It was one day in 1976. I was signing copies of my
first two records VIDA E MORTE (LIFE AND DEATH) and ROSALIA DE CASTRO, in the El Corte
Inglés of Vigo, when my friend Carlos Casares walked through the door accompanied by
Alvaro Cunqueiro. He introduced us and we talked for a long time. Cunqueiro said he was
going to send me an article about my Rosalía songs which he had written and published in
the Faro de Vigo newspaper...If the truth be told, I never received that letter but it is
encouraging to think that it exists or, at least, existed in his imagination. Still, I was
left wondering what was written in that article.
That was the first time I saw Cunqueiro. The second and last time would be years later, in
the Autumn of 1980. After giving a recital in Vigo, I was strolling through the town when
I saw in the shop window of a bookshop the recently released first volume of his collected
works in Galician, POESIA E TEATRO (POETRY AND THEATRE).
I bought the book and with the excuse of an autograph I phoned him and we agreed to meet
that afternoon in his house. Victor Freixanes accompanied me. Don Alvaro offered us some
coffee and a herb schnapps. The weak sun gilded some apples in a corner of the room. We
talked about Lord Dunsany, about the First Troubadours and about the novas cantigas (new
songs) from that book he was about to autograph...When I told him I planned to compose
some music for those poems, his face lit up. On saying goodbye I tried to imagine the
youthful Cunqueiro who had written DONA DO CORPO DELGADO (LADY OF SLENDER BODY)...
The same Cunqueiro who is at present, with all probability, living one of his marvellous
dream worlds besides Merlin and his family, with Bernal de Bonaval and Mendiño, courting
that crystal voiced princess, sob os abelaneiros frolidos...
Amancio Prada, 1987
CUNQUEIRO
Bishop of silver and oblivion, fat father of my celebrated luncheons,
preceptor´s body with a soul of an Atlantic bard that would sing inside of him. Major
trombone of Galician prose and verse, obese counterpoint of the bagpipe and flute, that
would nonetheless suddenly give birth to flautist and bagpiper verses. Incomprehensible
and tolerant Alvaro, my brilliant country yokel in Madrid, whom only Amancio Prada
understood as creator of staves which are but written freehand in the air/sea (airsea) of
Galicia.
Be that as it may, every time we arranged to meet for a meal, Cunqueiro
would invite an angel, and the angel ate little, that is true, but Cunqueiro would address
him or her as if he was really there, Casa Guría, calle de las Huertas, Madrid. I do not
know what to say about that cross between cardinal and archangel that was Cunqueiro.
Cardinals are angels who are thwarted due to impatience. They prefer the earthly powers of
Anthony Burguess. Angels are God´s athletes, theological beings in the unemployment lists
who will never amount to cardinals. This less social that theological revolution was alive
in Cunqueiro´s interior. He fed his interior angels with Mondoñedo mushrooms and cooked
on his own for all the saints and whores he carried in his soul. He left us expressions
which are music, and Amancio Prada has represented them in this way. Islands in which to
celebrate him. He was a human island densely populated by imagination. We party inside of
the magic map that was his being. And so does the Galician language which Rosalía brushed
slowly against it.
Francisco Umbral (Febrero,
1987)
(Text written for the presentation of the record of Cunqueiro in the
island of San Simón, where the troubadour Mendiño set his famous and sole remaining
song,
"Sedíame eu na ermida de San Simón [I Was in the Hermitage of San Simón]")
