Fito Paez has a long love relationship with Havana. A relation of comings and goings, somewhat heartbreaking, like any relationship worthy of an artist with a city that seems made or drawn or just for art shows.
Havana still keeps, despite the furies, a sensuality similar to Cecilia Roth, legs and excesses such as Fabiana Castillo,and that hard beauty close to that of Romana Ricci. Paez said it more simply, with an undefeatable containment, and one cannot help thinking that the best personal secrets are known through the eyes of others. "Havana is still a romantic and wonderful place," he said, hence the Argentine rocker, no matter the times, manages to return to Cuba under the shadow of any pretext.
Páez was the first foreign singer to fill the Revolution Square, back in the dark 1993. Paez came incognito. Paez has always presented, in the weird Havana of each December, his not very successful forays into film. The short film La Balada de Donna Helena, his debut Vidas privadas, or more recently, in 2009, his documentary Las manos al piano.
Paez’s cinema is always of second order. Dali believed that he could write well, but being a narcissistic and pathological liar he deceived himself mercilessly. Pasolini was not more of a poet than a filmmaker. One manifestation negates the other. From the Renaissance to the present, only Bob Dylan knows how to master more than one art manifestation with the necessary rigor. And Fito Paez has composed such memorable pieces that no one can give to his movies more than the attention of the curious.
Still, for those strange relationships that artists have with their Ingre’s violin, we do not know if it is in filming where the man holds the hidden balance of musical notes, of his paradigmatic lyrics, and his most furious chords.
This December 5, in the Karl Marx theater, Paez will play for Cubans. He is a great singer, with shorter hair and the pounds necessary to banish to oblivion his already distant squalor. Maybe his voice has become somewhat less tender. It’s something that should be checked.
We could forgive him any deviation if the bulk of the concert comprises his legendary anthems. As songwriters venture into adulthood, you just want to listen to their first compositions. When songwriters improve their demeanor, they start recycling their poetry. It is natural. They just have a guitar and a record and those stuff usually die before the men themselves.
Silvio wrote what he wrote when he was an ugly teenager. Páez did the same. And Pablo too. Serrat is different (he always looked good), but the poetry of Serrat doesn’t require physical annihilation. It is a theory based on suspicion, but the principles that later people prove are lurking on suspicion with sufficient determination.
Returning to the myth: when Dylan wrote Like a Rolling Stone, he was posing as an anorexic boy, rebel, dirty, with matted hair and long horrible dark circles beneath his eyes. Just look at the terminal Beethoven. Or to Janis Joplin’s LSD. In short: if Paez had not gone through everything that happened to him, he would not have been careless of his appearance, and then Havana wouldn’t have been waiting so badly for those great hits from twenty years ago.
Songs and covenants with a terrible beauty.
Author
Carlos M. Álvarez
