La vida deprisa

"I don't have a biography", said César González Ruano, "but rather a legend", he himself cultivated it in life and posterity has not always distinguished what is real from what is invented. Javier Varela follows in these pages the controversial itinerary of the writer and journalist, from his beginnings in ultraism and literary bohemia to his consecration as one of the most prestigious chroniclers of the 20th century, at first in the liberal orbit and later as a champion of the anti-republican right. Correspondent in Berlin (1933) and Rome (1936-1940), the journalist lived in Paris occupied by the Germans (1940-1943) and that period, in which he dedicated himself to the intermediation of forgeries of works of art and other trafficking heterodox, marks the darkest moment of his career. Back in Spain, in Sitges, he had to face the veto of the official authorities and a purge process in France, but once settled in Madrid he resumed his career as one of the most popular journalists between the forties and sixties, a collaborator in the main newspapers of the moment. A memorialist of genius, as demonstrated by My Half Century Half Confesses and Diario Intimate, González Ruano was a good writer, influenced by surrealism, and a master of the interview. The biography, which begins with the interrogation that he was subjected to by the Gestapo in 1942, does not follow a strict chronological order and intersperses chapters dedicated to homes -houses, a Ruanesque passion-; the cafes, the main setting for his journalistic and literary activity; the city of Cuenca, where he lived occasionally for ten years, or the illnesses of the biographer, protagonists of his daily life and of his literature. The legends, white or black, about the character from his death to the present are also collected.