Juanita Parra away from her battery

Juanita Parra (50) remembers that precise and inevitable moment when the roles were reversed forever. “A few months ago, we had a very crazy conversation on Skype with my mother, when the caretaker of the home where she is says 'Quenita, there is your daughter Juanita, she looks at the screen.' And she very seriously says: 'no, I'm Juanita!' So, I laugh and say 'of course, I'm your mommy'. She looked at me and told me that there was only one mother, with a tenderness that she was so beautiful. There it became totally real: now I was my mother's mother."

María Eugenia Correa (90) -wife of the deceased drummer of Los Jaivas, Gabriel Parra, and mother of the person who occupies that same position today in the group- began to suffer from cognitive deterioration for about eight years that led to senile dementia, which made her gradually begin to depend on her family and that in December 2019 she was admitted to a home that is now in charge of her care. The pandemic has restricted all kinds of visits, although she has not managed to erase the last corners where a meeting between a mother and her daughter is possible.

“A year ago I told him on Skype that I was playing with Los Jaivas and he said: 'but how? You so little and you're already playing with them?' Of course, in her mind I'm still a little girl, so these incredible things happen to her. She asks me about Gabriel too. 'Have you seen my skinny, have you seen my skinny?' This year of the pandemic we had very crazy conversations, but where we laughed a lot, at least I did. I prefer that to seeing her so dull. She is like people in a coma: I talk to her the same way, I say nice things to her and I give her all my love. Somewhere in the brain there will still be that connection.”

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The history of Los Jaivas seems articulated by symbolism. For example, the 15th marks an almost shocking presence in his blog. On August 15, 1963, the band gave their first show. On April 15, 1988, Gabriel Parra passed away, while on January 15, 2003, the singer Eduardo “Gato” Alquinta left. And on March 15 of last year they offered their last concert with the public, in the Loncoche commune, to later appear in very sporadic events, forced by Covid-19 to sound loud in empty places and in remote broadcasts, just as they will this June 26 from San Pedro de Atacama.

The parenthesis has led Juanita Parra to face unprecedented experiences. In January, when they got together to rehearse for the show they gave at a Las Condes Festival fenced off by sanitary protocols, she felt that perhaps she was no longer capable of sitting behind a drum set. “It has been very strong, you question many things. There is something that nobody says, but one arrives thinking: Could it be that I no longer remember? Do I know how to play? You stop doing it for a while and who knows if you can do it again. You don't know what's going to happen. So, it was very nice when as a group we resumed that communion, feeling that we count on each other and that with a single glance we already connect with our music”.

“But it is a super strong job because it is rare: you know that there is an audience in front of you, but you are not feeling that energy”, resumes the instrumentalist before the trend of online presentations that at the beginning of the confinement also revealed it before a confession almost wrong. She felt that a Los Jaivas show was simply lame. “To be honest, it came out super fome, because we were each distant. I did not like it. I was in a studio, the rest in their homes, and it was all very strange because we are a group that is precisely based on that magical and energetic communion with the public”.

For the founding fathers of the group, Mario Mutis (73) and Claudio Parra (75), the forced break has been just as daunting. There Juanita at times has felt again that the roles alter her order; in this case, her disciple can also contain the masters. “It has been very impressive to see how Claudio and Mario have experienced this moment. When recording this show (in San Pedro de Atacama) I saw them again with smiles on their faces, with hope, with an energy that I saw was going away”.

“I have seen them with wisdom and patience, thinking that we had to remain calm”, continues the percussionist. “But also very affected, because they started making music as children and suddenly they are told 'no, stop, you have to stop, you can't continue.' Imagine the feeling they can have. I do not want to tell things that perhaps they themselves do not want to tell, but we have all been very affected.

-The elder Jaivas once held you back when you were younger and faced Gabriel's death. How has it been for you, now an adult, to contain them?

I have learned from them all my life. They have contained me and I have contained them. We have built such a long road and something so powerful unites us, that we feel even more united in this pandemic, knowing that we have each other, that every Monday we get together in virtual meetings of which Eduardo (Parra) has been an intense part. , that since he got off the stage we had not had the opportunity to have such a beautiful coexistence. Of course, he has had to contain them, but they have also given me that patience to think that you have to wait calmly. Because remember that when I started working with them it was five years of preparation before I could feel that we had achieved something.

"Besides, since I don't have a dad to take care of today - continues the artist - finally they have that place in my heart".

-Legends like the Rolling Stones have raised this: to long-lived musicians who are still active, who gives them back these years?

Imagine everything we could have done in these two years. We had a very great work dynamic, which allowed us to tour our country, and from one moment to another you stay at home saying “what are we going to live on now?”, “how do we pay the bills?”. I don't get up in the morning and I get money for being Jaiva. I have to go to work as Jaiva to earn my money. People may think that Los Jaivas are millionaires, what problems are they going to have!, and it is not like that. I think that if we, being one of the groups with the most work, are like this, how will our colleagues who have not had this luck be?

“Feeling that you can't do your job is a very strong thing. To think that you won't be able to play, because at least I don't have that possibility, a room set up to be able to play drums piecemeal”.

Juanita says that her lack of work forced her to leave the house where she lived with her husband and her daughter in Peñalolén for a much smaller apartment in the same commune. “I was laid off and we said: our reality is different, our reality has changed and it is not worth getting into debt.” For the rest, she has not ruled out doing other work as a form of momentary survival: “Caring for animals, for example. Something that would allow me to continue being happy and being able to pay the bills.”

More about LT Sunday

As singular as it may seem, where the artist continues to express greater serenity at the minute of reviewing her rocky last year is when she returns to the health picture that affects her mother. There is a more recent reason: “We had a great time, we were happy, very complicit, she helped me with many things, she was my assistant, we traveled a lot. I always took the stature that I was like Lucerito: I was on tour with my mom (laughs)."

But there is also a more biographical reason: "For me it has always been a pride to tell her story."

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María Eugenia Correa was born in 1931 into a wealthy family headed by her father, Ulises Correa, president and senator of the Radical Party. She got married at 15 years old and by the time she was 40 she already had six children: it was the moment when she met a twentysomething bearded hippie musician named Gabriel Parra and she fell madly in love with her. The difference of almost two decades between the two -and above all the difference in life they accumulated- in no case distanced them, but on the contrary. María Eugenia's older children were almost similar in age to that of the, by then, Los Jaivas drummer, so almost a friend of theirs had arrived at the house before a new mother's partner.

“A while ago I opened a trunk and found a very nice letter from my dad that he wrote to one of my mother's children, Andrés, the youngest, the only one who has died. In that letter he treats him as 'brother', he talks to him like that, ”recalls Parra.

When “Quenita” and Gabriel wanted to form her own family, the doctors warned her that she could not have any more children. But they were wrong. On November 19, 1970, Juanita arrived to inaugurate the couple's new life, but also to join that maternal offspring that she also began to treat as her "brothers".

Three years later, with the military coup, a new break in the script and Los Jaivas began their long journey in exile with episodes in Argentina and France, where the bond between Juanita and Gabriel grew stronger and stronger. Thanks to some electricity courses that she took in Europe, around the 1980s the instrumentalist began to be in charge of the lighting in the group's concerts, closely observing the volcanic task of her father behind drums and drums.

There a dichotomy emerges. Her father, the wandering musician, acquires a stricter personality than her mother, the housewife dedicated to housework and crafts in the foreign life of Los Jaivas. “My mother had already had children and she knew what that experience was, so she lived more relaxed with me. But Gabriel didn't, he had that half-macho thing about 'how is this lady going to live when she grows up', so I think he invites me to be part of the team also to have me closer and support me as a teenager”.

In 1988, the group -which still resided in Paris- arrived in Chile for a series of concerts, with Juanita, 17 years old and already established in the work of lighting. In those days, the car accident that killed her father in Peru happened. When they returned to France, another dichotomy appeared: while she decided to stay there, her mother immediately came to Santiago. They had never been separated before.

“I wanted to stay there, but my mother, when Gabriel died, came running, because she did not enjoy life in Paris, it was not something that she chose by her own decision, it was only because her love was there. She had a hard time with the language. She wanted to return to be with her children and grandchildren. She gave me full freedom to continue in France”.

But in 1996, Juanita decided again on pure instinct: she felt that it was time to return to Chile and live with María Eugenia. If her adolescence had been a strong bond with Gabriel, now she wanted her adulthood to be written around her mother. “I felt that I had to enjoy it, that I couldn't miss those moments, that before I had been much closer to my dad and that now as a grown woman I had a greater affinity with her. We deserved to live under the same roof.”

Both lived together until the drummer married. But eight years ago, the first warning of an irreversible scenario arrived. And, as always in his history, with Los Jaivas playing in the background. “We were rehearsing and suddenly my phone rang and it was my mom. She tells me: 'mijita, I can't be here alone anymore, please come find me, I want to go live with you'. She had already gotten lost in a car several times and we had to take it from her. I took her home and that's where the process began that ended in the home she is in now."

In the last year, the instrumentalist, sensing the inactivity that the pandemic would entail, proposed to the rest of her siblings the option of taking her mother out of her home and taking her to her house, to dedicate a full time care. But the uncertain times of Covid-19, the cunning enemy of planning, made them decline. “I haven't played or traveled for a whole year now, I could have taken care of her before she faded away forever. But maybe it was for the better."

In exchange, Juanita talks to her through the screens and often goes to see her at her place just to greet her through the window. As she said at one point, in some memory space she must still be beating some connection.

*Show coordinates : Los Jaivas recorded a concert in San Pedro de Atacama that can be seen for free on Saturday, June 26, at 8:00 p.m., through the website www.vivemach.cl. In addition, you can donate to the Kodea Foundation.

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