Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio has died and, with him, perhaps the last of the classics of the 20th century. If I am not mistaken, of his generation, only Alfonso Sastre remains in this world, who, as a playwright, is something else, although his career and attitudes are quite parallel: both have been of the cornered genre, people against the grain. Even somewhat strange. I don't know who told me, or where I read, that Ferlosio, when he went down to the street to run errands, didn't bother to put on shoes and was seen wandering around the neighborhood in slippers, those plush brown checkered slippers. All the members of that generation have passed on, from the premature Ignacio Aldecoa to Carmen Martín Gaite, an early companion, in letters and in life, of the now deceased. Ferlosio repudiated his novel El Jarama. He got fed up, it seems, with El Jarama and also with the novel, a literary form to which he did not return for thirty years, and that, El testimonio de Yarfoz, was something very different. Ferlosio devoted himself to essay, to grammar, to hermeneutics, to things that I have not read because, frankly, I do not feel at the level of that Ferlosio. But I do perceive that Ferlosio was digging in the wells of language. He spent the rest of his life as a writer turning language, its traps and densities, over and over again. He had done it before El Jarama and he did it conscientiously in El Jarama. It is often said that his generation, so homogeneous in terms of age, interests, roots, social extraction and Education, was amalgamated by a critical look at the social and moral landscape of Franco's Spain. There is not much of that in his first literary output, those Industrias y andanzas de Alfanhuí, imagination, tenderness, children's world, so far from the canonical social realism. And how much of that is in El Jarama? I see a snapshot, perfectly delimited in space and time, of a hot day, very close to the Virgin of August, probably in 1953. Yes, that Spain, still very rural but in urban expansion, is there, frozen, despite the heat of the day. The tavern and the village gentlemen, the river with the boys from the Madrid neighborhood -being a Sunday boy was the great novelty then-, the girls' untidy pants, the ridiculous and authoritarian policemen, that German with such an uncertain past as the parishioner who has been in jail; and "the man of the z. b.". Is Ferlosio making fun, like Aldecoa? There are, above all, Life and Death, amassed in a language, full of registers and symbols, which is the best of this dry and silent novel. That impassive sun that presides over everything - the tedium, the incipient love, the unexpected tragedy, the impostured seriousness of the judge -, then that moon, and the river, of geological indifference, permeated by the intriguing prose of the narrator and the dialogues of the characters, are the true protagonists of this monument to the capacities of the language, the most enduring story of the entire postwar period. And Ferlosio knew it.