Arsenio’s blues – La Opinión de A Coruña

Back when I was a boy, and I think even now, working-class children had access to art, to beauty, in two ways. One was music. The other, football. Okay, we already read Verne and also Stephen King, in economic editions, but the key to the matter, the imperative need, was to be protagonists, never more spectators. Rebel against fate. Which, as The Diplomats sang, was in the clods of Riazor. The territory of our unexpected victory.

Getting on a stage to scream in front of hundreds of people. That the summaries of the matches on the TV had to focus on us. Write in newspapers. Everything was the same. It was all part of the plan. That was our revolution, collective but not built on the basis of heavy theories of the catapult year, based on the day to day, on the way we act in the present. The referent was not a bearded gentleman from the previous century. The engine sat on Riazor’s bench, he could be our grandfather, but he was the real idol, the punk that was born from normality, the honest rock. No posturing.

There were many of us who delved into creativity as a formula to honor Arsenio. There are no books on the subject, but when—back in the 90s—we gathered a few boys in a barreto to think of songs to sing to Riazor, those shirtless kids were doing what the listillos call a brainstorming, a storm of ideas, but not for to bother anyone’s life, but to make us happy. That’s Arsenio. Our great inspiration.

All he talked about was philosophy. Galician. A Coruña Of the city that came from outside that it represented, coming from Arteixo or Fisterra. The one that a few gentlemen didn’t like, but many of us in the neighborhoods loved it. The great CTV (Coruñés Also Neighbor). Let’s be clear, Arsenio was the greatest educator that ever existed in this city. in this country It invited me to think. His catalog of wisdom is inexhaustible. And I speak in the present, as I must refer to the eternal.

The big ones, and that word is small before Arsenio, are always there. They are installed in neurons, even in neurotransmitters. In common. The identity of A Coruña and Galicia is impossible to understand without our fox. What we all wanted to be. But he just went, in the most generous way possible, without asking for anything in return. I want to think we lived up to it.

Getting together between Kalimocho as a teenager to rehearse that “there’s a man in Riazor” that we sang from General in 1995 and ending up chronicling, in these pages, the Centenary of 2002 form a thread. “There is no Dépor without Arsenio, nor Arsenio without Deportivo”, says the musical ode that some friends from Monte Alto made for him. If they think about it, it’s even deeper. I wouldn’t be Me without Arsenio. We are what Arsenio taught us.

Thank you, Master.