Roberto Fontanarrosa, everywhere

Picture by sergio_serrano, from Flickr

By now, if you live in Argentina and you've talked to someone in the street, watched TV, or read the papers, and even possibly if you live abroad, you already know that Roberto El Negro Fontanarrosa died yesterday. Everybody's talking about it; a biography, a lecture on his life and career, a summary of the coverage of his funeral, would all be repetitive, superfluous, too serious — something he'd laugh at and brush aside with one of his typical, feignedly serious self-deprecating comments.

He spent the last months, so they say, trying to make his friends comfortable with the fact that he had a terrible illness and he was going to die, slowly; it's quite possible that he waited for this peacefully, with neither impatience nor resignation. Many say that he's now making God laugh His ass off. I don't know what he believed, and I don't see any logic in assuming there's a God who can just matter-of-factly give a man ALS, and then grant him that his funeral ends on a sunny, radiant Friend's Day, surrounded by hundreds who loved him. Maybe that (a warm winter morning with friends) is as close as we can come to define something as "God".