| Exile's End: The Cat Came Back |
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| By Terrance Cox | ||||
| This Issue Letters Contributors Archive
ON THE RECORD
ISSUES & IDEAS
LIFE & TIMES
DINING OUT |
Rafael ‘Gato’ Fuentes is no more in exile. So declares his CD’s title: Ida y vuelta: Canciones de fin de un exilio (Round Trip: Songs from the end of an exile). Redolent this title is, open to several readings, all linked to extraordinary events — with the recording itself as both cause and effect.
For most of the past two decades, Fuentes, with wife Glenys McQueen-Fuentes (who teaches dramatic arts at Brock University) and son Emilio, has lived in St. Catharines. In the late October sunlight of his South Drive livingroom, still reflecting on the overwhelming experiences of the previous month’s tour, Fuentes expands on another sense of the CD’s titular ‘round trip’ (literally, ‘going and coming back’). Wearing a red fleece sweater, emblazoned with the phrase ‘Canada, Est. 1867,’ he delights in a newly-enhanced sense of this place as home. He laughs when recounting — in his distinctly Hispanic-inflected spoken English — how old friends in Mexico kept remarking on his ‘northern’ accent, hearing twenty years of ‘Canajun’ in his Spanish. Having ‘come back’ to the shores of Lake Ontario, to the countryside of Niagara as the season turns, Fuentes affirms how here is “a land I discovered, in which my son grew up”. It was a double identity recovery, in a sense that you belong to two lands. For Fuentes as a musician, there is one further wondrous dimension to ‘Ida y vuelta.’ Although composing prolifically for the theatre and recording prodigiously his instrumental works, for a two-decade period, the ex-songwriter wrote not a single song. In the summer of 2001, browsing in a Toronto bookstore, he came upon a bilingual edition of the poems of the late Chilean Nobel Prize winner, Pablo Neruda. A poem that Neruda titled in English, ‘Walking Around,’ lit an unexpected spark. He bought that too-expensive volume, and began a near-frenzy of poetry reading, abetted by a friend in Mexico, Asunción González, who sent along a steady supply of her favourite Mexican, Spanish, and other poets. One night, midst of this immersion in words, Fuentes stayed up late with his guitar and, mirabile dictu, had a song by morning. In the following days came others. And more after that—over fifty songs as of our interview, and still they come. The muse of song, she too returns, susses out where the man from northern Mexico makes his southern Ontario home. She has moved right in, seemingly to stay, inspiring songs of north and south, of past and present. The first song that came to Fuentes was self-reflexive; its title translates as “After Twenty Years” and it is about the return of song. Among the dozens that follow are others that retain a self-awareness, address the process of creation and explicitly engage the fusion of forms that is happening, as a song entitled “Canadian Flamenco” illustrates. Yet another group of songs are excursions into personal history. Fuentes remarks on how unexpected is the fact that so many of these brand-new songs are visits to the distant past, but what a past it is that he has to draw on! It is no accident that the itinerary of Fuentes’ concert tour recapitulated his biographical journey. The venues played were in his hometown of Torren; in Guadalajara, where his university studies began; and in Mexico City, where first his music was heard. Fuentes describes Torren, in the northern state of Coahuila, as a “cowboy town.” He grew up there in the hacienda of his maternal grandparents, his parents divorcing when he was an infant. Fuentes describes the family as locally prominent, though not by their wealth. It is a familiar joke in Mexico, he says, to claim “we used to have money before the revolution, but now everyone is poor.” A supervisor of cotton-growing for a French company, Fuentes’ grandfather was renowned for having fought alongside Pancho Villa, the Mexican freedom-fighter. Such roots sustain in the strong themes of rage against injustice to be found in Fuentes’ music throughout his career, and illumine the naming of his son to honour another Mexican revolutionary hero, Emiliano Zapata. Fuentes got his nickname Gato (“The Cat”) from his grandmother, inspired by his frequent childhood feats of climbing. He describes her as a “tough, old-fashioned woman, who knew how to handle pistols because there were bandits around,” as a character out of the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Columbian magic realist. One beautiful new song, “Under the Lilacs,” is inspired by a moment and an image Fuentes recalls in the presence of his grandmother. On a spring day, he around ten, they sat out together, eating oranges, under a sky as blue as only a desert sky can be, with lilacs all about in bloom. He saw a vision of her as never before, as gentler and larger than life, in the blaze of colours—blue sky, oranges, yellow sun and lilacs—“a vision of the blooming of spring in an old woman.” This benign image stayed with Fuentes all his life, and now has been “translated” into a song. >> To read the rest of this article click here.
About the author
Photo courtesy of Rafael Fuentes.
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This past autumn, on a concert tour showcasing his new songs, the Mexican-born composer-musician Fuentes went back to his homeland, for only his second visit in twenty years away. He returns to his mother country as a ‘comeback’ performer (in both spatial and temporal senses of that phrase), well-remembered as a prominent member of a popular early-1970s rock band, La Fauna. The ensuing highly positive response to his sold-out concerts has plans for return tours and other ventures well in the works. Emphatically, Fuentes’ self-imposed exile from the Mexican music scene has ended.