollywood's most coveted heterosexual. People like Michael Jackson, as we have said, have obtained a verdict of innocence. Not as the world boxing champion Tysson Myke, who had to pay in jail his violent sexual excesses. On many gotha ​​gold characters, which celebrity would the writer José Luis de Villalonga, the courts have issued and convictions at various activities of life. Who would have predicted when people now in prison for economic crimes was above suspicion, sheltered by the power of money, influence and repute a resounding fame? I refer to that group of the 80 billionaires who got rich in Spain through fraudulent practices sanctioned by the law: that so-called beautiful people, composed, among others, illustrious men as powerful as Mario Conde, Javier de la Rosa, the Albertos Mariano Rubio, Manuel de la Concha and a few others like them as honorable citizens, participants of all hunting and all boards and friendship preferences of politicians and international investors.

In seedy plan, such a list would be added to Luis Roldan, Julian and some other little characters Sancristóbal middling, Pring or aspiring to thrive economically under a policy or complicated skills pampering them. Usually, celebrities often have a social aspect in mind that often contrasts with a less friendly and more sullen that show in private. Some people seem to be circumspect, as the Argentine dictator Juan Domingo Peron, who privately kept an affair with a girl of thirteen. Aware of this, the Vatican's Apostolic Nuncio, dared to make a gentle rebuke to the military's alleged Catholicism. "But sir, 'he said, look that the girl is only 13! ?. "No matter, I am not superstitious?, He said Peron. Are enough stories attributed to political leaders, perhaps the only posthumous revenge may sometimes suffered by their subjects. Other times, simply because they are true. In any case, many of which are difficult to verify, as the allocation made at the time by Forbes magazine to the austere Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died in Switzerland of having concealed a personal fortune of 300 million dollars.

Other criticisms of public men are more adjusted to reality. Atatturk Kemal, the father of modern Turkey, which rescued the delay secular and religious submission of post-imperial prostration, which criticized his main companion was strangely drunken carousing his horse. It is not unusual that relationship between horse and alcoholism, without going back to the surreal excesses of Caligula. American actor of the 50's Broderick Crawford was an inveterate drunkard who rode it as a horse stood as the soberest of mortals. Not continue beyond the glittering world of Hollywood deliberately and consciously, as the scrutiny of the lives of actors and actresses, if not their own narcissistic exhibitionism, has been steady and persistent. So, unless veiled stories like spy activity as actor Errol Flynn, for example, there is virtually double lives that show or falsehoods exciting to discover. Sometimes, however, there are posthumous revelations, like Allegret Catherine, daughter of Simone Signoret, who claimed in a book appeared three years ago that her stepfather, actor and singer Yves Montand, abused her as a child.

In general, actors and other artists excessive and extroverted, actually live to the public. Perhaps, by that characterization that made them centuries ago Jean Jacques Rousseau: "The bad actor he is because it has low sensitivity, the good actor, however, has a lot of sensitivity and exquisite actor, finally, totally devoid of it? . Whether or not certain as malicious definition, there are extravagant and passionate public figures, such as the Italian poet Gabriele d'Annunzio, who lived his life as an adventure, seduced like many others of his time by the fascism of Mussolini and famous for high-profile romances as whom he had with actress Eleanora Duse, arrived with three hundred military occupation of their own local Fiume Yugoslav year and a half until there was to be evicted from her for the brave. The relationship of intellectuals to fascism or Nazism is not as uncommon as people think. Your list would be long and hateful, which shows that talent has nothing to do with political affiliation. While some French intellectuals were active against the Nazis, as Andre Malraux, and others were declared anti-Semitic and friends of the Third Reich, such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline, author of Journey to the End of the Night, who had to flee France in 1944 to avoid being shot by his countrymen.

In Spain, although there is a culpable ignorance of it because of the deliberate falsification of history promoted by the government of Rodriguez Zapatero, were a veritable plethora of writers who collaborated with the regime established by Franco in 1936, as stated in Julio Rodriguez-Puértolas the Spanish Fascist Literature anthology: Agustí de Foxa, Manuel Machado, Eugenio Montes, Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Eduardo Marquina, ... As evidence of this reactionary thought, I leave here a small sample of it. It turns out that the Catalan poet Luys de Santamarina, who came to know personally, I once argued: "Do you know a black who can write? These people only serves to box! ?. Just like that. On both sides of the ideological spectrum are as shown, people unwise. Leftist American writer, Dashiell Hammett, creator of Black literature character chased by police and McCarthyism, was given alcohol and, given their subordination to his partner, also a writer Lillian Helmann-ended rights virtually stripped to her daughters. Of course his stalker, the ruthless Senator Joseph McCarthy anti-Communist, was even more unseemly than him. In retrospect, it is absolutely incomprehensible that such a lout came to terrorize an entire country for almost half a dozen years.

Rude, bitter, seedy and drinker, ended in political and social ostracism clamorous. Where the hypocrisy of many great men is not clearly evident in his relationship with women. A recent biography of Ecuadorian painter Oswaldo Guayasamín explains that this sensitivity should only apply to artistic creation while giving a beating to kill his wife. Neither have been very pious with the successive biographies of the great Pablo Picasso, in which militant misogyny has been made evident again and again. Sure enough times domestic violence is only a derivation of erotomania, or sexual addiction, as it is more modern now. The impressionist painter Paul Gauguin was solved by going to live in Polynesia, where an Indian was paired with 14. In contrast, the Polish director Roman Polanski was caught with a minor in United States, where not yet been able to return to hang over his head the threat of jail. Without going so far, Georges Simenon, creator of the literary character of Inspector Maigret, acknowledged in his memoirs that, in addition to writing non-stop, had quietly intense and promiscuous sex life, even in the presence of his long-suffering and indulgent wife.

Sometimes men are subjects of these stories patients bizarre or strange. Cambridge police investigated some time ago, for example, if it was true or not the physical disabled Stephen Hawking, confined to his wheelchair by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, had suffered repeated physical abuse by his second wife, Elaine Mason. And, if the relationships are already difficult in itself, when a genius goes in between are even more complicated. The best example, perhaps, is that of the legendary artist Frida Kahlo to the screen, Salma Hayek, and by the exuberant and excessive painter Diego Rivera, one of the two great Mexican muralists. The other, David Alfaro Siqueiros, militant and fiercely opposed Stalinist Trotskyism Rivera, lived during his last years on suspicion of having collaborated with Ramon Mercader in his brutal murder of Trotsky with an ice pick. Hundreds of examples of this relationship would never-ending stories about public figures, famous and admired all of them remarkable in their professional life and social presence, but with the same areas darker than the rest of mortals. Sometimes, even, for its superior sensitivity, the most creative activity or specificity of intellectual or artistic work, some of them end up believing that they are not covered by codes of conduct which govern the life forces of the other people.

Beyond them.