and Words
Habíamos prometido no llorar
Perdóname
Quizás esta sea la última vez que nos sentamos a tomar un café juntos
Quizás es la última vez que nos vemos así que tratemos de estar bien por favor
Me quiero llevar como recuerdo una sonrisa
Por favor no llores más
Te acordás aquella tarde que nos conocimos
Fue muy lindo conocerte
Y fue muy lindo todo lo que pasó entre nosotros, pero
Ya pasó
Lyric excerpts from Musixmatch.
As I lived in the sunny island of Puerto Rico, I first heard of Palito Ortega. I watched him in a movie in our tiny black and white television. This aired in the early 1970’s, so there was no means to record it to watch at a later time. This movie moved me, and I remember vividly to this day. Besides being an actor in this film, he also sang the title track to the soundtrack. That said, I’ll reserve writing about that song and that movie for another post.
However, that movie started a trend of our listening to Spanish music in our home. Subsequently, my older sister became fascinated with different artists and would buy the music for each artist. This music was often in the form of records. We collected these large two-dimensional square-foot boxes, filled with music, emotion, and now memories. We played them through mechanical boxes with needles onto a tinny speaker. The records, often marred with scratches, rendered the music with similar imperfections.
However, in the case of Palito Ortega, in at least one instance, it was filled with intense emotion and profound sadness.
Having listened to music performed in both English and Spanish, the Spanish music is certainly more poetic and more emotional. While this may simply be a side effect of the music I chose to listen to, I doubt that was the extent of it. While I speak English much more proficiently than I do Spanish, I still struggle to express some ideas as eloquently in English as I do in Spanish. However, I could speculate that it’s the way in which the language is structured. That it’s in the subtle differences that some verbs are reflective, with sentences like “Me encanta”, “Te quiero”, and “Te amo”. Or it may be the subtle differences between describing “Te quiero” and “Te amo”, which both mean “I love you”.
Or perhaps the differences are not as much linguistic as they are cultural. For instance, are phenomena like “boys don’t cry” scoped to the (English speaking) US culture? We wield phrases like “pussy-whipped” and “momma’s boy” to mock and wound. Do we intentionally box our boys and men into cookie-cutter roles? Do we allow them to emote?
That said, the beautiful answer to this, at least for me, is that it doesn’t matter. I get to enjoy the music and culture regardless, the need to switch languages in order to experience it is merely a speed bump.
My sister constantly playing this music anchored it to a recess in my mind. Some songs simply have a recall familiarity upon hearing them again; others inextricably burn themselves into our heads and our hearts. This song, ‘Prometimos No Llorar’ is certainly among the latter.
The song paints a picture of a couple in a public café. They sit down to what will be their last coffee as a couple. He starts by saying, “We promised we wouldn’t cry.” Throughout the song, he speaks passionately, but calmly. Her only words during the entire song are “I’m sorry” and “I love you”; otherwise, all we hear from her are the muffled sobs from her crying. As they converse, it’s abundantly clear that they have a great fondness for each other. At one point he mentions, “people are looking at us, please stop crying.” His reasoning was that they had fallen out of love, though the way that he expresses it:
Al amor hay que alimentarlo todos los días con esas pequeñas cosas que nosotros ya perdimos
It translates to “Love needs to be nourished every day with those little things that we have already lost.” He goes to describe how they had simply fallen into a routine, and it’s no longer love. As the song concludes, he wishes for her to have a happy life. There was no rancor nor venom between them. As he proceeds to get up and say goodbye. Her only response? “I love you.”
The song, heard from beginning to end, will absolutely shatter you. While rationally, I understand that it’s just a song, even today, I feel compelled to comfort this woman crying in a café.
Few, if any, songs in English affect me like this. And I still don’t know if the difference is linguistic or cultural, though like I said, it really doesn’t matter why.
However, this particular song mirrors a moment in my life. I remember a profoundly sad meal as two of us parted ways. We elected to have that dinner at the very same location of our first meal, the Icon Grill. We filled that first meal with excitement and promise as our hearts raced. Subsequently, we spent the months that followed fulfilling the excitement and promise of that first day. Our time together spent filling our hearts and smiles with joy.
However, that farewell dinner filled with the ghostly images of the time we had spent together, now there only to haunt us. We scarcely contained our emotional collapse as the waiter would stop by occasionally to check in on us. I’m not sure if we maintained our composure well enough, or if he was too polite to mention our obvious distress. I remember this moment vividly as if it were yesterday, even if chronologically it occurred decades ago.
Though even today, reflecting upon that farewell dinner devastates me in ways that words fail to express. In 2017, the local television stations announced on the news that the Icon Grill shut its doors, and in a subtle way, it exercised those demons.