It took a year and a half to work up the courage.
In October 2021, 18 months after the death of his father, Miki Aute, the artist's youngest son (35 years old), set to work organizing "dad's things".
He entered the "office" of the family home and placed his hand on the cassette player that his father used to record what he was composing.
There was a tape inside that his father hadn't told anyone about, but he didn't dare listen to it.
Days later he came back, took a deep breath and pressed
play.
The unmistakable voice of Luis Eduardo Aute began to sound, adorned by a guitar.
He only managed to reproduce two songs of the ten that the old recording consists of.
His emotion prevented her from going forward.
"I still haven't found the strength to listen to the entire tape," assumes Miki, sitting on a terrace in Madrid while smoking a rolling cigarette.
That tape recorder (without the treasure of the unreleased tape) is among what is going to be exhibited throughout the month of May at the SGAE headquarters, in the center of the capital, in an exhibition that will include talks, performances , exhibitions of paintings and memories of a polyhedral artist who, when pushed to define himself, said: “I am neither a musician nor a painter nor a poet nor a filmmaker.
I am curious”.
Luis Eduardo Aute suffered a myocardial infarction in August 2016. It happened at his home in Madrid, after what was his last concert, in Huelva.
The artist was immediately admitted to a hospital and lived two agonizing months in a coma.
He got over it and spent the next four years in his house in Madrid, sheltered by his family (his wife, María del Carmen Rosado
Marichu,
and the couple's three children) and receiving visits from friends, musicians, poets, painters... He had to give up his beloved tobacco and his glasses of whiskey and gin.
In the best moments of her convalescence she asked for some brushes and worked on canvases.
“These are somewhat surreal paintings, the kind of faces and expressions that he used to paint.
Strange portraits, playing a lot with colors, with contrasts.
I love them.
I have one in my house hanging.
After what happened to him and he was able to paint like this… I thought: 'How is it possible,' says his son.
In 2018 he watched the recording of the tribute concert in a packed WiZink Center in Madrid,
Cheer up, animal!
.
A fact that we now find out from the mouth of his son, so this time poetic justice was fulfilled and the honoree enjoyed the warmth of his colleagues and the public, even if it was delayed.
In that recital they sang their songs Serrat, Sabina, Silvio Rodríguez, Ismael Serrano, Rozalén or Dani Martín.
He aute saw it at his house, days later, on video.
"And he cried, well, he cried," now reports his son.
Miki Aute, last Wednesday at the SGAE headquarters, photographed with his father's paintings.
Samuel Sanchez
They were things that he enjoyed the last days of his life.
He also made some vacation outing.
But most of the time he was at home, where, according to Miki, he made ironic comments about current politics.
“The surrealism of today caught his attention, the strange things that happened, defining the situation as a circus.
He had great skepticism about everything.”
His health insisted on abandoning him at the beginning of 2020. His condition was very delicate and he suffered respiratory failure on April 4 that ended an intense life of 76 years.
“It was not covid.
It was due to the aftermath of the 2016 heart attack. But it was strange, because it happened at the height of the pandemic and organizing everything with the restrictions was painful, as I imagine it would happen to many relatives of the deceased at that time, ”says Miki.
The unpublished recording that his son has now found was recorded just before the heart attack.
Ella aute she sings in falsetto, a technique that she practiced as a whisper, so as not to disturb the coexistence with the rest of the family.
She used cassette tapes that she rerecorded over and over again as melodies and ideas occurred to her.
We are talking about cassettes that several generations grew up with, that recorded songs from the radio or from tape to tape, unsophisticated systems.
“You were around the house and you could hear the guitar very softly, the falsetto voice and the sound of the tape recorder when he turned it off and on:
tac, tac.
I grew up with that background music and I'm very into it.
I'm listening to the tape little by little because if I don't go into an emotional spin”, says Miki.
Her mother, Marichu, 76 years old, does not even come close to this material, today so valuable for fans of the singer-songwriter.
“She is still very sensitive.
She can't even see photos of her, ”reports Miki, who is a video maker and worked with her father on records and movies.
A drawing of Aute when he was 24 years old;
a jar with the figure of Leonardo Da Vinci, where his brushes rested;
and the palette with which he mixed the colors.
Samuel Sanchez
Luis Eduardo and Marichu were together for 52 years.
They were married in 1968 and have never been apart.
She was the inspiration for a career that the artist dedicated to romanticism and extolling beauty.
There is still a belief that
Al Alba
was a composition inspired by the last executions of the Franco regime, when it is a love song for Marichu.
One more.
“In addition to being her muse, my mother was also her contact with reality.
My father lived in his artistic world.
He spent the whole morning working on the creation, resting to eat, and then shutting himself up again until night.
He didn't stop.
And she was his connection to the physical world, as well as his mate.
They had their ups and downs, of course, but they were together for so long… I think about it and it makes me dizzy”, says Miki with a smile.
The very morning of the talk with this newspaper, Miki found a little faded green book by Robert Louis Stevenson,
Vailima Prayers and Christmas Sermon, among her father's boxes.
He has decided to exhibit it at the SGAE exhibition because his mother told him: "It is the only book he always had on his bedside table."
If it opens, you can read notes taken in pen and pencil by Aute himself.
One is the (landline) telephone number of film producer Andrés Vicente Gómez.
Another, this poem/reflection: “And I wonder, why do I ask myself questions that are asked?”.
The cassette tape player where Miki Aute found the tape of her father's unreleased songs.
Samuel Sanchez
Among the material found by Miki there are manuscripts, things that he had left halfway.
A note: “Call Pepe Caballero”.
That conversation with the writer José Manuel Caballero Bonald that never took place and that shelters a disastrous coincidence: the poet died in May 2021, 13 months after Aute.
Also drawings from when the artist was a child of eight or nine years old.
Also the original (from 1962)
kiss,
the famous silhouette of a person's profile that he later always used to sign his autographs.
With the ten unreleased songs on the cassette, the idea is to publish an album.
The option is that other artists take those sketches and reinterpret them.
"It can also be edited raw, with the voice in falsetto," he notes.
Miki states that the mourning for her father's death continues.
And so it will always be, logically muffled by the passage of time, but always latent and present when those beautiful verses of
La Belleza sound,
one of his most emblematic songs: “I claim the mirage of trying to be oneself, that journey towards nothingness that It consists in the certainty of finding beauty in your eyes”.
May, month of Aute in the SGAE.
Painting, music, cinema and poetry.
With the participation of Antonio Álvarez del Pino, Javier Espada, Pastora Vega, Miguel Poveda or Luis Mendo.
See schedule by clicking here.
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