Maybe tonight everyone will light a candle for their dead, but I want to light a whole bonfire with a memory: my father, being very red than before, had as a friend a man who was presumed to be the most Francoist in Zaragoza. They esteemed themselves above their means. That man died years later of a heart attack. I’m not saying the red friends and hippie son were the cause, but they gave him trouble.
My father had a small photography workshop at home. The world of liquids, times and lights of that space fascinated me. I remember his face and his magical hands in that alchemy. Sometimes the photos were secret, but I could see them, and so, in my early childhood, I was able to document firsthand what a hippie party was like in the late seventies in what we thought was so backward in Spain. This isn’t that it was modern, it’s that it was directly America. There was a total gap between the black and white of television and what people experienced, felt and, in some cases, even did. Both my father and his friend were intelligent men and they knew it. For my father it was a hope; for that man, a continuous despair.
I once asked him how he could be such a friend to someone so cool. He stared hard at me and said, “I hope when you get older you will know better who you can be friends with and who you can’t.” Growing up is controlling what others have said. Over time I have found that I can be perfectly friends with some people who are the opposite of what I think, but I wouldn’t have a single drink with some rabble bothering me until I agree on something. My father, among other things, was my vaccine against sectarianism. It is sad to see so many people without vaccinations.
