Twenty Years

La Voz de Galicia – January 18, 2019 →

The cup fell to the floor and broke. It shattered into a thousand pieces without even giving me the chance to mend it. I remember perfectly when and where I bought it: I was with my mother in Barcelona, at the Plaza del Pi. We bought a cup, a plate, a knife, a fork, a spoon, and a glass. It was 1998, and I was studying there. Now, only the glass and the cup remained. And today, on the same day I leave my mother’s house, weeping as always, to begin a long stint of touring, the cup breaks.

When we bought it, we had nothing but the hope that Barcelona would bring us a life experience, and if all went well, an advanced music degree. I remember the lodgings where we stayed while we were looking for an apartment, and I remember the moment we agreed to rent a room in the apartment on the Barrio de Gràcia where I lived for some time with the approximately 70-year-old Sra. Luisa, and Xerach, who was eighteen years old, just like me. Among other things, I had to bring my own dishes.

Today, when the cup broke, I thought that twenty years together had been enough. Enough of keeping every thing as if it were sacred. But suddenly, the dormant memory of my mother taking the money out of her pocket and adding in her head the price of those six essential articles made me cry even more.

Twenty years are nothing. And they are everything. Twenty years ago, the long-gone Fonomusic was preparing to launch my first album. Twenty years ago Tolemia was released. And that cup was, in a way, a witness to a radical life change that I had no time to absorb. Twenty years that taught me to learn that less is more, that the most sincere and the most beautiful is the love of the local, the small, that which makes one universal.