ERNESTO McCAUSLAND SOJO - Barranquilla, Colombia
(In the face of the singer's death Héctor Lavoe)
I. DOESN'T CRY ME NA
I don't want that nobody cries
if I die tomorrow,
gentlemen don't bring flowers
for me I don't want anything.
II. THE CHRONICLE (In first person)
On first Thursday of July of 1992, while we were about to land in the airport The Watch, of New York, it could not take from of my head to the character that I had put under an obligation to take that airplane to all career to attend their funeral one.
The Singer of the Singers, Héctor Lavoe, it had always been present in my life of an or another shape. Of boy I was captured for «Che Ché Colé», a song of sticky African rhythm that was like a musical goody for the infantile soul. It was their first great success. Then, in my adolescence, I was contaminated with the fever of sauce that extended for the world and that he had in «My people», of Héctor, to their lance tip. Already adult, I was part of a generation that was with the heart tattooed by songs like «yesterday Newspaper» and «The singer»; a generation that was hallucinated by that trembling little man of pale face and buttery smile that he appeared in the scenarios with suits of squares and that it dominated the secrets of the good one to sing.
Exercising the journalism already had the luck to know Héctor Lavoe in August of the 86, during their last visit to Colombia. He/she was a spontaneous and talkative man that went mad with the vallenatos that sounded for the radio.
--That is sauce! --he exclaimed once, when he listened Alejandro's song Durán.
He spoke hurriedly, alternating their strong Puerto Rican accent with one that another word in English. He sometimes forgot what was saying and it asked them to remind him. Their answers were tangled. He began to say a thing and it finished saying just the opposite. In the interview that I made him, Héctor Lavoe proclaimed its Manifesto of the cheveridad: It is fantastic to be big, but it is bigger to be fantastic. It was that the holder that we use, to the wide of the page, in The Herald. In that same interview, Héctor Lavoe spoke to me with its son's pride, Héctor Junior.
Thirty two days later, lost in the page of shows of the newspaper, I found a news that shook me from feet to head: Héctor Junior had been murdered in New York. The son's tragic death constituted the beginning of the chain of distresses that you/they had to point out the agencies of news the day of the funeral one: it disappeared of the world of the show.
Four years later I found out that he was rehearsing to return to the song. The on the way to return had had bad moments, like a presentation with the old stars of the Fania in the Madison Square Garden. Transformed into a human, thin and lame ruin, you ascended to the platform to sing «My people» and with great difficulty it could be sustained in foot. But in spite of the circumstances, I had the certainty that Héctor Lavoe would be able to vivify its sacred flames and soon he/she would be the hero of the return. I traveled then to New York to interview him. I called it from a public telephone in the station of trains and it played me a heavy joke.
He told me that it will rehearse that afternoon in a bar of the Bronx. I went and there was not any rehearsal. Then I realized that the singer had sent me to one of the most dangerous areas in New York. Thanks to a good friend, I was able to discover that the rehearsals were in the Boy's Harbor, in front of the Central Park, and there I found it at eight in the night. I was impressed. Of that jovial and plump boy that had known in 1986 in Barranquilla, it was only a little man of greenish face and scarce hair that you grieve he could walk. I interviewed him but I didn't achieve him to tell me a coherent sentence. Then I saw it rehearse: their voice was intact, also its spirit. In a rest it improvised these notes: «Kiss me, kiss me a lot, as if the husband that I removed you was...».
The landing made me return of my memories. The funeral one waited for me in Manhattan.
III. EVERYTHING HAS THEIR END
As the pretty carnation
he/she only wanted to flourish
teaching their beauty
and I wither to perish.
IV. THE NEWS
NEW YORK, July 1 (Associated Press)--- The popular Puerto Rican singer Héctor Lavoe was buried at noon today, after a parade of four hours that traveled the main streets of Manhattan and the Bronx, paralyzing the traffic and producing spontaneous reactions between pedestrians and residents of the sector.
A multitude of people of the common one accompanied the Singer of the Singers until her last habitation, in a street ceremony that seemed more a carnival that a funeral one.
Authentic characters of the street, many of them prostitutes and drunkards, walked beside the mortuary coach, dancing and singing Héctor's songs Lavoe whose voice sprouted for a speaker system that accompanied the funeral retinue.
the past died May 30 to the 45 years, soon after a heart heart attack, motivated by complications associated with the AIDS, after a painful chain of distresses and lost battles with the drug and the alcohol.
Born in 1947 in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and after emigrating to New York in 1961, Héctor Lavoe was main main character of the golden years of the sauce, when beside the Stars of the Fania, it filled stadiums, he sold millions of disks and it shook to the whole world with its melodious voice and its inspirations soneras.
In spite of the hegemony of among the figures of the Fania, some few of their colleagues only attended the funeral one.
V. THE KING OF THE PUNCTUALITY (I)
I will continue in my sway,
singing with sabrosura,
I will always be with you,
my people!
until to me they take me
against my will,
that they take me to the sepulchre.
VI. THE PARTNER
(Willie Colón, the man that discovered to for the music, one of the most dramatic moments evokes in the life of: the suicide intent in San Juan from Puerto Rico.)
«I remember the day in that it passed that. We were in Puerto Rico for a concert of many orchestras. But they made the concert in a time in that there were many employer parties there and the employer parties are free. So to the concert of us it was not nobody. The promoter calls us to the hotel and he tells us: 'Willie looks, better you don't come'. I Remember that the musicians sit down in the bar of the hotel, to see if they called each other to change the order. But Héctor Lavoe was in a condition that he didn't want to accept that. He left for the place of the concert and there he said: 'I don't care it if there are three people. I will play here'. While he sang, they began to disassemble the sound system and they finished turning off him the horns. It was an entire trauma. I believe that that lit the wick. On the following day they called me and they told me that it had been thrown of the ninth floor».
VII. THE KING OF THE PUNCTUALITY (2)
Your people want
to hear your sound voice
we only want
that you arrive a hour.
VIII. THE CHRONICLE (In third person)
A long, slow and stormy death that God only knows was when it began to be gestated. It could be in the childhood, when their mother died from tuberculosis, leaving him as inheritance her first illness and her first solitude. Or it could be in that summer of the 63, when--one month after having emigrated to New York--their bigger brother gave the cordial welcome to the world of the intravenous drogadicción. Or it was maybe later thirty years, when after having been the world sensation of the sauce, he wanted to put final point to a chain of tribulations and he rushed to the hole from the ninth floor of the hotel Excélsior in San Juan from Puerto Rico.
Depressed finally for that cocktail of distresses and self-destruction that it was always their life, Héctor Lavoe said good-bye to this world on last Tuesday of June of the 92, in a room of solemnity, while out New York was scenario of its great party of sun, slight clothes, doves, tourists, rats, begging, limousines, traveling sales, street painters and all the creatures of the summer.
He died transformed into a distant memory of premonitory songs; in a legend of the recent past, wrapped in a battered cuerpecillo that worked him very bad and that it didn't already serve him neither to sing, neither to light one of those cigarettes Camel that so much he liked they. Their last sentence was buried in its sister's memory, Sonia who, with smell of alcohol, he declared to the journalists in the funeral one:
--Their final words cannot repeat them in public because you know how Héctor spoke.
And it exploded in laughter.
The Singer of the Singers had spent her last year of life in a gray and paranoiac building, of hermetic windows and sophisticated architecture, located in front of one from the entrance grills to the Central Park. It is the Cardinal Cooke Health Center, kind of an asylum of charity, where for ten years a special pavilion worked for patient of needy AIDS.
There it had arrived one year before their death. Somebody left it in the door, transformed into a street lunatic that spoke incoherences and it was lonely. Héctor Lavoe lasted fifteen days amid an absolute anonimity, spread in a bed and screaming nonsenses. Neither the Puerto Rican nurses, neither nobody in the hospital, they realized that that patient of skeletal and ruined AIDS, was the charismatic sonero that fifteen years behind he was shouted and run off with in shoulders by mad multitudes. Until a floor partner, truck chauffeur, heard it sing one afternoon and it recognized the voice. The family was warned immediately. Their intimate friend and lawyer Jorge Carmona went to see it, but Héctor didn't recognize it.
--Take you to that type of here--he screamed.
That same afternoon, Nilda Pérez, his wife, went to the hospital. It was broken-hearted. For a year and half, Héctor Lavoe had disappeared. The visit made it react. Héctor left his mental nebulas immediately, he got up like he could, he hugged at his wife, and both they cried together during two hours.
Nilda knew then where its husband had been during the time in that it lasted lost. Davey Lugo, a stout Puerto Rican conguero, it had taken it to him for Miami, where Héctor was presented in bars of bad death, singing in deplorable state of health for some few dollars and consuming heroine in abundance. In one of those days, it suffered an overdose. It was transferred this way New York and left to the doors of the Cardinal Cooke.
Revived after the encounter with their wife, Héctor it recovered their good humor, and he made it in such a way that ended up joking about the great tragedy of their recent life, the suicide intent in a hotel of Puerto Rico. He said that it had been thrown because he and their wife had bet to who it arrived first at the casino.
--- For that reason I threw away myself--- he said---, for ganal the bet.
Although their body no longer responded him, he cheered up with the life again. He insisted in that would return to the scenarios. For that reason, every afternoon, of the wing of patient of AIDS of the Cardinal Cooke a fragile voice that always intoned the songs sprouted.
But the death had already passed its collection invoice. It was not only the AIDS: from their fall in San Juan, he had a wound in a leg that he didn't close him because it was diabetic. This way, amid topics of sauce that now sounded dismal, the Singer of the Singers was losing her battle with the death; a battle that had begun a lot of time behind and that he should have lost much before. But nr. Héctor Lavoe, the King of the Punctuality, the same one that made wait anxious multitudes during an entire decade in the whole world, also arrived late to their appointment with the death.
IX. THE DAY DE MY LUCK
Now I am here in my solitude
thinking what of my life it will be.
I don't have place where to return
and neither to anybody I want to occupy.
If the destination betrays me again
I swear you that I cannot fail.
I am tired from waiting,
but I am for sure my luck will change,
and when will it be?
X. THE INTERVIEW (you Move away from the interview with Héctor Lavoe published in The Herald August 2 1986.)
HEY) is The sauce in decadence?
HL) there is not decadence, he looks: when the sauce began twenty thousand groups of sauce they left. Now the sauce has been made a business that I don't like it; a business of lucre has been made.
HEY) But don't you believe that the Latin American youth has gone away of the sauce?
HL) he Looks at hand, what happens is that right now the sauce is in a pothole and he has to leave a marionette like my son, Héctor Lavoe Jr. To that type I will put it to sing sauce in English because he sings pretty; he gives three kicks to me. And he will have to put on the very on pants because I will come out to sing sauce in English before him. And I don't have to make it because there is more Latin than American pa' that know it. Do you know how many Mexicans there is? Do you know how big it is Colombia, Panama, Bolivia? All those countries speak Spanish. Pa' what we have to go to an American public, if they already have good American demasiaos, because the Americans that sing are buenísimos. Pa' what do we go to invadil that territory? That they leave to the carajo!
HEY) How does he explain their charisma?
HL) I look people at first and I sit down this way vibrations. I am a person that to me you are not able to odial; to me you have that querelme.
XI. THE SINGER
Me pára always in the street
a lot of people that comments:
'Héctor hears, you are made
always with females and in parties.'
And nobody question if I suffer if I cry
if I take a pain that hurts very deep.
XII. THE CAMERA
Plane open to the church of Santa Cecilia from Manhattan. Through the door main several men they take out the casket that is covered with the Puerto Rican flag, while it reaches to be seen a light sprinkle. He takes place a slow paneo then toward the other side of the street, where a multitude is maintained to line by the police. The multitude begins to shake white handkerchiefs, at the time that she screams: «Héctor, Héctor, the sky are crying!».
XIII. MI PEOPLE
My people
the biggest in this world
the one that makes me feel
a deep pride.
XIV. THE SURVEY
«A deep pride. That was him. That was what he felt». (Puerto Rican in Orchard Beach, speaking of Héctor Lavoe the following day of the funeral one, while he listened the song «My people» to all volume in an enormous recorder.)
«Today the town is crying, but in the sky he has to have a party, because the singer of the singers died». (Cuban to the doors of the church, little before the exit of the casket).
«He gives me sadness because he died like he died and nobody accompanied him. For that reason cry and I dance, and I will love him a lifetime». (Prostitute of the Dominican Republic everything dressed of white that danced frantically beside the casket, during the journey toward the cemetery).
«Because as him he said it, he didn't want the hypocrites to cry him. Because the town, the neighborhood, those that we really wanted it is here». (Puerto Rican Lady responding to the question of «why does nobody cry in this funeral one?»).
«The Singer of the Singers will live, she will live!». (uniformed Colombian Cyclist that never separated her hand of the funeral coach.)
«He was happiness, I believe that he was happiness. Now it is there up with the gentleman». (Puerto Rican that threw boxing blows to the air while the casket went down to the sepulcher.)
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