I am forty-eight years old and I have been studying and working in Bilbao for almost thirty years. However, during my routine days, on the way to the office or to a meeting, sometimes I look at the facades of buildings and suddenly they seem foreign to me and I feel as if everything around me is part of a props inherited, like the furniture in a family home. It is a sensation similar to what we can feel the first days after moving to a new apartment, an ambivalent space that is yours and foreign at the same time, except that I have been walking these streets for a lifetime.
I know what the reason is. No matter how many experiences I accumulate here, no matter how much happens to me here, in my eyes Bilbao will always be the city of grandfather, my maternal grandfather. I lived in a village and it was with him that I first set foot on these four-petal tiles as a child. With him I toured the Gran Vía and the Siete Calles, with him I entered bars and cafes for the first time, I went to mass in Begoña and, of course, I went to San Mamés. And because many of those first times in this city had football as an excuse, the same thing happens to me when it comes to Athletic Club: for me, Athletic is grandfather.
Grandfather He was the person I loved most in the world. In my eyes, personalization is all good. He died in September 1990, suddenly, without warning, from one day to the next. It’s been so long that it would be difficult to find anything in common between the fifteen-year-old boy I was when he left us and who I am today. However, I still miss him, every day. I still cry for him. And sometimes, when I don’t know if I’m acting right or wrong, I try to imagine what he would say to me, whether or not he would be proud of me.
I have told this story before: my mother, who is an artist, painted a portrait of him that began the day after his death. It is an oil painting on canvas that has been hanging in the living room of the house. known, the family home, since that sad year. One of the memories that moves me the most is coming home from school and finding my mother painting with her eyes filled with tears while she listens to Albinoni’s Adagio. Even today I am unable to hear that melody without feeling pain in my chest.
To paint the picture, Mom based herself on a photo of grandfather which he attached to the studio wall with thumbtacks. And there it stayed for more than three decades in which, little by little, the light was eating away at the colors and fading the image of my grandfather, which remained blurred as also happens with the memory of the people who left us. One afternoon a couple of years ago when Mom was showing me one of her last drawings, I pointed to the wall and asked her if she was giving me that photo. I explained to her that I was excited to have her, because thanks to her portrait it is that image of grandfather the one that has prevailed in me over all the others. When I went to take it down from the wall, I was shocked. The photograph was folded in half. One part had remained hidden, facing the wall for more than thirty years. And it turned out that there, clearly, because the image of him had been protected from the sunlight, posing next to my grandfather, was José Ángel Iribar.
It was a sign. That afternoon, when I saw the completed photo, I felt that something I already knew was proven: somehow grandfather It was still here, embodied in Athletic Club, in Iribar, in the values it represents.
In these weeks when Bilbao is buzzing with the possibility of us all going out into the streets to see the Gabarra cross the estuary again, the presence of grandfather has intensified. There is not a day in which I do not feel him: when crossing any corner, when seeing the red and white flags on the balconies, when passing under the window of what was his office in the Albia Gardens, when observing with nostalgia the esplanade where he was located the old San Mamés. I really miss him. But having him present in my memory and in the vocation to become someone he would be proud of makes me feel better and gives meaning to my routine.
to continue reading
_