Surname of saint and name of king. It must not be easy to put on your shoes every morning being Arturo and San Agustín, or maybe yes, if you have done it all your life and let the characters who name you also help to shape your identity, beyond social fussiness and borders between reality and fiction.
Arturo San Agustín (Barcelona, 1949) grew up in Barceloneta, where he was expelled from a La Salle school for punching an educator who tore up a photo of Sofía Loren.
His great education, in any case, was not school but the cinema. He learned everything he needed by watching films, especially Italian and neorealist films, by Visconti, Fellini, De Sica, Pasolini, Rosi, Ferreri and company. Then came the French nouvelle vague and everything went to hell. "The nouvelle vague sunk the cinema", he affirms, because he intellectualized it to the point of making it incomprehensible.
Newspaper newsrooms also lost their essence when water replaced alcohol. San Agustín, who began working as an advertising creative in the Barcelona that throbbed along Tuset street, switched to journalism when he learned that with this profession he could do what he liked best, that is, travel, meet people and write.
"Mineral water was the beginning of the end of journalism," he says nostalgically, recalling the newsrooms in which they talked, debated and discussed, an essential exercise to delve into the information that is going to be written. "Alcohol is another means of communication," she says, and when it disappeared "the newsrooms became a graveyard."
At the Giardinetto bar, Saint Augustine lets his enormous clear forehead speak, a dome that encloses the knowledge of a life dedicated to observing and synthesizing.
It is normal for journalists to talk to headlines, and he does it frequently. You can say, for example, that "an enriched asshole is unbearable", that "the ogre has always seemed to me to be the good guy and the dwarfs, bastards", that "never have women been manipulated as much as now" or that "Pope Francisco is a book Peronist".
He doesn't like Francis. He prefers Benedict XVI because of his intellectual superiority, especially because of his reflections on Europe and science. Saint Augustine is a great Vatican supporter, close to cardinals who move stealthily through palaces that are only a facade, men of the Church who have confessed to him that there, in the Vatican, "the first victim is the truth." There, he points out, "when someone tells the truth he signs his death warrant."
The Church opposes cloning, but one day it heard Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone say that he would make an exception for Sophia Loren. Saint Augustine would also do it. He does not believe that there is a perfect woman.
To Sofía Loren, precisely, he has dedicated his latest novel, La palema roja de Sophia (Catedral Editorial). The story is a walk through Rome, hand in hand with a cardinal, in search of the actress who most illuminates the vital faith of Saint Augustine.
