Alfonso Ussía, Spanish writer and TV pundit, dies

Alfonso Ussía dies: the master who made people laugh and blush

Was he the last great master of Spanish costumbrismo, or a drawing-room humourist who simply wasn't funny to everyone? The death of Alfonso Ussía has peine that debate. He leaves behind a vast body of work and, among its pages, two titles that the thread places at the summit of modern costumbrismo: Tratado de las buenas maneras and the Manual del ecologista . Nobody disputes the volume of what he wrote. What divides opinion is what lay beneath it.

A TV pundit who was a pleasure to listen to, even for those who never voted his way

There is one area where almost every assessment agrees: his skill as a panellist. People acknowledge his intelligence, his irony and an erudition that is scarce today amid the noise of the debate shows. Even those who shared not a single one of his ideas admitted he was a pleasure to listen to. Sharp-tongued, yes. Entertaining, too. In a country where public debate is settled by shouting and by party colours, that is starting to be a rare merit.

Ten years with a bodyguard for calling ETA what it was

His ideological profile, Anglophile and monarchist, was no secret. Nor was his stance against ETA terrorism, which, according to one participant, cost him a decade under protection. Ten years watched over for saying out loud what many preferred to keep quiet. Those who defend his legacy stress exactly that: a consistency that never bent once the price stopped being rhetorical. That fact, more than any award, gives order to his biography.

Here the consensus breaks down: drawing-room humour

For some, his humour was condescending towards part of the country, and his sarracena compass questionable and deeply bourgeois. He is reproached for having been a comfortable chronicler, applauded by those who already thought like him and read by others as servile towards power. Some even deny him the rank of master and place him in the shadow of his grandfather. Labels fly faster than arguments, and in this case they arrived before the condolences.

Two Spains, one and the same man

And so the balance stands: some read his irony as lucidity, others as disdain. The very same texts serve to prove opposite things depending on who opens them. It is the classic paradox of the columnist who endears himself to his enemies and raises suspicion among his friends. Neither mourning nor criticism has managed to agree on what exactly has been lost, or on whether there was anything to bid farewell to beyond the character.

The detail that sums him up

Among the anecdotes his memory leaves behind, one circulates that is worth a whole treatise: the one claiming that Zarautz good and Deba bad. Humour of minimal geography, of neighbourhood, of someone who knows every corner of what he portrays. That register, half custom half jab, is what his defenders miss and what his critics see as the symptom of the problem.

With everything going on these days, the handing out of labels will last less than the forgetting. What will remain is a man capable of making laugh the very person who had just called him a fool. Few trades are harder. And few are remembered worse.