“This morning my father passed away,” little Akela tweeted this Easter Monday, at 11:30 a.m. Akela Sánchez (10 years old) is the youngest son of Fernando Sánchez Dragó, a writer, journalist, traveler and literary promoter who died of an acute myocardial infarction at the age of 86 in his stone and wood house in CastilfrÃo de la Sierra ( village of Soria), in front of his desk, which was his favorite place in the world.
Barely an hour before, Fernando Sánchez Dragó had tweeted a photo with one of his cats, tabby and blond, climbing on his head, and this text: “Nano the cat says good morning to me. He knows that the secret of almost everything is in the headâ€. Dragó mourns his other three children, Alejandro (62), Ayanta (54) and Aixa (41), fruits of his passionate love for different women, as well as the journalist Emma Nogueiro (29), his girlfriend for a long time. almost six years.
Fernando Sánchez Dragó, a prolific writer (almost a hundred titles published) and fierce columnist, has been one of the most widely read authors in Spanish in the last forty years and –above all– the best literary disseminator that television has produced in Spain. As a teenage viewer, I became addicted to his magnificent literary interviews on Encounters with Letters (TVE, 1976-1981), a program that invited authors of all styles and generations. That program was an open field of freedom for all feverish readers.
Posthumous son of the journalist Fernando Sánchez Monreal (killed in full professional practice, during a trip to the Andalusian front to write a report, at the beginning of the civil war, assassinated by Falangists), Dragó grew up next to his father’s typewriter who he did not know: at the age of four he typed his first text, he maintained, always hyperbolic and literary to the marrow of the bones due to genetic imperative and irredeemable reader: he had read everything since he was a child and his conversation was a feast of erudition, emphasis and pleasantries .
From the mid-1970s and for the next four decades, Dragó was a professor of literature at universities in various countries, a literary critic, and a television interviewer. His introductions, questions and farewells were dazzling pieces of goldsmithing in prose for programs such as the National Library, The Night, The World by Hunt, Black on White, Books with Uasabi, The Lighthouse of Alexandria, The White Nights or Dragolandia. I didn’t miss a single one, extremely rich for their breadth of vision and curiosities, an exercise in vibrant pluralism with unforgettable moments like Fernando Arrabal’s, mystically drunk and whirling on set, crying out that “millenarianism is coming!” I saw live how good old Dragó prevented Arrabal from falling to the ground and getting hurt.
After a youthful communist activism that in 1956 led him to a Francoist jail, and then exiled for a few years, Dragó traveled through Africa and Asia, experiences that inspired him by Gárgoris and Habidis. A magical history of Spain (Hiperión, 1978), his greatest editorial success, an essay in four volumes and brilliant literary prose – I still have the first of his more than 70! editions– that tells a heterodox and esoteric history of Spain, sewn with myths and legends, from the Tartessian to the Andalusian, embroidered with Jewish and Moorish mystics, Sufis and Cabalists, the Spain of the game of the Goose and the Grail, of the Camino de Santiago full of stars, Templars, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, agotes, heretics and witches.
Works of all kinds followed (Eldorado, The Way of the Heart, Letter from Jesus to the Pope, The Labyrinth Test, The Path of the Left Hand, Parallel Deaths, Those Blue Days, Running Greyhound, Blood Pact, God Breeds Them). .. ), with a thread that reconnects them: the biography of the author, personal, family and social. With three parallel and often intertwined passions: travel, women and the spirit. He loved to talk about sex –he confessed to me that he never traveled without taking black stockings in his suitcase, just in case, talk about what you’ll talk about, he was intimate with a girl and he could ask her to put them on–, about his trips to the East and his rich readings mystical and esoteric. He also explored ecstatic experiences, literary and empirically, at the hands of his close friend Antonio Escohotado, (recently deceased): together they shared days with Albert Hoffman, discoverer of LSD.
For thirty years, Dragó has organized the so-called Eleusinian Encounters, in his adoptive town of CastilfrÃo, Soria, debates on spiritual, philosophical and mysterious questions, as well as dietetics: Dragó ingested thirty tablets a day, a miraculous cocktail of active ingredients against aging, with predilection for algae and fungi (and a bit of cialis, to always be ready). They have worked: Dragó has been active in body and mind – his eloquence was proverbial – until the last minute of his life, with a recent joke: “Excuse me for not getting upâ€, as a humorous epitaph. He had an unexpected role in recent times: a friend of Santiago Abascal (he published a book of conversations with him), he inspired Vox to present Ramón Tamames, a personal friend, as a candidate for the vote of no confidence against President Pedro Sánchez.
Friendship was for Dragó the main value: he cultivated it with journalists and writers, always affectionate with everyone, no matter what everyone thought, with literature for all religions. I met him in 1981, at the UAB, one day when he came to give a talk to the students (he gave a valuable contact to a colleague: “today for you, tomorrow for meâ€, he instructed us), and over the years we became friends, with some memorable evening at his house in CastilfrÃo, next to the grave of his cat Soseki –he loved nothing more than cats, and the poem If by Kipling–, to whose death he dedicated the book Soseki, immortal and tiger, which He described it as “the best of all the books I’ve ever written.” Friend Fernando, dear Dragó, you have inaugurated your happy eternity together with your beloved Soseki, immortal and tiger, meow and soul.
