THE NEW YORKER
Culture Desk
Posted by Benjamin Moser
August 17, 2012
Postscript: Mexico’s Majestic Lesbian Chanteuse, Chavela Vargas
When I was twenty-three, I found myself killing time in San Joaquín de Flores, Costa Rica. The town was within commuting distance of the capital, San José, but had few metropolitan airs: it was a place, I was told, where addresses were unnecessary, and where, in order to find the person I was looking for, all I needed to do was ask any passerby for the “Casa de la Vargas.”
It was an unlikely place to look for Chavela
Vargas, whose great age, famous affairs, and heartbreaking renditions of
the Mexican classics made her one of the monuments of Latin America.
Indeed, for the rich exoticism of the myths surrounding her life, no
other singer came close. There were stories of Chavela in Acapulco in
its glory days, singing at Liz Taylor’s wedding and then slipping off to
bed with Ava Gardner; there were stories of her speeding down the Paseo
de la Reforma in the white Alfa Romeo that was a gift of the Mexican
President Adolfo López Mateos; there were even stories, which Vargas
heatedly denied, of her carrying off peasant girls at gunpoint.
Majestic and beautiful until the very end of her life, she compiled
an amorous résumé that ranks among the most distinguished in the history
of twentieth-century lesbianism. “I live only for you and Diego,” Frida
Kahlo told her. She had an affair with the magnate and collector
Dolores Olmedo; rumor linked her to fellow-divas Lola Beltrán and María
Félix; and then, she told me in Costa Rica, she had lived a great
passion with “the most famous woman in the world.” She refused to
elaborate—the mystery (Taylor?) remains for future biographers.
The darker stories were as notorious. The queen of the bohemians of
the Plaza Garibaldi, the traditional center of Mexican music, Vargas saw
her life almost destroyed by drink; she consumed it such quantities
that she later joked that there was no decent tequila left in Mexico—she
and the songwriter José Alfredo Jiménez, another musical legend, had
polished it all off. Jiménez died from cirrhosis, in 1973, and Chavela’s
own alcoholism was so devastating that she disappeared entirely for
more than fifteen years. Friends assumed that she had died. “If anyone
goes to Mexico,” the famous Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa reportedly
said, “place a rose for me on Chavela Vargas’s tomb.”
She attributed her pain to her terrible upbringing in Costa Rica,
where, as a child in San Joaquín, she was tormented for her sexuality
(“What hurts isn’t being homosexual,” she said, “it’s that people throw
it in your face as if it were a plague”), and to her early struggles in
Mexico, where she arrived as a teen-ager. She claimed that she had sold
some chickens to pay for the bus fare. She sang in cantinas for years,
until Jiménez discovered her on a corner of the Avenida Insurgentes.
This time, the myth suggests a pedigree: Edith Piaf, after all, had been
discovered singing on a street in Pigalle.
There was a lot about Chavela that, like these legendary stories, was
hard to believe. When I first heard her, on a CD a friend lent me in
college, I couldn’t believe, first of all, that that murky, rough voice
was a woman’s. And I couldn’t believe that the songs were the same
anthems—with their sequined interpretresses, sombreroed mariachis, and
screeching ai-yai-yais—that provided the backdrop to the
margaritas of my youth. What was easy to believe, hearing the voice,
was that Chavela Vargas had known an uncommon share of hard luck. And as
she uncovered the core of poetic emotion in those cheesy old songs, she
enunciated, for me, a longing that I had vaguely felt since
adolescence: a first intuition of adult passion, of loves that burn all
the more brightly because they are fleeting.
From the moment I heard that recording, I was infatuated. As I found
more and more of her albums, I grew determined to track her down, and
when at last I discovered her, in Costa Rica taking care of her ailing
sister Ofelia, I headed there as soon as I could. Once there, however,
it was not easy to find her. As promised, the “Casa de la Vargas” was
known to every citizen. But she was so persistently not home that after a
few days of trying, I assumed she didn’t want to see me, and headed to
Nicaragua. When I returned to Costa Rica, I tried again. This time,
Vargas picked up the phone and told me to come right on over.
Dressed in a T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, the grande dame was
living in a tiny apartment in the town where she had been born in 1919.
She was not thrilled to be back. If Costa Rica is today the only Latin
American country that might fairly be described as suburban, in her
childhood it was a harsh, isolated, conservative place, as far from the
cultural ferment of Mexico as Dubuque is from Manhattan. “Ten families
own this whole country,” she said, eyes widening with dismay. She hadn’t
been here in years, and had only returned because of her sister’s
illness. “I owe my whole life to Mexico. And to myself.” She had been
influenced by nobody. She owed her prominence to no one—except, she
said, to the Aztec gods.
I had never conducted an interview in my life. Imagining that this
Olympian figure would never deign to speak to a mere fan, I said that I
was a journalist and, to prove it, bought a cheap tape recorder at the
Miami airport. When I took it out of my bag, I first observed a rule I
have since seen proven again and again: as a change comes over the
features of a person being photographed, a voice that knows it is being
recorded changes, too. Before I turned it on, Chavela was relaxed. On
the sofa that doubled as her bed, she inquired about my trip to
Nicaragua and peered anxiously into my coffee to make sure I didn’t
really want sugar.
When I fumblingly hit the “record” button, the friendly old lady’s
voice gained the enunciation of a prima donna, the informal accent
ceding to the careful syllables of an unschooled woman eager not to
betray her lack of education. Here was the great singer, and here was
her mythology—the Indian family that had saved her from alcoholism, for
example, and the tribe that had anointed her a shaman (La Chamana was
one of her nicknames). But in her touching way of mentioning how many
people—and not just anyone!—loved and admired her, I could hear just how
completely she had been abandoned and despised. She repeatedly
mentioned how her “spouse,” Pedro Almodóvar, had put her music in his
films; and how Isabel Preysler, Julio Iglesias’s glamorous ex-wife, had
recently thrown a party for her in Madrid; and how the then-President of
Argentina, Fernando de la Rúa, had personally begged her to stay in
Buenos Aires. In the dingy apartment in San Joaquín, these names shone
with otherworldly lustre.
Of all these famous people, she spoke most longingly of her companion
from the Plaza Garibaldi, José Alfredo, known to all Mexico, like
Chavela herself, by his first name only. “I lifted his songs to the
height of glory,” she declaimed, speaking of places unfathomably distant
from that little apartment. “I took them to the Olympia, in Paris, to
the Palau de la Música, in Barcelona, to the greatest theatres in the
world.”
José Alfredo was not her only composer. Among her standards were Mario Clavel’s “Somos,” with which Almodóvar opened “Live Flesh,” and a hymn to a weeping woman of Mexican legend, “La llorona,” which Chavela, dressed as Death, sang in Julie Taymor’s “Frida.” And Chavela herself set to music “Macorina,” a Spanish poet’s hymn to a Cuban courtesan.
But her favorite song was José Alfredo’s “Las Simples Cosas,” with its famous refrain: “Uno vuelve siempre a los viejos sitios donde amó la vida / Y entonces comprende como están de ausentes las cosas queridas.” (“One always returns to the old places where one loved life / And then understands how absent the beloved things are.”)
The setting for these songs is the bar; the beverage, tequila; the
singer, a lover drowning his sorrows. “I’m in the corner of the cantina /
Listening to a song that I requested; / they’re serving me my tequila
now, / And my thoughts turn to you,” “Tu Recuerdo y Yo” begins. “Share this bottle with me,” “En el Ultimo Trago” continues.
The years have taught me nothing,
I always make the same mistakes:
Once again to drink with strangers
and to cry for the same old pains.
In the age of Chavela and José Alfredo, drinking, her friend Carlos
Monsiváis wrote, had a positive value that is difficult to imagine in a
post-feminist, health-conscious society. “There were no critical replies
to the idiocies and ignominies of machismo, and being a drunk was a
feat that undermined the conformity of people enslaved by
respectability.” The enslaved—who envied her courage in escaping and
could hear what her escape had cost her—became her most devoted
admirers, and when she returned to the stage in her seventies, her
interpretations of José Alfredo’s love songs—“Amanecí en Tus Brazos,” “Llegando a Tí”—became
even more powerful. Now she sang not of love lived but of love
remembered, as the memories of a woman who, as she proudly told me in
San Joaquín, “never did anything halfway.”
In late July, the ninety-three year-old travelled to Spain to pay
homage to Federico García Lorca. “I came to say farewell to Federico, to
my friends, and to Spain,” she said in a short statement at his grave.
Hospitalized following her presentation, she lingered between life and
death for ten days. When she was strong enough, the Mexican government
arranged for her repatriation. “And now I return,” the statement said,
“to die in my own country.” On August 5th, she died in Cuernavaca. Her
last words were “I go with Mexico in my heart.” The next day, the queen
of the bohemians paid a final visit to the Plaza Garibaldi, where her
body was serenaded by an army of mariachis.
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