ALEXANDER GUTIERREZ/ EL PILON
The January sun is scorching in San Diego. Embers of December breezes are still felt in the streets. Some residents of the town spend hours sitting on the terrace of their homes, sheltered by mango and fig trees. Others do anything. Sweep the front, buy groceries at the store or repair abroad. A resident of the Arabia neighborhood drinks a bottle of beer while he listens to songs by Diomedes Díaz. He has a reputation as a heavy drinker, as can be seen.
Through the sound equipment, a dozen songs by Diomedes are followed, including La Juntera. Fabio López –the accordion player at all the festivals–, also a resident of the Arabia neighborhood, has gone out on a stagecoach, but he does not take long to arrive.
Oh, the sheets of La Junta/ Witness to my suffering/ Oh, the sheets of La Junta/ Witness to my suffering/ They can tell you/ How much I like you/ They can tell you/ How much I like you.
-Good morning how are you? Fabio López greets from the terrace of his hovel. I had thought that we would do this interview here –he says to the visitor, already inside his small home, which serves as a bedroom and a reception room at the same time, but listen to that noise from the neighbor!
Isn’t there a patio? – Inquires the visitor.
“Yes, but not here,” he says, pointing to the adjoining house that he owns and rents. Let’s go to the other house,” she replies. I think there is less interference there.
Nellys Doria, with whom Fabio had his two daughters, Liliana and Fabiola López, lives in the block immediately before – or after, depending on where it is located. There is the grocery store that together they promoted and today is managed by Liliana. From the shadow provided by the roof of the store, Nellys sees Fabio and the visitor coming.
–What are they going to do? Nellys asks with a hint of curiosity.
–An interview –answers the visitor.
–You know something? Nellys continues. Fabio has dedicated almost his entire life to vallenato folklore and has yet to receive any recognition.
Fabio, a native of San Diego, has a calm look, high cheekbones and browbones, and salt-and-pepper hair. He walks calmly and patiently, virtues with which he learned to play the accordion when he was a boy of only 16 years old, without an instructor and defying the discouraging forecasts of several compatriots. Nellys, a native of Montería, has red hair and pigmented skin due to her age. She has an easy word, restrained treatment and determined gestures. There are bruises on her face from a recent fall.
Once inside Nellys’ house, Fabio and the visitor continue to a small patio where there are Trinidadian flowers, croutons, and a poto that has begun to climb the stem of the mango tree. Nellys and Fabio tell their life story in San Diego in two voices.
“More than 30 years ago we were able to obtain these lots and we began to build. Before that, we roamed almost half the town renting houses. We live in a mud room, in which we were cramped at night. They were houses in which there were three and four families. Later, we built two houses, one where Nellys lives and the other where I live. She has been working and taking her house forward ”.
– What commercial activity did you initially have in the town? –Asks the visitor.
–My beginning –says Nellys– was working in a family home.
–And mine, in music, says Fabio.
Nellys, 68, came to San Diego at the age of 18, at the height of the Cesar cotton boom. She was looking for new horizons. When she met Fabio, at the beginning of the 1980s, he was already beginning to be a renowned accordion player, along with Leandro Díaz. They would live under the same roof for almost 30 years.
By then, Nellys had had her first two children. They helped each other in building the house and the store. She also managed to work as a community mother for 15 years, a job that she left after the appearance of a skin disease for which she still receives medical treatment. “The story is long, but here we are,” says Nellys. Today, they do not share a sentimental bond, but they maintain a friendship. Inclusively, Nellys attends to Fabio with the food.
–Whatever he wants to eat, he is given –says Nellys.
“I’m still from this house,” Fabio assures with a laugh.
Nellys goes out to attend to her chores. The visitor is left alone with Fabio, who narrates one of his most memorable encounters with the accordion. Nellys’ eldest son notices, partially and in silence, the interlocutors’ dialogue. He is at the back of the patio, washing clothes.
“Once a gentleman came by, as commanded by God, selling a little accordion with two keyboards that he brought in a cotton sack. He was messed up. I remember that it was fixed by a man named Carlos Noriega ‘Carlitos’, from La Paz. I’ve learned by myself. After playing it for a long time, I picked up the melody from ‘Lucero espiritual’ and from ‘La primavera’, by Leandro Díaz. -There is a man who sells a cheap accordion. We are going to buy it and send it to be fixed and there I am learning little by little, I told my dad at that time.
From hearsay, Fabio always knew that his father, Abraham Antonio ‘El chijo’ López, played the snare drum in the local wind band of the time and his grandfather played the accordion. His musical heritage also lavished gifts on several of his accordionist cousins and uncles. However, the poverty in which Fabio grew up and that his father tried to alleviate with the meager profits from cabinetmaking – his permanent trade – of him appeared as the recurring threat of fate that he envisioned for himself. Perhaps talent is nothing more than persistence in the midst of difficulty.
Also at that time when hardships worsened, Fabio began to help his mother, Luisa Murgas, in grinding corn to make arepas that he later sold himself in the region with a proclamation that became popular. Arepa for 50 pesos! Later, he dedicated himself to packing shoes in La Paz. He bagged the shoes of the Oñate, the Morón and the López; “People are tense, from society,” according to what he refers to.
–López, go under the beds and take all those shoes, pack them –they ordered.
He received food from his clients, a variety of presents and even bonuses in the last month of the year. It was in La Paz, while he was doing his job as an embolador, where he succumbed to the spell of the music of the López brothers. The notes of Navín, Miguel and Álvaro fed his dream of one day having that bewitched instrument that could wander through the most sensitive tonalities of the soul.
Suddenly, a flashback came over him. It is another event in a chained series that inexorably shaped her destiny.
“The idea of being a musician arose with friends in the neighborhood, the compañeros. We formed the pachangas. The one with a bucket. Another with a scratcher and fork and I assembled the accordion with cardboard, made the shape of the bellows. we partyed We made the rum in a bottle with water that we filled with water and lemon”.
When asked about the time it took him to learn to play the accordion, Fabio assures: “It took me a long time because I didn’t have a teacher. But from three years onwards, I began to hum the first songs and played with some friends from La Paz”.
Once the first accordion he had in his life was fixed, a period of adversity and disapproval began. A neighbor named Nicolás Fuentes told his father, old Abraham, that he was disappointed, that Fabio might not learn, that he was the same ‘firi firi’ all the time. He replied that he was going to leave him anyway, to see how far he would go. Another, named Hugo Araújo, once came to his house to tell his father to sell the accordion because Fabio was not going to learn.
But not all were snubs. A son of Hugo Aráujo, who was going and coming back from Venezuela, saw him with the two-keyboard accordion and promised him an accordion. “The man arrived and he gave me the money. I bought it brand new, in Maicao, with three keyboards. That was more than 40 years ago”, says Fabio.
“When I tell those stories, I even want to cry,” he declares, nostalgic. I’ve learned by myself. I haven’t been famous, but I don’t complain about life as a musician.
Currently, at the age of 64, Fabio López is a plant accordion player in different Vallenato music festivals that take place in the municipalities and corregimientos of Cesar, including the Vallenata Legend Festival, in Valledupar. “I accompany the one who does not have a companion, in the unpublished song. In the piqueria, if it’s me alone. If there are 50 versers, I have to touch 50 versers, ”he says. He expects a lifetime pension for his contribution to folklore and the training process of accordion players such as Lucas Dangond, Alexander Calderón and Raúl López.
–My goal is that the older I get, the more experience I get. I dedicate myself solely to this. People tell me that the older I play, the more I play. But that is the commitment, the effort that I make, the discipline that must be exercised with art, he concludes.