With Fito in Miami

Poetry is the only truth;
to draw beauty from this chaos is virtue

Cerati

Do you like Fito," the radiologist asks me with an evident Buenos Aires accent. I say yes, while he asks me to put my elbows on my waist and try to bring them together, almost like wings, and to take a deep breath. He approaches me and asks permission to touch me.

It is very little Fito, besides the fact that he is a fan of the opposing team.

It moves away. He makes the "flash" and the x-ray of my lungs is ready. Plaque, that's what we call X-rays in Cuba. He sits behind his table. There is a thundering air conditioner; in Miami these people never turn off the air conditioners, not even in winter. The guy points again and tells me that Charly is the guy.

-You have to hear Friday 3 AMNow that's a good song; Fito... - and I know what it comes with.

Fito separates rockers. The rhetoric ranges from the way he combs his hair, the clothes he wears, the disc of The love after Love, the beat circusvery Light. And I tell him that he's a guy who wrote Tombs of gloryAt least give it a chance.

-A lot of poetry, kid, but the guy doesn't get his guts dirty.

"Something of you comes through to me.

When I was a kid, I had a garden,

but I escaped to another city.

And it didn't help because I was in the same place all the time,

under one skin

and at the same ceremony".

I repeat from memory. The guy rattles the pen across the paper; he goes and I have a tumor. My old man died of cancer. In Cuba things are complicated; I smoked until my lungs swelled up while the Chinese Luis Fong made me listen, between shots of almost pure alcohol, to Fito's cassettes, and Demian Ravilero read me the texts. He was the only guy in Santiago de Cuba who had a kind of handkerchief with a caricature of Fito.

And I asked myself: what is greater than good verses? Life, what is it? To have money or to be moved by Spinetta's verses: "Muchacha, piel de rayón", no shit. I almost said it, but I whisper:

-Flaco, where are you? I am imagining another place, I am gathering information, I am wanting to be someone else.

-I see, you are a crack.

And we laughed. In the end, I wouldn't take the test results with me in a folder; he would send them.

I tell him then that the advantage of pop is that it manages to translate to the majority what belongs to small tribes, and that Fito has done it without losing the flavor of his land, without making concessions that curse him. It is rock, jazz, folklore, tango, Spinetta, Charly, classical music?

He gives me for impossible, plants his hands on my shoulders and repeats again that Charly. And I know, I have been in Buenos Aires, I have felt this same shine in the eyes of those who live the sound of Charly García. I do not insist; in the end there are also "Baglietto" and I also met those who could not stand Cerati. "No me lo banco", they would say in good porteño, and I could listen to the Orquesta Típica Fernández Fierro and the Runfla. I know that Buenos Aires and Rosario have given so much music that people do not seem to agree, or stand on one side or the other as in a Boca-River.

The greatest thing is that: this doctor feels my lungs in Miami and we talk in Spanish about the idols of our lives, people who were able to make music with our illusions (some lost); or about other beautiful things like a Beatles album, in which they sing about mystery, love, money and loneliness.

When I finally go out to the street, with more than 36 degrees (in Miami they speak in Fahrenheit), I put that "give joy to my heart", and I go on. In this city I have to go out to offer my heart and to roll and roll and roll and roll my life because as Charly told me in my ear: "you changed time and love, and music and ideas... but in itself, nothing else will change and a sensual abandonment will come".