"My father died this morning", tweeted little Akela yesterday, Easter Monday, at half past twelve in the morning. Akela Sánchez (10 years old) is the youngest son of Fernando Sánchez Dragó, writer, journalist, traveler and literary popularizer who died of an acute myocardial infarction at the age of 86 in his stone and wooden house in Castilfrío de la Sierra (village of Soria), in front of his desk, which was his favorite place in the world.
Just an hour earlier, Fernando Sánchez Dragó had tweeted a photo with one of his cats, tabby and blond, perched on his head, and this text: "The cat Nano says good morning to me. He knows that in the head is the secret of almost everything." Dragó mourns his other three children, Alejandro (62), Ayanta (54) and Aixa (41), the result of his passionate love with different women, as well as journalist Emma Nogueiro (29), his girlfriend for almost six years.
Fernando Sánchez Dragó, prolific writer (almost a hundred titles published) and fierce columnist, has been one of the most widely read authors in Spanish in the last 40 years and – above all – the best literary popularizer that television has given to Spain. As a teenage television viewer, I became addicted to his magnificent literary interviews on Encuentros con las letras (TVE, 1976-1981), a program that invited authors of all styles and generations.
Posthumous son of the journalist Fernando Sánchez Monreal (died in full professional practice, during a trip to the Andalusian front to write a report, at the beginning of the Civil War, killed by Falangists), Dragó grew up next to the machine writing of the father he never knew: he typed his first text at the age of four, he claimed, always hyperbolic and literary to the bone due to genetic imperative and unredeemed reader: he had read everything since he was a child and his conversation was a feast of erudition, emphasis and amenities.
From the mid-seventies and during the following four decades, Dragó was a professor of literature at universities in different countries, a literary critic and a television interviewer. His introductions, his questions and his farewells were brilliant pieces of prose goldsmithing for different programs, such as Biblioteca Nacional, La noche, El mundo por montera, Negro sobre blanco, Libros con Uasabi, El faro de Alejandría, White nights or Dragolandia. I didn't miss a single one, very good for their breadth of views and curiosities, an exercise in vibrant pluralism with unforgettable moments, such as that of Fernando Arrabal, mystically drunk and rambling on the set, shouting that "millennialism will arrive! ". I watched live how Dragon's boon kept Arrabal from falling to the ground and getting hurt.
After a youthful communist activism that led him to a Francoist prison in 1956, and then exiled for some years, Dragó traveled through Africa and Asia, experiences that inspired him for Gárgoris y Habidis: a magical story of España (Hiperión, 1978), his most important publishing success, an essay in four volumes and a brilliant literary prose – I keep the first of his more than 70 editions! – which tells a heterodox and esoteric history of Spain, stitched with myths and legends, from the Tartessian to the Andalusian, embroidered with Jewish and Moorish mystics, Sufis and Kabbalists, the Spain of the game of the Goose and the Grail, of the Way of Saint James full of astrologers, Templars, Rosicrucians, masons, cagots, heretics and witches.
Then came works of all kinds ( Eldorado, El camino del corazón, Letter de Jesús al Papa, La prueba del laberinto, El sendero de la mano izquierda, Muertes paralelas, Esos días azules, Galgo corredor, Pacto de sangre, Dios los cría ... ), with a thread that connects them: the author's biography, personal, family and social. With three parallel and often intertwined passions: travel, women and the spirit. He loved to talk about sex - he revealed to me that he never traveled without carrying a pair of black stockings in his suitcase, just in case, say you'll talk, he was intimate with a girl and could ask her to put them on -, about his travels in the Orient and his good mystical and esoteric readings. He also explored ecstatic experiences, literary and empirically, with his close friend Antonio Escohotado (recently deceased): together they shared days with Albert Hoffman, discoverer of LSD.
For 30 years, Dragó has organized the so-called Eleusinos Encuentros, in his adopted town of Soria in Castilfrío, debates on spiritual, philosophical and mysterious issues, as well as dietary issues: Dragó ingested thirty dragées every day, a miracle cocktail of active principles against aging , with a predilection for algae and mushrooms (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: "Forgive me that I don't get up", as an eventual epitaph playful He had an unexpected prominence recently: 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 motion of no confidence against President Pedro Sánchez.
Friendship was a main value for Dragó: 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 Autonomous University of Barcelona, 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 me", he instructed us), and with years we became friends, with some memorable evening at his house in Castilfrío, next to the grave of his cat Soseki - he loved nothing as much as cats, and Kipling's poem If -, which he dedicated to his death on book Soseki, immortal and tiger, which he considers to be "the best book of all he has written". Friend Fernando, dear Dragon, you have inaugurated your happy eternity next to your beloved Soseki, immortal and tiger, brain and soul.
