Able to write a thousand things with clarity and meaning, when dying Victor de la Serna Arenillas (Madrid, April 14, 1947-October 18, 2024), some may have thought that, rather than a journalist dying, an entire newsroom seems to have died. In a profession with difficult relationships with prosperity such as journalism, the pseudonym has very often been a simple cover to get paid twice. This, however, was never the case of Víctor de la Serna, who chose to use various aliases with the sole purpose of not taking up the entire newspaper. In the same edition, in fact, he could publish a basketball chronicle signed by Vicente Salanera gastronomic review under the nom de plume by Fernando Point and an international opinion with his own name. And earn respect with each of the three.
In that name of hers many others resounded: from the times of the matriarch Thorn Shellits lineage seems to be that of a family SME specialized in the production of diplomats and journalists, with some free electrons, like the painter Maria Blanchard or the chronicler Pedro de Répide. “There is no bad De la Serna,” the Cervantes Jiménez Lozano winner said, and Víctor was going to grow up in houses where official tableware on the table and Cavia statuettes in the library were common. His uncle Alfonso was ambassador in Geneva and Rabat; His uncle Jesús was deputy director of this newspaper and his own father was going to mix the chancelleries and the editorial offices in his career. Also the restaurants: the epicurean Víctor de la Serna cannot be explained without that family landscape in which his mother, Nines Arenillas, and his father – with the heteronym Punto y coma – wrote some of the first pages of gastronomic journalism in Spain.
Victor did not have to discover Bordeaux at the age of thirty, and that worldliness and privileged education—the Lyceum, New York, Switzerland—affirmed in him an ease and self-confidence that could intimidate the most timid characters, that is That is, everyone else. But if he was not Versailles in his criticism, he was not stingy in his frequent and explosive outbursts of generosity. The result is that, in a time when people talk about the “decline of character”, all of us who knew Víctor de la Serna can say that we have dealt with an unforgettable one. So exaggerated that we could be at a meal worthy of the Camacho Weddings at noon and we all knew that there was a greater chance that the sun would stop than that he would not deliver the article.
No one should conclude from this that Víctor de la Serna embodied a journalism old: he was always, in the best possible sense, a modern, and not just because he enthusiastically applied himself to tweeting. His international experience had given him sociability and languages, and would also give him a title—the first in Spain, he boasted—as a journalist from Columbia. The United States was going to introduce him to passions that would never leave him, from the blues – he was an expert on bells – to street food and, for what interests us, demanding and direct journalism, like that practiced in his age. gold of the prestige of the profession in the America of the seventies.
De la Serna’s beginnings in journalism are an indication of that liberal view of the world: correspondent in the United States and editor-in-chief of an open-minded bastion such as Information. I was also going to work at Diary 16 and in THE COUNTRYuntil Pedro J. Ramírez recruited him for the foundation of The World: He was attracted to De la Serna’s background that was both continental and Anglo-Saxon, his idea of the profession and, let’s say it all, a common passion for basketball. There in The World He was going to work for three and a half decades and, within the horror of dying, it is astonishingly consistent that the Grim Reaper took him to the doors of what—family apart—he loved most: the newspaper.
In 2007, this already tall man still had the ability to dazzle himself and tell his readers about an unknown but promising little restaurant: it was called Diverxo and he was the one who raised the alarm. De la Serna’s teaching in matters of taste will survive him because it has been key for several generations, with chairs like the longed-for Elmundovino and the ability to go down into the mud with their Manchuela wines, Finca Sandoval. It is possible that his gastronomic memoirs are the most important cookbook that has not been written in our country, but Víctor was incompatible with the genre of memoirs: something as beautiful can be said about him as that he died at the age of seventy-seven. without having stopped being young for a single day.
