The Battles Won by Jorge Martínez Reverte

He had a clear look and a bombproof constancy, which made him a general without uniform who dominated all the battlefields. A companion in so many professional adventures, I remember Jorge always with a ready smile and the good humour that took him to so many destinations.

We were circumstantial neighbours, door to door, in the beautiful penthouses of Barceló with those terraces with gazebos where Jorge wrote with the skyline in Madrid and where my host Fernando García Ervíti organised nightly feasts of succulent conversations.

He gave himself an air of intrigue, with that smile that marked his face and let you know that there was always something more. There was something more to the Battle of the Ebro or the Battle of Annual, to the mystery of the day that motivated his alter ego Gálvez or to the high-level political entanglement in which he always felt he was part of and the protagonist.  

I look back, as if unfolding a photo album of the journalist friend, and I see him in everything. His times on the radio, on television, in newspapers and magazines, in books... and also in the future. With the 3D design company, with his films and those of others. I remember him excitedly showing me Áute's story-board in my office at TVE to make that beautiful and delirious animated film: Un perro llamado dolor (A Dog Called Pain). There was no project that could resist him, because of his capacity for work and his charm for finding accomplices. He also made history programmes on television, apart from his time on Informe Semanal.

When Luz Rodríguez met us on his last birthday in Madrid, Jorge was already living on wheels, always helped by Mercedes, but without losing his enthusiasm or his smile. He made himself understood above all else, and his eyes continued to show his interest in going further. He did not miss the award given to his brother Javier on the evening of the Geographical Society, stoic and familiar.

Last moments shared after that day when the stroke left him parked, but in which he did not stop. Until the end. With his journalism boots on until his last breath. Until the final article, which related him to General Tagüeña, the man who defended the Ebro. In it Martínez Reverte recalled his wife Carmen Parga's written memoir of her journey into exile, from St Petersburg to Moscow, Brno, Prague... and her great disillusionment with Stalinism. One of the most overwhelming, sincere and sombre texts about dreams disrupted in a cruel world from which it is impossible to escape. I reminisced with his daughter Carmen Tagüeña Parga in Mexico City, where the family found respite from the long post-war period and the double exile. The young physicist Tagüeña had to reinvent himself as a general and stoically endured the Ebro border. Until the end. Javier was made of the same wickerwork. Strong in battle, tireless in peace.