Los que le queríamos no estamos de luto. Francisco Umbral no ha muerto y nos negamos a creerlo. La muerte de alguien cercano y querido siempre produce este primer efecto, de espejismo y negación, no pasa nada, no sucede nada. En el caso de Umbral esto es cierto o casi cierto, sabemos que su muerte de ayer es insignificante porque nos lega sus más de ochenta libros, sus miles de páginas, sus momentos de vida y sus segundos más brillantes.

Algunos nos formamos hace años con sus lecturas y nos ‘topamos’ con sus libros —por entonces hacíamos eso, leíamos a golpes, desnortados por completo—. Nos iniciamos de su mano paternal en los goces prostibularios, nos mostró su particular edén plagado de ninfas bañándose en la alberca —siempre en la alberca o en el pilón, nunca en el prosaísmo de una bañera o en un plato de ducha—, un vergel habitado por sudorosas labriegas plenas de vigorismo y sobreabundancia de carnes, escenas donde con su verga inclemente e inmisericorde profanaba a sirvientas y amas de cría indistintamente.

También a alguna cabra, todo hay que decirlo. Bajo su tutela vigilante aprendimos palabras nuevas —meretriz o casa lenocinio, por ejemplo, entre otras muchas— palabras todas ellas que envolvían y devolvían a las personas y a los sitios envilecidos aquel aura poética que la obsecuente realidad les había arrebatado. Los que le queríamos y robábamos sus libros en los supermecados como mercancías alimenticias —siempre con éxito y un mínimo de maña— nunca cuestionamos el vocabulario que muchas veces inventaba e improvisaba, digeríamos aquellas palabras compuestas y sugerentes y las incorporábamos a nuestro léxico particular, callejero, un repertorio tangencial y alternativo al de la RAE —tan caduco para lo que quiere y tan pintorescamente progresista para lo demás—. También supimos comprender, y agradecimos, el sillón negado por la Academia, siempre invocado por sus valedores —por Delibes o Cela, entre otros— y nunca logrado. Esta marginalidad empedernida hacia Umbral reforzaba más si cabe su coraza de maldito y dandy, de legendaria beatitud, su estigma de escritor bastardo y poco correcto. Y además estamos en España, qué narices. Al genio que no figura en la foto de la enciclopedia ni estrecha la mano, ni se le quiere, ni se le huele, ni se le reconoce. Para qué.

Su persona y su biografía siempre acompañaron su prosa arrolladora, íntegra hasta el final. Su forma de escribir nunca cambió un ápice, todo lo contrario, se afirmó libro tras libro, como si desde sus veintipocos hubiera tenido una preclara clarividencia. Su devoción a la literatura era un ejemplo de entrega sin condiciones a una causa inexplicable, perdida de antemano. A los escritores de entonces nos hizo comprender que la literatura era para él una necesidad vital. Tragando bilis soporté aquella sátira despiadada al escritor dominguero, de fin de semana, del escritor ‘a tiempo parcial’ con el que me identificaba y me identifico hasta la médula. Escribir a toda costa y a pesar de todo. No hay alternativa, no hay salvación si no es pasando por ese calvario. La felicidad es un espejismo y escribir es lo más cerca que se puede estar de él. Siempre habrá un bocadillo o un enemigo del que echar mano en los tiempos difíciles. ‘Ser sublime’, como decía Baudeliere y él parafraseaba incansablemente, ‘sin interrupción’. Para Umbral resultaba algo fácil, en apariencia casi lógico, ser sublime, me refiero, hacerlo sin interrupción.

Los que le queríamos recordamos sus frecuentes enumeraciones caóticas —las que enervaban a sus señorías y esgrimían sus enconados enemigos—, escombreras retóricas que sembraban el texto de imágenes y sensaciones, de pinceladas que solo observadas desde la distancia, acababan definiendo el fresco total, adquiriendo el sentido y la imagen de conjunto. Un retrato emocional y emocionado de lo que su pluma traspasaba sin concierto alguno. Los que leímos sobrecogidos Mortal y Rosa contemplamos impertérritos su despliegue de medios, la combinación de su barroquismo y la vanguardia más extrema, de la elegancia y la bajeza, de la belleza y la mugre, de la poesía y la prosa, del saber hacer y sobre todo sentimos ese dolor rosa, edulcorado y bilioso que secretaban cada una de sus palabras. Mortal y rosa. Para redimirme de mis delitos de juventud, lo compré hace poco, legalmente, pasando por caja. Incluso entonces volví a llorar con aquellas palabras cuando ya casi nada podía conmoverme, insensibilizado por la madurez. De los fracasos y las pérdidas ya nadie habla, ya nadie los recuerda ni los ensalza como él hizo en ese libro. Nos hemos acostumbrado a oír hablar del Umbral de los premios y los reconocimientos, de sus fines logrados y sus consecuencias gratas. Incluso le vimos estrechar la mano al rey. Hacerse viejo, supongo, tiene sus ventajas, uno olvida pronto, se le perdona casi todo. Son estas épocas de “triunfo” y triunfalismo, de euforia desmedida donde todo comienza por ahí, por el éxito y luego ya veremos. Pero siempre viene el descenso a los infiernos, la terapia del silencio. En Umbral, sin embargo, incluso esos comienzos difíciles supuran un aire de heroísmo tormentoso, (La noche en que llegué al café Gijón, Retrato de un joven malvado) un encanto y un deleite a ratos sospechoso y turbio, tanta precariedad, nos decíamos, no puede ser buena. Libros para llegar a libros. Su admiración inmoderada por Ramón Gómez de la Serna, por Cansinos, Lorca o Inclán nos pusieron frente a sus obras, nos presentaron oficialmente, mira, este es fulanito de tal… (Ramón y las vanguardias, Las palabras de la tribu, Lorca, poeta maldito, Los botines blancos de piqué….), reconocimos el páramo desolado de una ciudad que agoniza, su particular Spleen de Madrid (Nada en el domingo, Madrid, 1940), una capital de dolor suburbial y tiznada de gitanos, escritores penitentes y de bohemios pendencieros (Carnívoro cuchillo), de hombres que solo perciben la mitad del mundo (La belleza convulsa) y compartimos su visión más noctámbula de un Madrid lírico y galdosiano, lleno de tranvías, alucinados y cuerpos gloriosos (Trilogía de Madrid). Incluso sus últimos libros, afectados por una jocosa ironía ya irrenunciable (Historias de amor y Viagra o El socialista sentimental) rezumaban aquel humor acibarado contra la modernidad del triunfalismo, una sátira cáustica a lo que sucede y nadie quiere o nadie parece ver, una reivindicación a la raíz de lo español y el españolismo.

Es verdad. Umbral ha muerto. Los que le queríamos lloraremos su pérdida y echaremos de menos su cabellera blanca y sus columnas semanales, nos despediremos de su voz bronca y autoritaria. Pero nunca de sus palabras. Ellas siguen y seguirán ahí. Ha llegado el momento y la responsabilidad de devolverle todas y cada una de las deudas entonces contraídas.

Aquí está el discurso de Steve Jobs, creador de Apple y de Pixar, del 12 de junio de 2005. "You've got to find what you love". Al final del artículo hay un link al vídeo en You Tube con una traducción al español.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Enlace a YouTube con traducción al español