Sometimes, of friends, acquaintances, passengers on a train or on the same ship, and at any time, I receive an appellation that causes me a certain surprise and, why not say it, also a pleasant sensation: historian.
That frequently happens to me for recently, for my last books about Balboa and the South Sea, Hernán Cortés, or half of the world that was from Spain, a recent trilogy for whose elaboration, without haste, I enjoyed a lot.
The truth is that some of those historical sensations come to me from ancient, from the French Lyceum of Madrid, where I studied the best baccalaureate in the 40s of the last century. There, Prof. Miguel Kreisler was a teacher for all his students, for his dedication to always seek the balance point between the various opinions on historical facts still discussed.
Kreisler explained to us the story almost as a novel, with episodes such as the paintings of Altamira, the arrival of the Romans, the Arab incursion with all the subsequent reconquest, and the Renaissance from the Catholic Monarchs with the Spanish mission in universal history: the almost incredible action in America, its conquest, the development of the viceroy pseudoindigenismo, black legend, etc.
I like some to call me historian, although I do not think it is, because I should have specialized much more, although it is true that the historical background clarifies me almost everything. In that sense, the history of Spain has a cursed period, from the Napoleonic invasion to the 1898 disaster, when the latest overseas provinces are lost.
Do not hesitate. They can call me historian, even if it is not. But I would like to become.