Joan Manuel Serrat says that his exile in Mexico, due to the persecution of the Franco regime, was a “time of poverty.” “In the sense that I didn’t write practically anything, I didn’t write songs,” he specifies. They were times of loneliness, in which he had to cling to “holds,” he says, like those he found among the Spanish exiles in Mexico. “People who helped me understand things much more and learn,” he told this newspaper minutes after the Ateneo Español de México, the institution that keeps the history of the Spanish exile alive, named him as an honorary member this Monday. “It is the memory of sadness, of time lost, but also of time fought,” says the Catalan.
A plaque with his name now appears alongside other distinguished members of this institution. Monday morning was an intimate and moving ceremony. It has been quite a gesture by the singer-songwriter to open a space in his agenda to receive this tribute after the hustle and bustle of the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL), where he shone as one of the most anticipated and applauded figures of the literary meeting. In the Guadalajara city he also received his Ph.D. Honoris Causa from the University of Guadalajara (UdeG) and on Monday he remembered some of the words he spoke during that other tribute: “May the Mexico of books beat the Mexico of weapons and violence.”
He said it while looking at the balcony of the beautiful Porfirian house that houses the Ateneo headquarters in Mexico City. There were two groups of children’s choirs, to whom Serrat winked: “I invite you to take advantage of the opportunity, take advantage of the time and work to build a future for yourself as good citizens, of which we are always so in need,” he told them. These children, students from the Luis Vives Institute and the Madrid School, entertained the artist by singing songs from the Spanish civil war, such as the one that recalls: “If you want to write to me, you already know my whereabouts: on the battle front, first line of fire.” Because the memory of the war was present, with its longing for victory and the pain of defeat. “If Spain had gone directly from 36 to 37 without war, we would have had a different future, very different from the one we had,” Serrat told this newspaper.
It was Alonso Leal, treasurer and legal member of the Ateneo, who recalled during the tribute what Serrat’s music represented for the Spanish exile. “It was an indispensable part of our sentimental education,” he said. “His date of birth indicates that Juan Manuel Serrat was born and grew up during the Franco dictatorship, an experience that united him and continues to unite him with the Spanish republican exile,” he added and as an example of that alliance, he recalled that in 1975 the Mexican Government publicly condemned the last executions of the Franco dictatorship and took a series of economic measures against the regime. “Serrat, who was in Mexico, condemned these events and expressed solidarity with President Luis Echeverría. This cost him a year of exile in our country due to the search and arrest order issued by the Franco Government against him,” Leal recalled and added: “Thus, Serrat tasted the bitter bread of exile, as had happened to his countrymen 36 years before, and he himself confessed that that was a very hard period of his life, since he lived with “the permanent concern of not knowing if at some point he would be able to return to his land.”
A shared experience, that of exile, which Mariángeles Comesaña, vice president of the Ateneo, also recalled. “I am with a friend who, since adolescence, gave me and my entire generation the privilege of finding a place to accommodate our dreams,” he said. “Those little things, how big they are in the waves of your music, Juan Manuel. In the plains of loneliness, that which appears at 15 and 16 years old, when we were young we turned to your voice cradling the word in the time of Antonio Machado, expressing the inevitable future that we all share. That is why it is so natural that Machado’s verses find their other voice in your melodies. They are melodies that come from the deepest verse to blur into the air like soap bubbles. Without a doubt you make the word a song and the song a word,” he told him.
Serrat took the opportunity to walk through the corridors and spacious rooms of this neoclassical-style mansion. He saw his plaque on the wall of honor and was able to turn the pages of the book that keeps the memory of the ships loaded with Spaniards that landed in Veracruz. Then he spoke to this newspaper.
Ask. In an exercise of imagination, if you now had time to talk to any of those exiles, what would you say to them about the homeland lost and the homeland found.
Answer. I was here living among them and I knew exactly the bitterness of the lost homeland and not only the homeland, but the landscape, the perfume, that is, the loss is total in an exile that does not know when it will return. But it is even deeper when the exile is perpetuated over the years and the exile’s need to know that the provisional homeland is not simply a provisional homeland, but is the homeland of their present with all its consequences.
Q. What did exile mean to you?
R. It is a time of poverty, in the sense that I wrote practically nothing, I did not write songs. I made an effort to remain active so as not to lose the grip that I might have left. And I was also lucky to find some support from people from the Spanish exile in Mexico, with whom I had great contact. The Taibo family and everything that people like Buñuel, like (the writer Juan) Rejano, like (the screenwriter Luis) Alcoriza, represented, in short, many people who helped me understand things much more and learn.
Q. What does this plaque mean to you?
R. All the plaques here are the result of sadness, losses, lost time, but also, in some way, fought.
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