See you later, Joan Manuel

And now that Serrat has left the stage, after having spread that “necessary desire for freedom” throughout the world, even in Cuba, when he mistakenly believed that the Castros were liberators, without realizing that because they were totalitarians they were worse dictators than Franco. , I want to bring to journalism, I mean to politics, what I wrote in literature a whopping more than twenty years ago.

I put those words in the voice of Enrique D´ Arcos, protagonist of the novel Buccaneers, which the censors of the political police branded as “the novel of Cause One” and, what I say, intends to be a novel of all the causes and channels and not of a mere criminal file. That scene from an internal monologue, where seabirds were also participants in “the diversity of languages” by Joan Manuel Serrat says:

“Fuck it! Being oneself and with dignity does not imply that everything necessarily has to be good and pure, Enrique D’Arcos meditated, and he heard his voice mixed with the howl of the wind between the ropes when he said: Dogmas, nothing more. Identity and dignity, that’s enough. And he went to the kitchen to get a glass of rum, and with the glass in his hand he went up to the bridge, where along with the navigation instruments he had the player installed… I’m tired of being fed up, I’m tired of asking the world why and wherefore, the compass rose will help me and from now on you’re going to see me wander, between the sky and the sea, wander… The yacht was anchored to windward of a cayuelo where hundreds of white herons and dozens of paddle-billed ibis perched, and, when the Catalan’s voice filled the bay, the birds took flight, but as if they wanted to listen to the song, they remained hovering over the ship. Like a comet of reed and paper I will go after a cloud to be faithful, to the mountains, the rivers, the sun and the sea, to them who taught me the verb to love, I am a wood pigeon… Taciturn, still with the glass of rum in his hand, Enrique went to sit in the stern. He looked at the birds flying above him and smiled, thinking how much Joan Manuel would have liked to see his one and only concert, which had the sea and the mountains as its stage, losing the sight of the green mangrove in the blue of the sky, and his audience. , the white herons and the pink ibises, fluttering above the yacht, bound by the magic of song in their air boxes… Leave me alone, I don’t feel like a foreigner anywhere, where there is light and wine I have my home… Serrat always revived Enrique D’Arcos, and for that reason, wherever he went he carried his songs, which gave him strength, like any of the objects that exerted mysterious force on him.”