May 19 2008
A memory revisited
It was early 1981, and I was just around the corner of 10 years old. As a child with relaxed, lenient parents, I was allowed to watch TV more than the average infant. I would watch adult soap operas (OK, adult in those days meant cryptic, not explicit), and refrain from asking my mom embarrassing questions (a Virgo child tends to be discreet) that would force her to advance uncomfortable explanations that she would simply blush around years later. One night, out of the black and white small screen that presided our living-room, came the music and the verse of a song that captured my interest. It was called Annabel Lee. Only years later would I discover the words belonged to a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, and they had been translated ad lib to a romantic musical tune sung by an unknown Argentine singer with a rich mezzo voice. The opening theme to Marco Denevi’s Ceremonia Secreta was on, and the story began to unfold only minutes later. I would love to see that recreation of the short novel again, just to find out what impact it would have on me today. I know that, at the time, I was probably in a position to understand a fraction of the implications embedded in the plot, but I loved the performance of the leading actresses. Who decided to put Poe to music in Denevi’s work? Whoever it was, I liked it at the time, even though I was not sure what it all meant. I recently re-read the book, and relived some of the claustrophobic feelings I had as I was watching the show as they came back to me from the pages of Denevi’s closed and mechanically-calculated prose.
The other message, however, had arrived to me years in between childhood and now, when I was a student of the language that today imprisons me. In a secluded corner of the Lincoln library in Buenos Aires, as I was leafing through a collection of Poe’s works, some of that magic returned, sending me back to the childhood memory, albeit in a different background.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we –
Of many far wiser than we –
And neither the angels in heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful ANNABEL LEE
