It was an alameda surrounded by tropical heat. The center of the alameda was dominated by a circle of earth and right in the middle they placed a school chair. There he sat and began to tell stories. It was past noon, which some say is not the time to tell stories because the brain is trying to get rid of the endorphins from the food. There was expectation and noise at the same time. They didn’t come from the same place, but harmonized well, just like stories that seem exotic, but are like a usual tale.<\/p>
In the photograph that remains in my memory, with the changing image, with the random labyrinth of not knowing which parts were lost, which are reconstructions, and which are archeology, there are girls dressed in school uniforms one size less than they would need. They are seated, restless, noisy and leave an exaggerated distance from the man sitting down to tell them stories. Maybe he’s wearing a dark shirt or maybe it’s a concession of my memory. He sits down and begins to talk. In the memory picture there is no plot, there is ironic humor. But the ending is tender. That distance traveled, between irony and tenderness, is the true image of the photo that preserves the memory. By surprise. (surprisingly)<\/p>
In the center of that alameda, in the center of the memorial photo, despite the inaccuracies, is Xabier P. Docampo (R\u00e1bade, 1946; A Coru\u00f1a, 2018) giving his daily fight against everything that does not deserve to happen. He was there and could have done something else, but he decided that a story with a certain ironic cruelty should end with a tender gesture. Because Docampo, in his fair sense of the world, thought that stories should end well. They should end with good. They should be for the best.<\/p>
Memory behaves randomly but may be us that do not understand it. It must have reasons. So Xabier P. Docampo appears to me in the center of this story in which I was a fugitive spectator and my responsibility did not go beyond paying attention. He appears with that half distance as soon as I start reading obituaries, urgent biographies, justified tributes and all the post-traumatic literature of which we are capable to try to alleviate the pain.<\/p>
Then I think, from a certain reasoning not suited for this moment, that in Galicia we should take a very serious look at this: we only get unanimity when someone disappears. And, to avoid that feeling of being out of place, I search my memory for that moment in history when Docampo made a joke about the manifest opinions of deceased writers. And you have to start there: his rebellious sense of humor and his complete lack of imposture. They were two sides of the same issue in relation to life. He treated people with the same sense of humor: he brought friends closer and put a sarcastic distance to the shadows that only appear to be good people.<\/p>
Xabier P. Docampo felt admiration for the seduction that fear exerts as a literary argument and for the mechanism by which stories are told. It is possible that everything is the same science and the writer exercised that fascination of the stories told: knowing the handling and still retain the sense of magic, knowing that assuming the work of telling transcends the arguments: there is always something that cannot be predicted and that something is what becomes literature. That which cannot be measured.<\/p>
The storm that causes the death of valuable people cannot be measured. In one of those circles that are formed among people who talk a lot before and after public events, Docampo once ironized about how much world literature would gain if posthumous eulogies to writers were made while they were still alive. Memory is almost certain that he ended the sentence by saying “although I have no complaints…” and left the ellipses of irony because everything is worth more when it has a double meaning. It is an easy calculation to work out.<\/p>
Memory chains sequences like someone who joins quotes from different books. Someone would say it is postmodernism, but surely it already existed before. It throws Xabier’s image in more or less entertaining activities, in the sparkling conversation – \u201cyes, Xabier, that is castrapo, but I am from Ourense…\u201d- and in the feeling I always had that he was able to keep the necessary humor to put things in their place: lowering the saints, raising the people. That he was someone capable of playing with things in all their seriousness. There is always a lack of people like that, but now even more so.<\/p>
Then there is also Calvino. Not the theologian of the Protestant Reformation, but that Italian writer who also felt admiration for the mechanisms of storytelling, who ambushed readers in the fable and made them walk. All Docampo’s paths, like those of Calvino, lead to the reader. They lead to him and then lead the reader to wherever he wants to go. And it must be a journey that pays the wonder because prodigies and naturalities appear. Drawings appear on the horizon and words written in the sky. All those things appear like worldly but we have to look for something so we can keep our humor and look at everything from the front as Xabier P. Docampo did, who sometimes even argued with me for taking the P out of his last name to abbreviate in the headlines. He would ask if I was hungry for letters.There is Calvino, and I read these days that his wife, Esther Judith Singer, died, and the uncertain connections of the neurons return. There is also another whim of things. Italo Calvino was born in Havana, he got married there, and so I can close the circle of the man in a dark shirt in the middle of the Havana boulevard, surrounded by pioneer women to whom he tells a story with a sense of humor that ends in tenderness. It was noisy and hot. Things that would be necessary for us right now.<\/p>
This text was published in the supplement T\u00e1boa Redonda, by El Progreso and Diario de Pontevedra. July 3, 2018.\n\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Xabier P. Docampo disappeared last week. Memory brings back to us his attitude as an all-stories storyteller as well as that humor he practiced to bring down the saints and bring up the people. (Four years ago of the text and a few more of the stories, but continue, they remain the same).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":242106,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[191],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fatiga-ocular-en"],"acf":[],"post_template":"reportaxe","post_subscription":"no","pretitle":"","content_extract":"It was an alameda surrounded by tropical heat. The center of the alameda was dominated by a circle of earth and right in the middle they placed a school chair. There he sat and began to tell stories. It was past noon, which some say is not the time to tell stories because the brain...","reading_data":{"word_count":"1044","reading_seconds":"250","reading_time":{"minutes":4,"hours":0,"seconds":10},"reading_string":"4'10''","reading_human":"4 minutos"},"announcement":{"finishdate":"","finishdate_text":""},"opinion":{"subject":"","subject_info":[]},"event_info":{"startdate":"","starttime":"","enddate":"","endtime":"","entertainer":null},"interview":{"interviewed":""},"phototext":{"text_author":"","text_photo":""},"video":{"video_source":""},"promotion":{"action":"default","action_data":""},"categories_list":[{"name":"Eye strain","id":191,"slug":"fatiga-ocular-en","parent":0,"template":"default"}],"visible_author":"Camilo Franco","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242325"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242325"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242325\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":280352,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242325\/revisions\/280352"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/242106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}