The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light Read Online Free PDF

could be foolish, but I was always learning, especially out in the world. In Autlán, I was old enough to understand that my father was a musician, that he made a living playing the violin and singing. My dad played music that was about functions. It was music to celebrate by—we need some happy music, music to raise our glasses to. Can’t have a party without some polkas to dance to. Music to help someone serenade his girl, to get her back after he messed up. Music to feel sorry for yourself—cry-in-your-beer music. I could never stand that last kind of music—there’s way too much of that in Mexico. I love real emotion and feeling—I guess you call it pathos—in music. I mean, I love the blues! But I don’t like it when the music is about whining or feeling sorry for yourself.
    I got to know the kind of music Dad liked—Mexican popular music of the 1930s and ’40s was his bag. Love songs that everyone would hear in the movies, and the ballads of Pedro Vargas, a Cuban singer who was really big in Mexico—“Solamente una Vez,” “Piel Canela.” He’d play those melodies with such conviction, slow them down, either by himself at home or with a band in front of an audience. It didn’t matter. But he knew a wide repertoire of Mexicanmusic—he had to. Mexican music is basically European music: German polkas—oompah, oompah—and French waltzes.
    By the late 1940s, around the time I was born,
corridos
—history songs and all that macho cowboy stuff, including mariachi music—started to push away all the other music. My dad had no problem with that. He would play the mariachi standards that everyone knew. He would get dressed up in those costumes and the wide-brimmed hats. That’s what people wanted to hear; that’s the music that got you paid to play. It’s like so many fathers and sons—he had his music, and I had to have mine.
    But that came later. In Autlán I was too young to really appreciate what my dad’s being a musician meant for us. Later on I found out that he was supporting not only our family but also his mother and a few of my aunts—his sisters—with his music. His father, Antonino, was also a musician, as was Antonino’s father before him. They called them
músicos municipal
—municipal musicians—and they played in parades, at civil functions, and were paid by the local government. Antonino played brass instruments. But he developed a drinking problem and could no longer function. Then he dropped out of the picture. I never met him—the only thing I ever saw of my dad’s father is in a painting. There he looked like a real,
real
Mexican Indian: he had a large nose, his hair is all messed up, and he was standing with a band and playing a
córneo,
a small French horn. That’s the look of Mexico for me, the real Mexico.
    My father never talked about those things—not then, not really ever. He was one of ten children, and they grew up in El Grullo, a small town halfway between Autlán and Cuautla, where he was born. We only visited a few times, when my mom wanted to appease my dad. I remember my grandma frightened me—her silhouetted shadow on the wall, cast by the candlelight, scared the hell out of me. She was sweet as pie with my dad, but with us and my mom she was a little guarded.
    That’s where we met our cousins—my aunt’s kids. My siblings and I may have been from a small town, but we were city kids comparedto them. They were country, country, country—which meant that we got a real education. They would say, “Come here; see that chicken? Look in her eyes.”
    “Why? What’s wrong with her eyes?”
    “She’s going to lay an egg!”
    “What?”
    I didn’t even know chickens laid eggs. Sure enough, the chicken’s eyes got wide, it started clucking, and all of a sudden—
pop!
Out came this steaming egg. I was like,
“Wow!”
Not until we visited my grandparents did I experience that or the sound and smell of cow’s milk when it hits the bucket. There’s nothing