To understand Raimon

A couple of months ago, Raimon turned 85, and now he takes short walks through Barcelona's Raval neighborhood, an image that doesn't quite fit with the one we have of an artist who has always displayed prodigious vocal abilities on stage, those that Josep Pla immortalized with the description, "He exhales, in Valencian Catalan, a phenomenal outburst." The truth is, time marches on. Raimon jokes that he is now "a vulnerable old man, not a venerable one," and his friend, the journalist Miquel Alberola, has just published his biography. Raimon. That me that I am (Ara Llibres), which is being presented tonight at the Ateneu Barcelonès.

Apparently, everything has already been told in the singer's life: the Vespa trip on which he was born To the windThe father-son relationship with Espriu and his relationship with Annalisa, with whom he will celebrate 60 years of marriage in August, the concerts in Paris and Japan, the censorship, the achievements and the doubts; in short, the demanding trajectory of a musician and poet who has placed his non-negotiable individuality at the service of the collective.

But it is here that this biography can be considered new. Raimon. That me that I am It is a brilliantly written chronicle of a time and a country, encompassing the disappointment caused by insufficient political change and the bewilderment at a society hijacked by consumerism. Indeed, the passage of time provides the necessary perspective for present and future generations to understand the fear and violence that fueled that ancient and very long silence from which Raimon, and from which we all came, emerged, and the inner strength and talent that a young man must have possessed who, by consistently saying no, helped restore a hidden prestige to a forbidden language.