The safari that changed the relationship between Miguel Bosé and his father forever

He is one of the most recognized singers in our country and since his birth he has lived with popularity by being part of an important saga of artists who had personalities such as Pablo Picasso or Ernest Hemingway in their circle of friends. But when I turned 65 Miguel Bosé has decided give more details of your story and narrate in first person the most unknown aspects of his life like this, the moments that have marked him and the difficult relationship he had with his father. Makes it through Son of captain thunder, a memoir that will be published on November 10 and of which we show an extract in which the winner of a Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts and the International Medal of Arts of the Community of Madrid recounts a key episode that occurred when he was ten years old. The son of Luis Miguel Dominguín and Lucía Bosé tells how the trip he made with his father to Mozambique was a turning point for both him and his family, which was never the same again.

The interpreter of themes like Bandit lover, Pretty or Don diablo He goes back to his childhood to remember that he spent his weekends giving riding lessons and in one of those lessons he told his father that his horse was called Tiberius after the second emperor of Rome of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, a fact with the one that the right-hander realized his son’s passion for reading. “And hunting? Why don’t you like hunting? If you don’t like hunting, or fishing, or anything like that … tell me when I’m going to be with my son. You have to like it, Miguelón! You have to Do me a favor if you like him or I’m going to start thinking that you’re not my son, because for now, as far as I know, you haven’t gotten anything … MAnger, Miguelón, men have to do men’s things with men, like women do theirs with each other, do you understand? Riding a horse, going hunting, fishing and later on others that I will tell you about.. I’m looking forward to your twelfth birthday so you can smoke your first cigarette, damn it! Next year, if you train with the rifle, fine but fine. I’ll take you on safari for a whole month, you and me alone, to the jungle of Uganda or Mozambique“Luis Miguel, who was Carmen Ordóñez’s uncle, told him.

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A year after that conversation, in mid-June 1966, Bosé, who was ten years old at the time, and his father went on safari to Mozambique for a month, stopping over in Lisbon. His mother He gave him a notebook and a pen to write his own diary of that African adventure that changed him forever. “Dr. Manuel Tamames gave my father a small bottle with some tiny pills and explained that he was a quini na and that we should take one every fifteen days, that is, only two more apart from the one he touched when getting on the plane, three In total, and ‘don’t forget Luis Miguel, they are against malaria, and I don’t care if you don’t take them, but you give them to the child religiously or I’ll kill you’. ‘Yes, yes, don’t worry Manolo, I’m not forgetting, how can I forget, I’m not so irresponsible, ‘my father assured him. ‘I warn you, that as the child gets sick, he will leave us, and I am speaking very seriously, he will die’. And she looked him squarely in the face, without a joking face. As soon as we got on the plane, my father put the pills in his pocket and I don’t know what he would do with them, but he never gave me any“, the singer writes about those first minutes of travel.

A few days after arriving, Miguel Bosé remembers that they went to hunt hippos and that many mosquitoes bit him. “It was there where, with all certainty, I caught malaria, which today is known as malaria. And without a quinine pill, that my father did not give me by carelessness and forgetfulness, the disease was slowly incubating and by the middle of the second camp, in which we met Aunt Paquitina and Uncle Fausto, the Blascos from Madrid, also on safari, I was already visibly ill “. The trip progressed and Miguel remembers that one of the walks collapsed, sweating, shivering and cold: “I remember half-opening my eyes and seeing my father standing next to me, against the light, reviving me with the toe of his boot and saying to me: ‘Come on, don’t be a babe, get up and walk like a man and stop getting dizzy or you’re going to find out what a real smack I’m going to give you is, and enough of the nonsense‘ […] At that precise moment, I gave up forever. I understood that I would never live up to his expectations, that he would never be proud of me because I was weak, that he would never love me, that I was not the son he expected me to be “

As his stay in Africa progressed, the singer recalls that he suffered from violent diarrhea that began to dehydrate him and that on one of his visits to the camp latrine he was bitten by a scorpion for which he needed morphine. Thanks to this medicine he had a relief but it was only temporary since days later, when they returned to Spain, he found himself ill again. “In the arrivals hall of the Barajas airport, my mother was waiting for us. I will never forget the face she made when she saw me. Broken down. I didn’t have the strength to run to hug her. I went to Mozambique weighing thirty-many kilos and what came back from me was less than fifteen. His skin was stuck to his bones like a child from Biafra. Ice yellow, with cracked lips and huge purple circles hanging down from two sunken and shining eyes, her shorts were tied at her waist with a piece of rope that they must have given me there, in some camp, so they wouldn’t drop me. He was already seriously ill. My mother went into an attack of anguish and anxiety “, writes.

Convalescence and separation from their parents

Miguel Bosé explains that the next memory he has is him in his bed with cold cloths. “I slept and vomited, sometimes blood, and in one of those, sitting while drinking, I fell back in convulsions and was inert, as if dead. Had gone into a coma. I don’t know how long I stayed in that state, nobody remembers it well. It must have seemed like a century to my family, no more than ten minutes to me […] Suddenly I opened my eyes and saw everyone, standing there, surrounding the bed. Tata put her hands to her mouth and burst into tears and my mother followed. My sisters, whom since my arrival I had not seen, also, clinging to Rosi. Dr. Tamames, his friend Marita and Dr. Jaso, our usual pediatrician, also cried hugging and congratulating themselves. Jaso exclaimed: I told you, I told you, it is malaria, what he has is malaria! “.

The singer remembers that when he started taking quinine the fevers began to subside but that the convalescence was long, he remained weak for a long time and he spent the summer in a wheelchair. He explains that his father also fell ill but took refuge in Villa Paz, far away of the family: “He healed himself, according to what he later told, because as is well known, these critters know the danger they run by getting into the body of a bullfighter. The truth? My mother kicked him out of the house as soon as he arrived from Africa and told him that she did not want to see him for the rest of his days, and that if something happened to the boy, she would shoot him twice.“. Just a few months later the marriage of Lucía Bosé and Luis Miguel Dominguín, who had married in 1955 in Las Vegas, came to an end.