Cante Jondo
“I want something from her, but I don’t know what it is. I guess that means sex.”
– Joey Comeau, “Patricia”
The other night one of the women asked the rest of us, “Have you ever had a crush on a character in a book?”
I have not. I know some people have crushes on dead writers, which is the same thing, though; like Joey Comeau writes of a crush on Patricia Highsmith. I met him once, at a bookstore in San Francisco where he read his “I think this Coke made me gay” story. His eyes were pink and narrow because he’d been pepper-sprayed recently and the only thing I remember about the reason for the pepper spraying is that everyone pressing into each other and around the bookshelves laughed when he told us. I said words to him, but they had no recognizable shapes—it was a burbling gold popping candy efflorescence that showered him, and I think we hugged, because my bones felt the slightness of his bones and our frames were briefly mirror-to-mirror. He wrote in his dedication to me, “Live for today you little shit. The end is near.”
This is not a mean thing to say. He’s quoting a character in his book. I take parts of it to heart.
My thing is different because Joey Comeau is not dead as of this writing, which means now he is alive forever. Like a character in a book. Who, okay, I have a crush on. And it is also different because I could in theory write to him, rather than about. But I think crushes are more about than to.
When the woman asked the question, I was in shock. The other women and I had just been standing around a freeform fireworks setup (this being out in the cuts, but I don’t know if they call it that there, in Pennsylvania). We crouched underneath the lights as they escaped the orange tubes and exploded and boomed deep in our skulls, our jaws, our throats, colossal expansion in our chests, and their ash rained and twirled down on us like it was beaten out of a burning piñata, graying our hair.
All of us women, we’d screamed as a chorus, voices stretched by helplessness into those of little girls. Something so much bigger than us suddenly seizing our bodies, from the inside out, and the tangle of their soft arms as they fell together while I fell apart and away and smoldered about it.
So I was hearing, but not listening. This is the exhilaration of battle? That we attempt to replicate? Bodies rattled and pounding long after its echo has faded?
Tia Antonieta sent me a copy of Poema Del Cante Jondo for Christmas when I was thirteen and starting to feel certain that everything about the way our country’s government and economy functioned was antithetical to human life. Maybe it was thirteen-year-old morbidity or just a personal inclination toward tragedy, but after I was moved by Federico Garcia Lorca’s words—I read them in Spanish and English side by side—I fell in sick sorrowful romance with his death. There he was, dead and gone, on London Calling, which Papi, who was staying with his sister that year, away from us, sent me, also for Christmas, because he’d loved it when he was young. This was how I learned about the Spanish Civil War. I didn’t learn that I had been shaped by its ripples through blood until so much later.
Then Papi took me to Spain. It is the only time I have left North America (the world’s West Coast, if you will). It was the War on Terror years, and everyone hated Americans, Papi and me included. We liked punk rock and thought we were smarter than everyone and the son jarocho music of his voice made us seem like Mexicans in Spain. Foreigners no matter what, no matter where. In Granada I drank beer and wine and espresso. We looked like everyone else, maybe a little darker and softer, maybe our sounds a little rounder. I looked and looked and looked, and my eyes drank but did not swallow, and are still holding it.
Lorca’s childhood home had become a museum, and we arrived as it was closing. No more tours for the day. A man also named Federico, who usually worked the desk, took pity on us and the two German women who were late to the murdered poet’s museum, so after the last tour wrapped up and the official guide left, Federico brought us inside.
He was like a Lorca superfan, pointing out the first name thing, excitement vibrating off him, white-gray hair all shocked out as if by lightning strike. When we got to the piano, the ringing of whose hammered strings, according to Federico, was the joyous signal to everyone who could hear that Lorca was home, Federico looked at us like he was waiting for something nice to happen.
“No one is supposed to touch the piano during a tour,” he said, Papi translating. “But I have always wanted to hear it, and I don’t play myself, and the museum is closed, so this isn’t a tour.”
A little bubble rose in my belly. I looked to the German women, who shook their heads no. I looked at Papi, who smiled at me in a way I shied from, like the sun. More bubbles rose and burst, faded. Then his expression changed, like, I can’t believe you’re about to fucking pass this up, like the string of half-heated half-playful curses usually reserved for the dog who I think he loved more than anyone, pinche perra pendeja.
I felt sick. Never practiced enough. But I wanted to hear it, too, the sound of Lorca coming back home. I wanted to touch it, like touching Lorca’s fingers with mine.
This might be lazy of me, or unskilled, but I am dogshit at describing the sounds that comprise music. I sat down and the wooden chair creaked, bright and chirpy. I stumbled through some bars of Moonlight Sonata. I like sad music, no surprise.
The noise of Lorca’s strings wavered with and within me. Though I might not be able to tell you how his piano sounded when my fingers stroked and urged its smooth keys to crying, when I pressed down on its pedal, first gentle, slow, long, then sudden and hard, so that it whimpered and whined, ay! I can hear it, because my ears took it in their mouths, and did not swallow its deep song.
I know Federico Garcia Lorca is gay, and dead, but his face from a postcard I’ve kept on every wall since high school was the only image that flickered to the surface when I thought about my answer to the question of crushing on book characters. I didn’t say it, though.
It was that he had played with so many forms: music, theater, dance, words, communicating with the speed of life. It was that he had been executed by cowards who waste life in futile pursuit of control. It was that they took him at night, that they’d shot him in the ass twice for being queer, that they still don’t know where his body is, resting place bare and unmarked, perhaps feeding an olive grove. It was that his lover was said to have died a year to the day of his death in one of the trenches (“full of poets,” in the Clash song).
So, the question, again. My chest was a cavern, still, gaping open after the fireworks’ sound receded from it. I was compelled to run into traffic or kick over a trash can. I was compelled to kiss someone, shatter whole relationships and families with just my mouth just once, to walk unseen in the dark past sleeping campers and hiss.
I was compelled to say Lorca, to say Joey Comeau, to say You.
- Cante Jondo - February 18, 2025
* This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are producs of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
