In memory of Jorge Aulicino, an elderly poet whose legacy death cannot extinguish.

When people still smoked in newsrooms, our cigarette break took place on the second-floor staircase, just outside the space Ñ shared with Opinión. I'm talking about a time—16, 17 years ago—when a 40-page culture magazine could sell 100,000 copies a week in print if the cover story was compelling, offer 60-page special editions once a month , and continue to generate or amplify debates in its digital version. One of the protagonists of that time, which seems so distant in the age of clickbait, was Jorge Aulicino (1949–2025), deputy editor and columnist for Ñ between 2005 and 2012 , who had not yet become addicted to the pipe that accompanied him in his later years.

Auli, as we all called him, would light his cigarette on the stairs and even we non-smokers would join in the smoke to chat, knowing that in that relaxed moment the most revealing conversations took place , ironies were sharpened and ideas could be proposed without the formality of agenda meetings.

Extremely cultured and approachable at the same time , a translator of Pavese and Dante, among others (he said that the “Divine Comedy” could be read as an adventure novel), Auli once rewound there how he had become a poet, impressed by the phenomenal force and movement of scattered verses by Góngora, Quevedo and Lope, included in his secondary school textbooks, in which he quickly understood that in poetry language always works differently, connoting and without the need to say anything (although he later chose to do so in his own poems). Experience, readings and the writing of his books (the recent “Capital and Lyrics”, among others) developed his conviction that poetry is a meeting place between the personal world and the outside world , with an increasingly porous border between the two.

His articles and columns in Ñ functioned in the same way: they were universally and omnivorously curious, but without opacity ; he delved deeper by addressing the reader informally. Many years before the emergence of AI built into search engines, he could foresee where the web was going ("when a brain on the internet can guide us—and work is already being done on this," I said—"we will undoubtedly fear that intelligence"); comment on a controversy between officials and intellectuals at the Book Fair, or imagine a conversation with a friend over the blaring, brash music of a taxi. “The tireless expansion of intimacy. Remember that the car radio, some fifty years ago, was an instrument of personal enjoyment: it humanized, enlivened the cabin, and brought the sound of the universe filtered and encoded by radio stations in the form of music, announcers' voices, and laughter. Tobacco smoke and the radio created, how can I put it, one's own atmosphere. We see the opposite. The intention for the personal to dominate the world .”

I cherish two memories . When Auli left in 2012, the entire Ñ (National Council of Journalists) marched through the Clarín newsroom after him, applauding wildly, proud of that admired and beloved leader . It was a tribute and a way of publicly sharing that we were beginning to yearn for the rare blend of talent and humanity with which he had steered that ship. The magazine, which had been launched in October 2003 as an optional edition of Clarín costing one coin (50 cents), was already worth $3.50 and would later be battered by all the crises that forced and continue to force the paper to reinvent itself globally.

The second postcard coincides with the death of Juan Gelman, which surprised us on the night of January 14, 2014, with the Ñ edition closed. The Cervantes Prize winner was a poet Auli knew well. We put together a 28-page special issue in a day and a half. Although he no longer wrote for Clarín, Aulicino knew that a journalist doesn't retire, and he sent us a magnificent piece on poetry and activism in 1970s Argentina, against the clock . “There are, or seem to be, two types of porteños from Buenos Aires,” it said. “One is expansive, loud, Neapolitan, and the other cultivates a low, confessional tone: he smokes and waits. Both could be found in a café. One, along with some friends, gesticulating and defending his team's colors, or recounting his hatred for a boss, a relative, a former friend. The other chooses the table in the back, preferably on the side by the window, because he likes to look without being seen .”

Jorge Aulicino was, of course, a major poet, one of those who choose the back table , while choosing the discretion of good work and leaving the noise to others. Upon learning of his illness, I wrote to him to send him a hug from Madrid, and we chatted on WhatsApp. Very lucid and true to his character, he chose to call things by their name, not sugarcoat tragedies: "I'm in palliative care; you know what that means." That enormous school of life and profession in which we trained is part of a legacy that death cannot extinguish . As always when I think of the days of that editorial team, I am grateful for the first-class trip and repeat these verses of his like a mantra: "This is because of that. And perhaps because of that, a diffuse storm still hisses / among the underground pipes."