Essay from Tomas Esber @tomasesber
SOUND IN SILENCE
There’s this video on YouTube I sometimes watch, of a famous mariachi band playing on a night-time TV program. For a long time, my tendency towards this video was unexplainable. I’m not Mexican, never had a penchant for mariachi bands. Still, I can’t help myself.
There are about ten mariachis divided into rows, so that those in the row above stand in the gaps made from those playing in the row below. Propped up at their feet are suede-black mariachi hats with silver embroidery. All the men dress the same. Black shoes, black pants, black jackets; a white shirt underneath, silver belt. Everyone’s clothes seem a size too small. One of the guys looks like a rounder version of Jack Nicholson’s Joker. Another guy in the back-row, the trumpeter’s eyes go dead whenever the camera pans to him and this makes him look, incidentally, like Jack Nicholson’s Frank Costello, from The Departed.
What’s curious about the video is that none of the mariachis quit smiling. There’s a good deal of solos—harp, guitar, violins—and, even as the music becomes energetic, they hold the same facial expression, a static smile, like they’d been hit by a nerve agent. I thought maybe Mexican Joker had something to do with it.
I’d seen other live videos on YouTube of performers I liked, and always their bodies seemed to move with the sounds they generated. A guitarist shredding his guitar, a singer widening their arms, puffing their chest with closed eyes. I realized that, what drew me to the mariachi video, was the gap between what one saw and what one heard.
Of course, that sentiment wasn’t limited to the facial expressions in the video. With what I’d heard on the news, had seen in Hollywood movies and read on U.S. government travel advisory sites, it felt unreal that such beautiful sounds and smiling faces could come out of, what seemed to me, a troubled place. Once I was sure of this self-diagnosis—that this was the reason I’d been drawn to the video—I felt dumb. I had been to Mexico before. But I’d stayed at an all-inclusive, gone partying, drank from the tap and felt the two-day wrath of Montezuma’s revenge. I think I’d been closer to Mexico visiting my Mexican friend’s family in the Carolinas than when I’d actually gone. In the Carolinas, at least, I didn’t feel as if I was somehow contributing to a problem.
I think also, there is something defiant in their unchanging faces. As if to say: “the news says one thing—there’s murder and drug dealers and our relevance is limited to these stone pyramids left behind—but you never saw this before, did you”. An Uruguayan lady in the comments section of the video seemed to share my observation—“your music is an insult sung to narcotraffickers.” In the same way the string of mariachis alternated itself in rows, there seemed to be a thread of silence woven into this otherwise booming video. At least one other person—an outspoken Uruguayan—had picked up on this.
So I find myself looking with glazed eyes at the stone faces of the mariachis from a country I have no claim to. And this makes me think of other places I have no claim to. Like my parents’ Venezuela. I have no claim to the music shop in my mom’s Carupano where I’d learned to play Cuatro in the summers we’d spend there. In Miami, we fought once, and I told her I could do without her culture, and years later we’d speak only in English, at first out of spite and then only because habit. I’d smashed the glossy Cuatro she’d bought me—I’d told her a cousin had broken it—and stopped playing. So I have no claim to that instrument either.
I have no claim to the drawings on the floor of Caracas’ airport, scuffed with trolley marks. Growing up, there’d be two things that when my dad spoke of them, he did so with such charm, his love of the thing instilled itself into whoever listened. The first was God. The second, airplanes. “Look,” he’d say, showing us a picture he took that seemed like it was from the 70s or 80s. “Look at the Concordes,” he’d say again, pushing the picture up to people’s faces, as if worried they wouldn’t believe him if he didn’t. “Parked at the Caracas airport!” Waving the picture around, like he was trying to sell it. “You don’t believe me do you?” He’d say later after he’d put the picture down and people had started to talk about something else.
When I found the mariachis, I’d come to think the phantom thread that pieced their video together did the same for that photograph of the cigarette-airplanes. I thought of the mariachi whose hands glide over the harp’s invisible strings—the embroidery crawling up his pant-leg like a single wisp of smoke.
Sometimes when I’d watch the video late at night, or very early in the morning, I’d wonder quietly if there really was smoke, and if it would catch fire or not.
And one day looking at the mariachi video, I scoured the part of my heart I’d stocked in my boyhood with pity and compassion,and was surprised to have found instead something putrid, as if the pity and compassion had rotted without worth having been let alone for so long in a room I’d seen no need to breathe air into. And, in that moment, I realized I hated the people that made my dad wave his cracked photograph as if he was trying to sell it. And I hated the people that turned the mariachi’s faces to stone.
With all the cares my mother and father and younger self had taken, we’d failed, and I knew then I’d be spending the next years of my life seeking quiet of mind.
Miami Chronicles 