A mural in homage to health personnel in Caracas.Matias Delacroix / AP
“No one ever told me that grief was so much like fear.
I'm not scared, but the feeling is like being scared. "
Thus begins a text by CS Lewis -
Meditation of a duel
-, an admirable cross of meditation and elegy, written following the death of his beloved, the poet Joy Davidman, in 1960.
My younger brother, Óscar, nicknamed
El Kóskoro
, died in the Altos Mirandinos, a victim of covid-19, soon six weeks ago, but it has only been in recent days that that feeling, which, as Lewis observes, is symptomatically indistinguishable from the fear, has been turning into a sweet filial stupor, jubilant I will say, that now accompanies me even in dreams.
The word that best describes the feeling is pedal, understood as musicians understand it: a sound, a note, usually the tonic, very long and on which different chords follow each other harmonically.
Read other texts by Ibsen Martínez
'Godfather's war', by Ibsen Martínez
'Picozapato', by Ibsen Martínez
This harmonizing resource, essential to vocal polyphony, was established among humans in the Middle Ages and is so powerful that it became frequent in the mambo
big band
“niuyorrican” arrangements of the 50s, notably those of maestro Mario Bauzá, musical director of the Afrocubans de
Machito
.
My brother
Kóskoro
, although a photographer by profession, was originally a salsa musician from the southwest of Caracas –a consummate guitarist, bongo player, singer– and the baritone sax pedal that imbues me when evoking him is that of the mambo
Complication
of the great Francisco Aguabella, in the arrangement made by Tito Puente for his unsinkable album
Dance Mania
, from 1957.
I had two brothers and they were both musicians.
The oldest, a pianist, became a concert player while
Kóskoro
preferred the essence of the guaguancó.
So, a brother Prokofiev and another Ray Barretto.
The baquiné is that family celebration of African roots with which a deceased infant is dismissed with music.
The voice and the ritual came to us from Puerto Rico.
For a better overview of
Kóskoro
, note that while reviewing the record news at my house one afternoon, he held up a Christa Ludwig vinyl with
Gustav Mahler's
Kindertotenlieder (
Songs for Dead Children
) and said: “Hey, put Mahler's baquiné Let's see how the old woman sings ”.
Well, with that you can see what
Kóskoro
was
like
.
My brother, like so many compatriots, died as a result of the covid and, in short, also of 21st century socialism.
His old-age pension, after a quarter-century of work in higher education, was less than three dollars.
I never knew where that nickname came from that he preferred to his own name.
The truth is that in any situation that he would call “apprehensive”,
musing Kóskoro
works for me, cabalistically, as an oral talisman of good luck.
I associate this superstition with the great luck that accompanied him all his life.
Once —this happened in the Caracas of the 70s, which at night became the world capital of
Latin Jazz—
I went, very late at night, to a local salsero, a bailadero where we had met to hear some friends in
jam session
.
The place was packed.
I found
Kóskoro
sitting at a table chatting animatedly with a guy I didn't know.
I assumed it was an acquaintance of hers from the music scene and took a seat.
Just when he was waiting to be introduced, a hand emerged from the ambient zarabanda with a semiautomatic that pointed at the head of the stranger and pulled the trigger.
I say so confidently "semiautomatic" because my old man had an identical 7.65 Beretta.
The one in my story jammed and in the nanosecond of perplexity and panic that followed,
Kóskoro
, a reflex prodigy, grabbed the gunman's wrist, stood up, and began a struggle with him that dislodged the premises in just two measures.
The gunman, who was like a barrel, managed to fire several shots while
Kóskoro
was hugging him, until the cowardly onlookers made an erratic pylon around the guy and someone very strong managed to disarm him, literally with their teeth.
They turned on the lights: the stranger whose life my brother saved had disappeared.
Armed parishioners appeared calling themselves "officials", the uproar broke out.
Kóskoro
detached himself from the
mêlée
and yelled at me: "Run!"
We never knew who the gunman was coming from.
"Who was the guy they were going to kill?" I asked him, still adrenaline pumping, already in another place, far away, with the rum of commenting on the play.
-I dont know.
But he knows me from somewhere because he said: “Hello,
Kóskoro
, are you alone?” He sat down and gave me salsa conversation while they came to break it.
He owes me his life, the bastard.
Communications with Venezuela were infamous on the eve of his death.
The night he died, and despite his deplorable respiratory
symptoms
,
Kóskoro
left me a voice message: a phrase from Humberto Harris, a dear Panamanian friend, now deceased, of which
Kóskoro
made a password.
"Life is a turn at bat, Ibsen."
This is the end of the baquiné.
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