The cat made me do it…

I was sitting and thinking, a bit like Poe, perhaps, because it was a dreary evening and I was nearly napping, although the sound that I heard was not exactly a rapping. Yes, I was feeling weak and weary, but I was not mad, just nearly napping. It was late after all. My thoughts wandered, and I even caught the faintest echo of a word that could have been Nevermore.

I shook my head and looked around, but just as expected, there was no raven. Instead, I was able to make out in the dim candlelight the form of a woman and my eyes decided to follow her, because I could never resist Rosalía. Soon I had forgotten about my comfortable chair and the waning fire on the hearth; my focus was exclusively on the scene before me - a scene as real as any other and one that I’d like to tell you about. It’s only a theory, but it’s as good as any other, so here it is, as best as I can describe it:

Rosalía heard a soft scratching at the door of her small house (probably in Padrón, but perhaps in Santiago), so she went to inspect the source of the sound. Her response to what she discovered was:

“Look what the cat dragged in!”

What the cat was pulling along, looking rather proud of herself, was a drone. That is a reed the musician blows through when playing a bagpipe. (Note: There are bagpipes in areas other than Ireland and Scotland, and they are the national instrument of Galicia. There was no mystery about what the object was, just how the cat had found it and decided to bring it inside to its bed by the fire.

The drone had apparently been torn from the belly of a gaita. Gaita, thought by some to be a Gothic - Visigothic? - word meaning ‘goat’. It’s a logical theory, because the instrument was originally crafted from the belly of that animal. Rosalía may or may not have been thinking about the history, but rather

“Where did the cat ever find it?”

Bagpipes, Rosalía knew, were too valuable to leave lying around where an animal could get them and tear them up. She was puzzled, but also a bit uneasy, thinking about the owner, who must be missing the one that was missing a drone.

At the same time, I think a lot of people don’t understand what the instrument really means to those who hear it, play it, dance to its music. They just see the gaiteiros moving along cobblestone streets and start to move their bodies to the rhythm. They think it’s happy, celebratory tunes that are being played, but they’re not listening properly.

It’s also very likely that most people don’t know the history of the instrument. They don’t know it’s been around for a very long time. One source says “The “Oxford History of Music” makes mention of the first documented bagpipe being found on a Hittite slab at Eyuk. This sculptured bagpipe has been dated to 1,000 B.C.” The Bible even mentions it in the book of Genesis, plus in the third Chapter of the book of Daniel, in the “symphonia” of Nebuchadnezzar’s band it is thought there was a bagpipe.” But these are things I’ve been able to research. Rosalía had probably never done that.

I see 1863 as the year in which a well-known poem appeared, but believe it was inspired by the cat’s found object, perhaps in a different year. Well, it was not entirely the cat’s doing. There was the poem by Ventura Ruiz de Aguilera, who dedicated a poem to Rosalía’s husband, Manuel Murguía. Oddly enough, she was the one who responded to it. I learned the poem by heart, and think you might like to read a part of it:

Cuando la gaita gallega

el pobre gaitero toca,

no sé lo que me sucede

que el llanto á mis ojos brota.

Ver me figuro á Galicia

bella, pensativa y sola,

como amada sin su amado,

como reina sin corona.

Y aunque alegre danza entone

y dance la turba loca,

la voz del grave instrumento

suéname tan melancólica,

á mi alma revela tantas

desdichas, penas tan hondas,

que no sé deciros

si canta ó si llora.

The Spanish poet senses something mysterious about the bagpipe, hears its melancholy, yet says, and repeats: “I don’t really know if it sings or cries.” Rosalía was not ambiguous in her feelings, and to every “no sé deciros si canta ó si llora,” she made her reaction known. She leaves no doubt as to the reason for her feelings. We should consider one of her verses, written not in Spanish but in Galician:

IV.

Probe Galicia, non debes

Chamarte nunca española.

Qu' España de ti s' olvida

Cando eres ay! tan hermosa.

Cal si na infamia naceras

Torpe, de ti s' avergonza,

Y á nay qu' un fillo despreça

Nay sin coraçon se noma.

Naide por que te levantes

Ch' aIarga á man bondadosa.

Naide os teus prantos enxuga,

Y homilde choras e choras.

Galicia, ti non tés patria,

Ti vives no mundo soya,

Y á prole fecunda tua

S' espalla en errantes hordas,

Mentras trist' e solitaria

Tendida na verde alfombra

O mar esperanzas pides

De Dios á esperanza imploras.

Por eso anqu' en son de festa

Alegre á gaitiña s' oya

Eu podo decirche

Non canta que chora.

It’s late and I’m really nodding off now, so a translation will have to wait, unless you want to look it up yourself. In summary, this section, which I’ve also memorized, contains the famous

Probe Galicia, non debes

Chamarte nunca española.

Qu' España de ti s' olvida

Cando eres ay! tan hermosa.

Poor Galicia, you should never consider yourself Spanish, when Spain has forgotten you despite your beauty. In that forgetting lies the whole story, the story of poverty, of disinterest on the part of the country to which Galicia supposedly belongs. More than disinterest, it’s almost a dislike for the people, their language, their rural existence. Galicia the abandoned land, its people forced year after year to emigrate in search of employment because they have no other solution.

Yes, Rosalía saw intense beauty and wealth which Spain snubbed and snickered at, creating ridiculous characters in its own literature. The disregard, the injustice of it all, hurt almost as much as the ripping apart of families, the long farewells. She did not hesitate, and her reply is firm:

Por eso anqu' en son de festa

Alegre á gaitiña s' oya

Eu podo decirche

Non canta que chora.

“That’s why, even when the gaita plays festive melodies, I can tell you I doesn’t sing; it weeps.” The Spanish poet, writing to her husband - who wasn’t really one to write in Galician, had been doubtful about the bagpipe that expressed the soul of the people, because he only listened from the periphery. Rosalía held the land in her heart and every beat was painful. It was her Galicia that lived in the gaita’s notes, not a mere poetic motif.

All of this pondering (weak and weary) brings me back to the part about the cat whose appearance deeply moves the person it visits. My raven constantly returns quoting a single, dire word: Nevermore. Rosalía’s cat brings her a fragment of a weeping instrument, one that has wept for a nation, albeit not an official country. How she responded has become much more than a broken song. She told Ventura What’s-his-name exactly how she felt while reminding him of a dark history that went beyond a few songs heard by outsiders like him.

I don’t know if the cat’s present really inspired the poem, but in my weariness a lot of things became confused. They fuse and echo, disturb me and concern me. I’m just a reader who happened to come along many decades later, but I feel the anguish of the broken body of the gaita, just as I understand the foreboding in Poe’s raven. There is no clear reason why these two poems and the two animals should accompany me on dreary nights when I am deep in pages I love, but they are always with me. I dream about them, read them, recite them, could not live without them.

Because I could not live without poetry, I guess. Or music. Or cats.