Death of Octavio Alberola (1928-2025)

Published on 24 July 2025 by Agustín Comotto (his biographer)

You are 80, 85, 90 years old. These days you gaze out from the top of the building that you have spent years erecting. There are no more floors to be added because you have already added on the roof. So you sit there looking at the skyline made up of buildings such as your own that are being or have been erected all around you.

Some of the buildings in this massive city of mankind, the majority of them, are unfamiliar to you. But of course you know some of the builders. They are like-minded. From your roof you note that some buildings have no one sitting in them now, sitting as you are, looking all around you. They are empty: no one there because whoever built the building is not around any more. Some of them are beautiful, with aesthetic features of unparalleled originality, or the prodigious structural design skills of a Leonardo. Which is what remains of whoever lived there.

Some building are low-set, too low-set and have no roofs, or half-constructed roofs because, tragically, the builder ran out of time. Others look like a shell hit them and left them prematurely in ruins. Those are the ones demolished by outside forces.

Life is finite and when you build a building as tall as Octavio’s, it is not unusual to see the like-minded architects leaving and leaving the building empty.

Today it is Octavio Alberola’s turn to leave the building. A weary Octavio told me something like ten days ago that he would be checking out of life. 

We said our farewells and he referred to one of our interminable conversations about the universe. Now, he said, it is time for me to return matter to whence it came. That, without further ado, was the leave-taking of the last historic anarchist of my acquaintance.

Octavio Alberola was a different sort, with a unique turn of mind and a commendable optimism about the human race. I had the good fortune to know him and write his biography. We talked about unimaginable aspects of his life and his humanity: because Octavio was an inquiring mind fascinated by a range of topics such as quantum physics, the absolute logic of the universe and human beings or justice and equality between neighbours. That notion brought him into the fight for justice as a life-long anarchist. In Mexico, the country that took in his family as exiles in the wake of the war in Spain, as well as in France, the country in which he spent almost his entire life.

I shall keep this short because his biography is massive. Just let me say that Octavio Alberola – one of the most extraordinary people I have ever known – has left us and left behind a massive building replete with knowledge and ways of understanding this complicated species that is humanity.
Today, the world is a little emptier.

And the universe, Octavio, a little fuller.

[Photo added by KSL: Octavio Alberola and Stuart Christie, on the Paris Metro, 1979.]

Translated by: Paul Sharkey.