New Orleans,
The levee, 1884 (engraving)
Fuente: https://www.wikiart.org/
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When I decided to move from Boston to New Orleans, I thought the process of adaptation would be complicated. After all, I was leaving a city shaped by Puritan tradition, scientific reason, and classical discipline for one where French, Spanish, Caribbean, and American heritages coexist, and where the improvisation of jazz seems to set the rhythm of daily life.
Yet from the moment I arrived, I felt at home. It was as if I had lived here in another time, or as if my spirit had always known that one day I would end up walking these streets.
One morning, while strolling along the majestic Mississippi, I realized that there were indeed threads in my past connecting me to this city. The river, for example—the same one navigated by Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, childhood heroes who came alive for me through Mark Twain.
By coincidence—or destiny—I work at Tulane University, the same place where one of my father’s great friends, Vladimir Gil, studied agronomy before returning to Venezuela with his New Orleanian wife, Catherine, who spoke only broken Spanish but from whom I learned my first words in English. I also remember her daughter Christine, who was one of my childhood crushes.
Later, my parents traveled to New Orleans. My mother often recalled with excitement her carriage ride through the French Quarter from Jackson Square; my father spoke with fascination about jazz bands at Preservation Hall and the flavors of Creole cuisine. From that trip, they also brought back the greatest gift: months later, my brother Ricardo was born.
In my teenage years, when I began playing the trumpet, two figures became guiding lights: Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong and Wynton Marsalis, both sons of this city that breathes music in every corner.
Today, as I savor a jambalaya, listen to a quartet improvising on Bourbon Street, and enjoy a Sazerac—the official cocktail of the city—I confirm my intuition: somewhere in my memory, in my heart, in my soul or in my destiny, New Orleans had always been present, waiting for me.
And then I fully understand: this city cannot be explained, it must be lived. As we proudly say here, in this Crescent City embraced by the Mississippi, with joy and enthusiasm: Laissez les bons temps rouler.
