Suspending his trajectory from the privacy, despite the fact that the auditorium of the Farkas Hall of the University of Harvard was full, Joan Manuel Serrat remembered a sentence of Oscar Bonavena, Ringo, the Argentine boxer (actor and singer) who was murdered in Reno (Nevada) by a hitman of Sicilian mobster Joe Conforte in 1976.
"Experience is a gift you get when you're already bald", said the Boy from Poble Sec. He will always be a boy, because he is part of the collective memory. "What Ringo said is still true," he added.
Serrat, musician, writer and singer who, until December 23, the date of his withdrawal from the stage, made his way with poets such as Antonio Machado and Miguel Hernández, said more phrases during the evening of Wednesday evening in one of the emporiums of the wisdom to explain himself, the artist and the person, and deliver a master lesson on combs, excuse me, experience.
Gabo, his friend Gabriel García Márquez, recalled: "We are not what we have lived, but what we think has lived. We are what we think we are and not what we really are." Or the Peruvian Julio Ramón Ribeyro, who read the theory of the other, that "we all have a double who is in another part of the world". But he made a nuance of his own harvest. "I've never wanted to be someone else, I've never felt bad inside my package, I've never stopped being Juanito to my friends on the street and I've never become Mr. Serrat, because that was mine father", he clarified. "I have never felt a slave to the character or the popular person", he insisted.
These names represent influences in his life, as did the friendships he forged in Mexico in his 1969 exile: Luis Buñuel, Juan Rejano, Juan Rulfo and Max Aub. And he did not forget his references, Raimon, Paco Ibáñez and Quico Pi de la Serra.
"I have been lucky with the people who in life allowed me to know more things", he said. There was more: the family, the school, the street. All this and more was part of the review he made of his life route with Harvard professors Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza, Tamar Herzog, Mariano Siskind and Alejandra Varela.
The academic field is no stranger to him. He has distinctions and honorary doctorates from different universities. But at the event in this prestigious center in Cambridge (Massachusetts), organized by the Observatory of the Cervantes Institute at Harvard and the department of Romance Languages and Literature of this university, there were no hats or togas. The words and humanity of an artist who has marked so many people and in so many countries prevailed, although he clarified that he does not want responsibilities.
"Singing is a wonderful vice. I am lucky to have turned a vice into my job", he revealed. "If I had finished my degree in Biology, which I abandoned to sing, I don't know what would have become of my life", he added.
He talked about his roots in this trade. Radio was largely to blame. In his house there was no history of anyone having dedicated himself to music. Well, except for one exception. "My cousin Gloria took part in a strip competition", without specifying anything else
- He won?
-No, but all of us in the family were prone to singing.
In this talk about the origins, the question arose about the word xarnego, from the day he proclaimed: "I am a xarnego". He explained that it had been used as an insult to mark the immigrant: "I have always seen it as a great merit". Adapted to today's times, the equivalent term would be miscegenation, in which "it is shown that the opposite goes in the opposite direction to the human species", they say with much applause.
"As a child I was a mess. My mother spoke Spanish and I asked her where she was from," he recalled.
– From the same place as you.
- I'm from here.
- I am from where my children eat.
"I have always remembered it, and with time I understood it. I very much agree with this definition", he replied.
He alluded to the loss of quality of democracy and the need to preserve historical memory because "falsifying and hiding it does not help the future to have a solid foundation".
There was also football. "When I was born, I am convinced that the nun who handed me over to my father did not tell him if I was a boy or a girl, but told him that she had had a boy from Barça", he joked.
A spectator asked the orphan's question. "You have the habit of singing, but what will we do who have the habit of listening to it?".
"Don't think that it wasn't difficult for me to make the decision to leave the stage. I must say that I had no intention of adopting a radical attitude, but I had to do something. I considered that this stage was over", he said. Then he reflected that he is an optimist. "I'm about to turn 80 and I don't feel like an old man. I'm fine, I eat well, I sleep well, but it's difficult to maintain the pace of work that this job requires," he said. "I notice a certain nostalgia for the future, not the past. I see that everything flows in a different way, I look around and it makes me feel comforted with the decision. In addition, if he had continued, he would not be here", he replied.
As the icing on the cake, a quartet of students and members of the jazz band performed Mediterráneo and Penélope. Penélope was the song that, for a few minutes, brought Serrat out of the retreat and made him pick up the microphone again.
