THE IMMIGRANT

I pity the poor immigrant - Who tramples through the mud
Who fills his mouth with laughing - And who builds his town with blood
Whose visions in the final end - Must shatter like the glass (Bob Dylan)

I’ve always felt like an immigrant. Even in the country I was born in. A constant sense of isolation. Society has never been very social to me.  I was already the odd one out at school. Socially. And in terms of motivation. Was always someone from a different tribe. From a family without a phone or car at home. An emigrant from the Red Village, the wrong side of the tracks. Landed between the conservatives, the dentist's son, the evil lawyer's, the daughter of a rich farmer and that of a pharmacist. Later, I became a stranger in a marriage of loneliness. Always misunderstood? I ran away, climbed into my pen, hid behind the typewriter. It was only in stringing together words that I found joy. And of course there was the warmth of my musical friends, my musical heroes. I melted during our conversations. Watched from the wings. Found a purpose in boosting their popularity, their profile in the press, adding minutes on the radio. I found success in their gold records. But it was all glitter.

Gone. To another country. Emigrant. The feeling of coming home in New Amsterdam. Walking through Williamsburg and experiencing that you've been there before in a previous life. I read all those Dutch names in the cemetery of the Trinity church on Broadway. Felt one with all those souls who also washed ashore. I felt at home in New York. Maybe because it’s a city where you can never really feel at home. In which it is so easy to get lost, to feel lonely, alone among the millions. I landed in the Big Apple more than two hundred times. And I also took off more than two hundred times, always with an empty feeling inside. Leaving something behind, but not knowing what. A gnawing feeling of homesickness that only stopped with the next touchdown at JFK, the next arrival at Newark.

For thirty years I felt more at home in the capital of the world than in the city where I was born and raised. But never really at home. I always had to return. Until I fell in love in Nashville. After thirty years of flying back and forth, I decided to sign on as an immigrant. My procedure was way more positive than that of a refugee from Colombia, a roofer from Guatemala or a baker from Mexico. I was white. Recognized as Caucasian… I spoke English. Got married to a local schoolteacher. Let’s face it, I hadn't followed the correct integration rules, didn’t apply for a green card in New York or for a fiancé visa in Tennessee. But having the time to choose the right lawyer to fill out the right forms, that was a luxury I had. A luxury that those thousands on the borders of Texas, Arizona or New Mexico definitely don’t have.

In Nashville, I was cured of my homesickness. Gone was the longing for New York. Washed away in a sea of music. Everywhere in the city people were jamming, performing for tourists and for the big money, recording in studios and being broadcast by real radio. I no longer hid behind my pen but wrote for pleasure. Gradually I left managing and promoting artists behind me and started bombarding the world with electric guitars. One of my artists came up with a groundbreaking design and we decided to go for it. Fifteen hundred guitars later, all in the hands of insanely good musicians, our venture succumbed during the waning days of the Covid epidemic. Was it that very disappointment or the almost nauseating deluge of tourists downtown that suddenly made me feel out of place? And for the second time in ten years, a flood that was rumored to only occur once in a hundred years washed up into our house. And consequently, loosened my roots.

We washed ashore in El Prat de Llobregat. Which I describe it to my American friends as at the wrong side of the tracks, just across the river where the flamingos arrive in Barcelona. We live in the neighborhood of San Cosme, a barrio of immigrants. They come from the south of Spain, from Extremadura and Andalusia. From distant South America, our Peruvians, Ecuadorians and Argentines. And more than that, gypsies and Moroccans are our neighbors. I feel at home back in this Red Village, almost the same Red Village of my youth, the Red Village of workers and travelers. I enjoy interacting with people that I don't understand. Warm up to the beauty of the big city on the other side, to all that other music we get caught up in. I love to get up every morning with the urge to write something. It helps that I'm getting more and more angry with the politics I left behind in my second homeland. It helps that I am falling more and more in love with the darling teacher I have brought with me, and for whom this emigration is only the first time. It also helps that my memories drip down on paper like autumn rain.

It feels good in San Cosme. Being understood or not understood is only a minor issue in my Spanish life. More and more I find joy in stringing words together. More and more warmth I find in the music of my old heroes and certainly in the music of new ones, whether classical, flamenco’s or local. I warm myself with conversations in three or four languages, often needing hands and feet. Sometimes I still watch from the wings. Life is a splashing stream, life is shiny, golden. Getting older is wonderful, says Kader Abdolah. I agree with him. And here in the heart of Catalonia, in the shade of the wind of Barcelona, getting older feels truly and wonderfully beautiful.