Neruda: The Language of Love and the Poetry of Desire

Hola mi Gente,

I need to get new friends. My one remaining single friend is getting engaged today and will be marrying soon. Yuck. And no, I am not interested in getting married.

Today, an essay…

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Neruda

1904 - 1973

Whether sun-struck mornings, rainy weekends odorous with the alkaline smell of sex, or starry nights, poetry has been with me -- like a beacon -- and I've used it to illuminate other lives, other worlds. In discovering others (in discovering you), I discovered myself and I have lived with these poems until they have become a part of the very air I breathe.

I remember the first time my father, a dabbler in poetry, tossed me a dog-eared little book and told me, “You want to know poetry? Read this.” 

I was barely fourteen and Neruda swept through my soul with the impact of a tsunami. I would never be the same -- ever. After Neruda, there is no one. He is the greatest poet of the 20^th century, in any language.

Period.

Pablo Neruda, magnificent poet of Chile and eventually of the world. Internationally recognized, he was a figure larger than life, like a Picasso or a Chaplin. He is one of the most widely read and beloved poets in history. I once made love to a woman who pleaded for me to read her Neruda while connected together.

Gawd… I was young.

Occasionally, whenever the need to quiet the inner dialog arises, I make a pilgrimage to the beach. I take my little Neruda book, raggedy with years of use. What could be more fitting than to go to the beach and read Neruda aloud? He loved the playfulness of the sea -- creative as it is destructive, forever in flux -- moving. He loved and celebrated the rejuvenating marriage of wind, water, and sand, and found his inspiration in the crashing fury and freedom of the waves, the seabirds, the seemingly endless infinity of a blue sky.

He loved how the sea was forever renewing itself, a renewal reflected in his work and his life. He felt that creating poetry was like constantly being reborn. So I head for the sea to recite and celebrate his poems and to return once again refreshed, deepened, reborn.

In one of his most emotionally motivated and sublime associations, Neruda linked womanhood to the regeneration of the earth and the cycles of nature. It is one of the most powerful associations in all of poetry.

He never knew his own mother, who died two months after his birth, but he adored his stepmother, who he called la mamadre (“the more-mother”). At age fourteen he wrote his first lyric for her. He later wrote, “… it was at that age… poetry arrived / in search of me.”

Born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes y Basoalto, he later took on the pen name of Pablo Neruda in order to conceal his poetry from a disapproving father. But he quickly found approval elsewhere, when he published his second collection, the amazing Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, in 1924. The collection would make him a literary celebrity and is still revered throughout Latin America. This was the book my father gave to me for my fourteenth birthday.

Neruda’s is the first poetry in Spanish that celebrates erotic love in sensuous, earthy language -- without shame. He would later say, “Love poems were breaking out all over my body.”

As I read these poems for the first time, I immediately recognized the archetype of the adolescent lover -- at the same time a child and an adult -- being schooled in the art of longing and obsession. “Tonight I can write the saddest lines,” Neruda declared in the twentieth love poem. “I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her. / Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” I’m still profoundly affected by my memory of reading the first poem in this collection. I see it as an initiation, a ritual introduction into to the language of love and the poetry of desire:

Body of a Woman

Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs.
You look like a world, lying in surrender.
My rough peasant's body digs into you
and makes the son leap from the depths of the earth.

I was alone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me
and night swamped me with its crushing invasion.
To survive myself, I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling.

But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of eager and firm milk.
Oh the goblets of the breasts! Oh the eyes of absence!
Oh the roses of the pubis! Oh your voice, slow and sad!

Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace.
My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road!
Dark river-beds where eternal thirst flows
and weariness follows, and the infinite ache.

(translated by W.S. Merwin)

Neruda would travel the world and his first stop was in Rangoon, Burma where he would find himself estranged from his language, his culture, and his history. It was here he would begin to write harsh, ferocious and surreal poems that would flower into the three volumes, Residence on Earth. These poems reflect terrors and modern anxieties.

Neruda would marry several times in his life which makes me wonder about those who mourn the supposedly scarcity of romance. Who more romantic than Neruda? And what would they think of him once he left them? 

He would eventually turn to politics and forge within his vision of an unalienated humanity, of justice and equality, a new poetry reflecting this growth. His political and social commitments were central to his life. He was elected senator for the Communist Party in Chile in 1945. Eventually, he was accused of disloyalty and declared dangerous. Neruda went into hiding, then fled to Argentina, and traveled to Italy, France, the Soviet Union, and Asia. It was his stay on the island of Capri during his exile that was fictionalized in the touching film Il Postino. If you do anything today, at least rent the film, you’ll enjoy it (click here). It’s not time travel, nor knights in shining armor, nor even all that chivalrous, but it damn sure is romantic.

Throughout this period he was writing love poems for Matilde Urrutia, who became his third wife. Those blossomed into The Captain's Verses (1952), and 100 Love Sonnets (1959), which features my all-time, favorite Neruda poem:

XI

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing at the twilight,
hunting for you, your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens if Quitratue.

It’s infinitely better in Spanish, but how can one even think of writing poetry after reading something like that?!

Everything was magical for Neruda. Nothing ordinary was alien, or for that matter, ordinary -- everything was magical. He wrote separate odes to tomatoes and wine, to an artichoke and one to a dead tree, to conger chowder, to a fuckin' large tuna in the market, to his socks and his suit, to birds, to light on the sea, to the dictionary, to a movie theater. He wrote an ode to time and another to the Earth, an “Ode to Everything.”

Eventually, he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Neruda would write prolifically to the end. Ill with cancer and retired to his home in Isla Negra, he would write of entering “the silence into which everything falls / and, finally, we fall.” Heartbroken over the (US-sanctioned) coup that ousted Allende and the impending darkness that would eventually envelope his country, Neruda died eleven days later, on September 23, 1973, in Santiago.

Neruda remains a giant in poetry. His work contains multitudes, like his poetic ancestor, Walt Whitman. He was a poet of freedom and of the sea, a wondrous love poet, and a necessary voice of social consciousness.

In Neruda’s own words:

Poetry is a deep inner calling in man; from it came liturgy, the psalms, and also the content of religions. The poet confronted nature’s phenomena and in the early ages called himself a priest, to safeguard his vocation… Today’s social poet is still a member of the earliest of priests. In the old days he made his pact with darkness, and now he must interpret the light.

Radiantly impure, stubbornly humane… RIP Neruda.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Resources

Brittanica entry for Neruda (click here)

Wikipedia entry for Neruda (click here)

Site with many of Neruda’s poems (click here)

Labels: essays, Neruda, poems, poetry, aesthetics

Poetry Mash: Thomas vs. Dickinson

¡Hola! Everybody…
When you get a chance, check my submission to the online magazine, Subversify. This week I tackle depression (click here). Leave a comment.

I found the following while going through some old files. It’s a report I did early in my undergraduate studies. I was somewhat surprised in that I liked it -- and I hardly ever like anything I write! LOL I’m posting as is with no edits (as much as it pains me). On a personal note, a couple of years after writing this, I dedicated the Dylan Thomas poem to my father, who at the time was suffering from a liver disease he would eventually succumb to…

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-=[ Thomas and Dickinson: A Comparison ]=-

The two poems, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, by Dylan Thomas and, Because I Could Not Wait for Death, by Emily Dickinson, we find two distinct treatments on the same theme: death. In the former, Thomas uses an elaborate form and rhyme scheme along with radiant imagery and metaphor to present us with a passionate plea to cling to life; while in the latter poem, Ms. Dickinson composes, with the use of four quatrains written in a predictable, almost laid back rhythm, a kinder, gentler look at death.

The two couldn’t be more different. For example, Thomas employs an elaborate verse form known as the villanelle that a careless first reading may find excessively ornamental. However, upon reading this piece aloud, this writer finds that the form serves to create a grand dramatic effect. For example, lines one and three are repeated alternately in the following tercet’s third lines, rhyming with the respective first lines. In this way it has the same effect of a classical music composition: especially a composition that returns repeatedly to a motif. Consequently, Thomas creates an intensely lyrical, almost musical pathos that adds to the dramatic aura to the theme of this poem, which is: “hang on to life, man!”

By contrast, Emily Dickinson employs a structure and rhythm that could not be any more different in tone and temperament. Missing here is the elaborate rhyme and scheme of the Thomas villanelle. Instead, we find a seemingly spartan six quatrains that do not rhyme. This writer finds that there is a more subtle approach here, for Dickinson does not want to portray the more grim aspects normally associated with death. The first quatrain contains an eight syllable first line, a six syllable second line, an eight syllable third line, with the fourth line composed of eight syllables. The poem proceeds in this fashion for the next two quatrains, almost lulling us with a steady, secure rhythm, somewhat like the rhythm one may experience riding in a horse-drawn carriage like the one mentioned in line three. When we come upon the fourth quatrain (line 13), we discern a change in structure and mood. The change in rhythm is pronounced, while the change in mood is more subtle:

Or rather - He passed us-

The Dews drew quivering and chill-

For only Gossamer - my Gown-

My Tippet - only Tulle

For the first time in the Dickinson piece we encounter (if briefly and ever so subtly) symbols of the more harrowing aspects of death: the burial gown and shawl. But even this look at our transience is given a soft treatment, the “gossamer” gown and “tulle” shawl imagery being supple in nature: perhaps Death has a gentle touch, Dickinson seems to imply. The change in rhythm accompanying this subtle introduction to our mortality is a treated like a pause -- a momentary reflection. Continuing, the last two quatrains of the poem go on in the same fashion as the first three, adding to the effect that one has been riding in a carriage, paused for a moment, only to proceed on one’s journey.

Another significant difference between the two poems is in the contrasting use of rhetorical devices that the respective authors implement to state their primary messages. Dylan Thomas, whose overarching message is about the preciousness of the gift of life, implements rich imagery and metaphor to execute his goal. He uses the night and the “dying of the light,” as a metaphor for death. Radiant imagery such as, “Old age should burn and rave at close of day,” and “wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,” vividly convey the anger and impotence one feels at the powerlessness one experiences when confronted with death. When Thomas tells his father curse and, “bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray / Do not go gentle into that good night” (lines 17,18), you get a sense of the passion this man feels for life and how he wanted desperately to transmit this powerful emotion to his father.

Dickinson, on the other hand, whose message is that inevitability of death requires that we all eventually must accept our fate, uses personification to portray death as a man of “civility” (line 8) who “knew no haste” (line 5). Through Dickinson’s deft use of symbolism such as carriage (line 3), immortality (line 4), the setting sun (line 12), and eternity we take a ride and come upon the patient, “kindly” face of death.

Here we have two poems and two entirely different treatments of the same theme. One poem is elaborate in structure, passionate in its desperation and message. The other is sedate, subtle, almost too kind. It is enlightening to note that the Thomas piece was, in actuality, written for his dying father. It is a poem with which I can truly identify. Having had the opportunity of hearing this piece read by a professional actor and understanding its structure, I will risk over dramatization by stating that sometimes I can hear the wind howl when I read this poem. Dickinson, diametrically opposed, beckons us on a ride that gently brings us towards the inevitability of death, “towards eternity” (line 24). She teaches us about acceptance and peace; a stark contrast to Thomas’ angry, desperate rail against the injustice of fate.

… Eddie

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Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Because I Could Not Wait for Death

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

Or rather, he passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

Migrant Mother

¡Hola! Everybody...

I’ll just come out say it in plain words. If you listen to hate speech and get your political information from the likes of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, or voted for Sarah Palin, AFAIC you’re dumb fuckin twat with your head stuck so far up your arse you can’t hear me.

Period.

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-=[ A Madonna for a Bitter Time ]=-

When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.

-- Chinua Achebe

The woman... her name is Florence Thompson; she is 32 years-old, married, with no permanent address and seven children to feed. Even in the best of times, keeping it together would’ve been herculean, but the Great Depression now threatens to bring the family to the brink of disaster. Florence Thompson is one of the many migrant workers who travelled the land seeking any work they could find. It turns out that in March 1936, the pea harvest is once again poor, and that means no work -- and no form of income -- for the pickers. Florence Thompson has managed to find temporary lodging at a camp for pea pickers in Nipomo, California. As the photographer, Dorothea Lange noted, “Of the 2,500 people in the camp, most of them were destitute.”

The portrait of the young Florence Thompson -- worn, tight-lipped, and gazing blankly into the distance -- is one of the most famous of photographic icons. Since its appearance in the Family of Man exhibit (1955) the photograph has become part of the American collective consciousness. Originally titled in 1955 as “U.S.A.: Dorothea Lange Farm Security Adm.,” the photograph is now known as Migrant Mother, correctly situating the work in its proper historical context. Many interpretations have been attempted: from comparisons to the Mother of God with the Christ Child, to the attribution of the success of the picture through its balanced composition. One critic referred to the “dignity and essential decency of the woman facing poverty.” Another pointed out its “simplicity of means, its restrained pathos, and its mute autonomy of language.”

Whatever the reasons for its success, it is certain that Dorothea Lange basically ignored all such theoretical perspectives when she took the photograph. She described her approach to her work in different language: “Whatever I photograph, I do not molest or tamper with or arrange... I try to [make a] picture as part of its surroundings, as having roots... Third -- a sense of time... I try to show [it] as having its position in the past or in the present... ”

What I find fascinating with photography is the relationship between the photographer and the subject. There are at least three (often subconscious) dynamics at work in a photograph. There is the subject, the artist, the relationship between the subject and the artist, and finally there is the observer (you). All this works to create the aural power of the work. It is known that Lange approached the family slowly, taking pictures all the while, giving the family members a chance to pose themselves (in contrast to her stated approach to photography). In the initial photographs, for example, the children are looking into the camera; only in the final photo of the sequence do they turn away, in the process emphasizing their position as social outsiders that Lange strived to capture.

To be sure, Lange was seeking to do more than provide evidence, her understanding of documentary work included using persuasion. She wanted to do more than simply register reality; she wanted to move the observer. In making human suffering an object of art, Lange discovered a way of eliciting sympathy, attention, and interest in a world already saturated with images. She took the concept of documentary photography beyond merely recording events.

When Lange took the picture in 1936, she was forty years old, and had been a committed photographer for some time. She had been married to her second husband, a sociologist, and was herself a mother of two. The market crash of 1929 eventually led to dissolution of her moderately successful portrait studio. The ensuing economic calamity, however, forced many agricultural workers into the street, and this was what Dorothea Lange had tried to capture with her camera. Her perspective of the down an out waiting in front of a soup kitchen set up by a wealthy woman became known as The Angel Bread Line , and it marks a turning point in her work. Increasingly, it was the social realities of a post-agricultural America that she wished to capture.

It was the end of long hard winter, and several weeks of working with the camera under harsh conditions. It was raining and she was on her way back home in her car. A sign announced the camp of the pea harvesters. She drove past, but could not put it out of her mind. Suddenly, following her instinct, she drove back to the rain-soaked camp, parked her car, and got out. She immediately saw the woman in the distance, a “hungry and desperate mother.” According to Lange she doesn’t remember how she convinced the woman, or explained her presence. She told her name and age and she said she was living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children had killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that makeshift tent with her children huddled around her, and she seemed to know that the pictures would help her... so she helped the photographer.

Love,

Eddie

Update: For more of Ms. Lange's work check out the slide show (Music by Bobby McFerrin)

Art [Reflections on Monet]

¡Hola! Everybody... Engage the issue or be exposed... LOL

It’s cold out here to day! DANG! It’s days like this that make me seriously re-think my commitment to being single...

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-=[ Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond ]=-

Claude Monet | oil on canvas| three panels, Each 6’ 6 ¾ x13’ 11 ¾ | Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

“It took me time to understand my waterlilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.”

As a child, I was once walking across the street with my mother in NYC’s Lower East Side. We were at a busy intersection, just off the Williamsburg Bridge -- right by NYC’s famous “Bargain District” in Delancey St.

All of sudden there was a loud screeching of tires, cars honking their horns a car made a crazy u-turn and stop right in front of us. A woman jumped, ran straight to me and gave me a long, heartfelt hug.

“Mrs. Rubell,” I said, somewhat stunned. It was my 5^th grade teacher -- my teacher from the year before. We had since moved away from the neighborhood and lost contact with her. She couldn’t hug me enough. I think that if she could have, she would have adopted me. Mrs. Rubell loved me.

Mrs. Rubell influenced my life in ways I don’t think she ever understood. She was the person who actually awakened my intellectual curiosity. She was one of those teachers you never forget.

Mrs. Rubell’s main way of teaching was through her love of art. That one year, she took us, an overcrowded class of inner city children in Brooklyn’s East New York, to all the great art institutions of New York. By the time she finished with us, we were conversant in the major schools of modern art and could “read” paintings in ways that amazed the adults at the MoMA, the Guggenheim and all the institutions displaying modern art.

Yes, her passion was modern art and her passion would influence my artistic tastes for the rest of my life. That day, with her car left carelessly in the middle of a crowded NYC street, I somehow glimpsed how much she appreciated my gift. She did so much explore and transcend the boundaries of my world, urging me to read, to question, to dare contemplate.

Sometimes, especially when I visit a museum (which I do often), I think of her and I wonder if she knew how much she affected me, how her passion for modern art infected me and influenced how I look at the world, how colors inform me, even how I dress. I sure wish that she knew...

On my first visit to the MoMA, I sat transfixed in a large room surrounded by Monet’s impressionistic water lilies, while Mrs. Rubell sat next to me and patiently explained the painting, the artist’s vision, pointing out his use of light and color to effect a fleeting moment. It’s an event forever etched in my mind. I still go to that room, it’s like visiting an old friend.

In a very real sense, art saved my life. I like to think I love art as much as Mrs. Rubell did. When I was at my lowest, it was art and the creative impulse manifested through sublime works of art that reminded of the preciousness of life. In the midst of all that is ugly, of everything that is worst in the human condition, if you look in the right places you’ll come upon intricate beauty of a Faulkner paragraph. Look again and you can see the long stark shadows of a de Chirico urban landscape, immerse yourself in the unmistakable tone of Coltrane’s tenor. It’s one of my life’s pleasures that I can always go back to that room at the MoMA and look, with a child’s eyes, and if I listen closely, I can still hear my teacher’s passion for my gift.

Love,

Eddie

La Reina, La Gran Tirana, La Lupe

Hola Everybody!
It’s an amazing day today – bright sunshine, tolerable temperature, a soft breeze. I have to go get an apartment! LOL!

* * *

"El dia en que te deje, fui yo quien salio ganando."
(The day I left you, it was I who came out winning)
-- La Lupe, La Tirana

The other day, one of my friends left a comment asking what a bolero was and I wasn’t able to respond because it was one of those hectic work days. However, the question left me thinking about boleros, which led me to think of one of its greatest interpreters, La Lupe.

I first saw La Lupe barely into my 20s and before then, I wasn’t a big fan. I viewed boleros as a musical genre that parents enjoyed and sang to one another. I think it’s a common enough occurrence among Puerto Ricans, but my parents would sometimes have arguments via songs. You know: my father would sing some lyrics of a certain song, and then my moms would reply with lyrics from a song of her own, that type of thing.

Anyway, one of the songs my mother would sing to my father was her favorite bolero, La Gran Tirana, by the inimitable La Lupe. Its opening line was like a rallying cry for women all over El Barrio and sung by La Lupe, they ooze with irony. The opening line goes something like this:

"Segun tu punto de vista
yo soy la mala
vampiressa en tu novela
la gran tirana... "

(According to your point of view
I am the bad one
The vampiress in your soap opera
The great tyrant... )

I still get chills whenever I hear those opening lines. The great Spanish director, Pedro Almodovar, uses the song in one of his films; I believe it’s Women on the Verge.

In the hands of a lesser artist, La Tirana could easily sound melodramatic and trite, but as sung by the La Lupe, it’s a powerful claim to liberation, of doing away with oppression.

I saw La Lupe perform only once, many years ago in NYC’s cavernous Madison Square Garden. There were thousands of screaming fans, the noise level distracting, and the sound acoustics horrible. There were many acts that night in the early 70s, the main one being The Fania All Stars, a group of NYC Latino/a musicians that would storm the international circuit and bring the phenomenon known as salsa to the world. But that night, salsa was ours and ours alone. No one knew what the hell salsa was, and even less of La Lupe.

When La Lupe came on stage, the audience, composed mostly of young Latino/as, went into frenzy, screaming her name and screaming for dedications. To this day, I can’t say I have witnessed a more powerful performance and I have seen many, many performers. I believe it was Frank Sinatra who said that it was dangerous for a performer to give everything, that a performer must, for their own survival, save something for themselves.

Well, La Lupe, bless her soul, gave everything that night. She left nothing, not one thing, for herself. Halfway through her performance she was sitting on the edge of the stage and all of sudden, it didn’t feel like Madison Square Garden anymore, it was as if we were all transported to La Lupe’s intimate world. She sang as if it were the last time she would sing, throwing everything into every song, every note, every syllable. Each movement was imbued with meaning and energy and she laughed and cried. Her ability to create that connection was remarkable. You could feel her life force reaching out to you, taking you in, seducing you. She would claw at her clothes, scratch herself – she gave so much, and I sat there totally transfixed. She called herself an empress and I'd be a damned if she really wasn’t.

Finally, she came to that point in her performance – she sat on the edge of the stage her clothes by now gone – torn apart by her own hands – scratched and bleeding, she sat there in her bra and lingerie, and she managed to look like some reincarnated Taina Queen.

You could hear a pin drop...

And that’s when she sang the opening lines to La Tirana:

Segun tu punto de vista,
yo soy la mala…

And it was too much; she had us – all of us -- eating out her hand. At that very moment, I fell in love with that woman’s soul, because she possessed so much spiritual power and she was so willing, even in the face of annihilation, to share it. You actually feared for her, screamed for her, felt her pain.

Unfortunately, I never got to see her again and due to poor management and bad career choices, she would fall into relative obscurity. La Lupe would eventually die living destitute in the Bronx. When news of her death became known, tens of thousands of the people that loved her grieved. Money was collected for her funeral. An Off-Broadway play was written and in that way her music was revived for a new generation.

She was one of those that flared brightly if too briefly and gave all she could, throwing caution to the wind. To me, she was woman incarnate that night on that stage. I would never forget her.

A bolero is a ballad, Amy, and with that, I give you, ladies and gentlemen, La Lupe. Que Dios te tenga en la luz: