PANERO USA

La última vez que estuve en Sears fue con Aaron Shulman, penúltimo biógrafo de la saga Panero, que ha publicado ya su libro en USA. En el libro salgo como en un cameo, no sé si muy bien parado, pero Aaron ha tenido el detalle de ponerme en los agradecimientos y citar todas las notas correspondientes (el manuscrito de Michi lo utiliza, entre otras muchas fuentes, para seguir una trayectoria). Un tío serio Aaron, no como el tonto del hijastro.

Like his mother before him, and his brother Juan Luis soon after, Michi needed help converting his life into a book from a combination of editor, ghostwriter, and amanuensis. He found this cocktail of assistance in the form of a thirty-year-old journalist and aspiring novelist named Asís Lazcano. A dedicated cyclist, Lazcano had ridden his bike by the Sear Clinic numerous times, never suspecting that one day he would spend countless summer afternoons on a bench out on the grounds, recording stories from Michi’s life. Inside the clinic, where they also worked, was a literal life-versus-death struggle between illness and medicine—“a smell of urine, disinfectant, and cotton,” Lazcano noted in his diary. Outside, summer thunderstorms periodically raged over Madrid. Lazcano imagined Michi trapped in exile, the twenty-six stories of the newly built, sleek-black, sentinel-like KIO Towers rising in the distance like a closed city gate.