"Chavela Vargas is at home"

Manuel Arroyo, founder of the Turner publishing house and author of 'Pisando ceniza', at the beginning of March 2015, in Madrid.Carlos Rosillo

The most important of the Anglo-Saxon publishers of the time, Peter Mayer, Penguin's world president, was looking in the summer of 1993, anywhere in Europe, for an idol from his youth when he was recently in love. By the coincidence of his work, he was in El Escorial with other publishers and he asked if anyone would know there if there was a possibility of finding out the whereabouts of Chavela Vargas. It was easy, because it was well known here that another legendary of the publishing house, Manuel Arroyo-Stephens, founder of Turner and the bookstore that accompanied this fruitful adventure in publishing history, shared the admiration for that idol that Mayer was looking for . Manuel — who died on Sunday at the age of 75 — had rescued Chavela from the various streams to which the brilliant successor of José Alfredo Jiménez had given herself and had taken her to Madrid, and to Europe, to return her to a world in which she had another imposing godfather, Pedro Almodóvar.

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So with asking Arroyo it was easy to find the whereabouts of the once-elusive interpreter of A rare world , among other songs that she made pearls of life, love, and night. Arroyo had given himself over to that rescue and to those passions that Chavela represented just as before, and forever, he took care of José Bergamín or Rafael de Paula body and soul. He combined these fidelities with an even greater one, the accuracy of writing and music, the art of combining rhythm and speech to achieve synthesis of those that he gave recitals himself in formidable books ( Treading Ash , The Death of the Spontaneous ) that today they are explanations of his indefatigable way of defending taste (not only good taste: the highest category of taste) as an essential matter of the culture of writing.

So you had to ask Arroyo about the whereabouts of that woman now recovered for day life as well. And he replied: "Chavela is at home." Here's an editor, Peter Mayer, who wants to see it. "Let him come tomorrow at twelve." Mayer had attended one of the concerts that Chavela Vargas had given in Mexico City 30 years earlier in a Mexican cave, and that show had occurred at a time when the now powerful editor of Penguin believed he was facing the decisive love of his life. In Madrid he wanted to recover that memory.

No one told him that the next noon visit was precisely to see the publisher's protégé, and it was precisely Chavela Vargas who opened the door of Arroyo's house for Mayer. Since then, the Spanish publisher and the North American publisher shared other loves, the mutual one between them and the love for Chavela Vargas. Together they published (Cervantes, no less), together they traveled to listen as if they were new to all the songs by Chavela (and José Alfredo Jiménez), and the two of them, Peter and Manuel, were two friends for life, marked by taste and by the demanding inaccuracies of friendship. They rode together and left almost at the same time.