Friday, August 27, 2010



Tengo ganas de un beso (bolero)
Agustín Lara
Composición: Agustín Lara

Tengo ganas de un beso
por qué no me lo das.
A nadie una limosna
se le puede negar.
Tengo ganas de un beso
te lo vengo a pedir
aunque después del beso
me tenga que morir.
Ese jugo sabroso
de tus labios ajenos
me darán por lo menas
valor para esperar.
Tengo ganas de un beso...

I would like a kiss
why don’t you give it to me.
Nobody can deny someone
an alm.
I would like a kiss
I come to ask it of you
even though I may have to die.
That delicious juice
from your distant lips
will at least make me brave
to wait.
I would like a kiss...


I write this three days hence on Sunday night but this blog is indirectly inspired by the 2006 Pedro Almodóvar film Volver with Penelope Cruz. Rosemary and I enjoyed it and for free as I took the film out from our local Vancouver Public Library. The incident in the film that inspired (part of it) these musings has all to do with Penelope Cruz’s character sittting down with a couple of flamenco guitarist to sing the song Volver. Few here in Vancouver would know that the song was written by the Argentine tango crooner and idol Carlos Gardel in 1935 with lyrics by Alfredo Le Pera for a seminal Argentine film called “El Día Que Me Quieras” which sort of translates to (English has nor real future subjunctive) The Day In Which You Might Just Love Me.

Few in Vancouver would grasp the enormity of gall for someone like Penelope Cruz (nobody knows for sure if she sang the song in the film or if she was dubbed) to even dare sing it and to sing it as seriously as she did. But, in any case, the song brought me pangs of Argentine nostalgia particularly when the song is about love, lost love, and about returning to face the loss with that hint of hope that the loss might be recovered.

When my oldest daughter Ale (she was 42 last Friday) recently returned from Mexico City she brought a CD as a gift from her godfather Raúl Guerrero Montemayor. When I saw what it was I immediately appropriated it an slipped it into our CD player. The smooth delivery of tenor Pedro Vargas also brought pangs of nostalgia but a much more intense on that from the Cruz interpretation of Volver. Let me explain.

There is nothing like hindsight to defined periods of history. One can safely make definitions of what was, wasn’t, what was great and what wasn’t so great.

When I arrived to Mexico City in 1955 with my mother and grandmother I was unaware, as most Mexicans were also unaware, the decade of the 50s would represent the golden age of Mexican film and song. As a perfectly normal malinchista ( a Mexican who opts for the foreign over the local) I would not have been caught dead seeing any film based on any story by B. like La Rebelión de Los Colgados (1954) which was Directed by Alfredo B. Crevenna and Emilio Fernández. With Pedro Armendáriz, Ariadna Welter and Carlos López Moctezuma. Fans of The Wild Bunch might know that Emilio “Indio”Fernández” plays the dastardly and corrupt Mexican general in the film who finally meets his end with an unexpected confrontation with Mr. Gatling.

Pedro Armendariz (the wonderful Pedro Armendariz) plays the sure-as-hell atheist (who may have doubted in the end) in the John Ford adaptation (Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory) The Fugitive with Henry Fonda and the most beautiful woman in the world (yes even more so that Grace Kelly!) Dolores del Río.

But back in 1950 I would not have been caught dead watching a Mexican dramón (sort of like an overacted soap opera!) even though that cast of La Rebelión de los Colgados was stellar. It was only my infatuation with Mexican actress Silvia Pinal in the early 60s that lured me to two Luís Buñuel films, Viridiana (1961) and The Exterminating Angel (1962).

In the late 50s my mother took me to the theatre to watch Dolores del Río play Lady Windermere in an adaptation into Spanish of Oscar Wild’s play, Lady Windermere’s Fan.

But it wasn’t until the 60s that I began to appreciate the home-grown talent of Mexico. It was then that I went to se the great Mexican actor of the stage, Ignacio Lopez Tarso play in El Rey Se Muere by Eugène Ionesco.

In the 50s I was not aware of the golden age even though my grandmother, working at the Embassy of the Philippines invited to our home such people as Alma Reed, the odd Mexican muralist, intellectual and such fictions of their own imagination as the “Mayan” princess Nicte-Ha. These gatherings, because of my teenage cousin Carmen Miranda, brought well known Mexican trios like Los Tres Caballeros and others which I thought were all awful.

But somehow I watch some good stuff on TV. One of my favourite programs of the late 50 and early 60s was El Estudio de Pedro Vargas. It featured the tenor voice, but stony presence, of a dark chubby man from San Miguel de Allende. When he began to sing all was forgotten, even his wooden delivery. His foil was a Yucatecan-born comedian who had extremely oriental eyes so he went by the epithet “El Chino Herrera who made fun of Vargas’ dark skin. I remember one joke, “Someone ran into you one dark night because they didn’t see you. You are so dark.” The weekly program was called El Estudio Raleigh de Pedro Vargas but it also had another sponsor. This sponsor was a lesser known Mexican rum which, Ron Batey, is now sadly history as are Pedro Vargas, el Chino Herrera and Paco Malgesto. The latter was a Mexican radio and tv announcer who was perhaps the best bullfighting narrator that Mexico ever produced. The unforgettable Manolete, himself demanded that Malgesto travel to Spain to narrate his fights for Spanish radio.

In el Estudio Raleigh de Pedro Vargas, Malgesto was the more serious, but not by much, animador so that Vargas could do what he did best which was to sing. One of the more interesting of Malgesto’s tasks for the program was to prepare in a side bar (literally a bar that was on one side of where Vargas sang) the chosen Ron Batey concoction that some lucky TV viewer had submitted. The bar had the blender and all the other necessary apparatus for fixing any cocktail known to man and Pancho Villa. While none of the ingredients (that I can remember) ever featured crushed grasshoppers, It was extremely funny to watch Malgesto pour the concoction and then facing the audience he would drink, grimace, and always say, "Not bad." It always seemed to me that the man may have been an alcoholic and every drink he had in El Estudio Raleigh the Pedro Vargas added to his droopy eyes and pronounced bags.

The songs. The songs! Many were boleros which was a form that Vargas popularized and perfected. The big band always had a pair of maracas and that rumba-like beat. Many of the boleros featured the compositions of the greatest living composer of boleros of the time, Agustin Lara. He was an ugly old man with a scared face who had had a torrid affair with the second most beautiful woman of the world (much more beautiful than Grace Kelly) María Felix. It was Felix (sort of a dark, mannish, intensely serious and scary but still Mexico’s answer to a combination of Marilyn Monroe, Katherine Hepburn and Betty Davis) who managed to have an affair with a Mexican president, Miguel Alemán and (a very big rumour) with both Diego Rivera and his paramour, Frida Kahlo.

In those late 50s and early 60s it seemed that Frank Sinatra would visit Mexico City and would consent to sing for hours (telethons in reality) on end for Mexican TV and for charity. I remember watching all those programs not realizing that our very own Pedro Vargas, while not as handsome was every bit as good.

As I listened to Pedro Vargas sing the “cursi” (a Spanish word that almost means banal/corny) I realized the lyrics were the product of a perhaps more innocent times. They were times of romance when women did not mind if someone opened a door for them and they would not object being addressed as señora. As I listened to the accompanying orchestras of Mrio Ruíz Rangel and of José Sabre Marroquin, they sounded suspiciously like many of the bands that accompanied Frank Sinatra like the Nelson Riddle Band. The maracas and the Latin beat suggested the Nelson Riddle Band under the influence of a Ron Batey blend with perhaps some El Patrón Tequila.

The warmth in my insides these days (even though I don’t imbibe) suggests that I have come to appreciate that I lived and grew up in a Mexican Golden Age. What is incredible is that there is little information on the 12-year stint of El Estudio Raleigh de Pedro Vargas. Every citation of el Chino Herrera points out that there is no biography of the man. What you read here mostly comes from my memory. A lively chorus complete with a lively maraca beat, accompanies Pedro Vargas in the song whose lyrics are above, with a lively rendition of:

Even if I may have to die
Even if I may have to die
Even if I may have to die

I would like a kiss

Now there is another lyric that says:

I will find you, no matter where you have gone. Our world cannot be that big, after all, how big can it be if only five letters define it?

But that is another story for another day.

Bésame Mucho

Siboney