Bambino: the wild loves of Raphael's idol

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It was like a hurricane. After half a century of inhabiting the world and having seen better times,

appeared on

television program

as a phenomenon of force 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale: he screamed, suffered, waved his hands, gave kicks, he left his last breath on the mike ... He

All of this, with music that seemed to uproot Dorothy's house in 'El mago de Oz': full-blast bulerías and those bongos like machine guns that definitively sealed the connection between flamenco and rumba and other American rhythms. back and forth.

Once the performance was over, Gemio approached

(1940-1999), dripping with sweat, and asked him about one of the songs he had performed, 'Amar y vivir', by

. It says: "I do not want to regret after / what could have been and was not." With that slight stutter that he had when he was not doing his best in singing and dancing, he explained: "It is an important song for me because it was true.

. My principles ... I speak of love".

Debuts next week in

Before passing through the festival

- the documentary "Something Wild. La historia de Bambino ', directed by Paco Ortiz and with the participation of

, among others. The announcer

He acts as a narrator and, at one point, tells the story of Vargas's childhood love with a baby from his native Utrera. A romance that was interrupted by his departure to Madrid, to make a living in the tablaos. "Since then", Herrera recounts, "his was the ambiguity. His life was like his songs: intense, passionate, given over to wild loves, without names or labels. Bambino was many things for the society of his time, but, above all, he was a free person. "

In a well-known story,

was singing verses in a theater and someone in the audience shouted: "Mariquita!" And he: "No.

.

Bambino never came out of the closet slamming the door like that; it was enough for him to sing 'I am the prohibited' to put meat to all that hidden life of Franco's Madrid: "I am that night of pleasure, the one that is delivered without paper./ I am your punishment./ Because in your false intimacy, in every hug you give / dream of me ".

In the shadows of the night and the party, Bambino also found himself at ease, who in one of his last public appearances -the tribute that was paid to him at the Victoria Eugenia Theater in Madrid in April 1998, just a year before he died- He appeared

. He had recently returned to Utrera, where his mother and the rest of his family still lived. "I'm tired of acting, but not singing," he explained about that inner exile. And he had returned to his beginnings, to those sales where he started as a kid,

"If I can not sing more in life, when I arrive, I arrived," he said.

And so it happened to him: in what had to be the first concert of his return tour, in Rota (Cádiz), he was left without a voice.

Shortly after, they detected

that took him to his grave.

Then he revived that recognition that he garnered in the 60s and 70s. His gestures and theatricality paved the way for what was later Raphael.

María Jiménez started out, in her words, as a "Bambino with boobs".

In addition, he encouraged the meeting of

, who met in a recording of him.

Asked by García-Alix on one occasion, the one from San Fernando said that Bambino was an "artist of artists."

Because his colleagues liked him a lot and because, who else, who less, they all stole something from him.

"90% of the lyrics are my experiences.

And when I finish singing on stage, I am rested. I am not tired, because I have already explained myself," he said about his way of telling himself.

Bambino died without a boy, without seeing how they awarded him the title of LGTBI pioneer and perhaps a little resentful for the

, who had arrived after him,

.

He never quite fit in anywhere

: too liberal for gypsies and too gypsy for moderns;

rejected by purists of the jondo and also by iconoclasts;

Utrera in Madrid and Barcelona and a stranger when he returned to Utrera.

The almost two hundred songs he recorded made him

.

There are few images of him acting because he didn't really like being on television, which is a shame.

Because one can listen to 'La pared' or 'Bambino, piccolino', two of his greatest hits, and still feel their breath.

But you have to see it in action, as in the documentary, to be definitely devastated in its wake.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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