The endearing friendship and (supposed) romance of Pedro Messone and Violeta Parra who was born Back at 17

Due to affinities or tastes, on more than one occasion in Chilean music, intimate and romantic bonds have been created between male and female musicians. In July 1966, something like this formed between purple vine And Pedro Messino . Everything happened between the daily coexistence of Chile Ríe y Canta Tour, which took the singer to Patagonia. At least that’s how Víctor Herrero quotes it in his book After living a century. A biography of Violeta Parra (Lumen, 2017). The tour was originally financed by the State Bank, but it cut the aid after the inconvenience caused to the managers by the song of Rolando Alarcón I defend my land; there, the Agrarian Reform Corporation funded the show.

It was at the time in the Antarctic cold of the south of the world, during presentations in Punta Arenas, when a spark arose between them. They weren’t alone, Sergio Sauvalle (of Los Huasos Quincheros), Silvia Urbina, Rolando Alarcón and Patricio Manns were also in the squad. Key names in Chilean neofolklore, the movement that preceded La Nueva Canción Chilena.

Manns recalls the facts:La Violeta was in love all the time, and she fell in love like a schoolgirl! He was a lolo who hung out with pure lolitas from the upper district, but they went for a walk, had a few drinks, warmed up, went to the hotel and went to bed”. René “Largo” Farías is also quoted: “We saw her fall in love with the fashionable singer at that time and she was born there back to seventeen”.

Farias is not exaggerating. There was a notorious age difference between the two, as Messone was 20 years younger than her. Even if the singer places the relationship in other confines more distant from love: “She had the image and the importance of an older person. She behaved in a maternal way with others.

But as Farías points out, what left that brief and intense bond was precisely one of the songs that would make Violeta immortal. It was at the end of the visit, when the bus was already on its way to the airport and stopped briefly at one of the wild beaches in the Magallanes region. There, everyone took the opportunity to go down, stretch their legs, pick up stones and shells. Parra and Messone have distanced themselves somewhat from the others. After a while, they shouted at them that they had to turn back.

Messone says: “I look back and I see that Violeta arrives without any athletic, uncomfortable aspect. I turned around and asked him, ‘What is it?’, ‘Can I help you with the bag?’ I took her arm, then her hand. “Hurry up, hurry up,” he told her. ‘Ahh, how do you think you’re gonna run me? If they can’t leave without both of us’. “Come on, we look like 17-year-olds,” I told him. ‘What did you tell me, that we looked like something like 17?’ “I don’t know, we look like kids that age, running and running errands, collecting seashells,” I replied.

The next thing Messone saw, already on the bus, was Violeta picking up a pencil and paper writing something. The idea of ​​17 revolved around him. “What are you writing?” I asked. “No, nothing”, and put the paper away. On the plane, he continued to write. She was always writing on paper.”

The theme will come to life in November 1966, on the fundamental album the latest compositionsthere, as the second theme of side B, was Back to 17, with others as important as Thanks to life, El Albertío or Modern Mazurquica.

A few months later, in February 1967, the artist put an end to his life by a gunshot, in his tent in La Reina.