Next Wednesday, November 10 “The son of captain thunder” will hit the bookstores, the autobiography that Miguel Bosé will publish under the auspices of the Espasa publishing house.
“Generous and bold as we have never seen him, the author offers us the lesser known face memorable characters, from a vulnerable and twilight Picasso, to the beautiful and cursed Helmut Berger”, read the initial statement with which the firm presented the book.
Nevertheless, he is the father of the singer, the bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín, one of the most prominent people throughout the pages that make up the work, which already seems controversial even before seeing the light.
Despite the reluctance of his mother, who flatly refused to allow her “Mighelino” to travel to Mozambique to face lions, elephants and other beasts, Luis Miguel Dominguín did not stop until he took little Bosé with him.
«Fag, Lucia, the boy is going to be fag! Sure!», he complained, as a pretext for the singer to accompany him on his expedition. Then Calvary began of a ten-year-old boy who just wanted to go back to Madrid with his mother and his Tata.
“A few days later we went to hunt hippos, and since I was not standing in those marshes, they put me on the shoulders of a porter until I reached the staking hut between reed beds,” Miguel Bosé begins by recalling that horrible safari.
“During the journey, my legs, which from the knee down were always in the water, they were plagued with leeches, dozens of them, hanging like fringes that I didn’t even notice when they hit me. I was bitten by many mosquitoes, many, many and of all sizes, and it was there that, with all certainty, I caught malaria, what today is known as malaria.”
What would have been easily cured with some pills of quinine ended up leading to serious complications due to Luis Miguel Dominguín’s refusal to medicate his son.
His aunt Paquitina, who coincided with them in Africa, implored the bullfighter to treat little Bosé “or he would die before returning to Spain”, but nothing made the right-hander see reason:
“He said no, that was a queer that was useless. He closed the discussion by replying that what I had was not malaria but mastitis, and that he would either wake up or not bring me back on safari. The Blascos left the camp seriously worried, with a terrible anguish of heart, but there the issue was settled,” recalls the singer.
Miguel Bosé spent the following days chaining vomiting with diarrhea and dizziness, while walking for miles under the burning sun of the savannah.
“The walks became harder and harder for me, but I never protested, I didn’t want to disappoint my father. Until in one of them I collapsed, sweating and shivering, white and cold as chalk. 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 nenaza, get up and walk like a man and stop dizzy or you’ll find out what is a real one of the smack that I’m going to hit you, and enough of the nonsense.”
“He threw his hat over my face contemptuously to repair me from the sun, or so I understood, and turning my heels, I saw him walk away, upset and his patience exhausted,” says Bosé in his memoirs.
In that instant, he understood that their relationship was lost 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.And there, at the age of ten, lying in the middle of Africa, I decided that why try harder. I felt very bad, very sad, very lonely, very ill and I threw in the towel, I could not bear it».
Fifteen kilos less
After the month of safari and without having received the necessary treatment, the singer finally heard the words that he longed for so much from his father:
“Tomorrow we go back to Madrid.” Lucía Bosé was waiting for them at the airport, who was “decomposed” when she saw her son Miguel arrive with more than fifteen kilos less and “huge purple dark circles.”
Little Bosé got even worse in Spain, even going into a coma, a moment in which he saw the famous light which he describes as “bright, white, transparent and cold.”
Fortunately, he managed to return from wherever he was: “I opened my eyes and saw them all, standing there, surrounding the bed.” He was alive, but a difficult recovery awaited him. Meanwhile, his father had to carry with the shame and fury of a good part of the family.
An overpriced safari
It goes without saying that Lucía Bosé’s displeasure with her husband was enormous when she saw her son arrive completely undone.
«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 child, she would shoot him twice.»
Bosé tells in his memoirs. In addition, the family doctor, Dr. Tamames, also withdrew the floor from Luis Miguel Dominguín due to his great irresponsibility. That was the beginning of the end of a marriage doomed to failure for the continuous infidelities of the bullfighter.
When her patience was full, the Italian plucked up her courage and decided to separate at a time when she was still not well regarded. The right-hander, a close friend of Franco, threatened his wife with taking custody of their children, but she showed off her famous character and, shotgun in hand, took the idea out of his head.
The safari to Africa was too expensive for the teacher, who lost the trust of his son, his wife and the family home.