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| Palermo-Holywood street: Francisco Gonzalez |
While searching for the tango / poem about the angry guy in the cajón [coffin] I stumbled upon a tango about the night of San Pedro and San Paulo. The cajón mentioned here is a box, not a coffin. The images created evoked a captivating spirit of social winter festivity.
Saint Peter and Saint Paul
the kids will eat pigeon and roasted potato.
young girls with crimson lips,
* las viejas tendrán brasas, no gastarán carbón - old women will benefit from the heat without spending money on coal, maybe implying they will take home the embers later.
* las casas serán rojos fantoches - possibly in the flickering light of the fire the houses seem animated by the fire & therefore under it's control. It adds a slight air of menace contrasting with the festivities which is picked up later.
* Fantasmas de aserrín - the sawdust remains from the furniture & wood cut up for the fire, whipped up by the wind or heat. Possibly a metaphor for the soul.
*Dzhin-Dzhin - It occurred to me, backed up by the views of an Argentinian friend, that Dzhin-Dzhin is the sound of the violin and rhymes with Capuchín. Perhaps its capitalisation is a regional variation, typo or quirk of the author.
* Capuchín - evidently a song although I could find no more information about the form. Similarly, the word is capitalised whereas in English we would not capitalise a musical genre - if so it is. Perhaps that suggests that Dzhin-Dzhin is not the proper noun suggested by its capitalisation.
*Se cortará el piolín - the song will end when the string breaks. Possibly a metaphor for the end of life. There are contrasts in the poem between elderly and younger people.
* la noche tendrá fin, y el viento hará milongas - milonga here probably means "disturbance" or maybe also party, which is one of the meanings of the word. When milonga doesn't mean a musical genre or a dance venue, a dance party, not just of tango music, it also means a lie, a disturbance, a confusion. In Spain, milonga is understood as a lie. In Latin America it is is more understood as a party. Essentially the wind will whip up the soot and ashes. Given the connotations of milonga, you could say the wind makes the ashes dance as is not uncommon in English, although the general idea is more of the evening coming to an end.
The poem puts me much in mind of 'The Fair', by Vernon Scannell, about gaiety and festivity with a much darker undertone:
The evoked spirit of the thing is only half of what gave me pause. In the vidalas and many tangos there is often anguish. Women cry over their lot, men rail, albeit artistically, in song. The idea of dispersing sorrow as proposed here is equally poetic, if of unknown efficacy. But there is a difference. Sometimes in song, one wonders if the anguish is an end in itself whereas here the speaker is, if nothing else, trying to rid himself of it. It is poignant that ultimately Julio Ciesler did not manage to escape his demons.
Nowadays therapists propose mental solutions to problems akin to the one described. For instance, a therapist friend explained that if you had some feeling or issue bothering you, you might try to turn it into some mental object. Then you ask the troubled person what they feel like doing with the bothersome thing. They might say burn it or dissolve it or throw it in a lake or smash it with a hammer. Usually it is some way of crudely getting rid of it. It occurs to me one might perhaps more gently transform it in to something beautiful: perhaps cocoon it then watch it transform into a butterfly that flitters away.
Nonetheless, if one is are troubled, one might do worse than burn ones sorrows. Considering this poet met a sad end which it compels me - pace rationalism - to suggest perhaps not doing it in the shape of a doll-person:
llenarlo con las penas, la angustia y el sufrir,
y tirarlo cual pobre palo seco
y que se vuelva humo por siempre en mi vivir.
"June 29th is a commemoration in honor of Saint Peter, the first pope of the Catholic Church, and Saint Paul, the great apostle of the Gentiles, who were executed around the year 67 by order of Nero. Peter was crucified upside down, according to his wish, as he considered himself unworthy to die in the same manner as his master, and Paul was beheaded in the city of Ostia." [translated]
For obvious reasons, therefore it is not called a festival but a "solemnidad", a solemnity. Popularly, it is referred to as the "day of" St Peter and St Paul - although the fires take place at night.
The article is another memory of the event from the barrio Palermo-Hollywood, a part of the Palermo neighbourhood which became home to movie and TV companies. At the time remembered, it was an area of quintas, estates where wealthier families might have bigger, second homes in the country. The idea, at any rate, is of a larger home with some green space. The goal was what the kids called the fogarata [a corruption of fogata], a huge bonfire on the appointed day. They removed a cobblestone from the street and inserted a long pole into the hole, spliced with another to achieve a significant height. At the top of this they placed what we call a "guy" - the scarecrow-type creature placed on a fire. It was made with branches and straw, and old clothes donated by the neighbours. The old furniture and boxes the kids had gathered was piled around the pyre which was lit at nightfall. The neighbours gathered, sang and laughed, warmed themselves by the fire and watched the flames. When these died down, on the hot embers they would cook hot peppers, potatoes or sweet potatoes on the ends of wires or sticks.
The ceremony combined the religious commemoration with the winter rite of a bonfire of pagan origin. The "guy" in this case does not, as on the UK's "Bonfire Night" [5 November], represent a historic personage but is apparently "a collective expiation to pay homage to the innocent saints". I don't quite understand how that "collective expiation" works. That people still enjoy burning a representation of a human figure on a bonfire makes me rather shudder at the apparently thin veneer of our supposed civilization.
The word used in the article for this gathering is a neighbourhood tertulia, where it is worth pausing for a curious footnote. I see these often in Spain - whole streets sitting down to a meal together - almost any reason will do, even - in fact only - in the big cities which is where I go. Urban social isolation is apparently less of an issue in Spain.
Tertulias used to be private literary salons, initially held in people's homes from at least the 17th century. Later, they were held in cafes and some became more formalised. The DLE definition today is "A gathering of people who regularly meet to talk about a certain topic" The Chilean etymological dictionary calls it "an informal gathering where people discuss a certain topic."
Why tertulia? The same source says that in the seventeenth century it was fashionable to gather to read the works of Quinto Septimio Florente who was apparently three times ("Ter") better than Marcus Tullius Cicero. Thus the former became better known as the Tertullius who apparently gave his name to tertulia. Far-fetched?
The author of the 'La Nación' remarks that those neighbourly events exist no longer and contrasts them with the fires and burning tyres on the streets seen nowadays (the piece was written in 2011) which fragment rather than unify society. He says he writes to show the younger generations what it was like, this neighbourly camaraderie which he says was moneda corriente - common currency.
An Argentinian friend from the AMBA (Área Metropolitana de Buenos Aires) remarked: "Sí, hemos participado de esa fiesta popular pero cuando eramos chicos, tal vez hasta los 10 u 11 años de edad. Después, comenzaron a ser cada vez menos personas que se enganchaban hasta que se dejaron de hacer en general. Lo mismo ocurrió con los carnavales y con los bailes de fin de año en las calles." Sadly, modern life seems to have done for this and other similar neighbourhood festivities.
The words of the poem were written by a journalist and, unsurprisingly, for the vivacity of the images, poet, Julio Ciesler whose pen name was Julio Huasi and who was highly esteemed in Argentina and internationally. He was radical, committed to socialist causes, and sadly committed suicide in his early 50s.
Thanks to JCM for his comments
