Between Stations
BY Kim Cheng Boey
(Giramondo Publishing, 2009)

In memory everything lives in music, says the American poet William Matthews. Music preserves the pulse of our experiences and charts the stages of our lives. Each phase of our journey is attended by a different soundtrack, and all the moments therein are permeated by its tune, voice and the whole aural map of its being in the air. What we have lived through is carved in long grooves and then forgotten until some day the stylus is activated, and then there is no stopping the long playing. Everyone has his or her Vinteuil, a sonata that condenses the themes and expresses so aptly the storyline of their lives. It summons back les temps perdus, all those reveries and traumas of childhood, the state of being in but not of the world, when we watched our elders conduct their affairs with a logic that defied our understanding, when we witnessed them fall in and out of love while we hung suspended in a kind of transit; and then ourselves undergoing the throes of growing up. Like passwords to the country of the past, the songs conjure up the sights and sounds, the whole emotional geography of an era.

We can be forgiven for thinking that they were about us. There are songs that we loved and took as our own for each stage of our lives and then there are songs that we were listening to consciously but which we heard in a kind of unhearing way. Heard melodies are sweet, those unheard are sweeter. Especially sweet in retrospect are the songs you never really meant to listen to, but which formed the ambient landscape of your childhood. Music preserves the pulse of our experiences and charts the stages of our lives. Each phase of our journey is attended by a different soundtrack, and all the moments therein are permeated by its tune, voice and the whole aural map of its being in the air. You were absorbed by them, drawn into the drama of the lyrics, and the story unfolding around, the relationships that seemed bewilderingly remote and fascinating. They are songs that you would later reject in youth as saccharine, as you advanced to more exalted tastes: Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Mahler, Elgar, Charlie Parker, Coltrane and Bill Evans. You become a musical snob until you realise that Coltrane and Evans knew the value of a good pop tune and could transfigure it into something profoundly moving: Coltrane’s ‘My Favourite Things,’ Miles’s ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’ and Evans’s ‘Theme from M.A.S.H.’ Maybe something in me is at last turning postmodernist; I listen to what used to be in the top of the charts — ‘Sunday Morning’, ‘Yesterday Once More’ — with the same fervour with which I tune in to classical, jazz or world music. I don’t mind being called maudlin now; Elgar’s concertos touch the same chords in me as the sadly sweet voice of Karen Carpenter or the pained sensitive timbre of David Gates.

It is comforting to hum the tunes that ruled the airwaves in your childhood. Play a Beatles or Leonard Cohen LP and your belief in music, in life, is revived, even if momentarily, and you become that yearning, hopeful youth again. I find myself longing to hear even the Chinese pop that my mother played on her portable turntable that she acquired and carried with her from room to rented room: Teresa Teng, Tang Lan Hua, all those bittersweet songs that mirrored the disappointments in her life. The hits are indices to the past; a lot happens in the duration of their stay on the hit parade. For that reason a song can bring back a whole epoch of one’s life.

For a season in my life which coincided with the later half of the sixties, ‘Guantanamera’ reigned in the air. Nobody knew exactly what the word meant, let alone the Spanish lyrics. The song ambled out of the Rediffusion, the radio and turntables. It wasn’t that the music moved me to tears or grabbed me in a catatonic trance; the voices were not remarkable and the lyrics did not mean anything to one who did not know Spanish. But it somehow cut a groove in the memory; the freight of sorrow in the song was carried with dignity by the strong harmonies floating on melodious strings. The refrain suggested endurance in the face of adversity, a mantra which plugged deep into us. It was whistled in the streets, hummed in the lavatories and you could half expect the singers garbed in sombreros and ponchos to be sauntering and strumming among the Chinese, Malay and Indian faces of the neighbourhood in Tanglin Halt, where we lived at this time.

It wasn’t that the music moved me to tears or grabbed me in a catatonic trance; the voices were not remarkable and the lyrics did not mean anything to one who did not know Spanish. But it somehow cut a groove in the memory; the freight of sorrow in the song was carried with dignity by the strong harmonies floating on melodious strings.

There were of course the Beatles’ ‘Yesterday’, The Carpenters’ rendition of ‘Mr Postman’ and other exciting sounds. At the marketplace in Tanglin Halt, they would set up a wooden stage and aspiring rockers would crank out the Beatles opus. Those were the courting days of my aunt and uncles and we were often whisked to the marketplace to act as chaperones. It was like a theme to the drama unfolding before me; Aunt Shirley, my father’s youngest sister, was petite, with an oval face, big eyes, curled lashes, sassy long hair. There was a string of wooers and with each change of the top twenty there seemed to be a change in boyfriend. Those were the days of ‘agogo’ and it thrilled me to see young women like my aunt in flowery minis and bell-bottomed hopeful young men shaking and rolling in the open space in front of the stage. Inevitably, when it came to the slower numbers, ‘Guantanamera’ took centrestage and the couples would close in demure embrace.

Nobody understood the lyrics, not even the Malay troupe singing it, I think. But its melancholy melody and the plangent sound of the words had a profoundly soothing effect. If the song was an enigma, the group’s name was even stranger. The Sandpipers. At an age when I was navigating language without the guidance of a dictionary, relying solely on guesswork (as I still do), the group’s name conjured up sand-dwellers on the beach, transmitting the strains through holes in the sand. Later I confused them with ‘The Sandman’, the song by the seventies group America.

Then one day the song vanished from the airwaves, displaced by new hits and then the music became different; the late sixties and early seventies were over. The age of disco, funk and less melodious sounds and meaningful lyrics. For years ‘Guantanamera’ languished in silence until a few weeks ago when it drifted back, as though it had been playing all the time in the back-chamber of my mind with the volume turned down, the Spanish words indistinguishable but not the less mesmerising. It is not the current and ironically American-fuelled revival of Cuban salsa or the militant anthem English football fans had turned the tune into that recalled it. The tune started playing again after I watched the 1994 film of the same name by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juna Carlos Tabio. Yoyita, a famous singer, on returning to Guantanamera, meets her old lover Candido but expires just as Candido is about to declare his undiminished love for her. This is when the Cuban road movie really kicks off. Adolfo, the husband of Yoyita’s niece and a zealous Communist bureaucrat, has engineered a corpse transportation plan to save the state fuel. Yoyita is to be relayed from town to town, changing hearse as each town is supposed to supply the means of transport for the different stages of the procession to Havana. The cross-country cortege provides ample opportunities for escapades, misadventures, social and political satire and insights into the lives of ordinary Cubans.

To me the film is much more than just a dark comedy or a scathing satire of life under Castro. It is about how life carries on, how the past is relayed and memories connected through a chain of synapses. The voice-over and music stitch the disparate episodes and broken memories into what in the end turns out to be a redemptive journey.

A few days after watching the film, I saw the old Sandpipers record in a St Vincent de Paul shop. The poncho-wearing quartet looked more Asian than Caucasian. It was a serendipitous find; then the conviction strengthened that there was something more than coincidence stitching random events into some coherent pattern. Whatever it was, I embraced this emissary from the past and told the septuagenarian volunteer over the counter the story. She smiled indulgently and wished me good listening.

The song is braided with the dazzle of afternoon light on the field in front of the block of flats, the feeling of hope, of familial intimacy… For me the song will always bring back the moment when I first became aware of the complex world that grown-ups inhabit, my first inkling of the carousel of romance, heart-break and death, the alloy of happiness and pain in equal measures.

As I read the lyrics on the insert, it began to make a little sense, though I had to resort to an internet search to get the translation and history of the song. The song is now officially attributed to Jose Fernandez Diaz, though many argue it was already widely sung by Cuban peasants before Diaz appropriated it for his radio program. Diaz used it as a signature tune and its melody as a scaffolding for comments on daily events. Over time, ‘Guantanamera’ became a vehicle for expressing romantic and patriotic sentiments or for social and political satire, in Cuba and the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. The original lyrics are purportedly about a girl from Guantanamo who had broken Diaz’s heart. I wonder if the inmates of Guantanamo have adapted it to their own needs or if the campaigners against American treatment of the detainees have invented their own protest song around it.

The song, its haunting tune, the catchy lyrics, has become inextricably linked with that tract of my child-hood spent in Tanglin Halt; hearing it again after all these years brings back the hoarded associations, and it is ‘yesterday once more,’ to quote the Carpenters. The song is braided with the dazzle of afternoon light on the field in front of the block of flats, the feeling of hope, of familial intimacy. Strangely, at the age of five those days were already dressed in a sentimental nostalgia, and my recollections now seem like memories of memories. For me the song will always bring back the moment when I first became aware of the complex world that grown-ups inhabit, my first inkling of the carousel of romance, heart-break and death, the alloy of happiness and pain in equal measures. It brings back the image of Aunt Shirley looking out each day for mail from Montreal, where her future husband was studying, and being attracted to another man. A few times we tagged along on her outings with this man. I was dimly aware that Aunt Shirley wanted my sister and me as a safety measure; she had sworn she would wait
for her fiancé’s return. Not that we minded; Aunt Shirley’s friend had a car and took us on our first rides. I could sense how happy she was, even though she must have felt miserable at being tempted.

The melancholy beauty of the melody evokes that amber tone of light, the captivating aroma compounded from an assortment of things: my grandmother’s cooking, the fragrances the women in the house wore, the spiced flavours from the Malay families three floors down, the bodies of the grown-ups around. In its mantra-like refrain, it brings back the heady days that my uncles and aunts lived through, all of us packed into that tiny flat in Tanglin Halt, three generations welded together, like the Cubans in their haberna. It was the early days of nationhood, and there was promise in the air. A lot happened during the time the song climbed, reigned, slid and lingered in the charts. The Rolling Stones came to Singapore. Long hair was banned and hippie travellers were turned back at customs. Uncle Andrew, Dad’s younger brother, left his fiancée, a pretty lady whom we all liked. National service was introduced with Uncle Heng, Grannny’s youngest child, as one of the first servicemen. He would return from camp with a duffel bag and spend the entire weekend starching and ironing his uniform, waxing and polishing his boots. I also remember seeing death for the first time. It was our neighbour, a gentle Peranakan man who smoked his pipe in the corridor. I fell in love with the fragrant bourbon-laced tobacco smell and the idea of the pipe, a dream I realised thirty years later when I bought my own Peterson pipe in Dublin. Maybe it was not him but his mother whose face in the casket we filed past in the nearby Blessed Sacrament Church. What have remained are the sweet wreaths and the sweet scent of the pipe tobacco, the air bright with romance blossoming and my family still whole, together.

I remember a car ride, in Uncle Andrew’s Ford, breezing on the Pasir Panjang Road. It could be Cuba, with the coconut palms and the smell of the sea. We were visiting my grandmother’s sua teng friends in a seaside kampong. We had the beach on our left and coconut trees moving at a smooth clip. There was the bucolic kampong life at the end of the ride: we would play gaseng (Malay top) and perhaps be taken out to sea. But now we are ‘eating air’ (Chinese idiom for ‘relishing the drive’). The radio was on and inevitably it was ‘Guantanamera’. I did not know who Castro or Che Guevera was, but the road unreeling became one with the song, carrying us forward, the unknown country faraway blending with the Atlantis that one has loved and lost, the words like a chant of faith, an inexpli-cable happiness that life is worth living despite the sorrows: ‘Guantanamera/ Guajira Guantanamera/ Guantanamera/ Guajira Guantanamera.’