The first time in my life as a journalist, now I’m sixty years old, that I felt like a special envoy was when the director of my then newspaper, EL DÍA de Tenerife, sent me to interview Julio Caro Baroja, nephew of the great novelist , anthropologist, who had gone to the island to give a lecture in the island’s capital. It was in 1968, when the world was preparing for the changes that also affected Spain. Suddenly the Beatles and the miniskirt came along, the well-to-do bourgeoisie began to see their schemes broken and in Mexico, London and France there were movements and signs that left the old order that came from wars and dictatorships unrecognizable.
It was in this climate that Don Julio came to Tenerife. I was a clumsy boy, who dressed as he wanted, also because at home there was no room for more. I don’t know where my mother got the money for new clothes, but the truth is that, when she realized that this assignment, an important interview with a person who must have seemed exceptional to her, required clothing to match the circumstances.
It was a navy blue double-breasted jacket over a white shirt. She even bought a tie. With all these recent news, I appeared at the interview, which was to be held at the hotel where Don Julio was staying, the Hotel Mencey in Santa Cruz. I was going to ask Baroja’s wise nephew about witchcraft in history, following the book he had just published. I prepared it with the exaggerated zeal with which I now also prepare interviews, whatever their nature, and apparently the editor of the newspaper, Ernesto Salcedo, one of the best I have ever met in my life, was satisfied, because he continued to commission other , until one day I left the newspaper forever and joined the newspaper El País. Forty-six years later, as things are, I have returned to El Día, which is part of the Prensa Ibérica group, which to my honor has welcomed me on this downhill (or uphill) path of dangerous seniority.
During all these years I have been sent special (or similar) to many events and many characters. This week you will be able to read in these newspapers (those who are kind enough to publish it) a long chronicle of my travels in search of Gabriel García Márquez, forty years after the boy from Aracataca received the Nobel Prize in Stockholm (on a day like yesterday). of Literature. There, if you read it, you will see what was involved in that friendly persecution of one of the great writers of the 20th century, now recounted with the melancholy that is de rigueur, since time fills the pen with longing.
In recent times, I complete my first year at Prensa Ibérica in January, I have received many orders to be sent special to places, near or far, where I have dealt with facts, places or characters. Almost always, Jacobo de Arce, editor-in-chief of Culture of El Periódico de España, has commissioned me with those matters that have made me a special envoy once again, and many of these commissions have been published in other newspapers of the same group. He must already know to what extent this task satisfies me and fills me with pride, since there is nothing better for a 74-year-old journalist and still active than fulfilling an assignment, with two and two thousand if necessary, and doing it with the illusion of the first time.
On this occasion, last Wednesday, Jacobo asked me, with the timidity with which editors-in-chief now do commissions, to take care of the concert with which Joan Manuel Serrat would begin his farewells to Madrid, before his final, definitive farewell, from the city where the Noi del Poble Sec was born, Barcelona, whom I met, with Elfidio Alonso, a thousand years ago at the door of the Hotel Brujas of the father of Julio Perezin Santa Cruz.
I prepared myself as when I went to see Don Julio Caro, with the enthusiasm of a beginner, but without the new clothes, nor the black hair, nor the recently read book on witchcraft, and also without a tie.
A few months ago Jacobo gave me two successive orders, to tell how he said goodbye in Rota to Almudena Grandes, a very dear neighbor of that extraordinary English and Andalusian place, and also to tell what happens today on that already old landing strip (and splashdown ) that England has on our south coast. Perhaps encouraged because he would not have done so badly, Jacobo wanted me to go to Seville later to also tell how the Noi del Poble Sec said goodbye there.
On that occasion, he told me to deal with the context, to inquire into the artist’s state of mind, in the run-up to the concert, in what he or others close to him said behind the scenes. I did it; I had a great time as a journalist, I investigated what I could, and I kept doing it while Serrat took the stage.
The result was a work that I wrote while I was returning to Madrid on an Ave, with the prospect of another work in Madrid. The editors-in-chief are not usually (they are not, let there be no excuses) very prone to give you a grade for the work delivered, but I myself should not give myself another grade than the one that contrasted with those who did not meet the exam: not presented. I had introduced myself, and I was happy with the material delivered. Perhaps because he also felt that he could repeat the experience, now Jacobo asked me to go this Wednesday night to cover the new farewell, this time in Madrid, for Joan Manuel Serrat.
I already said how I was dressed. I took notes like an intern, halfway through the concert I kept listening to it while typing what I was hearing, and little by little I got involved in the spirit of the concert to apply it to the feeling of writing. A security guard arrived at the height of my eagerness to find out if I had permission to type on a computer at the bar. I don’t know what I told him, but I know that I showed him my journalist’s card.
I sent the chronicle happy for what I had heard: the best Serrat concert, the most beautiful, the most heartfelt, that I ever heard him. You will give my chronicle a note, if you decide to read it in this or in other newspapers of the group, or in the ephemeral websites that have made paper a matter of longing. There were imperfections in that chronicle, now as old as this morning’s newspaper, due to my haste (and the urgency of the delivery, if I may be allowed this unnecessary sympathetic apology), so I asked my boss Nekane Chamorro to reinstate, for For example, Serrat’s true age as well as the color of his shirt, which was not black but brown.
Sometimes I sleep badly thinking about how many mistakes I made. It happens to me with these articles, as soon as I deliver them, and then I call one of my senior bosses, Orsini, to restore as much as possible the reliability that he feints with me. But this time I slept well, past dawn. It must have been because of the melatonin. I offer to Don Julio Caro, and to my mother, and to Salcedo, so many years later, this new happy moment as a special envoy to a character like the one I found entering the Hotel Brujas and whom I now regard as an admired friend and as a of the voices, and hearts, dearest to my life.
