Tenho Uma Rosa

I received a note from a childhood friend who attached a video of Cristina Branco singing Fado in Macau which was Portuguese territory till 1999 and now it is called the Last Vegas of Asia. Few people pass by Hong Kong without a short stop in Macau.

My friend did not know how much Fado had touched me during my visits to Portugal As I watched the video and listened to the language I learned to guess given my knowledge of Italian, French and Spanish, a few old lines came back to take me back.

“Com àgua e mel”… Somehow I recall hearing that line sang by La Grande Dame de Fado, Amàlia Rodriguez on cassette from a ginjinha kiosk in Lisbon.  Water and honey against all the pains of life.

Then, I heard Branco whisper “secreto rouxinol” and I recall telling my friend in Lisbon that I never really understood why the nightingale was so often the bird of poets. Perhaps it is because the lonesome male often sings at night when all other birds are asleep?

I do not know. But there are poems that have stayed in me perhaps because they found a curious respite in my wondering soul. For example, there is a poem to the Rossignol by Paul Verlaine (Poèmes saturniens) that starts:

Comme un vol criard d’oiseaux en émoi,
Tous mes souvenirs s’abattent sur moi,
S’abattent parmi le feuillage jaune
De mon coeur mirant son tronc plié d’aune

It is a very famous poem for anyone who was educated in French literature. I recall many of the lines, but it is a poem where the song of the bird has not changed – what has changed is the poet, the man who lost his first love, and perhaps the man who lost love.

Another famous poem about the nightingale is by John Keats, who dedicates an ode to the nocturnal bird. It is again a melancholic poem, where the poet feels numb, as though he was under the influence of a drug he had just taken. He tells the nightingale that he is not jealous of the singing nightingale but that  “drowsy numbness” is grateful for the song that makes his too happy.

Again, I am not sure why the nightingale was chosen for the poem, but here are the opening lines:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains 

 My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, 

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains 

But not all rouxinol poems and songs are melancholic. I remember how my kids used to love listening to Cinderella sing “Sweet Nightingale” a Cornish refrain from the 1800s. Cinderella, Drizella, Lady Tremaine and Anastasia made that song memorable in its joyful simplicity.

… So, from the Cornish song to the sad Fado songs sailors’ wives sang to those who left from Lisbon or Oporto, the nightingale came back to tease my memories tonight. I am sure there is a rossignol  singing in a forest somewhere at this moment, and that would be a lonesome male hoping for a mate.

… At sunrise, no one will remember his song.

July 7, 2019

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2019