It has been a worldwide victory for poetry. In a century in which the winners are always those who hit hardest, who take the most votes, who score the most goals, the richest men and the most beautiful women, the commotion caused all over the world by the death of a man who has done nothing but sing to love is encouraging. It’s the apotheosis of those who never win.
For forty-eight hours no one has talked of anything else. Three generations—ours, that of our children, and that of our oldest grandchildren—have for the first time the impression of living through a collective catastrophe, and for the same reasons. The reporters on television asked an eighty-year-old woman in the street what her favorite John Lennon song was, and she answered, as if she were fifteen, “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” A boy who was watching the program said, “I like them all.” My younger son asked a girl his age why John Lennon was killed, and she answered, as if she were eighty years old, “Because the world is ending.”
That’s how it is: the only nostalgia you can have in common with your children are Beatles songs. Each for different reasons, of course, and with different pain, as always happens with poetry. I’ll never forget that memorable day in 1963, in Mexico, when I heard a Beatles song for the first time in a conscious way. From that moment on I discovered they had infested the whole world. In our house in San Ángel, where we barely had room to sit down, there were only two records: a selection of Debussy preludes and the Beatles’ first album. In every city, at all hours, crowds were heard shouting, “Help, I need somebody.” Someone brought up the old idea that all the best musicians began with the second letter of the catalog: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Bartók. Someone said with the same silliness as usual that Mozart had to be included. Álvaro Mutis, who like all great erudites of music has a weakness for symphonic bricks, insisted on including Bruckner. Someone else tried to repeat again the battle in favor of Berlioz, which I waged on the opposing side because I couldn’t overcome the superstition that he’s a oiseau de malheur, that is, a bad-omen bird. Whereas I insisted, ever since then, on including the Beatles. Emilio García Riera, who agreed with me and is a film critic and historian of almost supernatural lucidity, especially after the second drink, said to me back in those days, “I listen to the Beatles with a certain amount of fear, because I think I’m going to remember them for the rest of my life.” It’s the only case I know of someone clairvoyant enough to realize he’s witnessing the birth of his own nostalgias. We used to walk into Carlos Fuentes’s study and find him typing with a single finger of one hand, as he always has, in the middle of a dense cloud of smoke and isolated from the horrors of the universe by the music of the Beatles at full blast.
As always happens, we thought we were very far from being happy then, and now we think the opposite. It’s the trick of nostalgia, removing bitter moments from their place and painting them another color, and putting them back where they no longer hurt. As in old portraits, which seem illuminated by the illusory brilliance of happiness, and where we only see with astonishment how young we were when we were young, and not only those of us who were there, but also the house and the trees in the background, and even the chairs we were sitting on. Che Guevara, talking with his men around the fire on an empty wartime night, once said that nostalgia begins with food. It’s true, but only when you’re hungry. However, it always starts with music. Actually, our personal past moves away from us starting from the moment we’re born, but we only feel it when a record ends.
This afternoon, thinking all of this while watching snow fall outside a mournful window, more than fifty years old and still not knowing very well who I am, or what the hell I’m doing here, I have the impression that the world was the same from my birth until the Beatles started to sing. Everything changed then. Men let their hair and beards grow, women learned to take their clothes off naturally, styles of dressing and loving changed, and thus the liberation of sex and of other drugs for dreaming began. They were the clamorous days of the Vietnam War and university rebellion. But, most of all, it was a tough apprenticeship of a different relationship between parents and their children, the beginning of a new dialogue that had seemed impossible for centuries.
The symbol of all this—at the front of the Beatles—was John Lennon. His absurd death leaves us a different world populated by beautiful images. In “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” one of their most beautiful songs, newspaper dogs wear looking-glass ties. In “Eleanor Rigby”—with an obstinate bass line of baroque cellos—a desolate girl is left to pick up the rice in a church where a wedding has been. “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?” is the unanswered question. Father McKenzie is also left writing sermons that no one will hear, wiping his hands as he walks from a grave, and a girl takes off her face and leaves it in a jar by the door when she goes in the house and puts it back on again when she goes out. These creatures have caused people to say that John Lennon was a surrealist, which is something said too easily of everything that seems odd, as people who don’t know how to read him tend to say of Kafka. For others, he is the visionary of a better world. Someone who let us understand that old people aren’t those of us who’ve lived for many years, but those who didn’t get on board their children’s train in time.
December 16, 1980, El País, Madrid