This Wednesday, Traveling with Chester had Marina Castaño, widow of Camilo José Cela, as its first guest, who spoke openly about her relationship with the writer. From the great age difference that separated them, through their return to the house they shared, in addition to revealing some beautiful memories with the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In this sense, Castaño did not hesitate to, for example, clarify one of Cela’s most surreal moments on television. That interview at the hands of Mercedes Milá where the academic assured that he could absorb a liter and a half of water through his anus. The widow’s response left Risto Mejide speechless.
Camilo José Cela was a genius and a figure until the grave and, on occasions, his television interventions left both the public and the presenters and journalists with their mouths open. In fact, during Risto Mejide’s interview with Marina Castaño in Traveling with Chester, the publicist wanted to rescue one of the writer’s most surreal and fun moments with Mercedes Milá and a famous basin.
“Your late husband appeared on television, in prime time, claiming that he was capable of absorbing a basin of water through his anus,” explained the presenter, referring to the interview that the journalist did with the academic in 1983 during the Buenas program. Nights, from TVE.
“I have a skill, which is the absorption of a liter and a half of water in a single stroke anally. If you want, take a basin and I’ll show you,” Cela snapped to the astonishment and laughter of Milá, who didn’t know if the challenge was true or a lie. “He disarmed her, she died laughing,” the widow recalled.
“What I don’t understand is how he didn’t take out a basin. “Was she really capable of doing that?” Mejide asked him. To which she replied, laughing: “Man, for the love of God, it was a joke. “A joke.” “Is that the kind of humor he had?” the publicist stressed. “Yeah. Sometimes he came out with things like that,” Castaño revealed. “Well, a myth has fallen on me,” Mejide assured him.
Next, another anecdote about Cela also came to light, but this time during his time as a senator of the Upper House. During one of his long sessions, the writer began to shake his head, a fact that the president of the chamber noticed.
“Mr. Cela, you are asleep,” he said. “No, sir, I’m sleeping,” the writer corrected him because “being screwed is not the same as being screwed.” That way of responding and arguing any circumstance was part of the essence of Camilo José Cela.
