The scene is wonderful. The year is 2012: García Márquez is standing in front of a group of Vallenateros with that expression of absence that has covered his face in his last years, not knowing exactly what to say or who these people are. (At the end of his life he stopped recognizing everyone, but preferring not to snub anyone, he developed a number of strategies to make it less noticeable.) But then he recognizes the words of Vallenato they are singing , and his mouth begins to move with the words, and something on his face changes, as if someone younger had entered it. And those of us who know his biography can think of the boy who, in the middle of the last century, walked the coast with Rafael Escalona and other uncertain companions, sometimes selling encyclopedias, and sometimes looking for life in other ways, but always singing folk songs and took notes for the books I hadn’t written yet.
But the scene doesn’t end there: García Márquez is seated next to Mercedes and on the other side is Leandro Díaz, the inventor, as everyone knows, of the verse that serves as the epigraph to Love in the Time of Cholera: “In these places go ahead : they already have their crowned goddess”. Leandro Díaz, with his eyes closed, leans towards García Márquez as usual and says: “When I sing this song, I remember you wherever I am.” And it is impossible not to be touched by the encounter between the two men, the author of vallenatos that are part of everyone and the author of books that, as García Márquez said of Hundred Years of Solitude, are actually vallenatos of hundreds of pages. They were part of the same generation and the same world. Leandro Díaz was born in 1928 and died the year after this meeting; García Márquez was born almost a year before Díaz and would die almost a year later. And they both would have liked this documentary they are in: Leyenda viva by Martín Nova, which just came out in Colombia.
We knew Nova for the rigorous interviews he compiled into two volumes – Conversations with the Ghost and Military Memories – and this documentary draws largely on his talents as an interviewer: patience, information, and boundless curiosity. You are two hours that have no waste. I’ve seen it three times and each time I find something I hadn’t noticed before and now I have no doubt that Living Legend will eventually become an important document. In these two hours there is everything: the history of Vallenato to date (from Escalona to Fonseca, to say the least), but also an extraordinary exploration of what this music is from within, the genealogy of its instruments, the artifices of its lyrics , its place in our culture and its relation to who we are. Or better: the way the Vallenato has become the number of our character through winding paths that have not always found the acceptance of today: in the world of Vallenato all the faces of this contradictory land are reflected.
Through the Leyenda viva I learned, for example, that “El amor amor”, the melody that has characterized so many parties for as long as anyone can remember, was already mentioned during the Thousand Day War. I also learned that it was with the Festival of the Vallenata Legend, that invention of López Michelsen and other visionaries, that the inveterate machismo that banned women from attending the party began to crumble. (Two years earlier, a groundbreaking edition took place in Aracataca: and there are the photos of García Márquez and Álvaro Cepeda Samudio posing with the musicians under a tree.) And I remembered something I had discovered when I was for The Noise of researched things in autumn: that in the times of the marimbera bonanza, the vallenateros groups became so popular, especially with the new millionaires that the bonanza produced, that the usual interested parties soon could no longer afford to sing. In this respect, too, the Vallenato was like a mirror of our history.
At some point someone asks themselves: If there were no song, what would we do with violence? Violence is the opposite of everything behind Vallenato, this man seems to suggest, or perhaps what he means is that music makes it possible to better deal with what is overwhelming these societies. And it’s quite possible that he’s right: the Vallenato areas, the valley that stretches from the Sierra Nevada to the Perijá mountains, have often been badly hit by our war. “There are eight million displaced people in this country,” someone once said. “How many Leandros Díaz, how many Rafaeles Escalona will there be?” Everyone will recognize the justification of this question, especially in areas where giving an accordion to a child – and this said and acknowledged, without idealism or naivety – it very much can probably steal from the clutches of illegal gangs forever. In the end credits, the film commemorates all those who were part of this story and are no longer here. The name Consuelo Araújo Noguera is sure to shock many who still remember her.
But perhaps what I like most about Martín Nova’s documentary is none of these areas of interest, but the voices: the voices of these witnesses and protagonists of Vallenato’s rich history. Of course Vallenato is first and foremost narrative music: it tells stories and tells them very well. Or to put it another way, the minstrels of old are minstrels, but above all they are chroniclers: people who, as it is said somewhere, “get attached to the idea of making news”, first in their region and then leaving. What is in the documentary is also that: Everyone tells stories. Sergio Moya Molina tells them they are talking about “Lacelosa” and Nafer Durán tells them they are giving a master class on the four arias of Vallenato and Beto Murgas tells them how they are talking about the history of the accordion and Carlos Vives also tells them who explains very well the phenomenon that took place when he and his people took the folklore of their lives and transformed it into something else, groundbreaking and at the same time respectful.
Partying is like hell, someone says: everyone is talking about it, but nobody knows. Perhaps that’s the first thing that happens with this documentary: that we finish it with the impression of knowing. And that’s not the only reason why these two hours of legend are worthwhile.
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