2023-06-30 22:13:56
I grew up with the fights that were shown on television, at night, when my old man and I would sit on the sofa upholstered in scythe, and the fighters that appeared on the screen had names that were as resonant as they were significant: Urtain, Perico Fernández, Carlos Monzón, or that other one with the mustaches and Mongolian face who had been baptized as Dum Dum Pacheco.
Those were times when boxing was a way of writing, an attitude towards life where the only blow to take was money after collecting the Time.news. At that time I was a micurria who read the chronicles of Manuel Alcántara, Fernando Vadillo and Julio César Iglesias. And he enjoyed them with the same passion with which years later he would enjoy reading Hemingway, disassembling his sentences in order to study the mechanism that moves them.
It was Julio César Iglesias who baptized that mustachioed boxer who never wrinkled before his rival, whoever he was. He named it Dum Dum after those hollow point bullets designed to expand on impact. Accurate name for the boxer with the most lethal fists in the history of welterweights in Spain. Because the history of Dum Dum Pacheco is the history of our country in the last fifty years, ever since Dum Dum, as a child, joined one of the first street gangs of the sixties: Los Ojos Negros, so named because their leader He was a type of dark gaze that transmitted violence at every step. Los Ojos Negros came to the threatening dancers and suggested the owners the music they had to play, as well as the artists they had to hire. In this way, Camilo Sesto made his way into the world of choubisnes homeland escorted by a Praetorian Guard of which Dum Dum Pacheco was an active part.
Servando Rocha tells it in a hard and violent book at the same time that he has titled All the hate I had insidea work where the hidden and suburban history of our country intersects with music, from the mornings of Circo Price to Rock-Ola, the temple of the Movida Madrileña, a room run by an Algerian responsible for hiring mercenaries for the dirty war against ETA.
And all this with the guiding thread of Dum Dum Pacheco, a character of humble origin, without ideology, that is, from the right; a guy delivered to the lights of fame of those years in which he appeared in magazines kissing Paula Pattier or any other; years in which I rehearsed blows based on verbs, avoiding the adjective and using nouns in the right measure so that the phrase ran, swift and fast, loaded with the force of the fists of Dum Dum Pacheco, Evangelista, Monzón or one of those boxers who jumped into a ring where it smelled of menthol and black tobacco smoke, and where my old man concentrated his gaze with the nostalgia of someone who wants to return. Because my old man also fought to alleviate the post-war hunger strike that lasted too long.
These are things that come to me after reading the book by Servando Rocha, a book that has touched my heart, that has brought me back to those years of quinquis and yeyés, years of television with a letter of adjustment and a national anthem as a farewell and closing. Times that are part of my sentimental memory where the bell of the first round still resounds, which, according to my old man, is where the fight is decided.
#Quinquis #eyed