LORD BYRON´S MIRACLE (ENGLISH VERSION)

  
"There is something Pagan in me that I can not shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything".

  This Lord Byron´s thought met me yesterday, around the corner from the hotel where I've stayed for the weekend in Nottingham. It appeared on a poster beside another two quotes, one of DH Lawrence and another one of Alan Sillitoe, under the title "Our rebel writers”, with their respective portraits decorating the facade of a building under restoration opposite the railway station.

 It was a frontal impact without airbag that could cushion it, as if the aristocrat and English Romantic poet had decided to shake me in spirit, just a day after attending the ceremony of a typically English wedding in the place that had been the family home of his ancestors, Colwick Hall.

  I was anchored to the sidewalk, I do not know if I was only disturbed, or in addition terrified. For a writer who imagines stories in which destiny appears as the single gravitational element, it was like a little taste of my own medicine. And I had suddenly become one of my characters, one of those who wondered why causality governs this sudden event, which unreadable message sends me the beyond, for what purpose and to achieve what kind of goal.

   I also had a second filled with egocentrism, and I enjoyed briefly the idea of belonging to a supernatural chain that was joining romantic poets throughout the centuries. It was a joyful second, but fortunately went swiftly back in order to not face again my pathetic dissatisfied face of failure.

 So I decided to find a sense to the phrase, a useful application which spun what I am or what I want to be, to where I was and why exactly there and then. The postulates of determinism took possession of me, as if my life were a moving walkway - as airports or subway ones- that move me conveniently in line since my last cause to my next consequence, while I was returning from England.

 Indeed I would not have reached that poster or that phrase, if I had not been that weekend in England. I would have never attended the wedding if I hadn´t had a 7-year relationship with a woman, an English widow, with a son that is mine since he was 3.

 The truth is that they would not have gone if they had not known me. And I’m really sure about it. This serious illness I suffer since I was aware, as I repeat incessantly like my greatest dogma, that the stork erred miserably by depositing me in Spain and not in the British Islands, is the one who is guilty about me encouraging them the need of maintaining the contact with the child´s English family; the one who is guilty aboutI showing inflexible when flagging Britishness as a paradigm of the fusion between tradition and modernity. I’m the one who dragg them, not them who force me.
 

 There is also a lot of painful sea in the background, many memories that often emerge when you are in contact with the assumption of absence, to the point that in the past it has caused some unwanted somatization. To alleviate it, I say that I have come to serve as a greased nut in a mechanism that should not be broken and to which I bring my gym arms, my romantic soul and a generous sort of selfishness that I apply as none other every time I focus a trip to England on the horizon.

  It is much more than the fact to put the child Elgar´s music "Pomp and Circumstance" or "Rule Brittania" as an unavoidable part of human and musical education; much more than having an amazing ability to organize trips, tickets and itineraries; much more than the selection of an ad hoc costume for the event that included the same blue chromatic Anderson tartan in the tie that Liam wore during the event. It is much more than to feel love for them, much more than being a paranoid and a die-hard Anglophile.

 Is to reach at the end of the celebration that took me there, that my son's uncle, his father's brother, melted me into a deep and compact hug, so fulled of manhood as it was fulled of emotion, and told me in a voice that sounded as true as I felt british, that it was really priceless what I was doing, that Paul would feel tremendously proud of how his son was being educated, that I was already a member of that family…I just say as a joke that they should give me the opportunity of change my name and become a full member of the Scottish clan of Anderson, including the right to wear a kilt.
 They do not realize that they are the ones who are doing the real favor to me.

  P. D. "There is something Pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything.", said Lord Byron. And I say from a poet to a poet: thanks, from the bottom of my heart.