-In all artistic work,
intuition is of great importance.
When I'm asked to draw Camba or any other
I choose a certain line, I don't do it reflexively.
Then, I reflexively accept or reject it.
That's intuition. Intuition in art is essential.
The cartoonist has to take
what is expressive in the face
or a person's facial features.
Ok, so Camba works like this.
He acts a cartoonist, he exaggerates.
What does he exaggerate? He exaggerates the expression.
And he emphasises those little things
which will allow him to write the article.
And we are also surprised about that literary article
made by the caricature.
When I can truly
control Camba's expression
I have to simplify.
I must have less lines.
There's still a little of caricature.
For now, it's a caricature portrait.
A deformed portrait.
But it's still not a caricature.
It's in process.
It's in process, I see it in the eyes.
I see how the caricature should be in the eyes.
Here is.
Here is Mr Julio.
Well, a sketch of Mr Julio.
When the character is controlled,
we'll talk again.
We'll make a colour caricature, a full body one.
-Julio Camba spends the last years at the Hotel Palace in Madrid.
Since he returned from Lisbon in 1948,
with a delicate health,
until a few days before his death in February 1962.
It's almost thirteen years living in this hotel.
Therefore, even today he's remembered like the Palace solitaire.
More than 60 years after his death,
we return with Camba to this place
to see if we can find some of his trace
or at least, of his ghost.
Room 383 of this hotel
was the last refuge of a great traveller
who had already given up moving
and of a journalist who didn't want and couldn't even write
about a world that was no longer his.
(Soft music)
-"The sandwich men", by Julio Camba.
-My idea is to live abroad freely
without any cable connecting me to a Spanish newspaper management.
Living abroad like fish in the water and not like a diver.
-I wanted to become completely independent from Spain
and, to achieve it, I have only one resource:
becoming a sandwich man.
-The profession of a sandwich man isn't profitable, but philosophical.
It's a skeptical and peripatetic philosophy
that perfectly agrees with all my principles.
-Before dumping on the "business man" top hat
and jogging around the "city",
I prefer to put a poster on my chest and another on the back
and walk slowly around Piccadilly and Regent Street.
-I can stand the poster,
after all a poster is advertising.
When the poster is put on me,
I'll realise I'm moving
from the first to the last pages of the press.
-However, that hateful top hat
that everyone wears here to go to the "city",
I would never accept it.
-Actually, being a sandwich man
isn't precisely a profession,
but something infinitely higher: a philosophy.
-The sandwich man does nothing.
He walks, strolls, digs, smells.
It's different from the usual slacker
because of the poster.
-That is, the sandwich man is a slacker.
He's a slacker who manages his laziness
at the service of advertising agencies.
-Can there be anything more seductive for a Spanish?
But don't believe that everyone is good for being a sandwich man.
-A slacker isn't enough, as stated, a philosopher is required.
-The perfect sandwich man puts down all human vanities
and it doesn't matter if his back is used
to advertise a hair strengthener,
a depilatory, a product for gaining weight,
or a product to lose it.
-A Shakespearean drama rather than a Paulova dance.
A "meeting" of "suffragettes" rather
than María Corelli's last novel.
The sandwich man is so stoic
that lets himself to be run over by buses in Charing Cross Road.
Yesterday a sandwich man let himself
to be run over by a bus.
The truth, said the judge,
is that sandwich men should be removed.
-But he must have said that to the gallery.
The proof is the bus company was sentenced.
If sandwich men wanted to be removed,
buses wouldn't be pulverised.
-"A Tribuna, 1st March 1903".
-What's the secret?
-Jean-Paul Sartre said it about Boudelaire.
And Boudelaire took the secret to the grave.
In my opinion, Camba did something similar.
He deliberately erased his trace.
So, there's a big gap.
-He was quite a complex man to leave him a single secret, right?
He would have several secrets.
-Indeed, we know the newspapers in which he collaborated.
The countries where he travelled.
But we need the data.
Anyway, we need facts to move forward and we don't have them.
-It was Camba who was in charge of leaving no traces.
Well, he was a very protective guy of his privacy.
So much so that the only images of him in motion
are those of his burial.
It must have been the only moment where he was caught off guard.
We wonder what Camba would think about that daring.
-No, I don't think he liked it, but he would write an article.
He would say that for once he's taken a photo
he must be lying.
(Soft music)
-Despite his illness,
Camba keeps some rituals until the last days of his life.
Getting up late and his daily bath.
Two habits that allow us to travel
through the mist of his memory
to find out more of that man who wanted to be nothing
and only aspired to live well,
but who would become the best columnist
and the most prestigious international correspondent of the
Spanish press in the 20th century.
(Soft music)
-We're in front of Julio Camba's birth house.
He was born here on 16th December 1884.
It's a sailor style house dating from 19th century
that was well-known
because Cambas's grandfather lived in it, the expert.
He was a surveyor.
Julio Camba was a rebellious boy,
he was an incorrigible boy,
who was capable of angering
his father, the teacher and even the priest of the town.
"The rural school is a torture place
where my parents sent me as a punishment.
The rooms are infected and small.
-Diseases because of dirt are common there.
-And after six or seven years a child goes out of there
knowing the four rules.
-Writing a dictation,
-fractions, Iriarte's fables.
-And Father Estete's catechism.
-But, what does it matter learning a little or a lot?
-The problem is children hate studying when they come out.
-I was ten or twelve years old when a kind gentleman
talked to my parents.
And he offered to pay my studies for priesthood".
But Julio flatly refused.
Julio Camba rejected the school,
he rejected the church.
-"I used to miss school and mass.
-Mass angered me even more than school".
I showed promise of the anarchist I would soon become.
-"And in the atrium of the church I used to show off
a Voltairean skepticism
which was my girlfriend's terror.
-Having a girlfriend, smoking through the nose
and keeping in secret church matters.
-I only needed a cape and a moustache to be a Don Juan.
Atheist, seductive and cruel.
-Like that of a puppet company which had recently been in town".
-Camba's father, who was a doctor, an assistant,
wanted his son to have a profession.
But he never succeeded.
Despite Camba's refusal to study, he tried Camba
to be an apprentice.
That's when Camba had two experiences with chemists.
-In the back rooms there were outstanding,
very important libraries.
Chemists collected books and magazines.
It's believed the first readings come from there.
He read everything he could get.
It's even said the first English he practised
was reading magazines from Great Britain.
-He published poetry in Galician at a young age
in local newspapers.
When he's 15, he writes an article for Eco of Marín
in favour of the free love achieved by the archbishopric
of Santiago de Compostela excommunicate the publication.
-Camba realises his place isn't there.
Not even in Vilanova, Marín or Vilagarcía.
His place is in Buenos Aires.
-He took a blanket and decided to stow away
on a ship crossing from Galicia to Buenos Aires.
(Lively music)
-Buenos Aires was a great city at the beginning of the 20th century,
it was called the Paris of America. It was a lively city.
With a great cultural activity,
with an important social conflict too,
and a Galician guy is found,
who leaves his family, his town,
and gets to that great city which is Buenos Aires in 1900.
"Memories.
I don't know how it happened!
I only remember it in my aching mind,
the sad and biting memory
of a ship escaping towards those storms;
-and a beach that, with a blanket of fog,
was merged with the sky.
And of a town covered with houses
shone by the bright sun rays.
Oh! I'll always see, wherever my eyes look,
the poetic image of the town I watched from the boat that day.
-I opened my soul there
to the eternal lights and to sun rays and life.
I jumped happy as a child in the mountains,
streams, valleys and fields.
And there, finally,
in the tenderness of a mother, I felt the soft and pure caresses.
-I don't know how it happened, but I want to send to the land,
since I'm far away by huge seas,
a tear, a complaint wrapped in the breeze.
Simple interpretations of a blessed sorrow
that restrains me when seeing my land,
the pure sky of the beloved Galicia.
-And that town made up of cheerful and white shacks,
one of which is mine".
Julio Camba, Buenos Aires. San Xoán de 1901.
-The Galician community, especially Galician intellectuals,
didn't pay much attention to him.
No material attention, no literary attention.
Camba joined a powerful movement such as the anarchist.
There was a large brotherhood among anarchists.
-The Argentinian anarchist movement is very powerful and fascinates Camba.
He's fascinated because it's a joyful movement,
a combative movement, a cosmopolitan movement,
it's also an artistic movement
and, above all, an environment full of generosity.
The revolution that will come isn't the most important,
but the revolution which is made every day
during the struggle. That's the most fascinating.
The organisation of the movement is already a revolutionary fact.
-"Oh, fair, subtle, powerful poison,
Tomas de Quincey said about opium.
The poison of anarchy is also fair, subtle and powerful.
Any opium smoker, any absinthe drinker,
any morphine or hashish taker
had their dreams populated with more beautiful visions
than the visions populating the great anarchist illusion.
Anarchy is also one of the artificial paradises
and it's worth to visit this paradise
when a natural one isn't available".
-Camba's stay
was very positive within the Argentinian anarchism,
not only for the ideological configuration,
but also in the literary scene.
Anyone who compares
Camba's publications in Galicia before going to Argentina
can see they have a very low level,
much lower than those articles published in Argentina.
And during the time he was in the Argentinian libertarian media
he gained prestige.
-The key fact highlighting his expulsion from the country
is that first general strike in the history of the Republic.
-Buenos Aires was stopped.
Therefore, the authorities decide to create a residence law
due to the mistaken idea that most anarchists
were European immigrants who sought refuge in Argentina
because they really were the great agitators,
but time showed that it wasn't true.
He's detained.
So he's taken to the port, where he stays for several days,
and on 30th November of that year, 1902,
he travels with other ten people to Spain.
-That's how Camba became the first Spanish emigrant
who got the journey for free, both going and coming.
Going as a stowaway and coming as an expelled.
(Seagulls)
(Relaxing music)
-Camba begins to collaborate in Tierra y Libertad.
-That's a journal which takes part of a project
developed by the Montseny marriage.
For the first time in his life, Camba will be a journalism professional
and it also represents the beginning of a tour within the Spanish anarchism
that, of course, is no less interesting
than that in Argentina.
-He meets the typographer Antonio Apolo from Extremadura
and Camba starts a friendship with him.
-Camba and Apolo soon disagree with the owners of Tierra y Libertad,
with the Urales family, that is, Juan Montseny and Teresa Mañé.
Camba and Apolo's points of view
aren't taken into account, because they don't stop being
employed editors
and owners are owners, no matter how anarchist they were.
-They decide to start their project,
perhaps the most unique project in Camba's journalistic life
which was El Rebelde.
-It's a weekly newspaper to fight all tyrannies and
to coordinate the Spanish anarchism.
Very well written, very combative,
moreover, the style is direct, like a fist.
It's fluent, with some freshness
and above all, it's a newspaper written with some humour.
-"We came to fight, proud and resolved for the triumph of the good cause.
We came to soak our pen with the red blood of great pains
to write with it the epitaph of all tyrannies.
There won't be any faint or weakness.
If we fall down, we will with dignity,
on this barricade that is being risen now,
putting on it all the courage of our youth
and all the firmness of our conviction.
The ideal encourages us, the ideal is flesh of our flesh
and spirit of our spirit".
-The great thinkers of the anarchism at the time
published in El Rebelde.
It's also the most complicated stage of Camba's life.
It was a time when anarchism was very repressed in Spain
and Camba manages to be one of the journalists
who spent more time in the cells.
He once told that adding up every year
he was sentenced he reached the age of 180.
-Cansinos Assens said that Camba was an amateur anarchist.
I don't agree.
I think Julio Camba as a boy, as a young man,
was a very serious militant anarchist.
-It was a real anarchism of a great Nietzsche's reader,
which seems that wasn't told,
who knew Nietzsche and Stirner literature well,
another philosophy belonging to individualism
and also a great modernists' reader.
-Camba and Apolo ended up ruined.
-The police arrested at the headquarters of El Rebelde
an anarchist with some dynamite cartridges.
Apolo ends up in prison.
The Urales family, through the magazine Blanca
and Tierra y Libertad carried out a campaign stating that El Rebelde
was funded by the Ministry of Interior.
I believe, more than anything else,
it was a way to try to eliminate competition
that El Rebelde was doing to the media of the Montseny family.
-The bomb thrown in rúa Maior in 1906 when the bridal entourage was there
started the deep investigation to see who was behind it.
So, a first relation between Camba and Morral appeared.
Julio Camba knows the famous Mateo Morral,
because of the publication named El Rebelde.
Mateo Morral offered to fund El Rebelde
and, above all, he put Camba in touch
with someone who could help them,
who was the pedagogue Francesc Ferrer i Garda.
Morral committed suicide, ironies of life
that found out among his belongings,
Julio Camba's ID as a journalist
to cover the wedding of Alphonso XIII.
That's why he was tried and finally released
as it was proved he was Morral's friend in the past,
but he didn't have a close relationship with him
and much less he had nothing to do with that attack.
That attack may mark the beginning of Camba's anarchist end.
-But it won't be the only reason.
The closing of El Rebelde will also influence.
But the most important is Camba realises
that the revolution for which he fights won't happen.
And so it was.
My articles must be read tomorrow
and they won't cause a riot
not even an uprising.
It's talked about the anarchist who changed to the right-wing policy,
but I think it's the transition
between the man who believes and, besides believing a lot,
who believes a lot in that revolution,
and the man who doesn't believe and doesn't believe in anything,
but in anything else.
(Relaxing music)
perhaps his first great newspaper,
which is El País.
Camba began to publish articles that maintain
an anarchist ideology, which is gradually moderated.
He jumps from El País to España Nueva in 1907.
España Nueva is a newspaper where Camba is for a short time,
but it's an important journal
since Camba practises a new subgenre for him:
the parliamentary article.
-"One of the most interesting points
of this Electoral Law reform project
is the compulsory voting.
It's justified by means of a very simple reasoning
since citizens don't vote spontaneously,
they are obligated to vote.
Since voting isn't free, let's make it mandatory".
-"A friend asked me:
do you believe that the dead have the right to vote?
Of course I answered.
If there's something sacred, it's the vote of the dead.
A dead man rising from the grave at the dawn of an election day
and who goes to the electoral college to write the name on the ballot paper
is doing an exemplary action and gives to all the living
a lesson in civility.
On the other hand, the dead need to be represented in the parliament too.
What would happen with the life sentenced dead in niches
if there were no representatives identified with their interests?
That's why the dead vote.
I imagine their satisfaction when they lay down
after discharging their duties as citizens.
The electoral suffrage worked the miracle of resurrection
they won't get up and until the next election
His dream, which is the dream of the dead,
is also the dream of the righteous".
-He gives up that position as a parliamentary journalist
in España Nueva and goes to another really important newspaper
in his life which is El Mundo.
In 1907, Camba went to El Mundo, a much more modern newspaper.
That's where the Camba of today begins
and agrees to work in one of the most well-known sections
the newspaper had, which was "Words of a Society Person".
An unexpected event happens while he's walking one day around Madrid.
Leopoldo Romeo makes him a unique offer:
giving up his work at El Mundo
to be the Spanish correspondent in Istanbul.
It was a change of continent, from Europe to Asia, an exotic thing
and totally new to him.
Camba thinks of it, being a customs journalist
or becoming a correspondent.
In my opinion, this is the beginning
of the best Spanish correspondent career in the 20th century.
(Soft music)
-"From Constantinople,
the religion of water.
When the bathroom employee took the camel skin glove
and began to washed my chest, arms and legs,
I felt humiliated and surprised.
What's this? I asked to the Turkish friend who was with me
pointing out the dirt covering my skin.
The Turk hesitated for a moment as if he was afraid of offending me.
Soon after, with his arm
the glove didn't turn black, but pink,
and with a decisive gesture he said: that's Christianity.
It was indeed Christianity sprouting from my open pores
to the heat of a Mohammedan bath,
because Christianity, attentive to the hygiene of the soul,
completely neglected to wash the body.
For Christianity water is only holy
in the form of holy water.
On the other hand, in Islam all water is blessed by Allah,
that of the prophet and believers.
Let's walk around Istanbul.
If we're so sweet to use a notebook,
we can write on it the observation
that public fountains are the best monuments.
There's a Turkish legend in each fountain
that is literally translated as: Thank God.
Wherever Mohammedans found a spring,
they saw a proof of divine magnificence
and glorified the providence".
-He went there with a two-year contract,
but within a few months he feels the city is much for him.
When he comes back to Madrid, he returns to his previous newspaper.
But he's no longer the same journalist because the editor of El Mundo
understands the Camba correspondent
must be somehow exploited.
-Writing travel articles was much easier for him,
because he didn't have to invent anything, just observe.
Observing from an ironic, humorous, a little critical,
kind, elegant perspective.
He began to give his touch,
especially to the articles he wrote in Paris,
London and Germany. That was already final for him.
-He's proposed to be correspondent in the Paris of the "Belle Époque".
Camba discovers in Paris a custom-made city.
He's tucked up.
He knows all the streets, good restaurants,
he knows which clubs to go to,
the cafés where he can read the newspaper quietly.
Then, he's sent to London,
where he spent a year sending articles to El Mundo.
-He found more freedom, a grayer, lower sky in London.
I think he had more freedom there because the English, after all,
are the inventors of modern democracy
and believe that everyone has the right to give an opinion.
I think Camba had a good time in London.
-"Someone can be in a restaurant and an English comes to
sit down without greeting, asking permission and looking at.
It's the disrespectful English.
His ideal, while he's sitting with us,
is to show he isn't paying attention to our existence.
To do so, the English doesn't loot at anyone
and it's hard for him.
He usually unfolds a newspaper and starts reading.
With the newspaper between us
the English can refrain from looking to the sides and avoid a horse.
But this scheme is comical".
-The destination he chooses after London is just Paris.
When coming back to Paris,
he feels his place as correspondent,
the place to show off is Paris.
-"The inhabitants of Paris try out a satisfaction that doesn't exist
for London citizens and probably for those from nowhere.
The satisfaction of being in Paris.
-He wakes up in Paris and is happy because he's in Paris.
-Another person wakes up in London
and is sad because of being in London.
-What's there in Paris? There's nothing extraordinary.
-A person lives here believing Paris has things that Madrid doesn't have.
Until a man from Madrid arrives
and ask someone to show those things.
-These things aren't there. There's nothing.
-It's the soul of Paris and people giving life here
to which is loved.
-It's Paris and not what there's in Paris.
Paris is like opium, like morphine,
-like cocaine or like Valencian rice.
-It's a vice.
-Someone focuses on Paris for a few months and gets lost.
This person doesn't leave or does come back even if it's on foot.
-The most seductive city in the world.
-And God knows I'm not praising it".
-As he feels at ease in the city
he starts writing sarcastic, cutting articles
against French customs.
-But Parisians are aware they're Parisians
and they're a capital city and the cultural capital city of Europe.
-So it can give rise to a possible Camba's expulsion.
-It was the previous years to the First World War.
-He and the newspaper get the feeling
that the government of the French Republic
is trying to censor a Spanish journalist.
-"When the director of Securité Générale
threatened to expel me from France
I thought from a cooking point of view
that this expulsion would be a shame for me.
The popularity it would bring me didn't flatter me at all.
No, I prefer anonymity over a French "ris de veau"
to glory in a in a guesthouse in Madrid.
Even if this glory involved some credit from the patroa.
So, if the threats were confirmed,
I left Société Générale to a restaurant.
where I enjoyed a menu that was a work of art.
I had lunch with tears in my eyes and as I ate
I was thinking I had been very unfair to France.
A gastronomy that deserves utmost respect from the publicist."
Indeed, Camba was not expelled from France.
it was he who left out of pride.
-He often bragged in front of the public.
"I got expelled from Buenos Aires and Paris
because I said and did as I pleased.
(German music)
-Camba has a particular relation with Germany.
Camba finds Germany and especially Berlin
too cold.
-"I am the least German man in the world."
Germans are tall and I'm small.
They are blond and I am dark-haired. They are chubby and I'm slim.
Germans know about philosophy,
maths and Greek and another bunch of things.
I have an encyclopedic ignorance revealing a great Spanishism".
-Similar to what happened in France,
he began to write very critical chronics about Germans,
from an ironic perspective.
That also caused them to reprimand him again.
-He had a lot of fun in Munich.
-"Two hours after his arrival, he'd already drunk three litres of beer.
This is the country of beer and decorative art.
Other than that, a charming country.
There is a huge difference between these and the Prussian guards.
The guards in Munich not only don't hit you,
but they kindly provide all kinds of information".
-Once a certain activity is noticed and the pre-war phase is foreseen
Camba, along with other foreign journalists,
are transported to the border of Germany with Switzerland.
But once there, he decides to spend a summer in Switzerland as a tourist
and see how a foreigner behaves in Switzerland.
-"Here, every language and currency is in circulation.
There is a Swiss currency by design
to make it seem like the Swiss spend some more money.
But one can order breakfast in English,
French or Italian
and pay for it with English French or Italian currency.
Swiss money is our money".
-In April 1916 ABC proudly announces
that they are sending Camba as a correspondent to New York.
Camba spends a whole year sending some delightful chronicles.
-"New York is not a city, it's a system, a theory.
One can know New York and never live there,
or even study a describing guide.
You learn the theory and that's it.
I cannot surprise anyone in New York who has just arrived.
Everyone here navigates the same as the oldest New Yorker.
If a newcomer is in 114th Street, for example,
and they want to go to 120th Street
they know it's a matter of crossing six streets.
120th Street will be next to 119th Street
and the street number will be the only difference".
-He was a correspondent a couple of times
and the second time, when the Automatic City,
he meets Lorca.
Lorca tortured, expressionist, visionary, anguished,
and on the other hand, Camba.
Observing about realization, machinery,
he takes a skeptical distance.
-I believe the greatest singularity of Camba,
is precisely that he didn´t write tied to current events.
He used to go his own way.
He was a correspondent in Paris, London, Berlin.
He lived through the years of the Great War, the First World War,
but as far as I know, he never told a single thing about the conflict.
He always talks about his own things the pension where he lives in Berlin
the German teachers and his always stained frock coat,
about the "cafetíns", he writes with complete freedom.
-This leads some newspapers which have him as a correspondent
in a European city,
to have a second correspondent in the same city
responsible for more current news.
Camba goes his own way.
-These are articles depicting an era,
they don't narrate an event.
Telling events is within anyone's reach.
Portraying an era is within the reach of few people.
-He takes on the attitude of an innocent and skeptical being,
traveling the world discovering things,
But what things does Camba discover? Those visible to everyone.
He doesn't have to dig anywhere.
It's the thing that we all see but don't pay attention to.
He's capable of turning that vision
of something that was already there that we all see
into a fantastic literary work.
-"One may envy the fortune of the traveling writer.
The things such men will see in this world!
Some people think.
But in this world, and I suppose in all worlds,
the poor writer sees nothing but one thing: articles.
For most people,
and a forest is a forest.
For the writer, however, the desert is a chronicle
and the forest is another chronicle.
You, my dearest reader, leave me in front of the sea.
Let's say, you go for a little walk, and when you come back
what do you think I've done with the blue immensity?
Exactly the same thing I'd do with a Romanesque church,
a pair of socks, a speech from Mr. Lerrus,
a sunset
or with a new method to combat tuberculosis.
I'd have taken it, turned it
and reduced it to a 150 square-centimeter
literary surface approximately".
-In a few years, Camba becomes the most beloved foreign correspondent
among Spanish readers.
The main headlines of the Spanish press vie for his byline.
They know that his texts,
always brief, entertaining, original, and fun,
are the most read, and even significantly
increase newspaper sales.
So Camba, later becomes one of the most
sought-after journalists of his time
and envied by some colleagues.
(Calm music)
-If there is a word that defines Camba,
the first one that comes up to my mind is columnist.
A columnist among the greatest, a reference.
-His conception of the column, I would say is perfectly summarized
in a couple of his articles.
One of them is titled: "My Name is Camba",
published in ABC, which is a presentation,
a kind of poetic manifesto for the days as a traveler in Germany.
It's "himself" reacting in a specific cultural context.
There is no travelogue in Camba, no narrative of the journey.
There are no descriptions no landscape.
He doesn't go to a museum, he can be in a city like Paris
and not enter the Louvre. He's not interested.
He enters a good restaurant and he wanders around.
Then, he starts observing.
He discovers something that he realizes inspires him.
It could be someone dresses it could be a dish
and from that specific area, he constructs an idea.
He builds the column.
-The love for insignificant details, he did this a lot.
And I love this, to praise those who are fragile.
To exalt who's been forgotten, to put on a pedestal a crumb of bread
or to put on a pedestal the peel of a tangerine.
To put on a pedestal who has never been there.
What does that have? What can we get from there?
If you're using a pedestal to exalt what was never exalted
the first thing you do
is take off the pedestal whatever was already there.
That's what I like, how Julio Camba takes off the pedestal
those who have occupied that place in the first place.
-"My name is Camba,
ABC, October 8th, 1913.
-When a German enters a room, be it an aristocratic salon,
or a guesthouse,
-he makes a deep bow and says:
My name is... [name of the German person]
-I also want to introduce myself, the German way, when entering the ABC
Can you picture me? with a poorly tailored tailcoat.
-I go towards you dragging my feet.
Suddenly I come to a sudden stop.
-I bow martially as if I were receiving
a military order from you and exclaim, not without a certain pompousness:
my name is Camba!
-German people often say other things too:
What they do, what they gain.
-Two years ago, I joined a newspaper in Madrid,
just as I now enter ABC,
and that newspaper used to tell its readers what I earned.
-Later, they published my portrait, and the young girls would say
-Well, he's quite chubby.
-But if this guy earns enough, and manages it well...
-And even His Majesty the King,
who was informed about my salary by a journalist from the newspaper,
acknowledged that I was splendidly paid.
-To the readers of ABC, I won't tell them what I earn,
-neither what I eat, nor what I weigh.
-But I want them to know my name and become familiar with me.
-Entering a newspaper is like entering the bosom of an unknown family.
-I feel very inhibited at first.
I don't dare to make any jokes.
-During the first days, I am in the position of a shy man,
-who, when being introduced into a house, sits
with his knees together, with a very stupid expression,
and starts talking about the weather.
-Showing an interest in meteorological matters
that is very far from feeling.
-If someone tells the shy man
to recount what someone told him on a certain day,
-that story that is so amusing,
he becomes annoyed, apologizes and finally starts the story and
he ends up looking ridiculous.
-I'm a shy writer.
I write my articles as I write my letters.
of course, I won't write to ABC readers for the first time
as if writing to an old friend.
-I need to believe that the reader already knows me.
-That he is indulgent with my passions.
-That he is used to my little paradoxes
and doesn't take them entirely seriously.
That he will read me, in short, as one reads a friend.
-And that many times instead of getting angry with me,
he will affectionately smile saying,
What silly things this man comes up with.
-Because I come up with many silly things.
As soon as I have confidence with people, I tell them:
-The thing is to pass the time, and I don't want to hush up a silly
thing that can amuse us all just to pass as a serious and solemn man.
-My name is Camba, and deep down, I'm a good guy.
I have a German tailcoat,
but I don't have any pretentiousness or affectation.
-The idea I give you of Germany from this Berlin
where I come sent by ABC will mostly be a personal idea.
-And that's why I need you to get to know me
before getting started
so that you never take me entirely seriously.
-Neither entirely seriously nor entirely as a joke".
I think that here he describes himself quite well.
Very well.
-"A man is neither essentially good nor essentially bad.
He is essentially absurd".
I believe it fits well perhaps with what he could think of himself.
-The technique of the caricaturist. He goes straight to what's essential.
What does he have to do?
What does he have to highlight from the reality he's commenting on?
And he does it, but he doesn't comment on it as it is.
He exaggerates like a caricaturist.
What does he exaggerate? He exaggerates the expression.
He makes a shorter nose or longer,
bigger eyes or smaller
to highlight that expression that characterizes the model.
What he does is emphasize those little things
that will give him material to write the article.
To us, that literary article
produces the same surprise as the caricature.
What will the English be like as Camba describes them?
There's no way British are as Camba describes them.
But Camba says: a British is a British and can't be anything else.
In the end, you become convinced that the British are like that,
and when Queen Elizabeth II dies, you see what they stirred up for
an uncountable number of days, and you say: well, Camba was right.
-Camba was more an observer than a thinker.
-"Camba was a skeptic, with no vanity.
He didn't take himself seriously. He wasn't seduced by anything.
neither fame, nor recognition,
nor ostentation or wealth".
That's how he expressed it in one of his most recognized
phrases when he said:
any showiness carries a hint of farewell.
Opposite of immoral narcissism.
The most pervasive political illness of this century
that accompanies mediocrity.
Skepticism and stoicism maintain a special balance in him.
On one hand, he is capable of ridiculing adversity,
here, he is Chaplinesque, skeptical.
On the other hand, he's imperturbable, phlegmatic in the face of absurdity.
Here, he is Keatonesque, stoic.".
-He creates his own character.
The humorous character is Julio Camba.
He appears in all his writings as a naive being,
who doesn't quite understand what is happening around him.
Or skeptical, a very skeptical character when it suits him.
And then, that's his great originality.
He doesn't need anyone; he is the protagonist.
-If he allowed it, Camba should be the protagonist of this documentary,
but between Julio and Camba, there is a character
created by him when he was very young
who is the one who truly speaks to us through his articles and columns.
A kind of skeptical, wise and with sarcasm.
A Galician and cosmopolitan
philosopher who never lets us see the person behind.
What we know, from some people who knew him well, is that
he was an extraordinary player and a great liver of life.
(Calm music)
-I've said it many times you have to read Camba
before lunch.
Because if you read him after lunch,
you might end up with a significant stomachache.
From laughter, I mean.
So, Camba fasting, always fasting.
-"May you always have a dietary regimen,
a regimen against obesity, against arteriosclerosis
or against anything else.
When they give you bad food, rely on the regimen.
However, when they offer you an excellent meal,
send the regimen on its way.
The best thing about any regimen is the pleasure of breaking it".
-The only book that Julio Camba wrote on purpose
was "La Casa de Lúculo".
It is already considered by some people as his masterpiece.
-I love that there is a person who has approached gastronomy
with that point of view,
almost narrating each dish as an adventure.
-From my point of view, it is a total and absolute innovation.
He doesn't write recipes, doesn't explain how to cook.
I believe he's not interested in cooking at all.
He's interested in what's cooked.
He moved throughout Europe and had direct knowledge
of the gastronomy of those places.
Besides, he was a bon vivant,
a person who liked to live well.
Therefore, I am convinced that everything he tells
are indeed personal experiences.
-I really like how he narrates, how he tells
and describes each culinary experience.
-It's like a selection of short stories, his gastronomic experiences
rather than a philosophy of what cuisine is.
I remember now
an article where he recounts that during his stay in London,
they made him eat seagull eggs.
He says: they tasted like sardines, but they tasted so much like sardines
that for a while I couldn't eat sardines again because
I remembered the seagull eggs.
Interestingly, something unknown,
but until recently, seagull eggs were consumed in Galicia.
(Calm music)
It also occurs to me how Camba approaches sardines.
The topic of sardines, which he says are a rascal fish,
that you can't eat at home with your legitimate wife, but you
have to eat them out there, partying with friends and your mistress.
And with your hands, no cutlery.
And he seems a very neat person,
in this case says: no, sardines must be eaten with your hands.
A menu by Julio Camba has to be based on what he writes,
not on his personal tastes
because he was a French cuisine lover,
and therefore, what we would get is an absolutely French menu.
So, I think what we need to do is go look for those preparations,
those products he talks about, and we have to make the pig fly.
We need a cook with as much imagination as Camba
and as sparking as Camba
so that when they present a menu on the table,
it surprises us and makes us say: Wow!
A surprising menu.
-I think he was a bit of a sybarite when it came to eating.
Yes, from what he told me, just anything wouldn't do for him.
-When he was in Vilanova, he didn't eat at his own home.
He used to come to ours to have lunch.
-And he told me, the first thing he did was
going to the kitchen and uncover dishes to see what food there was.
If there was a convincing dish, for him,
he stayed.
(Calm music)
-For Julio Camba, the Ría de Arousa
was one of the most marvelous landscapes that one
could contemplate in the whole world.
He needed to come here every time he returned from one of those trips.
-It was a completely solitary beach,
and he used to go at one o'clock because he used to wake up late.
The "Con da Mina" beach
There was a large rock and he would lie down on it.
He did it completely naked.
-A man wanted to learn English and went with Don Julio
so that he could teach him English because Don Julio could speak English.
-That man was my uncle, a close friend of Julio Camba's,
the boatman who took him to swim at Terrón.
-He had no money, so how did he pay?
In chickens.
-He had to exchange chickens for English lessons.
He didn't learn English, I don't know if he learned something,
but not English. He enjoyed the company of his friend.
-For us, he was like family.
He came to listen to the radio and eat
And he spent the afternoons there,
the cat would sit on his lap,
and he spent the afternoons listening to the radio.
Sometimes in a foreign language.
He must have known several languages.
-He always dressed elegantly; I always remember him with a tie.
I never remember him in short sleeves.
I don't know if maybe in the summer, playing.
When he played poker, sometimes playing.
But on the street, I never saw him in short sleeves.
After lunch, he came to the casino; they played poker.
He always played with his back against the wall.
He didn't want onlookers.
He lived here; in his house, he had a maid
named Felisa, who was from San Miguel de Deiro.
-He played cards with the maid,
won, and he didn't pay her.
He was a bit cheeky.
But it was out of necessity. (Laughs)
Because he never had a dime available.
When he wrote to the editorials, they paid him,
but it slipped through his fingers.
He lived at the expense of his friends.
Don Julio, the money is running out.
Because they gave him money to support the household.
Don't worry.'
And that night he would send a couple of articles to ABC.
Tomorrow we'll have money.'
I don't know if it was ten thousand pesetas or so,
a fabulous amount for that time.
He was a pleasant man, people here loved him.
Unlike Valle Inclán, whom people didn't love, they adored Julio Camba.
I think that he was very Galician because that humor, cynicism
that many want to attribute to him, for me, it's pure sarcasm.
Pure sarcasm from an old Galician.
-He embraced his Galician identity,
I believe he didn't embrace it religiously or devoutly.
He embraced it as a worldly man who knows he is born in a land.
Galicia is a land of sardines and politicians.
Sardines are born from each other, and politicians too.
-To be a Galician politician, the first thing you need
is to be a relative of another Galician politician.
-The son of a Galician politician has ministerial status
from birth.
-The nephew has the status of undersecretary or director-general.
-And so on.
When one is not the son or nephew of a Galician politician, a rare thing,
-given the reproductive faculty that characterizes this region,
-then one has to make love to a daughter or a niece.
-It should be noted that those who become related to
the bigwigs of politics through this procedure
-are called political relatives.
Then the new politician goes to Madrid and starts asking.
-He asks for ports, docks, bridges, streets, school groups, whatever.
-One day, walking through the corridors of the congress with a political
authority, we saw the shape of a fellow countryman deputy.
-'We're going to give him the boot', the authority told me.
-'Because as soon as I lose sight of him, that man takes a port from me.
-Some people attach great importance to a port even if it's only
worth 300 or 400 thousand pesetas.
-Still, it's easier for a friend to give you a port
than a bronze writing desk.
Sometimes, to capture the minister's will
the deputy asks for a box of cigars.
-A box of cigars for a port?
-Other times there were no ports available. A port?
-Wouldn't a bridge be the same to you?
-Well, I promised a port.
-The allocation for these works is completely exhausted.
Come on, give us a bridge, man.
We can give you a magnificent one.
The deputy was resigning himself.
-If only we had a river!' he exclaims, already half convinced.
-He would end up taking the bridge -The thing was taking something.
-They gave a bridge to the town that needed a port,
and those waiting for a bridge had to accept a school group".
-He would let it be, letting time pass,
and then he realized that he had 12 hours to submit the article.
-Writing was a bit of the final stage.
I think he had already worked out the articles in his head more or less.
-That semi-spontaneity,
but as it happened with what Churchill said about speeches:
My impromptu speech took four or five hours to prepare.
-'How do you write your articles?' a journalist asks.
To write my article, I lock myself in a room in the afternoons
with a bit of paper.
There I start making efforts, and the article comes out.
Sometimes it comes out easy, flowing, or abundant;
other times it comes out hard, difficult, but it always comes out."
-He asked the director of El Imparcial or El Sol,
for a quick text.
And he said: Julio, but I asked for less.
And he says: but making it shorter would take me much more time.
He wrote slowly,
despite the thousands of articles he had written, he used to write slowly.
He thought or reflected on what he had writen.
He was a master of conciseness.
-That's what he was gifted for, for very brief narration.
On the other hand, 'cause he was lazy,
because he didn't like to write.
Because he suffered a lot,
every time he had to sit down with a paper to write
the article he needed to eat, if not, he wouldn't write it.
-Cursed be the man who invented the printing press.
-There are a few years when he writes more than 200 articles,
and that's a lot.
-But he didn't like to work because he was lazy,
or because he spent time watching life go by?
-He was so skeptical that throughout his life,
at many moments, it was evident that he didn't want to be anything special.
Not even a writer, not even a journalist.
(Calm music)
-The first downturn in Camba's decline
is undoubtedly World War I.
After World War I, he's not the same man as before.
And then the Civil War that ended up with him.
The Civil War left a tremendous mark on Camba's character.
It turned him into a shadow of what he was.
-It seems that writers are born young and are eternally themselves.
I think there was a moment when Camba said:
I'm going to be the Camba that I really am, the real person,
and we're going to get rid of the Camba writer step by step.
If necessary, because I need money,
well, I'll bring him out again.
I think he was a man burdened by loneliness.
Before, I thought he was a curious, restless man,
but I believe there comes a moment when he travels
to not feel the loneliness so much.
Because feeling alone in a foreign country where you don't know anyone
and you have to make an effort to meet people
seems more forgivable than being on your own.
But being on your own when you live in a city where you have friends
makes a big difference.
-Precisely, his closest friends
deceive him to move him with his few belongings
from the small room he occupied at Hotel Palace
to a Madrid clinic, where he dies on February 28, 1962.
Those last days were the only ones
when he couldn't take his daily bath.
After a long illness and a slow agony,
it is said that his last words were:
Life is beautiful, but it ends.'
Julio Camba, a leopard never changes its spots.
Even his biographers couldn't go further than he allowed them.
What he did leave us were his articles,
at least those collected in books that we can enjoy today
and recognize as masterpieces of journalism.
And many of his columns, however, are still to be unearthed
and compiled in complete works.
But be careful, go slowly, because Camba creates addiction.
We can definitely tell.
-For me, Julio Camba is a...
He is a complete mystery.
I can't understand his personality well.
I can't understand his personality.
He is a man of extraordinary literary talent.
However, he hates writing.
And then he is a guy who during his youth
has a very clear anarchist ideology and then
becomes a hedonist.
It seems to me that Camba doesn't believe in anything.
I think he didn't care about anything.
I think he was such a skeptical, absurd man that
he could spend a whole day sitting at a café table
looking out the window and watching people come in.
For me, that's the mystery of Camba,
he's an inexplicable character.
Then, it's a mystery.
It's a mystery how he can travel the world
without being interested in the things that the rest of us are.
He doesn't go to museums, he doesn't go to all the things tourists visit.
What matters to him is walking, what he likes is walking and observing.
And that, that's incredible.
That's enough for him to create those articles
that are authentic lessons in journalism
and authentic lessons in humor.
His ability
to humorously describe
things is prodigious.
It's absolutely prodigious.
I found the expression from him.