No way. I'm not going to talk about that first time that nobody really cares.
But I will speak about that other first time.
¿Which one?
The one that lives alone and hits it so hard that it wakes you up and lifts you up so high that it seems like a dream.
I mean that first time we heard a song and the lyrics do not matter in the least because the voice (and the time) acts as a lullaby that takes us, over and over, to THAT place.
My sister was about nineteen years old, which means I barely brushed all six with my fingertips.
She had been working for Aerolineas Argentinas for a year, as a stewardess and from each of her trips she brought vinyl records. For me they were like flying saucers that arrived in a suitcase, from very, very far away. She had hundreds in her house: ABBA, Simon & Garfunkel, KISS, Queen, Van der Graff Generator, Bowie, Jethro Tull ...
She took them out of her chest. And to me, the way I used to look at them, they were like treasures (sometimes I wanted her to look at me and take care of me the same way).
Next, she cleaned them up and put them in a Magnavox that had been brought in from California.
I used to sit and watch the show I improvised in front of me for 45 minutes. Sometimes I fell asleep directly on the carpet, and other times I dared to hum a melody with my body, imitating it, to make me smile.
One day, when she returned from London, she came running, hugged me and said she had a surprise for me and showed me a new album. It had blue letters on it, the picture of a man with huge glasses and really weird bangs and he said:
"Today you will be Elton John"
She put me in huge heeled shoes, sunglasses three times bigger than my face, and drew me a piano with books and silverware. It was then that she pressed play and a song started playing: Tiny Dancer.
Until that moment, everything I had heard seemed to me part of the same. Yes, I knew there were differences, but the same ones that a tourist feels when he touches the sea. Instead, Tiny Dancer made me a fisherman: suddenly I understood everything, as if I spoke THAT language. It was a lullaby that had my name and a rhythm that my body also had.
There is no way to fake that. But we have all experienced something like this once.
At five, seven, ten, or thirty. Nobody has to explain to you when you fall in love and, in the same way, nobody has to warn you that this song will accompany you for the rest of your life.
My sister had to play the song about thirty times until I promised her that was the last one.
More than 40 years have passed. Today, if I go in the car, if I'm buying something or waiting for someone and I hear the song, I immediately smell my sister's apartment, I look at my feet hoping to have shoes with heels, I smile inwardly and tears come to my eyes, in public. And I don't care, because at that moment I brush my six-year-old again.
✏ Juan Scaliter @juanscaliter