“I am a 76-year-old boy and at times I do not understand the world,” he wrote to me in the last exchange of emails we had before what we wanted to imagine a pause in his work due to health problems was imposed. Actually, since I met him several decades before, Luis Frontera He had the sensibility of a young boy who just discovers injustices. Let’s say that he was obsessed with the suffering of others (and also his own) and tried to exorcise that pain by putting it into words.
Journalist (Rivadavia and Nacional radios, newspaper El Mundo, Humor, NEWS) and self-taught writer, at 16 he wrote the first of several books, the product of an education without classrooms: it was done in the street, sneaking into clubs, reading from Monday to Friday with self-imposed discipline from two in the afternoon to ten at night in the National Library. Before going to sleep on the steps of the Teatro Colón. “I was always in love with words, but what I wanted to write I couldn’t say at school,” he told me when 2020 just started, he presented his latest book “Sagrada familia”, an autobiographical novel in which he tells the story of the captain Frontera (her father), who in 1936 left the woman with seven children to fight in the Spanish Civil War. And that she conceived the minor (Luis) in a prison when, repatriated with war psychosis, he was purging his communist adventure in the time of Perón.
The drafts of that story took up much of his life. They speak of poverty, of a dysfunctional environment that the mother of the clan called “the court of miracles” (among the captain’s children there was a seer, lyrical singer, dancer, boxer) and of a search for the absent, idolized and hated father. time.
When he entered the colimba and a military man questioned him to fill out a form with his skills, he did not fit in any. Until a legend was stamped on his enrollment book: “read and write.” He liked to say that that moment reoriented his life. In the crude literalness of the sergeant he had found his calling.
But a few years later he swallowed his words and ended up in a mental hospital. Could not talk. He said that Ernesto Sábato rescued him from Borda after reading some of his books.
He had ups and downs but he never stopped writing, researching taboo topics bordering on mental illness. And he spent the last 36 years in love with his partner. That “street boy before there were street boys” – as he liked to define himself – attributed to this bond more impact in his life than literature. What do you think saved you? I asked him that time. He looked at his wife with tenderness and replied: “Ofelia’s love.”
