VictorElijah wait sitting in the Marriott Hotel on Gran Via in Madridwhere we journalists pass as if it were a window. He has just published a kind of memoir at the age of 33, “#I sustained” (Planeta), in which he tells the “story of an almost broken toy”, and in which he recounts his childhood marked by his parents and their vices, his wayward youth, some love stories, the figure of his now wife, Ana Guerra, and what has always been his passion, music.
The first thing we do is ask him if he is okay, sincerely, so that he gives us an equally sincere answer, taking into account that he has had dozens of interviews, he has as many more left, and some have already been reflected in the press in a different way. which he himself imagines. “All good“, suffering a little from the sensationalism of the Spanish press, but oh well,” he confesses as soon as he begins. This piece is a small sample of the full interview which we will publish at another time.
“#I Sustained” not only talks about his time in “Los Serrano” as little Guillebut it tells in depth his fight against addiction to work, and to substances of all shapes and colors. But it is much more than that. “Yes, I have opened a channel” – in the interviews he refers – and they have also stirred up the wound even though I have shown it. But he still considers that the experience is being positive, and that says a lot about what has matured all these years of trial after trial and with a family life in bed that made everything more difficult.
In the book he tells how he found out late that his two parents, the harpist Liberto Villagrasa, and the actress Amelia Álvarez del Valle, had a serious problem with alcohol and he himself had to look for his mother in the bars on more than one occasion. from the neighborhood after returning from the recording of ““The Serranos”. We ask him if he is able to explain himself without them, both already deceased. “They are not here to defend themselves, so, apart from the fact that I can tell this story from forgiveness, not absolute, but from a very great forgiveness, and that is what makes me tell the story like this, is that there is a part of the story that I was never able to talk to my mother because she never really recovered. That’s why what he says in the book, including when he agreed to sue her, is “telling all the time how I felt and how over the years, after I stumbled over the same stone, I understand how they felt, that in the end they did the best they knew how.” And, as he explains to us, not everything was their fault: “A few years ago this was even worse. If the problem of this comes from society, drinking beer every day is fine and no one sees it as a problem. What’s more, it’s almost as if you don’t drink it, you’re the weird one. In the bars you ask for a sparkling water and the waiter still tells me ‘we don’t serve water here’, and if I tell him, sir, that I have a problem,’ then all the same. ‘poor’ world.
After running away from his family he ended up living with his uncles and since then he has had several families and several fathers and mothers, including “Los Serrano”. “I flee from self-pity and victimhood and I think it is reflected in the book. How lucky I have been to experience this, with the number of children who live it without having the opportunity to go to a set every day, to be known on the street, to be able to have an album called Santa Justa Klan. I am a very lucky guy, very, very lucky deep down. As a child I always thought, well, you can’t have everything.” Now he confesses that, except for some very localized tik toks, he has not watched the series again: “Not for nothing, in fact, once did Ana (Guerra, his wife) when we started the relationship, if we went out, he said ‘I’ve left positions The Serranos so that the dogs can relax, so that they can hear your voice.”.
We remind him that he is living a good personal and professional moment and we want to know if he still has that murmur that something always has to go wrong, and he assures us that this is the case and that “I don’t know if it is more in line with the condition of the disease of the addiction, which we unintentionally tend to futurize and put ourselves in the worst scenario all the time. But because in this case the disease wants to try to play with you to tell you ‘see how everything is going wrong for you. Come on, come on, go away a little bit. there. sometimes I stand up and say lie, lie, lie, lie, lie and I continue because I know what the disease is that is trying to sell me an idea that is not correct.
“Every day I get up, I am grateful and I ask myself how I am that day to see what I can cope with and what I can’t. And well, thanks to that, because there are days I’m a little more screwed, at least I say it because I’ve been able to see myself. It’s just that before I didn’t see myself, before I didn’t even know. Before I knew it, I was in a mud and when I came out of the mud I said this was because I was a little screwed, because I had argued with I don’t know who. Now, on the days that I argue with I don’t know who, I allow myself to be sad and they allow me to be angry.”
(To be continued…)
