_______________________
Note: Don't be distracted by my musings about mariachi music. This post is actually about Barcelona.
_______________________
This past summer, on a whim, Lisa and I went to Albuquerque to see Vicente Fernandez, Mexico's "King of the Ranchera." He's kind of like the Frank Sinatra of mariachi music. The show was great fun, from all the cool Mexicans in their cool pointy boots to the man himself, singing his heart out. Not long after the show, I went out and bought a collection of his songs (in retrospect, I should've done this before the show, but oh well...). One of the songs was "La Ley Del Monte." I liked this song right away but there were certain words that I did not know. One of those words was "penca." I asked, Lupe, one of my fluent New Mexican coworkers the meaning of this word. She told me that it was "girlfriend." I went home and listened more closely, but it didn't make sense. Translated to English, it would've been, "I carved your name into the girlfriend of an American aloe plant..." This is how northern New Mexican Spanish can trip a guy up! I looked around a bit more and found out that a penca is the fleshy, pulpy leaf of the maguey plant (a kind of aloe). The maguey plant is used to make a tequila-like hooch. The next day, I re-consulted with Lupe. She had gone back to listen to the song overnight and soon helped me get the definition right.
Anyway, it's a great song. The basic idea is that Vicente is coming back to town, having been away for many years fighting in the revolution. He confronts his childhood sweetheart--the same girl with whom he had carved his name into leaf of a maguey many years before. In the intervening years, she has married another. Vicente somehow manages to comandeer a live performance at a local fiesta to sing a song about their childhood experience with the maguey and he reproaches her for her faithlessness (He also cries copiously while singing the song, which is something of a trademark of his videos). The final cool thing is that the lyrics are almost psychedelic in their weirdness. He sings of pencas that can speak and rebuke the faithless woman. Even the new pencas that grow on the plants have their names carved on them. Symbolically, this seems to be somehow representative of the true depth of the their love even though she is married to another.
OK, so on to Barcelona: When we visited Barcelona this past Septiembre, this song was fresh in my mind. One afternoon, we visited a famous park, Parc Güell, which is well worth a visit if you have several hours to stroll around. Parc Güell was designed by Antoni Gaudí i Cornet, the famous architect who is kind like the Frank Lloyd Wright of Barcelona. Gaudí's works are everywhere in Barcelona. While walking through the park, we noticed some plants that looked like the maguey plants that we had heard about in that song. Upon closer inspection, we saw that carving your name into a penca is a bit like carving your name into a tree over here. They all had declarations of love etched onto the pencas.
Here are some pictures:
In this picture, aside from more pencas, you can see a Gaudí tiled tower on the right, as well as Gaudí's still unfinished cathedral, La Sagrada Familia off in the distance in the center (you'd better click on the picture if you want to see it, currently surrounded by cranes). Of all the cool things in Barcelona, La Sagrada Familia is the one thing that will very literally take your breath away more than anything else you have ever seen in your life. That's the way I fell about it. It's jaw-dropping in a very real, and literal sense.
Here is Vicente's dramatic, titular scene in La Ley Del Monte. It's low quality video, but still compelling, even if you only speak English. You'll get the idea.
No comments:
Post a Comment