Antonio Robles died. He was an excellent reader. His friend Arturo Pérez-Reverte, who published from a very young age in the publishing house where this unique and important man worked, wrote about him when he became the creator of this work. Alatriste He was a boy and his friend was 45: “The man whose literary insight I respect most in the world is called Antonio Robles, he is 45 years old and he smokes a pipe.”
Robles always smoked a pipe, walked as if searching for a seat on a drifting ship, frowned and was horny at the same time, laughed at his shadow and He was only interested in books, his sisters, and the many women he admired.Among them were his colleagues at Alfaguara, where I had known him for about eight years. Antonio died last Friday and was 74 years old.
In this text written by the most famous writers of the Spanish language for Vocento newspapers, Pérez-Reverte talked about the ability to read and persuade about what is read: Those who had a say in the publishing house conveyed the evidence to which they asked his opinion.: “He reads them very seriously,” remarked the author Tango of the old guard, “He judges without much consideration and never fails. Amaya ElezcanoMy favorite editor, Machaca, will testify to the extent to which the above undersigned respects and cares for Antonio, regularly handing over manuscripts. drum skin, “How he predicted the number of samples we would place in a month, with a very small margin of error.”
Pérez-Reverte is not limited to this in profile: “In fact, Your technical judgment caused me to delete two lines at the end of the section where a particular intimate action of a character in the novel is detailed. ‘About masturbation’ – said Antonio very seriously – ‘I know more than anyone else. And I tell you that this position is impossible.’”
Arturo says that at that age and later he was unlucky in love with Antonio Robles, but that he was always surrounded by women, in the publishing house and outside, who mourned his loss and described the great happiness they experienced. friendship is provided..
I was invited to one of the last meetings planned by his friends (Olivia Rojo, Natalia Vicioso, Ana Lyons, Marta Donada, Rosa Arrizabalaga, María Jesús Román) and there I confirmed to the reader that Antonio still lives this memory. and the enthusiasm that made him the legendary reader of Pérez-Reverte, Alfaguara, Rafael Chirbes, Nuria Barrios…
Reverte said he was a “pathological, voracious” reader; Paul Auster, Don Quixote, Faulkner…”An August with very little work, from beginning to end, Faulkner, with a couple. (…) But what really makes you miserable is nose for good and bad booksand to predict what will become a bestseller and what will not.” Arturo was his confessor, his friend, and the best interpreter of this man born in La Carolina, and seemed to be the only one in Madrid who did not sleep, when he was paid as the caretaker of the building. In fact, everyone trusted He was a reader.
Among his impossible ambitions was, of course, Marylin Monroe, but as Pérez-Reverte would prove again and again, and as Amaya Elezcano, who would become Alfaguara’s editor and later its principal director, and his many other admirers (and above all) his (admirers) knew, (again Pérez- In Reverte’s words) “he preferred to flip through the pages of books, amidst the smoke of his pipe, where he could experience wonderful stories with the leading ladies.” head: his ideal woman. “He confesses that he is a woman who possesses the bodies of Almudena Grandes and Erica Jong.”
He was an amiable man of admirable intelligence, walking slowly and thinking quickly. He was secretly laughing at the profession’s obsession with paying too much attention to unimportant details and less attention to the content of the text.He cared about this as much as the passion that made him so happy: imagining that reading was a way of loving, perhaps the best, the most lasting.
Sometimes this editor, who was also his friend, would see him when he came home at night. He was carrying packages from one place to another; He knew what was inside each one, and before handing them over, if they were manuscripts, he was already sure whether they were worth opening.
He leaves three sisters, Pilar, María and Carmen, and with the love of his daughters or grandchildren, everyone who had friends inside and outside the publishing house, who formed a large part of his life as an intelligent and quiet reader, is left saddened. When you asked about the book I was reading that night.