John y Yoko

Como hemos podido comprobar en estos últimos treinta años, la culpa de TODO no era de Yoko Ono. Digamos que hay más culpables...

Recuerdo el día del asesinato de Lennon como si fuera ayer. Raúl y yo nos quedamos paralizados. Luego se nos unió Fausto, el más Lennon de nosotros. El instituto nos importaba poco y nada: la música era real. Qué extraño. Lo real era aquello que no se podía tocar. Siempre me ha fascinado la capacidad de la música para crear estados mentales, espacio donde no lo hay. Una buhardilla en San Cosme y San Damián extiende sus muros hasta las playas del sur. Mind Games, isn't it...?

Así escribe Mrs. Ono Lennon sobre el que fuera su compañero. Me gusta imaginarlos tomando té a medianoche, riéndose con ganas por el extraño e improbable suceso que supone estar juntos. Más allá de cualquier consideración, John y Yoko se amaban contra viento y marea. Y eso, en estos tiempos que corren, es mucho. Ole ahí.

THE TEAMAKER
by Yoko Ono Lennon

John and I are in our Dakota kitchen in the middle of the night. Three cats: Sasha, Micha and Charo are looking up at John, who is making tea for us two.

Sasha is all white, Micha is all black. They are both gorgeous, classy Persian cats. Charo, on the other hand, is a mutt. John used to have a special love for Charo. “You’ve got a funny face, Charo!” he would say and pat her.

“Yoko, Yoko, you’re supposed to first put the tea bags in, and then the hot water.” John took the role of the teamaker, for being English. So I gave up doing it. It was nice to be up in the middle of the night, when there’s no sound in the house, and sip the tea John would make.

One night, however, John came up with “I was talking to Aunt Mimi this afternoon and she says you are supposed to put the hot water in first. Then the tea bag. I could swear she taught me to put the tea bag in first, but…”

“So all this time, we were doing it wrong?”
“Yeah…”
We both cracked up. That was in 1980. Neither of us knew that it was to be the last year of our life together.

This year would have been the 70th birthday year for John if only he was here. But people are not questioning if he is here or not. They just love him and are keeping him alive with their love. I’ve received notes from all corners of the world to let me know that they were celebrating this year to thank John for having given us so much in his forty short years on earth.

The most important gift we received from him was not words, but deeds. He believed in Truth, and had dared to speak up. We all knew that he upset certain powerful people with it. But that was John. He couldn’t have been in any other way. If he were here now, I think he would have shouted so we can all hear it. That truth was important. Because without knowing all the truth of what we did, we could not achieve world peace.

On this day, the day he was assassinated for being a truth seeker and a communicator, what I remember is the night we both cracked up drinking tea.

They say teenagers laugh with a drop of a hat. But nowadays I see many teenagers angry and sad at each other. John and I were hardly teenagers. But my memory of us is that we were a couple who laughed.