The woman who filled the radio with fantasy: Nené Cascallar, from fighting polio to entertaining a country

Something accompanied her long before paper and pencil and until her death: a wheelchair. Her saving angels were before her her books and, later, her own writing. Write to levitate, to inhabit other worlds, to stop being quiet.

Nene Cascallar governed emotions, switched tear ducts on and off, managed Argentine moods like a remote control. Polio left her paralyzed, but forced her to develop another way of “dancing”: “Nature is wise and what it takes away knows how to reward it”, he consoled himself

“I know that God chooses the materials. He didn’t want to hurt me, he was entrusting me with a different mission. “

Polio had hit her before that 1956 outbreak in Buenos Aires that filled the air with bleach and mite. The trees in her neighborhood weren’t the ghosts painted with lime to fight the plague, which would come decades later, when the disease affected more than 6,000 children. In 1919, Nene’s recovery was combined with leg massages and a radio in the background.

After listening to the radio so much, he walked in. He has created more than 50 fictions for El Mundo, Belgrano, Splendid. It was in 1941 that his handwriting, narrow handwriting, debuted on the dial bitter bliss, of the company of Carmen Valdez. He will immediately do a double night fiction, with the cast of Silvio Spaventa until he can cope with the commissioned fairy tales.

First a journalist, then a writer, Alicia Inés Botto painted the radio with romance and illusion. She was the author responsible for gathering ears like flies around a loudspeaker and, later, doing the same with images, in that brother of the radio drama, the teleteatro.

Alice in Wonderland he chose to sign under a pseudonym and the pseudonym became a company of the word. His mother’s surname (Doña Regina Cascallar) sounded more Kafkaesque. Her radio scripts had anguished atmospheres, full of crushes and setbacks, but her pen dragged those climates to a happy ending. In a country where radio theater was water, Nene quenched that thirst for ink.

It was born on 11 June 1914, six years before the first radio broadcast from the terrace of the Coliseo theater and just over a month before the outbreak of the First World War. He loved Saturdays, the color yellow and playing basketball. His characters were a mixture of beings he met and others he only read about. The secret was not in his eyes: “I am not struck by the retina of the character, but by the look”.

He painted for soprano, he studied opera singing, but at the age of five the tragedy happened. Polio before her prostrated her, her health improved, but her legs never got better. “Watching my little friends run and play, I had to channel myself to another field and moved on to reading. And I invented an imaginary universe, with spectators. I invented the serial novel, the boys surrounded me and in the best of my story I suspended the story until the next day.

He studied for a period at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. When she announced to the family that she would be dedicated to the world of “the air” she was called “the madwoman of the house”. It is that her was «a bourgeois and puritan family. The approach to art was forbidden “.

The first “son” was his book of poetry miniaturesin 1935, and the first cent was won with a poemFallpublished in the journal Rosalinda. He also collaborated with Graphic news, The house, You, in the various romantic and style sections. Subsequently, in the late 1940s, she jumped to the theater with plays such as What did not come with Ilde Pirovano, Luisa Vehil and Alberto Closas.

The routine was like this: He wrote three or four pages and passed them to the typist Elisa Cecilia, his cousin and secretary. His letter archive was a family SME, with his brother Luis as the representative. He has come to sign in three different ways so as not to overload the air with his name. The premise of that factory: “A little beauty because people have lost the ability to fall in love with life every day.”

The graphic advertisements of the time highlight it in large letters and with a photo, above the figures of its own fictions. And it is that Nene has achieved something that her current colleagues cannot believe: that the author was more important than the actors themselves. The letters arriving at the stations were counted by mountains, with several offended who blame the fate of their characters. She was in charge of responding to every last complaint.

When you feel sad: what do you do? So a reporter asked him in the 1960s. “I let myself be carried away by my imagination and I am happy with my thoughts. I am not afraid of the intensity of feelings. Pain gives a different dimension and so does love “.

She captured love in her pages, but a couple’s love seemed to slip away from her life. “My mother warned me that there are things I would never have, but suitors appeared in front of my healthy sister,” she laughed. “I believe in coup de foudre (love at first sight), in looking and feeling: this is the man“.

“People feel alone because they do not realize that no one can penetrate the other completely. We all have our corner that belongs to us in an absolute and individual way”, he philosophized that crushing generating machineand complained. “In this time we live in, there is a kind of modesty to all that is beautiful. The cheesy and vulgar words immediately come out.”

His love stories sponsored, for example, by El Ombú soap powder or El gaucho soap are now part of a powerful advertising archive in magazines. titles like my wife wants to get married or the bold They show his photograph on that of Hilda Bernard, Nydia Reynal, Oscar Casco.

In 1947, radio plays bore his name. All done by hand, hand-sewn, basting and darning. The sounds were made with tricks and gadgets, a shot was nothing more than the lid of a falling piano, and a kiss on the mouth, the kiss on the hand itself. Behind that game, the confession of a frustrated actress to her performers: “In each of you I am what I could not be “.

Arnaldo André was one of those who knew Nen’s house-workshopé, a magical refuge in via Arenales where the potions were reams, notebooks. Between porcelain, Murano glass and tapestries, he writes from Monday to Monday, in double shift. “There was the myth of a mirror in the living room through which he could see you behind, but I never could verify it,” adds the Paraguayan actor mystery.

“Once I went to ask him for a place and he gave it to me”, André relives before a phone call from Clarione and travel back half a century. “She was sweet, charming and I went to ring her doorbell. That’s how I got a gig on Channel 9, a role that didn’t last a minute. More than the work itself, I cared that she saw me. Thanks to that time, then they called me for my first role with continuity. One day they communicated from the Carlos Thompson agency, which produced his novels, and they gave me an eight-month-old character. It was Cascallar who chose me, who trusted Me. contract chose its actors. A time when Nené, Alberto Migré and Abel Santa Cruz were the most important authors “.

Television came like a withered magnet. love has the face of a womanthe successful telenovela with Claudia Lapacó, Rodolfo Bebán, Bárbara Mujica and many other figures was the milestone that canceled the surname and paved the way for mass production, Four men for Eve, four women for Adam and more.

Glory had its questions. “Today’s Accused” was the title of an interview with extra magazine in 1966 in which she was “accused” of “erotic and immoral works and even the suspension of the broadcast in Córdoba”. His bridesmaids were accused in the Revista Así of “use light deshabillés” and practice “short kisses and those of others”.

“In my works I pour the maximum of realism. I created a program for adults. I achieved what has never been achieved until now: attracting the male audience”, he defended himself.

He understood from the first Nene the value of the word, the responsibility of what is said, the depth of a promise. “Once a sponsorship company offered a liter of cologne to every listener who wrote in the first 24 hours. That’s how loud the radio was, they almost fired the head of advertising. They had to donate more than 6,000 liters “.

The sentimental educator, as she proclaimed herself, died on May 16, 1982from cardiac arrest. Some authors claim that he dies a little more every time a colleague’s signature is deleted or ignored. As if the stories wrote themselves.