What is the difference between a big lie and a good story? I was always prone to believe the stories, but I have noticed, to my misfortune, that over the years I am becoming more suspicious, more suspicious; and I see lies where I used to see stories that made life better. I was born on the island of Ibiza and grew up surrounded by urban legends and improbable myths that I give up, little by little, just as one renounces the memory of childhood to make room for a sweetened routine. What a misery! Before I was different, I lived surrounded by certainties that transformed my provincial adolescence into a fascinating experience: here, behind the walls of Dalt Vila - they said -, in this restaurant, Freddie Mercury composed Bohemian Rhapsody , yes, and in this Ibiza hotel he celebrated his birthday and there were dwarfs with trays of cocaine on his head and a thousand guests and two elephants . Queen's drummer, Roger Taylor, has a house in the town of Santa Eulalia and occasionally descends from the skies of Live at Wembley '86 to buy peasant bread at the corner bakery. The picture of Bob Marley, Mick Jagger and Peter Tosh? They took her out one night in the Las Dalias party room, near San Carlos. Bob Marley, a living legend, played his last concert in the bullring of Ibiza and very little does not coincide with his namesake Dylan walking through the white sands of Formentera. Mick Jagger's granddaughter goes to English school, my mother teaches geography. The other day, in San José, Cindy Crawford asked how the sobrasada was made.

These and other legends fed the teen fan of Queen, the Rolling, Dylan and Bob Marley, the teen in love with Cindy Crawford - I'm still in love - and instilled in him the ridiculous idea that there was no great distance between their world of girls and classes and the world of stars that came out on television. I was aware of this distortion a few years later, in Salamanca, when I shared a flat with three students from Toro, Zamora. What seemed more or less normal to me seemed extraordinary and literally incredible. I have a crystalline memory of Polanski buying a piece of pottery from my father - that was Polanski, my father said without much emphasis, he is a film director, he comes here because he likes young girls -, and that was Polanski, for me, during a long time, a skinny guy who liked girls and pottery. I became friends with the Welsh actor Rhys Ifans, famous at that time for his role as Spike in the romantic comedy Notting Hill , in the parking lot of the Amnesia nightclub - I was a minor and had not let me in - and got me a job as a translator for a very bad movie that was shooting in Ibiza. I was 16 years old and that seemed pretty normal. I had seen Notting Hill the previous summer with my friends at the cinema and now one of its protagonists was getting me my first job. That's life, I said. No, it's not like that, the Toro boys replied.

Like all of them, Ibiza's legends were based on a truth - some of them were even true - and they grew and conformed to the language of their narrators: my father always repeated that famous phrase: «never let the truth spoil a good story », But it must be said that, in Ibiza, and especially in the Ibiza of the 80s and 90s, the truth did not need too many ornaments to be implausible.

From the mythical universe of my teenage Ibiza there is a minimal story that will undoubtedly fall into oblivion if someone does not insist on telling it: last year died the cartoonist and humorist Johan Lodewijks (Amsterdam, 1944-2018), known by his pseudonym John Lodi . He lived almost all his life in Ibiza and was a great friend of my father and an exceptional artist whom I was lucky to know well. He was a cheerful and generous man who held only one grudge: he claimed to have sold a pendant made by him in 1970 to Keith Richards, which represented a mouth with his tongue out. He did not give it much importance, but he was convinced and occasionally he laughed with my father about the mountain of invisible money that corresponded to him. To me, of course, that seemed very plausible to me and today, still, the famous mouth with the tongue out that John Pasche designed belongs, within my personal mythology, to another John, John Lodi .

Growing up surrounded by stories makes you gullible, and being gullible is wonderful. Ibiza and Formentera are tiny, but they have no end and the legends about Hollywood stars, singers, billionaires and artists keep coming and it hurts me, sometimes, to discover that I no longer listen to them with such interest. In the origin of some I have been present and in others, almost unknown, I myself have been complicit and protagonist. And if I don't count these little summer adventures, or if I share them only with the closest friends, it is not because of shame or respect or because I think that nobody will believe me; It is because I want to build with them a personal and non-transferable mythology, far from urban legend, an amazing mythology that is close to a truth that, as trivial, boring, bland, recognizes as mine.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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