We’re not famous, but sometimes we manage to snag a touch of fame. The famita is the zero degree of fame, a misleading stage of celebrity, like the incredibly adorable baby that arrives and makes you crave another one, until you go slowly insane. The famita is recognition handed out in drips, kind intrusions, tender surveillance. People say your name, you nod, and a few words of favorable status cross your way, which always sounds like confusion. You’ve been mistaken for someone who matters to them, but hardly matters to yourself.
After a long spell of writing, I achieved the famita with YouTube videos. This makes sense if we admit that fame is photographic, and thus Hollywood’s most successful screenwriter can stroll through Madrid for five hours and be unrecognized. To be famous you have to show up regularly in people’s lives, you have to be a face, not merely a name attached to a work; an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay doesn’t cut it.
The face of fame is, notably, a face apart. Nobody is handsome or ugly if they’re famous. Fame clarifies the immediate judgment of the unknown, who can be handsome or ugly, or somewhere between. The face that seems familiar comes from a dream, from a spectacle, from a parallel world, and that amazes us, and we always judge it from an epiphany. Someone who was only in the symbolic realm suddenly shares your time and space, and that is gratifying. You want a photo; not just an autograph. You want a photo that proves you inhaled a breath of celebrity.
For what I’ve said, being a little famous is somewhat disorienting. People get confused, but it isn’t your fault. Now, every time I step out in Madrid (that is, every time I cross the river), someone greets me. This is well organized because it’s only one person per day, but it’s true that there isn’t a day in Madrid when someone doesn’t stop me and misinterpret me. They’ve liked some videos, some statements, a political tone, a joke, a company. Sometimes even a few articles. All of that accumulates in the way they look at you and in the way they excuse the intrusion. “May I greet you?”, I recall a friend asking long ago on Gran Vía to Julio Anguita. “May I greet you?”
I’ve never greeted anyone because I knew them or admired them, would have read their books or watched their films. I’d even say it seems disrespectful. A person is about their business (often talking with someone else) and you decide to burst into their life, as if you’re trying to sell them something or gain advantage. Moreover, you leave them with a sense of being watched, a watchfulness that doesn’t know how long it’s lasted. Perhaps you’ve been watching them for half an hour. Perhaps you’ve followed them down the street. And worse: perhaps many more people are following them and staring at them for half an hour.
With the famita, that’s what you think. What you’re wearing, what you’ve done (did you drop a cigarette butt, a receipt; did you leer at someone’s backside?). All of that will have been seen by the person who watched you before you offered a greeting. You stroll the streets without giving yourself importance, without wanting to be noticed, and suddenly someone has registered your number. That’s odd. You don’t wear the diligent “presentation face”; perhaps you’re sad, unattractive, nostalgic, or furious. That’s why, in big fame, Boris Izaguirre’s rule holds: “Always act as if someone is watching you.” You never know when someone is watching, if you’re a major celebrity. All the time, really.
The polite lone stranger who greets me every day I go to Madrid always does so as a fan or follower. “I’m a follower,” they say, very modern, very confusing. Or, “I follow you.” I don’t know when the term “follower” became the appropriate label for these moments, because it sounds a tad sectarian. The point is, I’ve never had someone say my name and then show displeasure with my podcast or my column. It’s always ambushes in favor.
We might say here that perhaps friendliness sometimes provokes more than dislike, that you have permission to flatter but not the official order to admonish. Yet you can imagine that, just as that man stopped to greet you because he enjoys what you do, there may be others who haven’t because they disapprove of what you do. With grim pessimism, one imagines the anti-fan—the other gentleman or lady, madam or dashing young person—who has also recognized you, and if you haven’t noticed it’s because they detest you. With the famita, moreover, if you catch someone looking at you, you no longer know why.
Sometimes I’m with my kids and these sightings happen, and a man shakes my hand in Mercadona, in the checkout line. Then my children look at me and ask: “Who was that? Why did he talk to you?” This gives great satisfaction because they’ll be able to tell it later in life, and I’ll stand out as Michael Jackson.
The morning I interviewed Santiago Segura, I then walked with him for a few hundred meters along the street. One person stopped him every five meters. They asked him for a selfie. Segura took selfies with everyone, without complaint. That out-of-control fame is incredibly impressive to witness. It’s like the guy who throws himself into the crowd at a concert and is carried along from hand to hand, never touching the ground.
The thing that intrigues me most about real fame is the selfie. No one asks for an autograph anymore; that scribble on paper must be a photo. In the photo, the follower and the celebrity stand together, close, perhaps with one arm around the other’s shoulder. It’s a trophy of the big game. But it’s also a point of contact between two worlds that don’t exist, yet we all pretend they do. The world of ordinary people and the world of the famous. They share the same bars, the same streets, the same hospital rooms, but they seem separated by a glass screen of recognition: you see the famous, and the famous see themselves. So the selfie with someone you admire helps you cross that mirror, that barrier, for a brief rush of elevation. When you show the photo, or simply recount the encounter with So-and-so, your social value rises, thanks to the, undoubtedly, “farmed aura”.
What the follower may not know is that, with the famita, you also tell it later, and your self-esteem swells for the rest of the day. Someone has mistaken you and holds you in esteem. It’s easier to work when you know someone likes you.