GETTING A CONCERT READY IS NOT THE SAME AS MAKING MUSIC!
Bahía de Caraquéz, Ecuador, 11 November 2008

Kathleen and I have been practising our programme every weekday for weeks now in preparation for the recital tonight. (The museum’s recital hall where the piano – probably the only one in all of Bahía – is located is closed on the weekends.) We know the songs, of course, but getting them ready again for a public concert still requires a lot of polishing and getting the voice and the fingers limbered up.

It isn’t, in fact, really the music that raises the tension before a concert; we can deal with that. It’s all the peripheral and administrative stuff! After our initial offer of a concert was accepted by the Alcalde (mayor) on behalf of the city, for example, it was unclear to us who actually was going to be responsible for the advertising. Our Spanish was either not good enough to clarify this point, or perhaps the people at the Municipio’s ‘Oficina de Cultura’ were not sure themselves. So, we made up a simple poster on MSWord, ran off a hundred photocopies and started sticking them up and handing them out around town ten days ago. As of yesterday, I noticed however, they had all been either torn down or had disappeared for some other reason. Oh, well!


The cruisers are very supportive. We reckon that the 140-seat recital hall will probably be partially filled by thirty cruisers, who will be there perhaps more out of either support or curiosity, or maybe for a change of pace, then for a real love of Lied. Our local Bahía friends will come too. So, maybe at most forty listeners. That’s actually a nice size for Lied (chamber music) anyway. Curiosity might not be the best of all reasons, but, whatever it takes to fill a hall! Back in the 18th century, Dr. Johnson went (out of curiosity) to hear a woman preacher at a Quaker meeting house. He was later asked what it was like. “It was rather like a dog walking on its hind legs,” he responded; “It wasn’t done very well, but one did not expect to see it done at all!”

Getting dressed

It’s the unexpected of course that gets you. First, when I opened the plastic storage box that was by now under a huge pile of sail bags in Vilisar’s forecastle last week in search of my white shirt, black trousers and a pair of leather shoes, I found that somehow the whites had all received a coating of brown that might just have been the engine oil that had been spilled in there two years ago. That just shows you how often we actually dress up!

Fortunately, and unusually for me, I had not left all this to the last minute! I took the black C&A trousers to a local seamstress to be let out a bit (singers generally consider breathing to be a good idea during a recital!). The trousers are, thank God, washable. There is no laundry in town except at Puerto Amistad. But the seamstress said she would wash them by hand and iron them after her sewing was completed. Two dollars total.

I don’t have a suit or blazer on board; that might be too warm for the concert anyway. And, the thought of wearing just black trousers along with a white shirt and a black bow-tie calls up memories of high-school choirs. So, while I was in Manta last week, I also found a Guayavera, which is a dress shirt worn without a necktie in hot Latin countries. It is open at the neck, is worn outside the belt and looks rather like a dentist’s smock. But for $12 I had solved my dress shirt problem. Finding a plain white T-shirt to wear underneath (singers tend to perspire at lot at their work) proved more difficult, but I eventually found one in Bahía for $3 (expensive by local standards).

Although I have dress leather shoes on board that had curiously enough not become covered in mildew, how was I going to get them polished up? Then I remember that there is a shoe-shine stand over near the Municipio, and of course there are lots of little seven-year-old urchins on the streets eager to spit-polish leather shoes. Although leather shoes give you a certain standing in Latin America (nice sandals are acceptable, flip-flops are déclassé and bare feet are common amongst the poor and confirms that you really are at the bottom of the social heap). Cruisers don’t usually wear leather shoes; too impractical around the salt water and in the salty air. So, I had not taken real note of the shoe-shine guy till now.

The first time I take my shoes ashore in a plastic shopping bag, there is a cute little kid hanging around the restaurant with his little wooden box. Shoe-shiners and shoe-shine boys are an open testimonial that poverty is rampant and that fifty percent of the population of Latin America is under the age of 18. Even so, only the poorest of boys (no girls) – and there are plenty of them- are reduced to shoe-shining; in the major cities of Latin America shoeshine boys, often homeless, run around in swarms, surviving hand to mouth in the streets, sometimes killing themselves with cheap drugs and slipping into petty –and, if they live long enough, later perhaps – into violent crime. You can view it as a Dickens novel but leave out the upbeat moral lessons. It’s genuine poverty with not much chance of ever rising above it.


There are shoeshine boys of this kind even in little, backwater Bahía, though perhaps the scene here is not as desperate and the boys don’t run in such large packs. But, you do sometimes see them playing cards in a side alley or smoking, BS-ing and quarrelling with each other at the curbside. Or, they hang around gringo restaurants - hoping for business, perhaps, but also thinking they might get your leftover food, too. Sometimes, they just want coins so they can play video games.

Although there is a great deal of poverty here in provincial and rural Bahía, it does not seem as grinding as it does in the giant cities. Like most gringos, I have trouble dealing with obvious poverty and with begging. In the case of the kids, I don’t usually want to give cash to them when there are enough old people begging. At first I tried to ignore all beggars. I guess my sense of moral outrage at ‘slackers’ was at work. Get out and find a job! I thought to myself. But there is no real work for anybody here, and, if you are old, sick, handicapped or have no family to support you, you are driven onto the streets to beg. There is one very ancient, blind old man who rides the car ferry back and forth all day with holding out a plastic cup for coins, for example. And, I have often seen an elderly blind lady being led around the streets by a young child to collect alms. In Canada and the U.S.A., where relative poverty certainly exists, we keep it physically separate so we don’t have to see it. But here it is right next to you. There are no middle-class suburbs to escape to. Don’t worry! In countries where begging is so common, it is all too easy to learn to ignore it altogether; the beggars somehow just become invisible. Here in Bahía at least, I usually give something to the old people, though it is usually only loose change. Sometimes other gringos will tell you that ‘these people’ will just waste it on drink. But, I have decided that what the recipients do with the little money they get from me is their moral quandary; what I do about obvious poverty and poor beggars is mine. I know it does nothing to solve the real problems, but an old and blind lady might get something to eat today.


The restaurants nearly always serve you far more rice and plantains than you can eat, which is embarrassing if some street-kid’s eyes are watching you from a few yards away, i.e., far enough not to be totally intrusive and so you can safely ignore him, but close enough that you can see him if you want. If they can catch your eye, they will shaft their gaze obviously back and forth between your plate and your own eyes. But, on the other hand, I don’t like to give anyone just my scraps. So, if I see them before I start eating, I might tell the waiter to put half of my meal on a separate plate for the kid, or pack in the ubiquitous plastic take-away containers. If I see them after lunch, and I am feeling flush, I buy the kid a whole meal. The restaurant operators always seem a little amazed, and sometimes they won’t actually let the kids sit at the tables reserved for paying guests, but, looking back as you leave, those kids are diving into the food like they haven’t eaten in a week (maybe they haven’t), and my conscience is partially salved for a while.

Anyway, here is this kid with the most charming smile. How do Latin American girls and boys get so beautiful? I wave him over and hand him the shoes. He sits down on the pavement next to the table nearly at my feet and gets right to work, looking up occasionally and flashing a smile. I pay him the going rate of 50¢ and he beams another smile. We are just ready to leave by then and I tell Junior, the waiter at El Maná (Manna, as in ‘from heaven’), to fix a plate for the shoeshine boy, which I pay for as we are leaving with my like-new leather shoes. Looking back the kid is heads-down over the plate and shovelling it in.

Getting the word around

As I mentioned, we have been expecting maybe our cruising colleagues and perhaps another 5-10 of our local acquaintances and friends to come to the recital. Wacho, our mechanic friend will definitely be there along with his ‘family’, i.e., his ex-wife Consuelo and a few of his kids. Wacho thinks the idea of me singing is rather hilarious and says he and his friends have been saving up all their tomatoes and eggs for the occasion. This joke might get a little old for a singer. But, for Wacho, it has been a knee-slapper for days. At least the cleaners and technicians at the Museo, where the concert is being held, are very supportive. They have been dropping in nearly every day to listen to tus rehearse.


Then last night, a lady shows up a Puerto Amistad to talk to Kathleen while I was somewhere else. As it turns out it was Señora Mendoza de Guijeje, the head of the Oficina de Cultura; she was the person I met when I offered the concert originally. She tells Kathleen that the concert is being advertised regularly on the local radio station and the Municipio is expecting a very large crowd. (Hot dang! A good thing I polished my shoes!) But would we please write a blurb that can be read in Spanish by way of introduction tonight? Man, this is starting to develop into work. That’s what I mean about all the peripheral stuff to get a concert off the ground.

I have already written up programme notes in English. Kim Corson, a cruiser aboard his S/V Altair out of Phoenix, Arizona (one of the great seaports in the U.S.A.!), agreed to translate them. A local friend and native Spanish speaker, Margarita Moreno, is reviewing his work and making corrections. But now, more stuff to be written and translated! I sit down at a table in Puerto Amistad and get to work. Francis, an English teacher from Colegio Interamericano who also works part-time in Puerto Amistad’s office, is translating it and getting it over to the Municipio.

Anyway, despite all this, I think we’re ready! Tomorrow we shall take it really easy, no boat work, avoid conversation as much as possible to save the voice, rehearse very briefly at the recital hall before lunch, enjoy a leisurely lunch, head back to the boat for an afternoon siesta, get over to the recital hall around 1845 to make sure everything has been set up as agreed, and then hide out in the artists’ dressing room (yes, they actually have one; it is in fact much nicer than most people’s houses in Bahía!) until the various introductions are finished and the lights go down.