On his passport, Joaquín Lavado.
For the world, Quino.
He’s a writer that draws.
That’s how a close friend of his defined him.
And I make mine his sayings.
Quino Elf.
Or Gnome.
He likes gnomes.
As much as he likes mythological gods, because they made mistakes too.
He also likes trees and the sun.
Nature, his vision of God, maybe.
An animist outlook on Creation.
Elf or gnome of humorous pages.
Humor o sketched ideas?
Of books, videos, comic strips on newspapers.
Of angels.
Bitter angels some times. They would like a better life. For everyone.
Reader of the Bible but not because he’s a believer: because of its cherubs and demons.
That later appear on his illustrated stories.
Father of Mafalda.
The girl -lives in all of us in the whole World- opened her eyes in 1964.
Two thousand strips that traveled the world translated even to Chinese.
Sanskrit was left out. Well, maybe some other time.
The Elf said goodbye to Mafalda in 1973.
It didn’t Matter that Quino would no longer stop by the cashier.
He didn’t want to repeat himself.
“Stop the world I want to get off”, Mafalda bellowed some time.
And her father and I followed that order for a moment.
At my house with laughter, mate and some pain hidden behind the laughter.
Standing on his a little more than fifty years, Quino is a man of severe reading.
Then, he delearns the books and lets life inhabit him.
Naked soul and eyes wide open.
Eyes that see the World as something terrible.

- Terrible, this World, isn’t it?
- Yes. That’s why Alice and I never had children. It would be an infamy to bring someone to this world. I wouldn’t have wanted to be born.


But he was
“My family, which is Spanish, arrived to Mendoza from Andalucía: We used to live in a (pork sausage-like) home: rooms and more rooms, the kitchen over there and the bathroom at the back; there was a big backyard, were I used to play: I’d kill cockroaches and ants. I didn’t have any contact with the city. I got to primary school that way, only with my Andaluz “language”, with expression and communication conflicts. And that’s why I chose to express myself through drawing”

- Do you have such a bad time in life?
- Yes, when I did the military service my weekends were bitter. I was always thinking I would have to get back to the barracks. And the same happens with life: I don’t want to go through the bad moment of dying… Why? (Indignant) ...I would have rather never been born and end of the story!
- You like life: you don’t want to die...
- (Very serious) Well, now that I’m here I’m not going to shoot myself but… what’s that about thinking on not being a grumpy old man?
- You sound like Mafalda....
- I’m actually more like Felipe. And luckily I stopped doing Mafalda in 1974. The strip was based on the concept that the World wasn’t going anywhere. And it’s not, it’s not… it’s crap!
- 1984, at the threshold of the new century: these are not good times.
- They’re terrible!
- But life can be transcendental and we can fight to change what’s wrong…
- Yes, but the thing is being forced by other places and a humorist cannot change a thing. The only thing that works is the combined work of the writer, the actor, the author, of all society. And that’s not happening and…
- Existence as a brotherly fact...
- Yes, but it’s not lived that way. I definitely don’t like this life.
- I believe you. But you also “play” a fatalist character, with no faith in humanity and with some sort of anthropological pessimism...
- No, because there are thing that I like. Music, painting, landscapes… I don’t know… eating… making love… that’s nice! (behind his glasses his eyes glitter, but...) But… it’s not enough! What are we all doing on this planet? Do you see?: I don’t have a religious sense on life.
- Is there no God?
- Supposedly, he exists because there’s a word to name him, but I don’t believe in that human invention of a mister with beard sitting on a cloud. Well… I believe in God the same I can believe in ghosts!
- What mix up is that between God and ghosts?
- Look… my old man died when I was little and two years ago he appeared on my balcony (very serious, makes you want to believe him)
- Come on! We were being serious.
- Well… I’m still serious… That day I was having some soup and I raised my eyes and I saw him. He was looking at me like he was saying: “He got together pretty well after all”
- And what did you do?
- Well… I said…”Okay, it looks like we have visitors”. (He’s not trying to be funny) How can I not believe in ghosts… when I saw my old man there, on the balcony of my own house?
- Did you see him as something blurry… like a photograph out of focus?
- Blurry? Nothing like that! (Convinced) I saw him from head to toe and the worst thing was… he was smoking!… and his doctor had forbidden him to. (laughter)
- Did he say anything?
- No, because he was behind the glass, but he was looking at me with a pretty pleasant look.
- How much did this presence last?
- Two spoonfuls of soup.
- Quino... what is this measuring presences with spoonfuls?
- Well, sure, I took a spoonful of soup and said to myself “we have visitors”; lowered my head; had another, looked at him and on the third one… he wasn’t there any more!
- Did this unsettle you?
- It did not! I liked it a lot… like on the movie “Eight and a half” ... do you remember?
- I’ve never seen “Eight and a half”, it’s one of my pending tasks.
- (Desperate) And what are you doing here with this interview if you haven’t see “Eight and a half”?… Come on, get out there urgently and get it!
- Have you ever eaten raviolis from “La Real”, then?
- (Burst of laughter) No, neither... but you’re right! But… this artery thing… I’m a cholesterol factory! I don’t eat bread, nor pasta, nor carbohydrates.
- You’d leave Manolito out of business.
- No, no, because with the wine… Nothing! I don’t mind with that … my two bottles a day, very easily.
- Besides wine, never an excess?
- Yes, every time I have to take an airplane. Then I eat everything, because I think I’d feel like an idiot if the plane crashed… and I went to the afterlife on a diet!
- Are you that afraid of flying?
- Yes, but I like it. It’s like with earthquakes… the idea of the world shaking… that fright, so big and so nice.


Quino and Mafalda
“My parents died when I was twelve years old and we were sent to live with an uncle, advertising illustrator and artist. That’s how I got in touch with graphics, pencils, brushes and that kind of things. But primary school was terrible for me… I was like Mafalda’s Felipe. Of course I stayed in school: My mother convinced me when she told me that to draw comic books I had to learn how to read and write. But it was tough. And some times I’d drop my notebooks down a stream so I could say in my house that I couldn’t go back to school”.

- Were you trying to contribute to changing the world with Mafalda?
- I was thinking about waking up the readers’ awareness. Now I know it doesn’t work.
- If Mafalda was still in action, she’d keep on trying...
- Yes… but Mafalda is the character I like the less. I prefer the other ones, that are possible because of her, but don’t pontify neither they get dense on world peace and all that.
- She said the things you used to think...
- Sure… I believed in those things when I did it. Or is it that you can talk about the future of the world… or even your own? Let’s see… How do you picture yourself in about fifteen or twenty years?
- I think I will carry on in my effort at changing my little piece of the world. With poetry and in poetry. Quino, what is your opinion on…?
- Ah, no! I don’t believe in giving opinions, because I could think one thing today and a different thing tomorrow.
- You sound cranky, almost authoritarian...
- Let me make it clear that it’s not about you. But tell me if you don’t feel authoritarian when you’re ran over by a bus. Besides, if the authoritarians went on strike nothing would happen, but nothing would happen if us comic book artists did it either. The disaster would be if the bakers or the trash collectors stopped working.
- Despite that, let’s continue with the opinions. Of the Church, for example…
- The guys from the Church are magnificent, they’re the bosses. Imagine, hanging on to their Power for so many centuries!!!
- The Power, one of your favorite themes on your pages…
- I don’t know how to make it work. How can I boss a guy around that perhaps wants to do something else?


Persons and personages
“After graduating from primary school I studied two years of Fine Arts. And I got tired of drawing the little pieces of cloth, the vases and stuffed ducks. When I was eighteen I came to Buenos Aires and went to see every magazine with my horrible little drawings. Of course, they said no in every one of them. I returned to Mendoza, to the military service and again to Buenos Aires. Here I started on “Esto es” (‘This is it’), but since it was a Peronist magazine –I don’t know which tendency- it disappeared with the revolution of 1955”.

- You put many opinions about the “absurd of life” on Miguelito...
- Well, but he didn’t pontify like Mafalda did. You know well, because we talked about it before you turned the recorder on, that he was born from a coincidence. The day Miguel Brascó called me and told me that the Siam refrigerator factory wanted to work on a different line: Mansfield.
- And they wanted a Charlie Brown-like comic strip, that portrayed a typical family...
- Sure, but they didn’t want him saying: ”What a nice refrigerator!”. They wanted a script that included –somewhere- the name and the model. They wanted to take the strip to the newspapers as a gift, but nothing came out of it.
- And the strip that is a part of the life of children and grown-ups was almost left in oblivion...
- Yes, until the magazine “Primera Plana” came out, and it appeared there for six months. Then I left and through Miguel Brasco –that played the role of a father to me- I got it published on the newspaper “El Mundo” (‘The world’). And I had to do it every day, without knowing what I wanted from it nor where it was going.
- But other characters appeared.
- Yes, Susanita y Guille.
- Very polite, all of them… never cursing...
- (He laughs) But to me its inevitable and very useful. I think it was in Israel, where they preserved a zone to keep it uncontaminated by them. But it was the ones living there that invented them.


“Freedom is very small”
“After “Esto es”, I drew for “Que”, “Avivato” and “Rico Tipo”. I spent many years there. There I had my met Divito, who was so important in my life: he’d ask me for my drawings in pencil, to correct my disasters. Up to then my line had always been simple, no grays nor blacks. And from then on I changed. After that, from magazine to magazine I ended up publishing in every magazine in Argentina”

- Quino, your recurring themes are old age, illness, Power, sexual prejudice, hypocrisy… and so on...
- (He smiles) I deal with the things I know the most of, like medicine and such, but you must have never seen any drawing related to sports… I know nothing about that.
- Your attitude against totalitarisms was born from within you or from some fact that marked you?
- I think I was marked during my childhood, by the Spanish Civil War and the fascism.
- And your interest in life comes from before or as consequence of the health problems you’ve had?
- It’s better not to talk about that. What for?
- Because there’s a breaking point in everyone’s life, that marks a before and after in their lives. Was this your case?
- I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t think about those things.
- It’s alright. What is Alicia to you?
- My woman: she has everything I lack.
- You are a sort of critical conscience of Argentina, from your humor where anguish and tenderness live…
- No, no, I’m nothing more than a penciler.
- Quino, you’ve traveled so much… How do you feel in Europe?
- Okay, because between paperwork and paperwork I can visit The last supper, or discover the house where Florencio Sánchez died (in Milan), or know the places where Mozart’s been. Do you know, once I went crazy: I didn’t know where I knew this girl from, she was a secretary at a clinic. “Maybe I’ve seen her on the streets?”, I asked myself... until it hit me… She “worked” at Botticelli’s The Spring!
- You mean...
- Yes, she was identical to one of the women on that painting! (he laughs amused)
- I think this is getting much less serious. Let’s see, where does your world go to?
- I don’t have the slightest idea… Don’t forget that both Mafalda and Miguelito were surprised to realize that freedom was something as small as, precisely, Libertad (‘freedom’).



© Copyright Cristina Castello
www.cristinacastello.com
Buenos Aires (Argentina) , 2nd of May of 1984

Published on the newspaper “Tiempo Argentino”