What is the glory? That thousands of people clarify you and after the concert your fans assail you, break your shirt and take away the souvenir buttons? Perhaps the glory is that in any trendy restaurant there is always a table for you even if you show up without warning, or that when you ask for the bill in a bar the waiter tells you that the unknown lord who is in the other has paid for it corner of the bar. The philosopher Francesc Pujols said that the Catalans lived feeding this dream: "There will come a day when the Catalans, wherever we go around the world, we will have everything paid." In Joan Manuel Serrat this dream is often fulfilled and he also naturally accepts that a marriage of a certain age comes to congratulate him and the woman confesses that she has fathered her children by listening to her songs in the bedroom on a Saturday night. How many Penelope don't owe their name to Serrat's song? At this point he is still surprised that so far no one has asked him for damages.
Yesterday Joan Manuel Serrat was invested Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Zaragoza. His maternal family has its roots in Belchite, an Aragonese town that was reduced to rubble by the alternative hatred of both sides of the Civil War. This academic recognition comes to return the artist to the origin of half of his ancestors, so that it can also happen that the glory is found within that spun egg cap imposed on Serrat's head for his merits, among others, that of his moral rebellion, tenacious, committed, put to the test in very difficult moments, which he has made compatible with the joy of living.
MORE INFORMATION
Serrat and Sabina fill the Sant Jordi with excitement and messing
Serrat represents that transversal catalanity, which, beyond Wifredo el Velloso and other stories, feeds on that mysterious beat that gives the land in which one was born. Indeed, the roots constitute the identity of a person as long as they are not like those of a pumpkin with no more horizon than the bench where it is raised. I have an unforgettable memory of a summer night in which his song Paraules d'amor sounded under the stars on the seashore and I heard it from a fishing boat full of people of different races. That voice of Joan Manuel Serrat implied that there was a universal homeland to which those words of love pronounced in an excellent language, debtor of Latin. The Mediterranean may be a dirty sea today, but the one who sings Serrat is that sea whose thousands of drowned people go down to the bottom of the abyss where there are Greek and Roman gods also shipwrecked alongside amphorae that transported oil and wine between various cultures, is the sea who has taught its inhabitants the moral of small pleasures, to move between madness and good sense. In this case, being Catalan is to have been born in the Poble Sec of Barcelona and breathe the air that arrives from Greece and Italy against the policy of the botiguer de vetes i fils and the tortel on Sunday after Mass of twelve. Serrat is a Catalan from Madrid, from Buenos Aires, from Mexico, from Santiago de Chile, and also from any Mahón tavern with a glass of wine in his hand.
That summer night Serrat's song took you to the universal homeland of adolescence, where was that girl whose name you no longer remember, who heard your first words of love, simple and tender; Who has not happened? You were 15 years old; you loved her, she loved you too; You don't know what happened to her, where she will be, you lost her and you won't find her again. It could be from anywhere and you still carry it together with the first tremors of the flesh.
While Sabina has remained in repair pits of his explosion engine after the accident of the last concert in which, dazzled by the spotlights, for not stepping on a cable he fell into the pit, Serrat receives the recognition of doctor, but the air will remain image for the story taking his partner from the stage of the Wizink Center in a wheelchair to apologize. One day Rafael Azcona told them: “You have achieved everything, come on, leave it now”. How will Sabina leave him if he is still unbeaten after having closed so many dawns pissing on the foamy lemon of so many urinals; if Joan Manuel Serrat has survived the Mediterranean and keeps intact the melancholy of those trams that transported overdue people to the beaches on Sundays and returned to the city only defeated by the sun, with salty lips and burned skin, the forgotten swimsuit behind the reeds, with the smell of pitch that gave off the nets of the fishermen lying on the docks where the cats slept. Doesn't Serrat deserve his freedom, wherever he goes, to be invited to a shrimp ration and then do it, if it is done, Doctor Honoris Causa?
