Dead Lino Patalano: the story of the Italian who won and lost millions and remained in love with Argentina

He never tried to escape the spirit of Cáceres, the Chilean engineer who hanged himself on the roof of the Maipo in 1985 and whose soul – they swear – makes itself felt every night.

He was not frightened even by Radrizzani, the other spirit that not a few felt after the fire of the theater in 1943. It could be that he feeds on fear and he lived his whole life enjoying the risk.

He played, won, lost and played again, until a crippling pandemic hit and he had to stop.

He lived with 14 dogs. Atina, Napoleone, Roma, Tritone, Magui, Pedro, Felipe, Juan Cruz and six other Neapolitan mastiffs on a farm in Moreno. She could receive Julio Bocca, Norma Aleandro, or half of the Argentine celebrity as guests, and take them for a walk through those eight hectares whose mansion was designed by the architect Alejandro Bustillo. Impossible not to smile if you have passed through that peaceful area where your horse sleeps, that surreal space that you have decided to baptize The Island of the Captain Ass.

A photo album shows him in Thailand, wearing a (live) snake as a scarf, or hugging a mouse (the real one, Toby) that has “entered the scene” in The Curious Midnight Dog Incident. Lino wasn’t eccentric, he was rather hypersocial. His specialty: animals, artists and beastly ego management.

Good sense of smell and intuition

It was March 2020 – almost sixty years of his adventures in the field – when he had a presentiment. He was in Spain on tour with Les Luthiers and felt he had to “break the ground, send them back in time”.

The intuition was followed by a threat. “They warned me of a trial, which I would have to pay for lost earnings. In a few days all the theatrical activity was canceled”, he laughed at the trained sense of smell, and told the 2022 calendar of his productions, with Norma Aleandro (my crazy grandmother), with Ricardo Darín and Andrea Pietra (Scenes from married life) and many others. He planned and dreamed as if he didn’t live in Argentina.

His story is that of an inveterate optimist, of which i love art roulette. In 1975 he had everything ready for release Little Marshall-Light Illustrated, at the National, and Niní Marshall suffered an aneurysm a few hours earlier. Linen lost more than half a million dollars. It wouldn’t be the last time. Less than a decade later, he went bankrupt pursuing his dream of owning the Bambalinas theater.

By the time he arrived in the room, his partner had changed the lock and taken the house apart. Lino had to get rid of the department of Viamonte and Ayacucho, he was “on the canvas”, he went to visit his mother and she doubled the bet: she gave him gold coins which belonged to her husband so that he could sell them and start over. Down and up.

Eventually he produced Roberto Goyeneche and Astor Piazzolla at the Regina. The family history already dragged on that swinging DNA, the top and the mud. The Patalano did not go as a result, it flowed along the road.

The father of the clan had lost seven houses in Italy, blown up by the Germans. He went from landowner to starving immigrant. I was thinking of going to the United States but ended up in Argentina. Lino is the abbreviation for Pasqualino. In the DNI he appears as Pasquale Cósimo Patalano.

His name is explained from the day of his arrival into the world, April 21, 1946, in the middle of Easter. A post-war child, his mother’s birth took place in a room where the woman made an offer looking at the useless meaning of money: there being no paint, they used worthless banknotes as wallpaper. Lino soon realized that silver is an unusual set of colored pieces of paper who may be missing today and leave tomorrow. And viceversa.

Fr Patalano Sr. arrived in Buenos Aires two years before the rest of the family. He sent for his wife, three-year-old son Lino, and two other daughters, and they all left Gaeta, Lazio, and crossed the snow-covered river Po before boarding a third-class ocean liner. In Buenos Aires, as soon as he got on deck, the boy’s mother was disappointed by the murky waters: This is a river (a river) of shit!

The cabinetmaker who collected stars

Lino on tour with Julio Bocca in Bangkok, Beijing, Moscow, Siberia. Linen in India which produces Facundo Cabral. Flax in the pyramids of Egypt. Lino, Lino and Lino in remote places.

He could have gone elsewhere a hundred times and for good, with his enthusiasm for investment in tow, but no. Something found in these payments that was not repeated around the world. This year, after the “Covid Apocalypse” that put the theatrical sector in check, Patalano decided to do what he had done all his life: put beauty out of sadness.

“Even during the war, something like this hadn’t happened, because people would rather die in a theater than hide in a hole,” he said weeks after catching a plane, enduring an 18-hour flight, and landing in the Maldives to catch some ‘of oxygen.

“I come from the post-war period and as a boy I argued with those of the Villa Ballester club. ‘You don’t know anything. They don’t know the country we have, four climates, everything ‘“the one who” was not born in Naples for a few meters on the map “, the one who as a child was” high altar boy “in Argentina to speak Latin and other languages”, the one who had no heirs, no children, but had a battalion of his blood , two sisters, eight grandchildren and dozens of relatives including great-grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Every Easter Sunday he shared with them and various actors an 80-kilo chocolate egg which he had made the mold for. One of his mottos: “Money is useless if it is not shared”.

Following this philosophy, in 2016 he celebrated his birthday in Italy. He took care of the passage and the stay of 50 people (including family and friends, Eleonora Cassano, Marilina Ross, Sandra Mihanovich and others). You did not skimp on accommodation, at the Serapo hotel, with a private beach and a view of the Tyrrhenian Sea. He took guided tours of his hometown and the church where he was baptized to conclude with a party where his nephew was dressed as Anita Ekberg (the sweet life) and Lino shouted Honor life.

Owner of Maipo since 1994, two years ago he got rid of part of those shares (the new owners are Carla Calabrese and Enrique Piñeyro). “What if I thought that theater would disappear in a pandemic? Never. It is the place where protocol is most respected and it is the last living act we have left. It will survive and the future will be better, I always think the future will be better, even if we will have to go out because the planet is taking revenge, “said Pasquale, who in 1985 Julio Bocca asked to represent him.”I don’t know anything about ballet, I know about famous artists“, he apologized. Bocca hired him:” I want to be popular. ”

Life lessons

The life lessons came to Pasqualino early, long before he gave shape to the café concert in the baptized spacesThe pregnant hen, The lame rooster, The erotic chick.

When he got off the ship in the port of Buenos Aires, he took a tram that took him to Lanús and went on an adventure. By now he was already taken by the magical memory that he dragged from the land of him, the theater of giant puppets and puppets, which he tried to reproduce with poles, bins, canvas and wires.

Progress found the Patalanos in the shape of their home in Villa Ballester. At 13 Lino found work in a carpentry, but saw the hands and arms of the workers mutilated by the machines, he was frightened and gave up. He dreamed he was a sailor, but his mother begged him not to be; I couldn’t bear the memory of the sunken ship with half a dozen cousins ​​aboard.

Destiny proposed better navigation. When he joined Riccordi’s Musica Ligera group as a cadet, where his uncle worked, he started dating artists and found a great crossroads with the playwright María Luz Regás. He gave him tickets for The rhinofrom Ionesco, in San Martín, and there was no doubt about the vocational focus.

He asked Regás for a job, if necessary “ad honorem” and a door opened. He started writing newsletters, blown away and grew until he launched himself as a producer for Mercedes Sosa and other Queen figures.

The first time she saw who her “sister of Tucuman of the heart” would be, she appeared in her apartment of Marcelo T. de Alvear “walk-in, with a bouquet of roses and a box of brown icings” to convince her to give her first recital in a theater. They told him that “La Negra” was taking a siesta. The laundry hasn’t left. She waited for her to sit on the aisle steps until Mercedes woke up. “La Sosa” ended up singing to the Regina.

Compulsive persecutor, another “sister” he persuaded was Niní Marshall. “He was behind her for six months to do a concert in a cafe. He talked to her and talked to her, but he was afraid of being so close to people because she was shy,” says Niní’s daughter, Angelita Edelmann .

“She was able to convince the stones. She convinced Mom and it was one of the best things she did. She works and works and she succeeds with her sense of humor, her intelligence and her perseverance. Today she is a great friend of. this family “.

Lately he no longer smoked five packs a day. He gave up cigarettes, but not his biggest vice, the theater, even in the age of 70% capacity, the protocol manual and the chin straps.

Perhaps setting up a bottom-up scenario, “that non-exact science”, allowed him to make up for all that time as a child without toys. “I enjoyed Christmas manger dolls.”

As if he didn’t measure the narrative arc of that whole life of fiction, the man of the more than 200 plays he produced – he didn’t want a biographical book. He preferred to keep that incredible film to himself and continue to defend the theatrical republic tooth and nail, even when the variable “Delta variant” appeared and the numbers spoke of the worst moment.

“I wanted to be a missionary in India and look at the mission I had. I tell the little dreamer that he has no hope that sooner or later you will have it. Theater is an illusion and if you have no illusion, dedicate yourself to something else”.

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