Pepe Domingo squeezed his life to the end

The day dawned rainy and with bad news: everyone’s friend had died. I found out, stretching, on the radio, where Manolo Lama was speaking. At first, his goodbye made me think that he was retiring, an idea that he managed during the last few years. Suddenly the harsh reality hit me: he had passed away.

Since we are neighbors (wall to wall) and our wives are very close friends, three days ago I found out that he was sick, but it sounded like nothing: a throat infection. Last night my wife, so observant of everything, told me that Pepe must be fine now, because she saw that there was no light in the house, from which she deduced that they had gone out. They went out very frequently, always with friends. They lived in the happy spirit of a young and recent marriage.

But no, this time the light off meant that they were in the hospital, in the last trance, which he spent surrounded by his wife, Tere, and his children. He left unexpectedly, but he left well.

He crushed life, thanks to the love with which he embraced all things: the radio, music, friends, sports, travel, the family from which he formed it (an ideal family), the sun, which he took with greed, readings. She did her thing well and spread good around her, always leading, he and her better half, Tere, groups of friends who at the same time made friends with each other easily, because they were all good people. .

“Until I run out of words. My memories of radio and life”, is the title of his autobiography, which I estimate is not even two years old, and whose purchase and reading I recommend for anyone who wants to get to know this friend of all who is gone more closely. And also those who want to know better the history of this country in the last eighty years, its society, its radio, its music, its politics. The profits, by the way, were allocated to charity, after much resistance to putting his life in ink, until agreeing at the insistence of a tenacious editor. And in good time he relented. Reading it made me cry in some passages (when I found out that the sister who helped him get out of the window to escape to Santiago to try his hand at the radio died) and laugh in some humorous episodes.

He was born in Iria Flavia, along with Padron, into a very large family. It was never explained how his parents had so many children if they couldn’t support them. In fact, they sent him to the seminary so that he could eat and acquire training; When at the first rebellion of the flesh he saw that that was not his thing, he returned unexpectedly and encountered the displeasure of his father: “And now what do I do with you? What are you going to eat?” The father spent a lot of money to feed his offspring and resorted to smuggling deals that he himself discovered while walking through the attic, but he never knew about it.

He started working in an office, but his dream was on the radio. And one day she ran away without saying anything to take a test with twenty applicants. The last one arrived and they caught him. The plotting sister warned her mother: “Mom, turn on the radio at five this afternoon.” And there she learned that her son had left the office to embark on the insecure profession of ‘speaker‘, as they said then.

Then came the jump to Madrid, in a first failed attempt that angered his director in Santiago, plus a second that cost him hunger and hardship until the triumph that his talent, enthusiasm and bonhomie deserved came. A long triumph, first on music radio, with appearances on TV and notable successes as a singer (with ‘Motivos’ he was number one in Mexico), then in sports. First on Cadena SER, where that legendary trio began on Carrusel Deportivo with him, Paco Gonzalez, then his adopted son (now his adoptive brother) and Manolo Lama. That triumph opened a panorama of offers that took them to COPE, where the trio maintained their strong cohesion and success.

He has gone active. Some time ago he flirted with the idea of ​​retiring and resting, he said it a lot, but with a small mouth. His voice was already a little shaky, but he didn’t lack words, much less the desire to participate, to be there, to work, to live. He’s suddenly gone, and gone fast.

The absence hurts, of course. It will not be easy for so many friends to lose her word and her gaze, and I’m not even saying for her beloved Tere, her lifelong companion, her children and her grandchildren. I don’t know if she can be of any consolation, but I hold on to the fact that she has gone active, happy, surrounded by everyone’s affection and accompanied by her family. He has squeezed his life during these 80 years and has not known the difficult trance of decrepitude, that threat that everyone feels when the final stretch of life approaches and that for him, energetic, vitalistic and, if I may say so, a flirtatious little point, it would have been especially hard.

Rest in peace. The words are over, but the memory and the friends remain. The example remains, above all the example. His was an exemplary way of living.

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