By Pablo Toledo, Herald staff.

He was the very definition of “larger than life,” and this explains why his foretold death still came as a shock to thousands of devoted fans (his beloved “chicas”). Sandro (born Roberto Sánchez, but to be remembered as Sandro de América) was the indestructible, undefeatable icon who could do anything, and his career proves that: his peak was definitely a 1970 sell-out night at Madison Square Gardens (the first Latin artist to do so), but the endless string of hits, the movies, the sold-out shows were unmatchable.

Corny? You bet. Cheesy? Sure thing. And that was the magic: he made it work. Somehow, when it came to him the rules changed. The sex symbol with the biggest, weirdest nose in recorded history, and the unseemliest face, and the fattest lips (lips and hips were his signature).

In his youth, when he started out in Sandro y los de Fuego, he was the Argentine answer to Elvis the Pelvis, and took his moves verbatim from the King of Rock and Roll. From there, he projected into a period of generic iconhood where his music morphed into romantic pop more palatable to the feminine audience, an image which was cemented by a string of movies that combined teeny-bopper US movies with a Bollywood aesthetic and which will remain gems of local kitsch culture forever.

It is from those films that I would rather remember him: tons of swagger and pheromones splashing from the screen, chest hair flying in the wind, characters that ranged from a car racer who loses his sight in an accident to a playboy with a prudish twin to a humble ferry boy from Tigre’s delta, always winning the angel-faced beauty, always triumphing over his own demons and adversity in the coolest way, and, of course, always breaking into song at the unlikeliest moments. His gipsy looks gained him the nickname “Gitano”, and the most absurd of his movie moments in a film where he fakes a Spanish accent amid midgets and circus clowns. He knew the films were bad, and that made them good.

That was his best trait:  he always knew it was an act. From his youth, he built a wall around his private life  a wall of secrecy and a very real, five-metre-tall wall around his house in the Banfield neighbourhood.

The division between the character and the man was absolute, so much so that he allowed himself to laugh about it on stage, telling his 50-plus “chicas”  that they weren’t that young anymore, playing the dandy while everybody knew the plastic tube running up his microphone stand was supplying the oxygen without which his tobacco-shot lungs wouldn’t be able to breathe. And the “chicas” yelled back in ecstasy, teeny boppers once again. Not many people can do that, and only he could do it for a whole generation at once.

Many people compared him to Elvis, but he was more like our Michael Jackson, a secretive man shrouded in a cloud of mystery yet projecting an aura that was positively superhuman. Sandro was, and it deserves repeating, larger than life. Roberto Sánchez will be remembered, paraphrasing William Blake, as “the immortal hand or eye that dared frame his fearful symmetry”.