Victor Jara smiles in the photos and seems to be more alive than ever. It is. In one, he smokes a cigarette and one can almost hear his voice singing his theme: “When I dawn with cold / light a cigarette of a rod / and I heat my face / with the cigar on.
In another, a foreground of profile reveals a love gesture; In a third it is serious, almost melancholic, and in the last one appears tender, among children. His presence, suspended in black and white snapshots, now accompanies a scene that seems to cross time: his daughter Amanda meets an old fellow ex officio and struggles of his father, Silvio Rodríguez.
The Cuban troubadour comes to this intimate encounter, yesterday Saturday, loaded with history and emotion. They barely hug, he says with a voice that brings echoes from other times:
“I remember we were going through your house when you were very small, back in 72. We were going to look for your father to go to Valparaíso.”
Chile was the first Latin American country that Silvio met. He arrived in September 1972 with Pablo Milanés and Noel Nicola. They were almost two intense weeks, of memorable nights of guitars, wine and songs with the artists of the new Chilean song in the Peña de los Parra.
In those days he strengthened the friendship with Victor Jara. In one of those days they undertook a trip to Valparaíso to sing at the University; Silvio, sick of his throat and fever, was sleeping in the car.
Amanda surprises Silvio with her father’s guitar. He takes it delicately as if it were a sacred object and runs it with his eyes: the betas of the wood, the strings, the arm, the pegs. They ask you to touch it, to tear at least one chord, but refuse. Sorry, barely reaches a no.
He prefers not to desecrate the echoes that still sound within that relic. It is a gesture of respect, love, recognition to the fallen partner who continues to sing through others.
After the long pinochet night – years of censorship and exile -, Silvio returned to Chile in 1990. He did it with Chucho Valdés and Irakere for a historic concert at the National Stadium, where 80 thousand people heard him dedicate the evening to Victor Jara, tortured and killed in 1973 after the military coup.
That night also premiered The strange manhis tribute to the friend martyr: “One day, without warning, / that strange man died … / at that same moment, / from the sky, the birds / discovered that the world / lips were born.”
In the first of his recent nights in Chile, before 17 thousand souls, Silvio remembered him again. “Amanda reminded you”, accompanied to the piano by his daughter Mallow. And now, in this house where the air seemed full of memory and vitality, Victor met again. In Amanda’s smile, in the photos, on the guitar before which he kept silent, in the story that still sings.
