My mother sang in a clear soprano, with that slight reedy quality of the good Spanish female voice. My mother’s voice was untrained, but proper for the romanzas I heard her sing when I was a boy. The romanzas, passed down in my family from mother to daughter since those fifteenth-century days when my ancestors stood erect in the court of the Catholic Kings, were ballads of tragic love, of chivalry, of the life that is precious because it is also pain. Today, I can hear those romanzas and villancicos on the dubbed copies of scratchy aluminum discs which my mother recorded for Columbia University three decades ago. This personal cancionero was part of a larger one which my aunt Zarita Nahon had collected in Spain and in Morocco—where it had taken refuge from the Inquisition and survived. Perhaps some day an eager musicologist, disturbing the dust of the academy in search of footnotes, will “discover” them for the world.
The words still sing to me:
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