Recently, I started thinking about those couples that just work, you know? The ones that last decades without drama, without scandals. Leonor Viale and Mauro were like that. They met when they were almost teenagers, looked at each other in a movie theater, and basically never separated. Almost 50 years together. Just like that, without fuss.

Mauro was Mauricio Goldfarb on his ID, but everyone knew him as that journalist who became a familiar voice on Argentine television. When he met her, Leonor, he was just a credit agent with big dreams. But the guy had something: that presence, that way of speaking that captivated you intellectually. He told her he would be famous, and she believed him. It was that simple.

What fascinates me about Leonor Viale is that she was never in the background, even though Mauro was the one on TV. While he built his career, she supported the family. They raised two children: Ivana, who pursued psychology like her mother, and Jonatan, who ended up being a journalist like his father, working at LN+ and Radio Rivadavia. The family functioned like a well-oiled machine.

Mauro was an obsessed worker, almost never at home. Leonor was the one who accompanied the kids to their studies, who waited for that husband who only took 15 days of vacation a year. She never complained about that. Over time, when the children grew up, she deepened her passion for psychology, for Freud. And the interesting thing is that Mauro invited her to his TV shows to talk about psychological topics. You saw them together on screen and noticed they were proud of each other.

In their later years, when they no longer had the responsibility of raising children, Mauro and Leonor traveled when they could, spoiled their grandchildren, enjoyed that apartment in Palermo where they lived. Leonor kept insisting that he take care of his health, that he slow down. But Mauro kept working as always.

In 2021, everything changed. Mauro contracted COVID. Leonor was isolated as a close contact, watching from a distance as her husband went through intensive care. For a moment, he seemed to improve; they took him out of intensive care. But then he had a cardiac arrest. He passed away.

The hardest part was that Leonor couldn’t be there with him at the funeral. Only her son Jonatan and his wife could go to the La Tablada cemetery. When they told her the news, her world collapsed. More than 50 years sharing life with someone, and suddenly you’re alone.

It was a love story without complications, so perfect that it would almost seem boring for a novel. But that’s sometimes what’s real: two people who choose each other at 18 and never let go. Leonor Viale and Mauro built something that lasted, that mattered, that left a mark. That’s no small thing.