Why in godsname writing about Mercedes Sosa? Am I pretentious enough to believe that I can add anything meaningful to the parting of such a figure? Would I be remembered by my clumsy lines on an issue bigger than life? In one way or another, that is the question that all of us face when deciding to hit the keyboard. The answer, obvious since you are reading this, is yes. I am pretentious and arrogant enough to write. Which is what makes Mercedes even more important. She wasn’t.

Mercedes Sosa embodied that which many of us dream of being and will never be: the artist, the creator, the interpreter that taped in a huge undercurrent and brought it forth. Brought it so much to the front that her voice became a guideline. A real Songline (as Chatwin wrongly sought in Australia), mapping the intimate and barely understood currents of our own emotions. Would you want to know what is to walk in the Andes, trying to reach the top of a mountain? Hear “cancion con todos”, endlessly hummed by hundreds walking under a backpack, heading to yet another small south american town under the stars and above the valleys. Or would you prefer to know how it really feels to be an migrant? plug your earphones in “todo cambia”.  Have you ever been real real grateful? pay attention to her voice remaking once again “gracias a la vida”.

Last night I was coming home from Brussels, deep in the night and chatting in the train with my very dutch and very good friend Lin, journalist. Parading our tragedies, as one does now and then after a fulfilling day, we came to talk about the demise of Mercedes. It turned out that many years ago Lin interviewed Mercedes (In Crete, from all places). As any other left-winged southamerican can imagine, I was thorn out between the admiration and the envy (also because Lin heard once Atahualpa Yupanqui alive, but that is another history). Lin, on the other side, was almost ashamed of herself. She could not make head or tails from the interview, which was never published. A jetlag was involved, but in any case, the shortcomings of Mercedes facing an interview are part of her legend. One can read the myriad of obituaries from distinguished journalist appearing the past week, and the fact comes again and again: Mercedes was very hard to interview, since she has very few to say. Falling back to commonplaces, repeating old cliches of the left, many journalist were frustrated by the simplicity of Mercedes Sosa in the flesh. And that is what made her. Mercedes was no political leader, was no inventor of a new music, nor she had a voice unheard off before. Mercedes was the full opposite of the self secure and self promoting artist that we have become to consider normal in the last century. Mercedes was not arrogant at all. She was nothing more, and nothing else, that an interpreter of the people, of many people. She might has been for all what matters, the last of the folklorists. The one versed in the lore of the people, capable beyond any other to interpret it and bounce it back to you in a way that would grip your stomach and expand from there into all of you. Hear Mercedes once more, and become. Not be-gone, but be-come. Come back to be one of the many. Mercedes transgressed borders. Our borders, the individual ones. You might be a jazz-lover, heavy metal and Bach perpetual hearer, as I am. Or a Dvorak, Bartok and Piazzolla piano player, as my wife is. A world music fan, a lover of the Oscar de Leon’s salsa or a sophisticated classicist capable to hear the slips of Ashkenazy playing Beethoven’s fifth, and criticize Gould’s humming. But all of you, all of you will be tackled, gripped and transformed when hearing our Negra.

So, our Negra is gone. And again, she isn’t. We will teach our sons, growing in this cold Europe that “el que bebe de tu vino gana sueño y pierde pena”. Ayden, with his eight years blooming into a world that we can’t predict, knows that “si se calla el cantor, calla la vida, porque la vida, la vida misma es como un canto”.

Mercedes, gracias a tu vida.