- Music: Die Pau Donés, from Jarabe de Palo
"Alsoris Guzmán, La Flaca , very pleased". The woman who answers the phone from Milan, where she has lived since she left her native Havana two decades ago, has been called La Flaca since she was a child. Long before Pau Donés christened a record with his nickname and described it as ethereal: "One hundred pounds of skin and bone, 40 kilos of sauce."
Alsoris is now 45 years old, other more forceful measures -166 pounds, 75 kilos for 1.78 in height- and a version of the story that he has never told and that differs in some verses from the one that the song narrates. "For a kiss from La Flaca I would give anything / For a kiss from her, even if only one were," wrote Pau Donés . And now La Flaca throws us the chorus on the ground telling us that there was a kiss, a small one, not very important, but a kiss: "A kiss came up, but now, a kiss on the bus when we were traveling in Cuba. He was a person shy then, apart from that we were very young, and don't ask me to mix work with something else, " says La Flaca .
Last March, Pau Donés released the compilation album 50 Palos and at the same time an autobiographical book - 50 Palos ... and I'm still dreaming - in which he tells that the mythical theme of his first album, La Flaca -of 1996, two million copies sold-, is inspired by a real woman whose name is known: Alsoris. The story began like this: "It was 1995 and a group of friends set out to travel to Cuba. Film director Fernando de France had bought eight cheap tickets and invited us to travel to the island with one objective: to shoot the video clip of The dark side ", writes Pau Donés .
"We arrived in Havana, we left things at the hotel and with the rush we went to a party in 1830, an open-air disco on the Malecon that everyone knows there as La Tasca . We had some mojitos and when we were leaving he entered the premises a woman of stunning beauty, wearing a semi-transparent red chiffon dress, and in the face two suns that spoke without words. (...) During that week we were looking for a model for the video clip, we saw many wonderful girls, but in the There was only one head of all, the girl in the red dress that we found the first day in La Tasca . And there we went every night until we finally found her. A goddess, that's what she was. We approached and told her of our plans : We needed a model for a video clip and we thought she was the ideal one. And without further ado, Alsoris accepted. "
"Uh- huh, that's how we met," Alsoris nods on the other end of the phone, which tells that at the time she was a model, who paraded every night at La Tasca , and that when she ended up on the catwalk, she actually started ' dance and dance ', as the lyrics say. He is not so happy, however, with how Donés continues the story. This insinuates that La Flaca did not give him a ball because the one who really attracted him was the model Eva Nielsen , with whom he shared the room first. "Alsoris moved to my room (not because he liked me more, but rather the opposite, because it turned out that Eva liked him a little more than normal) ...", read 50 sticks .
"Let's see why he puts it in the book that I am lesbian. That is not true. I have a son and this has come to my family in Cuba, who has called me worried. You cannot imagine how my father got when he they taught this outrageous ... ", he says very quickly and with a very Cuban accent. "They did not have a half-broken euro back then to take a hostel and give each person a room and Fernando decided to divide the rooms and I had to do with Pau from the beginning," he says.
It was in that shared room, he explains, where Pau composed La Flaca : "One night he stayed up writing the song. We woke up in the morning and he gave me a stuffed toy of his - a green dragon - and the envelope with the song written to him. his handwriting. "I have written this to you," he said to me. That poem, which is not a poem is a song, my mother has it, I do not know if it keeps it because who would have thought that song would become famous "It was between photos and things that I had, and I left those boxes with my mom. It's been 20 years, my mother is not going to keep that for 20 years, and who would have imagined that it would be a famous song? No one. You won't find it ... ". We cut it here, but the monologue is even longer in which Alsoris laments the disappearance of that original manuscript, since he guesses that the paper may have some economic value and the money would do him good. "Pau Donés made two originals of the manuscript text; the one reproduced here is the one reserved for him . "
Alsoris Guzmán says that she has a 10-year-old son whom she raises alone and that, although she earned a good living when she came to Italy working as a vedette and as a singer for the group Alsoris and those who are from Cuba, now is not a good time there for music and struggling. "They began to close stores, the business declined and it is no longer enough for me. Imagine that now I work as a babysitter during the day , nine hours, and I assist people with Alzheimer's. At night I continue to act when they call us, six or seven nights a month as much".
Alsoris also tells that he has not seen Pau Donés since that May 1995 when he appeared looking for her in La Tasca . The video clip for which he required it, the one from The Dark Side, was finally not shot because of the weather. "It rained without compassion all week, so we could not shoot a meter of film, although we could discover, from the hand of Alsoris , that Cuba that does not appear in the catalogs of travel agencies," reads 50 Palos . Until Fernando de France , discoverer of Jarabe de Palo, read the lyrics of La Flaca and decided to change the pace and shoot that song, says Alsoris . "The acoustic video that was shot in Cuba before they left, that is the true video of La Flaca . It starts with me walking along the Malecon," he says. On YouTube it has 2,250,000 visits. La Flaca received nothing for participating in it. "They took me there and there, we were partying, enjoying, but they didn't give me anything. What would they give me if they didn't even have one for them. Pau slept in my house for five days because they didn't have a shelter ..."
La Flaca was the first album by Jarabe de Palo and was released in 1996 with little success. But the following year, the tobacco brand Ducados chose the theme to put music to one of its ads and the tune shifted to become the song of the summer of 1997, just now 20 years ago.
Alsoris was hit by a newcomer to Italy when La Flaca boomed, and the echo of the repercussion reached him there. "My sister was living in Madrid at the time and it was she who warned me about the video, which began to roll everywhere. 'Here is a revolution with you that you can not imagine, you are on all screens, on the street, in the bars ... El Pau has become famous. '' Well, ok, if he wants to look for me he will look for me, but I already have my visa for Italy. 'And I came to Italy. "
Alsoris now regrets not having taken more advantage of his participation in La Flaca, economically . "Isn't something going to come to me for the use of my image?" He asks. "Because I am the only protagonist of a song that has never been given any benefit. And he continues to use my image, he appears in the book and everything ... " And he launches from here La Flaca the business card of his group in case they wanted to hire her in Spain." I would like to succeed with my talent and not begging for crumbs from nobody. How I would like to go sing to Spain ... La Flaca and those who are from Cuba! The rooms would be full, I'm sure. It is a dream to realize. "
"I still love her a lot," Pau Donés told us when we asked about her muse. "Indeed, thanks to the inspiration of that woman, it was possible to write that song that millions of people have enjoyed."
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