We will have to blame or rather thank 'Penelope' for the miracle to happen. Joan Manuel Serrat returned to singing on stage, after saying goodbye to the public on December 23. For two minutes he returned from retirement to enjoy and make people enjoy.
“Singing is a wonderful vice. I am lucky to have made a vice my job,” she confessed. “If I had finished my degree in Biology, which I abandoned to sing, I don't know what my life would have been like,” he added.
Serrat was the protagonist this Wednesday night of an almost two-hour conversation at Farkas Hall, a candy theater at Harvard University, in which he reviewed his artistic and personal life with the professors of this institution Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza, Tamar Herzog, Mariano Siskind and Alejandra Varela.
“He is a man with ideas and knows what to say,” said Aina, one of those attending the event. To conclude the session, the organizers (the Cervantes Institute Observatory at Harvard and the department of Romance Languages and Literature of this university) assembled a quartet composed of members of the jazz band.
They started with “Mediterráneo”. The one from Poble Sec lost his feet and drummed with his hand on the chair or on his own leg. When he finished he got up and came quickly to congratulate the quartet. But this was not the end. The singer Gabriel Ortiz, from Texas and also a member of Mariachi Veritas (truth in Latin, Harvard motto) where he plays the trumpet, reported that they had two other songs and encouraged the audience to collaborate.
In 'Those Little Things', the author was seen excited listening to his own creation. And then 'Penelope' emerged, another anthem. When he heard the first stanzas, the guest could not resist. He got up, grabbed the microphone and encouraged Ortiz to do a duet. A real madness in the room.
“What an honor to sing his songs and what a privilege and what a gift to sing with him,” said an emotional Ortiz.
It was the culmination of a night in which the artist who has made it seem that Antonio Machado or Miguel Hernández wrote his poems for him to sing, as described by Marta Mateo, director of the Observatory, put the audience in his pocket with its proximity and that ability to be one more.
Shortly before the musical performance, one of the attendees, Carlos Ponce, also a teacher and so in love with Serrat's music that he arranged for Venezuela to grant him a prize so he could meet him and shake his hand, asked the question of someone who feels like an orphan. "You have the habit of singing, but what are those of us who have the habit of listening to you going to do?"
“Let's not put ourselves in the role of the other. Don't think it wasn't difficult for me to make the decision to leave the stage. I confess that I had no intention of adopting a radical attitude, but something had to be said and done. I considered that stage to be over,” she clarified.
Then he reflected that he is an optimist. “I'm about to turn 80 and I don't have the feeling of being an old man. I'm fine, I eat well, I sleep well, but it is difficult to maintain the pace of work that this job requires. I could have continued, but out of self-respect you have to make a decision when you are still well and people are following you. It’s that simple,” he continued.
“I notice a certain nostalgia for the future, not for the past. I see that everything flows and circulates in a different way, I look around and it makes me feel comforted with the decision and, furthermore, if I had continued today I would not be able to be here,” he joked, laughing.
He got laughs from the beginning. “You're going to excuse me for the cough,” he excused himself as soon as he sat down, surrounded by the teachers, as if he were still active, as if his subconscious was betraying him. “The cough is the announcement that something tremendous is going to happen, a cold, a cold, ridiculous things but they put the singer off his game,” he lamented.
“I have a cough drop,” one of the attendees raised her voice. “Are you sure it's good?” he replied. Another spectator offered him another, different one. “This one seems less suspicious to me,” he joked and accepted it. The first laughs.
He talked about his origins, about that radio that he listened to as a child at home, which opened his eyes to the world and which influenced his formation so much. He emphasized the three key elements in his pedagogy: his parents, who with a glance already conveyed to him what he was doing well, school and the street, “the most fun.”
In his home there was no history of anyone having dedicated himself to music. Well, with one exception. “Cousin Gloria participated in a sash contest”
-Won?
-No, but everyone in the family was prone to singing.
Serrat acknowledged that he continues singing, in private. He remembered that he sang a lot at night, at open bar gatherings. He assured that he was not one of those who beat up his friends, that if he invited them to his house he would not play them the latest album, "not even I listened to them, only to make concert repertoires," he said.
He maintained that Raimon, Paco Ibañez or Quico Pi de la Serra were his references when it came to writing committed songs, but without losing his compass. “I never wanted to be someone else, I never felt bad inside my container, I never stopped being Juanito for friends on the street and I never became Mr. Serrat, because that was my father,” he clarified. “I have never felt like a slave to the popular character or person,” he insisted.
Although he clarified: “As García Marquez said, Gabo, one is not what one has lived but what one believes one has lived. “We are what we believe we are and not what we really are,” he added.
He regretted the loss of democratic quality and advised working every day towards that goal and not abandoning everything in the hands of the leaders. He reiterated the need to preserve historical memory because “falsifying and hiding it does not help the future have a solid basis for change.”
When asked about the word charnego, Serrat replied that it had been used as an insult, a term to mark the immigrant and “I have always seen it as a great merit.” Adapted to today, the equivalent term today would be mestizaje, where “it is shown that the opposite goes in the opposite direction to the human species,” a phrase that provoked a standing ovation.
“As a child I had a problem,” he admitted. “My mother spoke Spanish and I asked her where he was from,” she recalled.
-From the same place as you.
-I am from here.
-I am from where my children eat.
In this way he reproduced that dialogue. “I have always remembered this and over time I understood it. “I very much agree with that definition,” she added.
There was football, of course. “When I was born, I am convinced that the nun who gave me to my father did not tell him if she was a boy or a girl, but rather she told him that she had had a child from Barça,” he responded to the joy of the room. And he thanked Ronaldinho because, thanks to the Brazilian, his wife, Candela, who was in the room, stopped passing behind him when he watched football, murmuring how she could see that and, from then on, she sat next to him. side.
“Messi and Serrat, presidents of the galaxy,” someone in the front rows proclaimed. “But let Messi speak,” the singer-songwriter added. And it was time for 'Penelope'.
