“In the hard years of ETA, hearing my father’s last name was a threat”

Pablo was seven years old when he experienced his first murder. TO Enrique Casas The terrorists shot him dead at the door of his house on February 23, 1984. He was his father’s great friend. To him, she was his uncle despite not sharing genetic markers. The boy heard his mother’s inconsolable crying and knew that his life had changed forever. He didn’t imagine how much.

In his native Donostia, Pablo was always “the son of Txiki Benegas” either “the son of Benegas”, the first affiliation always pronounced with a smile and the second, with a sneer. In the bloodiest years of terrorism ETAlistening to it put him on guard: “It was a sign of a threat, it didn’t usually bring anything good.”

With the death of Enrique Casas The security doors, the armored glass, the “dad’s friends” who did not leave him in the sun or the shade and who spent the day sitting by the door without moving came to the family home. “Actually, I had a happy childhood because my mother knew how to isolate us very well from everything that was happening outside,” he recalls in a conversation via video call from Saint Sebastian. “But it is true that when you get older you begin to see hate, to understand what it implies and you learn to live alert, to anticipate certain situations.”

One day he Pablo Benegas university student felt the need to know and asked the following question to a fellow partygoer, one who could be himself but with aesthetics abertzale with whom I shared an afternoon at the bar: “Would you agree with them killing my father?”. And the other responded, without flinching: “Yes. If necessary, yes”. “I don’t know why I did it, I guess it’s one thing to have what you think and another to have it confirmed. Look, hate is not chosen. Whether you have it or not depends on your way of being, and I suppose also with your education. I have never felt it and that has allowed me to talk to people who thought so differently from me, who were willing to wish me harm,” he ventures today at his recently turned 48.

That conversation is just a small sample of a life marked by politics that moved away from a destiny written in offices and rallies to delve into music. Because Pablo BenegasIn addition to being his father’s son and a trained jurist, he is a founding partner and lyricist of Van Gogh’s Ear. All that darkness and all that light that coexisted during his transition to adulthood is now remembered in a book that he has titled Memory (Plaza & Janés) for their own, yes, but above all for the collective one. “Society moves very fast and things are forgotten that happened not so long ago. Writing I have realized the fragility of memory, collective memory is lost and other stories are imposed, or even none at all. It is simply forgotten. I think that it is important to leave certain things written.

The Memory of Pablo Benegas It is dedicated to his four children: “Because there are things that I have not told you and you should know.” “They are no longer going to find graffiti in Donostia ETA to suggest questions, but we have the responsibility to tell them what happened, because otherwise no one will. There is a part of that hatred that continues to be transmitted from parents to children, I see it at school, on the street. It feels like we haven’t learned anything,” he laments.

What does someone who has had that family experience think when they see the heirs of those ideas sitting in Parliament negotiating face to face with the socialist Government? “The process that the left has to do abertzale It is very complex because They have to tell all those families whose lives were destroyed, including theirs, that it was of no use., that that was not the way. And that has its rhythm,” says Benegas. “I want that world to be doing politics and not shooting, but I don’t think anything can be agreed with them either. “There are sensitive issues, such as the Democratic Memory Law, in which they should not have a say.”

Pablo Benegas He spent his early youth escaping the violence of persecution – that poster with his last name stuck in a telescopic sight that appeared in the high school bathroom, that concert in which he was warned: “Tell your father that we are going to kill him” – and He found in the rehearsal space an oasis that took his life away from the politics to which he seemed predestined and focused it on the world of entertainment. “I will never know if music and my peers saved my life,” she writes. Her first steps outside those four protective walls followed in the wake of her previous existence—“What does Txiki Benegas think about his son being a puppeteer?”they asked in the first press conferences, “How has Txiki Benegas managed to get his son to sell 50,000 copies of his debut album?” – but they took him very, very far from there.

“The first years of Van Gogh’s Ear I kept getting alert when I heard my last name but little by little I processed it,” he explains. It is not easy to overcome fear. “Above all, the fear generated by hate. That devastating look that annuls you because you are very convinced of what you feel and what you believe, that disorients you, makes you lose your identity,” he points out. In that context, music became a lifeline. “It took us to situations of absolute sensation of freedom.” And before he realized it, he had abandoned the Law and his city and was someone in Madrid. Someone who achieved eight platinum records without even personally playing the instruments on all the songs..

A few weeks ago, the anecdote returned as a scandal, and Pablo Benegas does not avoid the mud Memory. The times of the record company did not expect newbies who had just arrived from the province, and that self-taught band was guided more by their heart than by the requirements of the industry. As a result, Alejo Stivelwhich produced that mythical tell the sun In 1998, he turned to backup musicians. Benegas does not feel any shame when remembering that episode. In reality, he sees the positive side: “If we had been career musicians or more aware of the compositions we made, it is impossible that those first albums would have come out. When you don’t know, you do things that are outside of orthodoxy and many times there That’s what’s great, what’s special. There’s no better musician to play. Van Gogh’s Ear that the five of us are the ones who best defend our songs,” he says. And he emphasizes, against those rumors: “If the record company had wanted a product from marketing I would have chosen the components much better.”

The San Sebastian band has survived many bumps in these almost 30 years, but none like the crater that opened the game of Amaia Montero in 2007, in the midst of a popularity boom. He also remembers that Pablo Benegas, who even confesses that he met the singer dressed in tuno: “Yes, yes. It is what it is.” “Those first ten years were wonderful. Everything happened so fast and we were so young that I think we didn’t even fully understand the dimension of everything that was happening. There came a time when we were dying of success, in the sense that we were normalizing things who were extraordinary, and that’s when Amaia left the group,” he recalls. “It was very hard, tremendous. I remember that the four of us returned to the rehearsal room without really knowing what we were going to do, with a lot of fear and a lot of insecurities. And there we met again with our origins, with the real reason why we were making music together. , and everything went very well and very natural.”

It is impossible to end this interview without the million-dollar question, the one that every historical fan wants to know. Will it ever come back Amaia Montero to Van Gogh’s Ear? The response, on the other hand, can be disappointing, don’t say we didn’t warn you. “Our relationship with Amaia is fantastic, wonderful, but she has her own career.” Nothing, it seems that this time there will be no reunion either.