From Caetano Veloso, Walking into the Wind

He’s a sage, a musical holy man, the friend who consoles us when love falters or when we take the wrong path. He’s got a movement behind him, but he’s miles from any phony ideology. He’s simple, transparent, honest, a rebel.

He can pull anything out of his hat: old sambas by Vicente Celestino, Fellinian fantasies picked up you don’t know where, those raspy chords of Henri Salvador that so dazzled him when he was a kid. Caetano Veloso is a man of deep curiosity.

He never plays the know-it-all, never makes a distinction between high culture and low. The people have their knowledge, their own culture, and he shows the greatest respect for the people, always. After all, he’s one of them. He can combine everything: the mystical and the folk, reason and desire.

Caetano Veloso is a tropical smoothie; the flesh, the rind, and the seeds all work together. He doesn’t exclude, he includes. He’s like Brazil that way. He smells of that land of beauty and contradictions, of heaven and horror. He never made it his conscious mission to tell his country’s story, it just happened.

Look at him, there in his dressing room relaxing, friends have arrived and he ushers them in, even though he’s in his underwear. They laugh, they’re having a good time, fooling around. Paula Lavigne, his ex-wife and manager, is there too. Paulinha, a magnificent person. When you love Caetano Veloso you cannot but love Paula Lavigne, indeed, you adore her. She is the Branquinha in the song, the Carioca de luz própria, the woman who after their marriage (and two children) ended, has remained by his side to look after his affairs. They’ve been through a lot together, and they respect one another.

She not only serves as his manager, she gives us his story almost minute by minute, us fans. On Paulinha’s Instagram account are many, many pictures of her ex-husband, pictures that let us to feel close to him. Of course she also posts photos of other singers she manages, the rapper Emicida for example. But there’s a positive jubilation of photos of Caetano Veloso in every imaginable guise, pure bliss for those of us who love him. In my favorite, he’s surrounded by a group of young Parisians who seem to gleam with joy because he is near them, sending out light like a great star in a solitary galaxy. The joy of those unknown French kids is my own joy, and when I saw that photo I understood that those of us who love Caetano Veloso are a community. My family comes from Somalia, but I’m not so different from a Spaniard from the Malasaña quarter of Madrid or a Brazilian from Salvador de Bahia. We’re all in the grip of the same passion, acute Caetanitis.

A photo of the seventy-three-year-old singer looking relaxed in his BVDs, the subject of much irony and mockery on the web recently, just fills us with tenderness.

Caetano Veloso does not foster sleep. No, often he troubles our sleep, and in those troubles each of us finds something of ourselves. In Peter Gast, one of his loveliest and least-known ballads, he says this:

Sou um homem comumQualquer umEnganando entre a dor e o prazerHei de viver e morrerComo um homem comumMas o meu coração de poetaProjeta-me em tal solidãoQue às vezes assistoA guerras e festas imensas [. . .]E sou um.

I’m an ordinary manLike every manCaught between pain and joyI must live and dieLike an ordinary manBut my poet’s heartLeaves me so aloneThat I sometimes take partin great wars and celebrations [. . .]And I’m just one man.

It’s a song not everyone knows, dedicated to Heinrich Köselitz, a composer friend of Friedrich Nietzsche (to whom the philosopher gave...