The year of retirement has been fruitful for Joaquín Sabina.
Also for what was convenient almost by prescription: to stay at home.
To rest ... Especially after that fall into the void that left his faithful in suspense after his last performance at the WiZink Center in Madrid on February 12, 2020.
It was a spectacular absurdity.
Suddenly he was seen approaching the din, like a wounded bird losing its balance towards the cliff.
In this case, the distance that separated the stage from the ground measured 1.70 meters before the astonished gaze and the shock of the person accompanying him before the public: Joan Manuel Serrat.
The stumble cost him trauma to his left shoulder and a clot for which he was operated on in the decline of the old normality.
It was almost a metaphorical warning and with a tormenting aspect of what was coming to all of us.
"From the fall, despite two operations, I recovered, I would say even religiously, quickly and well," he says now.
This is how he finished off the last tour of Spain and Latin America that he had done again with success and full to overflowing with Serrat.
It was all good, except until that day.
Very distant in vibrations from the previous one that he faced alone, also injured, and that the singer ended up as he could with some cancellations.
He suffered it short of strength, with his collaborators holding their breath on each scale, but sheltered by a parish that idolizes him and forgives him everything: that he sing and not sing, that he shouts on stage or remains silent, as happened to him. also in Madrid in 2018.
Sabina is not a man of agendas or obligations.
Anything that smells like duty repels you.
It activates in your mind and your will a conscious and unconscious defense mechanism that rebels you against appointments, schedules, commitments and obligations.
He is happy in his house in Tirso de Molina, in the heart of Madrid, where neighbors often doubt that he lives because it is difficult to find him in the surroundings.
From time to time he gives signals, like this last year, when he went out on the balcony in April to applaud the toilets, perched at the Apolo theater, right in front of his house.
It looked good.
The disease has not touched him, as could also be seen recently in Dani Rovira's program on La 1 de TVE.
Another good proof of his superhero genetics, the one that saves him and reconfigures him again, as happened after the 2001 stroke and the depression that followed.
But there was then his wife, Jimena Coronado, already at the beginning of a relationship that led them to marry in June 2020, with Serrat himself as godfather and with his daughters, Carmela and Rocío, in the Pradillo street court, plus a bunch of good friends.
Family and friends are pillars of this cat who has stopped jumping on rooftops.
Retired among his books - he is a bibliophile and a collector of old editions -, in his living room with musical and bullfighting relics and his cigars, Sabina is still inspired, although he is also willing to sneak out of the confinement whenever he wants and without restrictions: " Leaving home for me is hugging friends and going back to bars.
I dream about it, ”he says.
Meanwhile he composes and writes poems.
He has created, he claims, more of the latter than of the former, if there is a difference in his case.
It even specifies: "More sonnets than songs, they have come out," says the author of
One Hundred Flying Fourteen
, published by Visor.
The music is coming out, too: "I even have a text design for a record," he says.
And the title?
None thought, for now.
What is clear is that it will be produced by Leiva and that several lyrics have been made in collaboration with the poet Benjamin Prado: a formula for success, as happened with his last album,
I deny everything,
Leiva's case and a large part of his songs for 20 years,
Prado
case
.
The new material will make up that future album that, as soon as possible, will give for a new tour.
Proof that the injuries of the previous two have not made a dent in the artist's morale and neither in his desire: "I'm looking forward to returning to the stage, touring Spain and Latin America."
Something natural in those who usually tell their friends this year that songs are made to be sung to someone.
They don't make sense if they don't, Sabina rightly believes.
Hopefully we can see him soon, reaching for the bowler hat to greet the respectable, with the guitar around his neck, with the echo of the broken voice echoing in our ears.