…or in the language that glides through my fingers, today, tomorrow, no matter
where I am or how the wind blows.
It has always been so: words, words and more words, written here and there,
gone lost with the time, forgotten, loose papers, marginal scribbles on books, magazines, supposed dead things, or really dead, well, maybe better, the most
making no sense any more, just a few survived and - here you are.
After so much to-and-fro out there, similar to some epiphytal plants or migrating
birds, half rootless or with no feeling for nest, I’m not a great believer. I’ve been learning that the most reasonable attitude is not to cultivate any kind of fetishism associated with languages… the first, the second, the third - who cares?

If we begin to search for our origins, the surprises are not rare.

I guess to remember my grandfather saying we were Italian descendents.

But we aren't.
Bustamante is a Cantabrian lineage, and only quite late I finally discovered this
family detail. I don't know if and how it brought me to marry a Spanish woman,
who seems to have Sephardic ascendancy and also a few drops of German blood,
or rather Bavarian, and narrowly happened to be born in Rio de Janeiro, where her father spent a couple of years.
In other words: touring so many countries and cities (far away from mine) to meet
a Spanish woman who after all comes out being Brazilian - almost.

A Brazilian … writing in German … and furthermore poetry?

Normally you speak Spanish down there, right? Oh no, wait a minute, in Brazil you speak Portuguese, I mean Brazilian-Portuguese!

These or similar questions, not rare indeed. I always had to come up with some discomfort, and depending on the circumstances and the particular tone, trying
to find a cute answer. As if I had to apologize or justify using “their” language.
A hissing “How dare you, etc.”, not to be missed.

First, the small correction: Portuguese, of course! In Brazil we speak Portuguese, although a little different than in Portugal, but it is Portuguese!

In the course of many years of daily living with professional activities
in the field of classical music (opera and concert) in Germany, first in Frankfurt am Main, during musicology seminars and corresponding researches at the J.-W.-Goethe University, and at the same time regular Singing and Piano courses, Musical Theory and Interpretation, Opera and Lied, at
the Frankfurter Musikhochschule, and later on in Heidelberg, as a member of the Theater Ensemble, I was often invited to read my own texts (prose, theater and
above all poetry) in special occasions in private salons, residences, coffeehouses, galleries and bookstores, or for public readings as well in various places and institutions.