Daniel Adolfo Moreno, septiembre 30 de 2024
LITERATURA
(YELLOWSTONE)
II
EL MARIACHI
Si miro un poco afuera, me detengo
La ciudad se derrumba y yo cantando
La gente que me odia y que me quiere
No me va a perdonar que me distraiga
Creen que lo digo todo
Que me juego la vida
Porque no te conocen
Ni te sienten
Te doy una canción, y hago un discurso
Sobre mi derecho a hablar
Te doy una canción
Con mis dos manos
Con las mismas de matar
Te doy una canción y digo: «patria»
Y sigo hablando para ti
Te doy una canción
Como un disparo
Como un libro, una palabra
Una guerrilla
Como doy el amor
Te doy una canción, fragmento,
Silvio Rodríguez
Since his teens, G has been a deep and fervent fan of Silvio’s musical catalog. More than that, I’d say he practices a cult for Silvio, much like several of his friends. A Pink Floyd fanatic; a metalhead, a fan of Slayer, Dimmu Borgir, and Arcturus. Like me, he started learning guitar as he hit his teens—thirteen, fourteen years old. Also, like me, he could have learned as a child, but just as I did, he preferred playing with childhood friends, drawing, and watching cartoons on TV before finally picking up a Spanish guitar to begin his training. A fanatic of Robotech and Captain Future.
When we were kids, we played at his house and in his backyard. We played under a grape arbor; we played «la troya» and «tres hoyitos,» which are marble canica’s games. We also played boats and naval wars in a stone trough that we’d fill with water, launching little toy plastic boats that actually floated. We had fun with Hot Wheels, too—the ones that changed color with warm water and snapped back to their natural state with cold. We drew a lot. That’s how we spent entire afternoons.
Little by little, as we grew, we got mischievous. After ten, we developed a taste for ducking into video game dens and pool halls. We went in secret, without our parents’ permission. Don Jorge was the name of the man who owned that business where they also sold lottery tickets—a dive frequented by teenagers, all over fifteen, where we were always the youngest little shits in the place. We had to carve out our own space just to get on an arcade machine among people who were almost all grown adults.
Sometimes, when we didn’t have money for tokens, we’d flatten one-peso coins (a denomination that went out of circulation years ago, and wasn’t the same peso coin that stopped circulating in 2016 along with the five-peso piece). It was a round coin that we’d smash between two stones until it was thin enough to fit into the slot where the arcade tokens went.
We also started liking the wander through the street markets that set up on a main avenue on Sundays. We’d walk it from end to end. I’d do these things before lunchtime and head back to my grandparents’ house just as they were sitting down at the table, without anyone in my family knowing where I’d been. On Sundays, we used to visit the grandparents; we’d have lunch at my paternal grandparents’ house, always with a crowd of cousins and uncles, because gathering at Grandpa’s on weekends for lunch and tea was a family tradition. Birthdays and holidays, too. So, arriving at my grandparents’ house, after greeting the family and getting settled, I’d take off for the street to play with G. and other friends, because that was the neighborhood where I was born, where I had many friends and cousins.
The first time I smoked a joint of marijuana, I was thirteen. I smoked the whole thing. It was for New Year’s. A few friends and I agreed to meet in a small plaza after midnight and the family hugs to smoke weed -my very first try-. My friends had smoked before. I asked them to hook me up, and that night, the guys showed up with two joints of weed: one to share between the two of them, and another they gave to me as a gift. I smoked the whole thing, not knowing that a couple of puffs would have been plenty for a thirteen-year-old with virgin neurons.
When I stood up from the bench and started walking, I felt like my feet were sinking into the asphalt up to my shins, as if the ground were made of cotton. I passed by G ’s house; he’d stayed home alone and was throwing a party. He introduced me to his friends, and as soon as I could, I pulled G aside to tell him I’d smoked a joint and didn’t understand anything that was happening. I asked him if it showed on my face, because I felt like my eyelids weighed a ton. G stared at me and said it didn’t show that much, but told me to go wash my face in the bathroom, drink some water, and not to accept any alcohol if someone offered me a drink at his party. G is two years older than me, so he’d already had experiences with marijuana; that’s why it occurred to me to stop by his house, not knowing he was hosting a party. A couple of girls invited me to dance, but I excused myself, acting busy. I knew the house well, but since the lights and music were making me dizzy, I washed my face again, found G, and said goodbye. After that experience, I didn’t want to smoke weed again until I turned seventeen.
By the time G started playing guitar, we’d stopped seeing each other as often as we did when we were kids, but we started picking the friendship back up when I was sixteen, specifically because of the guitar. We’d swap songbooks and teach each other songs or arrangement passages. That’s how I met his high school classmates. They were guys who hung around the El Llano sector, all of them rookie guitarists: Stephan, Nico, among others. Stephan amused me because his personality and attitude were just like a guy at my school—a Maiden fan who liked all that heavy-metal shit that I find so funny. Those punks think they’re the «ultimate guitarists»—and «tough guys» on top of it—when in reality they can’t get out of the fucking A-minor scale. Stephan was just like «The Worm,» which is what they called him: a Maiden fan, learning his little minor and pentatonic scales, believing he was the god of guitar in Chile. Fucking hilarious. Honestly, I shit on heavy metal and glam; they’re a joke.
G and I never had a serious musical project, but when we got together, we always rehearsed a couple of songs. I even wrote and arranged a Granados piece for two guitars once, which reached a very high level of execution. We also managed to play some John Dowland quite well. At first, it was G who taught me things because he started playing before I did, but after three or four years of practicing, very few of my acquaintances in all of Santiago played better than me. Many of them, several years older than me and who had taught me certain tips, couldn’t believe their eyes when I played Stone Temple Pilots songs or Bach transcriptions for guitar. I left them behind one by one, and very quickly, too. Generally, Chilean guitarists don’t read or write sheet music, and I started reading and writing even before entering the conservatory. G and many others started learning from me, like «Fathead» C and «Short F”, who were G’s childhood friends and fans of Latin American folklore—the charango, the tiple, the flute, the panpipes. «Fathead» and Nibaldo—who had acquired a double bass—wanted me to join them in a Buena Vista Social Club tribute project, but we never made it happen because I had too many other projects in progress and on my mind.
G studied informatics but didn’t want to finish the degree. He had a gypsy soul, I think. He started several musical projects after twenty: metal, tribute bands, folklore, even punk. Reaching his thirties, G started frequenting workshops and bars where they practiced the cueca and cueca chora or cueca brava. This was several years after that trend started among college kids, though; the first time I heard of this «movement» was through my university classmates who invited me to a bar. To me, it seemed like total shit for hipster kids—the truth is, all of Chilean pseudo-culture seems like absolute shit to me. The art faculties in Chile, their professors and deans, and generations of students strike me at this point as actual mental defectives.
So, over time, G went from learning to dance cueca for fun once or twice a week to becoming seriously interested in composing cuecas bravas and writing décimas. This is where we began to overlap in a deep interest and admiration for the intellectual and folkloric work of Violeta Parra. I think he even wrote a cueca chora for Violeta. He started writing décimas, many of them—material he’d show me for my opinion—and everything he was composing was actually interesting. His couplets and décimas needed some sanding and correction—things that come with time if you persist with dedication—but there was a seed there wanting to sprout. After thirty, he lived with his partner in a neighborhood off Manuel Montt, and they had a beautiful daughter. A couple of years later, they moved to the beach, and a few years after that, they split up.
After this, G started hitting the night and the streets again. We resumed our friendship for about two years around the time the pandemic started. He’d visit me at the studio to look at the paintings I was doing and show me his poetry and décimas. We’d have a couple of beers, walk around downtown, grab some tapas somewhere, or sushi, or a couple of Hotdogs –completos-, and we’d end up in heated arguments about painting, literature, and music. Sometimes he’d come back to the studio with me because I never abandon my intellectual work, and we’d keep chatting about art. Other times, after eating something at a resto-bar, he’d take off to keep partying.
At one point, he started telling me he wanted to write short stories. He told me about the ideas he was developing, which I thought were great, especially since he wanted to write autobiographical stories—mostly stories of the street, the night, binges, violence, and marginal neighborhoods. Shortly after, he messaged me to visit the workshop because he wanted to show me a couple of stories he was working on and wanted me to edit them. I asked him to email me the copies so I could have them reviewed by the time he visited, and that’s what we did: he sent me two or three short stories, I printed them, and read them on paper. I liked them a lot, but I had to give him a lot of pointers on verb tenses, narrative voices, spelling, etc.—corrections he received very well and with a lot of enthusiasm because he knew I was right. At that time, I was already anthologizing Dámaso Alonso, transcribing prologues, and re-reading Cervantes’ Quixote with serious literary intentions. And I had already developed the draft for my «Ultra-Creacionist Literary Manifesto.»
Actualización, 20 de abril de 2024.
