He was the son of contradiction, of the uncomfortable truth, sometimes the most brutal. Conceived in Paris during a honeymoon in which the parents finally decided to separate, Fernando Peña has absorbed the absurd and the contradiction from the womb.
She said mom Malena and dad Pepe had an argument over her infidelity, her screams sounded deeper than the Marseillaise, and the “society” ended up in France, before adding a member.
The attempt at reconciliation took place in Uruguay. She didn’t understand, but there was an agreement: she would stay and live in Montevideo. She rented a house in Carrasco and waited for her belly to grow. On January 31, 1963, at 00:05, little Peña sprouted, “An uncomfortable day, an uncomfortable hour – Fernando would later judge in his biography -, inopportune, as always”.
He grew up with Pepe Sr. as an inevitable guest on Fridays at 8 p.m. The man, a sportscaster, traveled from Buenos Aires, where he returned on Monday morning.
The first toy he gave her was a Lufthansa plane for Dynamo, something “phallic” – Fernando joked – which ended up being his means of transport and life. As a flight attendant he was discovered by Lalo Mir in flight and that encounter sweetly doomed him on the radio. Lalo heard a Cuban tone on the loudspeaker, asked to meet that flight attendant and a certain Peña appeared.
Fernando was himself an airplane. A bird of the air, of the radio, of the TV, a monument to freedom, to risk. Sometimes it took off in fury, sometimes it went through thunderstorms, sometimes it crashed and flirted with death. He had wings.
60 years after his birth, that self-proclaimed spirit “mix of Christopher Columbus with Alexander the Great” he flies over the studio of Del Plata, Metro, Rock & Pop, Mitre, Continental, Nacional, all the stations where he has distorted voices, exorcised ghosts and seeded characters.
His friends, his neighbors, his enemies speak in the present. No one remembers too much that on June 17, 2009 he died. If until that day His closest friends had the feeling that he was about to get up from the drawer, to roll his wild eyes at them and shout at them: ‘They bought it’.
“A farewell with joy, and electronic music, with sequins and a bottle of whisky,” read the note from clarion on his vigil in the Buenos Aires legislature. From afar, many remember that ritual as surreal. “It was a continuous parade of characters, a shaman, a politician, an actor, an ex-companion, I was more Western and cried for him,” revives his great friend Juan Butvilofsky, a TN reporter.
“but I” he held her hand in one of the last chemotherapy sessions who accompanied him together with María Laura Santillán and received his ashes on the radio days later. “María, the lady who worked in her house, took the cash register and we left it there for a while. There is a photo next to the urn. It was something grotesque, functional to the type of humor of the program The parking machine, who was 10 years old. He would have died laughing.”
Boarding, customs and stopovers
“Monday this guy starts making rumors with Lalo, give him a hand”, The director of Radio Metro -Luis Serres- warned Javier Bravo, operator, in 1999, without imagining the chain of letters from COMFER that would arrive later.
Driver Ari Paluch had to deal with that landing. Bravo, now replaying the moment just minutes before Peña’s 60th “birthday,” feels a shiver. “You had to be encouraged to put a guy like that on a radio. The first thing I thought was ‘this is coming to make little voices’. Look what a beast he has become.”
“The first character that went on the air was Palito (Rubén Ramón Sixto Alegre, a boy of humble origins, with street and malice). Gradually others appeared. The reality was that he was just bringing out what was inside of him, all of his characters were a part of him, but he gave them an artistic form.”, considers Bravo, who adds an anecdote. “Two months after its debut, one day I lost the program and I listened to it from home. The interaction of the characters had already begun, the recovery of the radio play. I understood that I was doing something that didn’t exist, I had to give it a shape from ‘operation, a decoration’.
The first year of Metro they worked without a script together with announcer Luis Pesiney. “Fernando has always respected me and allowed me to edit the stories by sound. It was like I was throwing balls at his juggles. If I threw him a piano, he played it.”
Lalo Mir was in 1994 the great “keeper” of the secret. ‘Please don’t say on the radio that Milagritos is me because they kick me out of the airline’, FP pleaded with him after Mir opened a curtain and discovered the woman speaking on the plane was not a woman. It was then that the light bulb went on for Lalo: “Why don’t you come and do it on the radio?”
It was 1994, Lalo was driving Tutti Frutti, of Del Plata and then Milagros López raided, with cassette recordings he made from “the ship”.
Despite this reputation for being difficult, I made friends everywhere. “I met him in the bathroom,” laughs Butvilofsky, who recalls that the first talk, in 1999, took place “urinal to urinal”. Peña wanted to buy him the alpaca necklace imported from Cancun that the young journalist who worked at Radio América wore, who stopped by the Metro studio to listen to him.
Over time and at the crossroads of work the friendship blossomed, Butvilofsky’s surprise debut in the theater came by decision of Peña, who invited him to join schizopen, in Xirgu. Shared rides have also arrived.
“I prefer the small one, like the two of us skiing alone in Bariloche, where we did from The parking machine. He was my favorite toy, I would fall and he would talk to me like he character Sabino about him and I would fall apart. After, on the cover of that Sunday of Perfil was a photo and the headline ‘Peña with his new boyfriend, Pampi’. they confused me, but I didn’t care. She once wrote to me that I, a journalist in the same field as her old man, had reconciled him with that father,” adds Butvilofsky.
He loved life in a five star hotel, ran away to one whenever life overwhelmed him. He wrote a lot and in any format because “writing is explaining oneself” and often he could not understand each other or make himself understood.
He felt the life of an airplane worker had taught him to face what his oligarchical neighbors in San Isidro did not know, “Take care of bags of unnatural anus, gently carry dead ashes.”
He loved dogs and sometimes lived with half a dozen “pichichos”, in his books he cruelly maintained that “couples last no more than ten bedridden people”, and he spent his therapeutic sessions trying to untie this being “the work of a a couple for love, a frozen couple”.
Peña, the immeasurable
The fact that moved to Buenos Aires at 7the one who dyed herself blonde with chamomile at 13, a Psychology student for three years, suffered an early mourning that destabilized the family. His little sister, born with growth problems, died at one and a half years oldbefore the interruption of Malena’s subsequent pregnancy and the birth of the minor, Federico.
«Mother neglected Fer in his first years of life», confesses Federico in the book fucking cuteby Diego Scott. “He didn’t know how to raise a child like this, he was afraid, the subject was not discussed in the family”. There was always the doubt that this girl was not dead, that she would be taken to a monastery to avoid the “what will they say”.
All that Peña was and it’s not enough to tell it. A month before his death, the former English teacher starred in Dialogue of a prostitute with her client. Each service was dedicated as a tribute to his actress mother, Malena Mendizábal, and his other “mother”, his maternal grandmother. Gloria Baiardo, who starred with Mirtha Legrand in the third kiss (1942) and created it based on “Lorca and Juan Ramón Jiménez”. It was the most decisive acting influence. “Without art, I would have been a sad fucker.”
The urn with his mother’s ashes was something close to Peña: he kept it in the living room. “I remember in 2004, at the time of KSK radio, I had to set up the studio in his house and when I went to take everything apart and take everything apart, I came across that urn. It occurred to me that it was a commodity and I didn’t want to have any problems with that object, I was there and I said to María: ‘I don’t know what it is’. She explained it to me,” says Lucas Ribaudo, who was her producer for five years. “If she was sad, she put her hand in it and stroked it.”
Ribaudo had gone to ask him for a job and the request ended up being a safari. “In 2004 I left him a CD with my work in front of the radio and he left me a message. He told me that he loved what he did, that we should have a coffee,” he recalls. “He made an appointment for me in a bar opposite the San Isidro Racecourse, but we couldn’t meet because the time was wrong. In the end he asked me to come up with ideas for his program and I left him an envelope with a CD on which I recorded dozens of voices… like Betty Elizalde.”
“Production didn’t call me. I saw him again at the radio desk and he told me he hadn’t heard anything. So I left my Torino parked and got into his Peugeot 306, without knowing him, headed for the Aeroparque, because He was going to Mar del Plata. Along the way he was listening to the CD with my work. He loved it. Before his check-in he paid me a taxi back and that’s how I started working with him”, sums up Ribaudo .
Out of a thousand lives condensed into one, Peña had several chapters as a citizen of the United States and a “prostitute in New York.” He rejected the word “defiant” and asked to replace it with “beater”. It continues to be in the mouth of those who build it how the big fish, perhaps a great storyteller a la Tim Burton. on one occasion She confessed to Jorge Lanata that she had a lost son. “I’m not going to ruin a child’s life by showing up.”
Hear it on old recordings or read about it in your books (thank you for flying with me Already don’t you dare read this) is to come across experiences like “Nora’s death”, that corpse that had appeared wrapped in yellow tape with the name of the airline and the words ‘fragile’.
He always seemed to be on the edge of the precipice. Sea walker, trapeze artist, tightrope walker. His was the height and frame. He was able to do what many could not: jump and float. Forever suspended in the air.
Source: Clarin
