Years earlier, when I was working at La Scala, I had a moment of bravado. Or desperation. Or maybe both. One evening I drove to Peter Asher’s office on Doheny Drive, just off Santa Monica Boulevard. The plan, if it could be called that, was to slip a cassette through the mail slot and leave quickly.

Asher was Ronstadt’s manager. He was also a regular at La Scala. He and I were on Good evening and Enjoy your dinner terms. Nothing more.

Long before that, he’d been half of Peter and Gordon, British Invasion chart-toppers. Later, he became the first Head of A&R at Apple Records, handpicked by McCartney, who was dating Peter’s sister Jane at the time.

Asher signed James Taylor as his first act: brilliant, but in no condition to tour. The album tanked.

So, this wasn’t just any cassette drop. It was audacity in motion. Me, trying to slip a song to someone who’d once been tasked with finding the Next Big Thing—for the Beatles’ label, no less. Someone who was there when Beatlemania detonated and the British Invasion crossed the Atlantic. And like most people who know where the bodies are buried, he was circumspect. All business. MI5 and all that.

As opposed to Rod Steiger, another La Scala regular, one who enjoyed a mini debate with his meal. Every dinner was an opera in rehearsal. His Italian a practiced flourish, his Parmesan summoned and held with the solemnity of a priest about to grant absolution.

Asher had never been anything more than cordial, if a bit distant. Mattered not. This was no social call.

I walked in, hoping to find the place empty, and there he was. Mid-meeting. He looked up, recognised me. I offered a quick apology for the intrusion.

‘Just wanted to drop this off,’ I said.

‘It’s a song I wrote for Ms Ronstadt.’

My aim was to be brief, be brilliant, and be gone, in the words of my friend Bob. (Bookman, not Dylan.)

He nodded and pointed. ‘Leave it on that desk.’

I did. Thanked him and left.

I didn’t share that entire vignette with Jimmy. Just that I’d once tried to get the song to Linda through Peter Asher.

He smiled. ‘Well, tell you what,’ he said, handing me his card, ‘send me that song and I’ll see if I can get it to her.’

The card simply listed his name, address, and phone number. A little logo, a planet or something in blue and pink hues, sat in the centre. At the time, Jimmy apparently had offices in New York. I mailed it there. Silence came back, the most familiar of answers.

And I never brought it up again, not even in the handful of times I saw him afterward at 72. We simply visited. Spoke of other things. Shared some wine. He loved Dunn Vineyards’ Howell Mountain Cabernet. I remember Tony and I went to see him perform at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood one night.

He was brilliant, of course.

It was fine. Jimmy Webb didn’t owe me anything. He offered, sincerely, and for whatever reason, logistics, timing, Linda herself, it didn’t lead anywhere. That’s just how it goes.

I still have that card. Folded into a notebook of business cards somewhere, probably yellowing by now. But there.

⁂

There had been another brush with that song, back during my La Scala days, this one involving Deborah Lutz. She had a way of opening doors without seeming to try. One day, Deb called and asked if I could drive her somewhere. She didn’t say where. I said yes.

Deborah was from Ohio. An artist. A singer. One of four sisters, all built to stop traffic. Brains and beauty to spare. Her father had flown thirty missions over Europe. There was a famous photograph of a B-17 belly-landing in England. That was her father’s plane.

She was staying with her cousin Bonnie in Beverly Hills—real name Adelle, who would later marry David Byrne. Bonnie’s sister Tina had already married Michael Chow. Both had modelled in Japan, moved in rarefied circles. That’s how Deborah knew the Rodeo Drive restaurant world.

We drove north up Doheny. The road climbs steeply. At some point I asked where we were going.

‘Jerry Moss’ house,’ she said, casually.

Jerry Moss. The ‘M’ in A&M Records. The mighty label he co-founded with Herb Alpert, of Tijuana Brass. I nodded like it was nothing. Let the name settle into the silence between us.

His house was at the very top, on the left, just before the road curled into a cul-de-sac. Elegant, not ostentatious. A Rolls-Royce Corniche sat in the driveway like punctuation at the end of a very expensive sentence.

Deborah walked up and rang the doorbell while I waited in the car. Mr Moss gave a perfunctory glance toward me and my ’57 Belvedere, salmon pink, white roof, fins sharp as opinions.

On the way down, I asked how she happened to be delivering something to Jerry Moss. She shrugged. ‘Oh, Michael asked me. I think he’s an investor in Mr Chow. Comes in for lunch a few times a week.’

Right, I thought, as I memorised the address.

The following week, I returned to the top of Doheny Drive. Back to Jerry Moss’ house. No car in the driveway. I took that as a sign and retreated.

The week after, a vehicle out front. Not the Rolls. A black Cadillac limousine, boxy and still. I didn’t like it. From a Corniche to that. The signal felt off.

But the week after that, there it was. The Corniche, back in its spot.

This was it.

A rush of adrenaline surged as I stepped out of the car. Oh fuck, oh fuck. I can’t believe I’m doing this. I walked up to the door, large, heavy, dark wood, vaguely intimidating, and rang the bell. Through the intercom came a voice:

‘Who is it?’

I launched into a rapid-fire, get-the-words-out-quick would-be elevator pitch:

Mr Moss? I’m Raf Nazario! 
I’mafriendofDeborahLutzwhowasherejusttheotherday 
I’msosorryfortheintrusionIjustcametodropoffacassette—
it’s a song I wrote—oneIthinkyoumightreallylike—
I’msosorry—Idon’tusuallydothiskindofthingbutthissong—
Ibelieveinitifyoufindamomenttolisten …
Through the intercom: ‘Wait, stop—WHO?’
‘Hi-I’mRaf Narario-Raf Nazario-a friend of Deborah Lutz-Deborah LUTZ! Who was here just … ’
The door cracked open. A face appeared. I froze.
‘Okay … Say that again. But slow down.’
So I did. This time with a bit more composure, if not actual confidence.
He opened the door fully. He was very tall, maybe 190 cm or more. He studied me.
‘So, tell me again. You are … ?’

I ran through the script again. Who I was. Why I was there. How good the song was. How sorry I was. I made sure to bring up Deborah’s name again.

I saw him glance at my car, an automotive anachronism near his Corniche. A platypus next to a dolphin. But also, unforgettable. A creamy salmon.

Those fins …

Then he gazed at me, as if taking measure of the person now standing in front of him.

To my absolute shock, he invited me in.

We walked in and turned left into the living room, oversized, thick leather chairs arranged as if mid-conference. I tried not to look around. Not to gawk. Kept my eyes straight ahead. He asked for the cassette and offered me a seat.

He played the track. We listened.

When it ended, there was a beat of silence, then he said:

‘That’s a hell of a song … Mind if I play it again?’

He rewound the tape. Played it again. At the end, he paused it.

Looked at me.

‘Anything else on here?’

I nodded yes. ‘Two more.’ We listened to those as well.

When the other songs ended, he said,

‘Listen, I’m leaving for China tomorrow … ’

This was 1979. No one went to China in those days. Except for Henry Kissinger.

And that was iffy.

‘So I won’t be in the office this week. But here’s the name of the guy I want you to call. David Anderle. He’s head of A&R … I’ll reach out to him later today and … ’

I left that house giddy with excitement. Hopeful. Grateful.

It was nearing dusk and the city below glowed like a bejewelled carpet. I wanted to find Deborah and hug her. I don’t think I ever told her. She’s probably finding out as she reads this.

If she reads this.

⁂

And so began a labyrinthine journey through the inner sanctum of A&M’s A&R department and their publishing division, Almo/Irving Music.

In the end, the journey dissolved into a kind of soft inconclusion. The cassette drifted from desk to desk. No one knew quite what to do with it, or with me. The music industry, like the film world, lived by the quiet doctrine of self‑preservation: the safest gesture was always the one that risked nothing. Why stick your neck out for someone with an outsider’s name who’s not exactly a matinee idol?

The machinery thrived on caution even as it spoke in the rhetoric of daring. The Mo Ostins and Clive Davises of the world were as rare as snow leopards.

Besides, I ‘didn’t sound like anyone,’ they said.

It wasn’t meant as criticism, maybe even the opposite. But the way they delivered it made clear it was a disqualification. The industry needed reference points, comparisons, a recognisable shape. Without that, there was no shelf, no slot. And they were right. I didn’t sound like anyone … That was either the flaw or the essence, depending on the angle of the light.

I found myself thinking, almost to the walls themselves: the Beatles didn’t sound like anyone either.

⁂

Which brings me, I suppose, to the matter of audacity, and its second cousins: presumption, chutzpah, and the sometimes delusional ‘maybe-it’ll-work.’

Dropping in on Peter Asher and Jerry Moss with a cassette in hand was, by most measures, a terrible idea. Like saying you want to open a restaurant on the North Pole, another one of those bright, terrible ideas. Float something mildly outlandish and your nearest and dearest will say, You’re mad. Don’t do it.

But if it works, IF your lunacy actually takes root or flies, they’ll pivot on a dime: Brilliant. Always knew it.

Fail, and you’re simply the fool who tried that.

Same transaction in music and film. The gatekeepers are all dressed in Greek choir robes. Their gates stay mostly shut.

But sometimes, just sometimes, audacity lands and judgment takes a walk.

Like the guy at the Pat Metheny concert in Argentina. He crashed the stage mid-show, dodged security, and as two guards began to drag him off, feet skidding across the floor, he kept the cassette he intended to give raised overhead. The last act of a drowning, desperate man. Metheny walked over and took it from his hand before they carted him off. He listened. Hired him. Toured the world with him. The kid was that good.

Ironically, I first heard that story from Metheny himself, as he introduced the singer at a concert I attended with Tony and Helen at The Wiltern, the Art Deco landmark restored by Tony Heinsbergen, a 72 Market Street and Olinka regular, whose father had painted its original murals decades earlier.

Tony Heinsbergen was a custodian of elegance. He believed in beauty as a lived standard. He dressed like Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, and ‘toured’ every Sunday in one of his immaculate vintage automobiles from the 20’s or 30’s.

Once, upon hearing I was in New York City, he arranged a night at the Met for me: La Bohème, his reserved seats. The now iconic Zeffirelli production he’d seen and I had only read about. Opera was a frequent topic between us. I am, almost always, helpless against opera, especially one as beautifully staged as this. It transported me to the Montmartre of the 1840s. The tears began early and continued in fits and starts, leaving me to dry my eyes and wipe my cheeks more or less constantly.

The lady who accompanied me, a friend of Tony Bill’s, at one point leaned in and whispered, ‘Are you alright?’

⁂

Back to Metheny’s anecdote: the larger calculus remains unchanged. Because for every story like that, there are hundreds more. Men—and yes, they are mostly men—who mistake noise for voice, ego for gift, ambition for a sense of mission. And they just keep moving forward.

The ones with real talent? The quiet ones? They wait. Until they don’t.

Some of us did. Until the few times we didn’t.

⁂

And perhaps that was the shape of things, 
the shape of nearness.

My distance was not failure.
It was a place unto itself,
a shore just opposite the green light,
where I stood,
listening for an echo.

Not exactly arrived, 
just present.

And in that half-lit memory,
what remains is not regret,
but a stillness,
a melancholia resembling reverence.

*Pictured: Tony Heinsbergen, Tony Bill, Julie Stone, Dudley Moore.

Photo courtesy of Julie Stone

© 2025, Raphael Antonio Nazario, writing as Raphaël de Saav. All Rights Reserved.

Thank You for reading. I do not offer paid subscriptions via this platform.

Rafael’s music can be found online at YouTube, Soundcloud, on Apple Music: here, here and here; with limited selections on Spotify and Bandcamp.

The last time I’d seen Dudley was in Portland. 1995. He phoned one morning, out of the blue, to say he was in town, performing with the Oregon Symphony. Rhapsody in Blue.

No, really. The Rhapsody.

We met at the Heathman Hotel that afternoon, a short walk from the concert hall. Martinis at the bar. Conversation like soft cloth, familiar, gently folded. At this point, we were old friends, and we shared as much in conversation as we did in silence. The way only old friends can.

Behind us, women began to appear, at irregular intervals, one by one, as if summoned by music only they could hear. They drifted toward Dudley in a reverential procession, each carrying the same expression: wonder, awe.

They offered shy compliments, asked for autographs, then departed again, like dancers vanishing on cue. He received them all with his usual elegance, unhurried, warm. Flattered, even.

Gracious to a fault.

As if fame had grown weightless with time, no longer a thing to be carried.

Dudley shared that he was thinking of getting married again, but wasn’t sure. I suggested that if he wasn’t sure, it seemed most unwise to get married. He stared at his glass. A few months later, I learned he did in fact get married. It was disastrous.

⁂

Some twenty years later: Sydney. After the partnership that came apart like wet cardboard, after I’d midwifed Mad Mex (another Mexican food chain) into existence, after the global financial collapse of 2008, after the return to music; years teaching piano and harmony to the rhythmically hopeful, after the consulting gigs for restaurant groups who all believed they were reinventing the tortilla … Yes, much happened. Too much. And none of it, as it turns out, is the point.

One afternoon I was alone in a small conference room in Sydney, high above the CBD; glass glare, the city doing its best impression of a heat‑struck motherboard, when an email arrived:

Hello,

This is a little awkward, but did you ever know a woman named Lynn or spend any time in Georgia or Tennessee, say around 1976? I’m not quite sure what to make of the Ancestry results I received this morning, but I thought I’d follow up and see if you might have any information.

Thank you for your time.

Regards,

Heather

⁂

I remembered the name, of course. Lynn. The face, the soft Southern lilt. She had been the last brief romance of my Locomotion days in Knoxville, just before we left for Indiana and Norman and I slowly unravelled from the other two. Back when my future was an unpainted sky.

I clicked ‘reply’. It took me to her Ancestry page. There, her face looked back at me, features that unmistakably mirrored my mother’s.

Uncannily so.

At the top of the page: Predicted relationship: Parent/Child.

Confidence factor: 100%.

I sat back, thoughts racing.

The table for eight in the centre of the small room had suddenly become an ocean, the surface rising in swells. And I, a tiny raft in the middle of this immensity, memory folding over itself like a tide returning: urgent. Insistent.

I stared at her photo, studied her eyes, her expression. Read the page a few times. There was plenty more that also resonated: a passion for music, theatre, languages … She worked as a graphic designer. Funny that.

Ink and paper ran in the family bloodlines. My father and grandfather were in the newspaper business. My grandmother was a linotype operator at the magazine my grandfather cofounded, Puerto Rico Ilustrado. It’s how they met. Four of my uncles were also printers.

Along the way, I too had become my own graphic designer; my cookbook, my CDs. Never studied it. It took hold during the Mastering the Modern Classics collaboration with Thomas. Learned on the fly, as most things were.

And here was Heather, a trained graphic designer. Inherited traits. The thread running clean through. We had never met. But it didn’t matter. She had been sketched in the margins long before I arrived in Knoxville.

This for me was something akin to The Shock of the New, but in reverse. The shock of the familiar; the known, revealed. Like catching your own reflection in a window you didn’t see was there. And there was that disorienting shift, the ground tilting. The building emptied of everyone but me, high above downtown Sydney.

Still, I felt a bit of hesitation. The uneasy truce between knowing and not. Instinct nodding gently. Intellect raising questions:

Is this what it seems? Are you sure … ?

I was about to cross a threshold and in fact, wasn’t sure what I was getting into. But I wanted to respond. I also wanted more information.

Say she was my daughter, what if there was already a father in her life?

What if my answer would crack open a past she wasn’t ready for?

I wrote back something along the lines of:

Yes, I remember Lynn.
Yes, we shared something, brief, unscripted.
Not love, not quite.
A passing constellation.

⁂

I had always always remembered Lynn kindly. There was nothing to forgive, no resentments. It had all dissolved before it had time to ossify.

Back then, the band moved through places like verses, and the stanzas blurred. Towns rolled by slowly, like ground fog drifting over fields. In those towns, kids leaned against gas pumps like accents, as if posture might impart importance, and therefore, relevance. Hope served on Formica, a jukebox playing something forgettable in the corner. Old men blinked into the sun with forlorn expressions, as if they’d watched the world vanish and not return—twice before noon.

That was before there was such a thing as online, before we all learned how to find ourselves in the past.

⁂

As I responded, I pondered how a father figure might have entered her life,—or if one had been present at all. If …

So I closed with a door left ajar, a space for her to step into. The way one sometimes coaxes notes from a piano.

‘Please tell me more,’ I wrote.

Her reply came some thirty minutes later. Long. Composed with care. She had been raised without a father. She wasn’t even looking for one. She just wanted to know if she might be Native American. Her mother and siblings—all from different fathers: blonde, blue-eyed, fair-skinned …

She was dark-eyed, dark-haired. Mediterranean.

Like my mother. Like my eldest sister. Like my sisters’ daughters. She hadn’t expected to stumble into me, a Latino father, of all things. But Puerto Rican is not a race. It’s a nationality, a description written in salt and sugar cane.

A windward bearing.

She wrote of other things, and by the time I reached the halfway point, I knew without any doubt: She was mine.

I replied: ‘If you’re of me, of mine, then I want you in my life.’

And I sent her a flurry of photos:

‘This was your grandmother. This was your grandfather. These are your sisters and your brother … ’

‘In this photo are uncles and cousins you would’ve never heard about … ’

She needed to know.

ASAP.

I wanted to make up for lost time. Starting now. Immediately.

⁂

Heather had been conceived in Knoxville, born in Georgia, Lynn returning to her own beginnings.

Six weeks later I flew stateside to meet her. In time, we’ve grown very close, as if making up for the years in the only way available—by being present for the ones ahead. She too has become my everything.

And along the way, I’ve come to understand something: the tide hadn’t only taken things away. It had, all that time, been carrying something back.

⁂

And later, there was me, 
standing on the beach, 
gazing eastward. 
 
When I'd met her mother, 
she had often spoken 
of going west.
Out to California.

And now here was Heather, 
arriving with grace.
A constellation discovered.

Heather was living 
in Southern California. 
Near the beach.

The Vast Pacific.

© 2026, Raphael Antonio Nazario, writing as Raphaël de Saav. All Rights Reserved.

Thank You for reading.

Una llora sin que nadie le pregunte por qué. 
La otra espera que alguien lo note.
Una tiene capas y capas y capas,
como mi abuela, que tenía secretos,
 y los secretos tenían sus propios secretos,
escondidos dentro de cajas, 
dentro de cajas,
dentro del armario.

La otra también se esconde entre ellas, 
entre lo que dice y lo que calla, 
entre el te quiero 
y el pero…
Lo que las lagrimas hacen transparente.

Una es blanca y pura 
como primera comunión, 
como la mentira más bonita que me han dicho,
como mi primera comunión.


Pero hay otra que no lo es tanto,
más bien roja, casi violeta,
agridulce, un poco brava,
que pica más,
pero también dura más,
que no se disculpa por hacer llorar,
que se abre como un corazón,
fatigado, quizás, pero todavía vivo.

Y como toda herida que insiste en ser desenvuelta,
tiene capas…
como el amor tiene ciclos: 
se levanta una, y hay otra debajo, 
translúcida, casi herida, 
casi lista para ser tocada,
perfumando el aire de azufre,
esperando la mano que no llega

Yo soy la cebolla roja.
Existí antes que tú.
Existiré cuando ya no quede
ni el perfume de lo que fuimos,
cuando solo quede el eco
de lo que ardió al tocarnos.

Raphael Antonio Nazario, (escribiendo como Raphaël de Saav).

© 2026, All Rights Reserved. Todos los Derechos Reservados.

Foto: darwin Bell, San Francisco, USA (Wikimedia Commons). Con gratitud.

“Can’s Shop.” You couldn’t walk ten metres in Roppongi without encountering one or two, then three more, then another cluster. Small constellations glowing, like minor deities of convenience, the sort of gods who had long abandoned Olympus for the more reliable economics of fluorescence on the sidewalk. Amaterasu‑Ōmikami* in her coin‑operated phase, dispensing light and consolation in aluminium cans.

They sold everything: beer, cigarettes, flowers, whiskey, Pocari Sweat, rice, cassettes, underwear—the whole liturgy of modern sustenance. But beer and coffee ruled the shelves with the serene confidence of monarchs who know the coup has already failed. Café au Lait, Cappuccino, Drip Style, Mocha; each can a small, self-contained dawn, a promise that fatigue could be outwitted by modern chemistry and a pull-tab.

There were also the Genki drinks (元気ドリンク). Genki: the default response to “how are you?”, but also, the Japanese art of appearing lively and cheerfully indestructible, regardless of the evidence.

These potions were formulated to—at least, in theory—restore energy, vitality, and with luck, cognitive functions for the beleaguered and probably hung-over salaryman who never made it home last night. Sold in small brown bottles branded with pharmaceutical authority, of course.

Decades before Red Bull colonised the West.

⁂

Walking to work from the hotel was never not an adventure. The sidewalks were a kind of rolling improvisation of foot traffic, children, grandmothers of alarming velocity, young men in three-piece suits who had apparently decided that the path was theirs, and cyclists who regarded the concept of pedestrian safety as a negotiable rumour. They parked there too, naturally. On the sidewalk. Where else?

The main avenue between the hotel and Bar’s BAR—twelve brisk minutes—contained, by my count, roughly two hundred restaurants. Not spread along the street, but stacked vertically like culinary strata: Trattoria Moderna, 3F…

Café Spritz, 5F.

Japanese, Italian, Chinese, Indian, American, French, Indonesian, Czech.

Czech…

You’d ride the elevator to dinner. Or to Karaoke.

At least a half dozen pastry shops, split between the neo-Baroque (gleaming with the faint suggestion that cake was a sacrament) and the Boulangerie style, which operated on a more egalitarian philosophy: eat quickly, eat standing.

Cocktail and hostess bars abounded, invariably prefixed with the word ‘Club’; Club Fearless, Club Happy Lady, et al. As though the naming committee had decided that the noun alone was insufficient, that what these establishments really needed was the concept of membership, of belonging (so very Japanese), of having somewhere to be.

There were the Mom & pop convenience shops with Kleenex and toilet paper stacked four feet high on the sidewalk, which in any other city would constitute a cry for help, but here read simply as ad hoc commerce, a throwback to the late 40s and early 50s, when space was scarce and every surface doubled as storefront. Possibly a case of post‑war pragmatism elevated to tradition.

And somewhere in between: a supermarket of almost theatrical ambition, staffed by girls in bright uniforms who, the moment you entered, would bellow “Irashae-Mase!” (welcome!) with the focused enthusiasm of people who had been trained to mean it, and quite possibly did. They stocked things like Italian mascarpone alongside English shortbread, foie gras across the aisle from instant ramen, and seven categories of whole milk.

In Japan, milk wasn’t just milk; it was an entire cosmology in cartons and bottles. Back home you grabbed whatever was coldest. Here, you practically needed a sommelier. Every bottle announced its lineage with the pride of a minor aristocrat; Holstein, Jersey, this pasture, that hillside…butterfat percentages climbing like interest rates: 2%, 2.5%, 3.8%, 4.6%, 5.2%... and so on, each one promising a subtly different experience of whiteness. You half‑expected a waiter to appear and suggest, “This one pairs beautifully with regret.”

It was dairy as high ceremony, dairy with terroir, dairy that had read Proust. And the astonishing thing was how normal it all seemed once I’d been there a few weeks.

In Tokyo, even the simplest things—milk, umbrellas, traffic cones—had a way of behaving like they were auditioning for a more refined universe. And then there were the telephone booths with their green phones. On weekends, the booths acquired a second function. They became, let us say, browsing centres, plastered with post-it style mini booklets: photographs of young women in a series of suggestive poses and considered outfits; the Office Lady, the Geisha, the Schoolgirl, the Airline Hostess.

All of them available for home visits. Or hotel visits. Or an assigned location. A hundred and twenty-five dollars an hour. The market, it seemed, had identified a need and was attending to it with characteristic Japanese efficiency.

What was touching, if touching is the word (and I suspect it isn’t quite) was the ecosystem that had arranged itself around this need. A dozen flower shops on the same stretch, several open past midnight on weekends. Vending machines dispensing flowers, and also, with no apparent sense of irony: underwear, cologne, toothbrushes. The overnight kit, available at street level, no questions asked. Someone, somewhere, had thought this through.

And then the bookshop. Large, well-stocked, with an international magazine selection (the New Yorker, nine dollars, which in those days felt like an existential statement about the cost of American cultural anxiety abroad), and a curated American book section that would not have embarrassed a mid-sized city. You could stand and read for as long as you liked. No bag-check. No pressure. Open until four in the morning every night, because Tokyo had apparently decided that literature, like desire, observes no particular curfew.

Next door to the bookstore sat a Nissan showroom with a grand piano in it, because of course it did. Tokyo in 1990 was the kind of place where a Yamaha grand could have wandered into a car dealership, gotten comfortable, and stayed.

A few of the cars were retro-futurist models you’d never see in the States, unless Detroit suddenly developed a sense of adventure. Or a sense of longing.

The showroom bled into an art-supply store, which bled into a men’s clothing store, which, through some architectural mitosis, became a building called WAVE, five stories of vinyl, books, and cultural overkill. Each floor had its own taxonomy. The Classical floor featured a small room devoted entirely to Mozart: recordings by the hundreds, but also, pins, mugs, brooches, toy pianos, figurines—everything but the Kugeln. Because why not? When the Japanese commit, they commit like a nation trying to impress God, and possibly succeeding.

Sometimes this wholeheartedness tipped into the genuinely absurd. A recently bankrupt real-estate company had spent $1.2 million on a Michael Jackson mural for the outside of their office building. Those were still the boom years in Japan. A mural. Of Michael Jackson. For 1.2 million. Because why not?

But back to WAVE. The Jazz floor stocked vintage American recordings, sides long extinct in the U.S., displayed there in climate-controlled, catalogued, meticulously annotated splendour. In the basement: two small cinemas screened French films in which women disrobed with the punctuality and regularity of a very reliable train service.

Up the street, at the main Roppongi intersection, more than twenty people would cluster nightly in front of Almond Coffee & Pastry, waiting for their rendezvous. This was pre–cell phone ubiquity, when “let’s meet at Almond Cohee” constituted part of the city’s unofficial GPS coordinates.

Threading through the crowd, I’d inevitably pass a few young men dressed in what can only be described as Psycho Killer–Bimbos from Outer Space attire—Sgt. Pepper jackets, heavy make-up, shoulder pads like ballistic shields, hair spiked and dyed in colours that suggested a philosophical argument with the visible spectrum. A kind of sartorial DayGlo.

These young men occupied the same spots every night, working the street for their clubs, recruiting customers, thrusting free drink cards at passing women. The women sidestepped them with the practiced reflexes of someone avoiding a lit match.

Just around the bend was Bar’s BAR, where I played and sang five nights a week, mostly old standards. A stone’s throw away, Mister Donut dispensed coffee ($2) and donuts ($1), small, perfect certainties in a city otherwise devoted to spectacle. A smaller stone could’ve reached the building that improbably housed both Tony Roma’s and the Hard Rock Café, with Spago just behind, as though fragments of America had drifted across the Pacific and taken root. And if frugality beckoned, three McDonald’s stood within a single block, each two or three stories tall and open until 5 a.m. on weekends.

Tokyo didn’t do moderate.

It still doesn’t.

⁂

Japan’s legendary work hours were real enough, though the labour itself often seemed to resemble a long, slow séance: meetings whose outcomes were preordained, documents shuffled, examined and reshuffled like ceremonial offerings, and endless “relationship building,” which was essentially chatting with a sense of duty. If the section leader stayed late, everyone stayed late. Shades of the post-war years: commitment to rebuild the country above all. Solidarity, or at least the performance of it, was more or less mandatory. A bottle of sake often helped the performance along.

I knew this not only from observation. Among the regulars at Café Reino, my local coffee and conversation spot where I forged many a great friendship, were several architects, quintessential salarymen. Despite the baked-in creative pretensions of their profession, Junya and Nagata San were two independent minded Japanese who spoke excellent English. They both had spent years abroad, which inexorably shifts perception. We shared many a conversation, and over time they provided a candid picture of life inside the machine: the unspoken rules, the carefully calibrated deferences, the sheer exhaustion of performing loyalty seven days a week.

After work came the drinking, another ritual, another hierarchy. The boss paid, the subordinates laughed, and the evening progressed in stages: sake first, beer second, maybe some food, then more drink. Faces reddening like warning lights.

⁂

I saw a lot of this up close. In my second year I played piano at a different club, this one tucked closer to Tokyo Tower. It was a hostess club. Not sex for sale, rather: attention, which in many cases was the more valuable commodity. Young women in immaculate dresses, tending to the conversational needs of men who were usually older, usually tipsy, and often accompanied by one or two colleagues who looked as if they’d been released from the office on a day pass. The walking wounded.

The routine was simple: the ladies poured drinks, lit cigarettes, and made each man feel like the most riveting human being in the room, if not the planet. Every vignette was fascinating. Recent trip to a factory in Thailand? “Please, we’d love to hear more!” They would gush. If a customer suddenly felt moved to sing, a common affliction, the other house pianist, a Japanese gent whose name I’ve long forgotten, would drift over and whisper, “Raphael, sumimasen, do you mind if I play?” Then he’d launch into whatever tune the gentleman requested, often a heroic but doomed attempt at “Fly Me to the Moon,” delivered in a key no moon has ever visited. The ladies would applaud enthusiastically.

Most of these entertainment tabs were paid by the companies, of course. It was all part of the great corporate bonding ritual: drink together, flatter each other, pretend the evening was spontaneous, and charge it to the expense account in the name of group trust, morale, and whatever else the accounting department didn’t question too closely.

Once the boss left, the power dynamic shifted, but the inertia remained. No one wanted to be the first to peel off—and what, break with the group? Heavens, no. So… people stayed, sometimes until they were horizontal. I walked past many a bar where I witnessed patrons passed out at tables while their companions carried on, as if unconsciousness were simply another acceptable stage of the evening. On more than one occasion I had to step around a guy in a very expensive suit, completely passed out on the sidewalk.

All that was missing was a chalk outline.

⁂

The clientele at Bar’s BAR generally arrived in coteries of men. Businessmen, naturally. But every now and then a couple would wander upstairs, usually young, as if they’d taken a wrong turn or decided, on a whim, to investigate the fancy bar perched above Cozy Corner. Sometimes two couples would appear together, a classic double date. Except it never resembled anything so hopeful. The men didn’t speak to the women. They spoke to the bartender, or each other. They would lean back expansively—manspreading—cigarette smoke curling, sharing their views on cars, manga, television, film—anything but the women sitting beside them. More smoke.

The young women, for their part, sat smiling politely, studying their own hands with the practiced downward gaze of someone who had been raised to treat the moment itself as something that required obeisance. Meanwhile, the men kept talking.

To each other, naturally.

Fact is, many men seemed unsure how to talk to women. Instead, they relied on scripts borrowed from comics or samurai dramas. So, entire cottage industries evolved to teach young, clueless men how to date, how to behave like functioning adults, possibly even, how to kiss.

Meanwhile, a cultural definition of femininity meant many women maintained a kind of cultivated girlishness well into adulthood and beyond, a practiced innocence in their voices that seemed to have no upper age limit. Almost all Japanese women’s names end in ‘ko,’ a particle of the word ‘kodomo,’ which means child. It’s like having a diminutive attached to your name. Like they do in Spanish, e.g., Pablo, Pablito; Lola, Lolita.

Back home, wives kept the household running and waited up for their husbands, often serving a late-night bowl of miso soup or noodles when they finally returned. The salarymen were mostly absent, caught in the endless loop of work and work-adjacent obligations: company dinners, client golf outings, even accompanying a superior to get his hair cut. Phantom husbands, present only in theory. On any given afternoon, you might see a mother tossing a ball while her young son held the bat, the father’s role reduced to a symbolic placeholder. A system that left everyone diminished: the men exhausted, the women alone, the children raised by absence.

Years later, many young women would initiate a seismic shift that became a social tidal wave: they simply refused to marry. Stayed at home with their parents or moved out on their own or with other single women.

They had watched their mothers wait endlessly.

⁂

On trains, people often sat in a kind of curated silence, their faces arranged into a shared expression that hovered somewhere between fatigue and social camouflage. Impassive, impervious. Swiss neutrality without the diplomatic mission. It wasn’t that anyone lacked an inner life; it was simply that the inner life was regarded as private property, not to be exhibited in public, like a yard sale of emotions.

Meanwhile, I was the observer being observed, though never directly. The glances were peripheral, the way one might acknowledge a painting in a museum without admitting to studying it.

I desperately wanted to crack the code, to understand the culture better.

Learning Japanese, as it turned out, was a formidable undertaking. I studied it for a few months and became reasonably nimble in conversational Japanese, and as a Spanish speaker, my accent sounded natural.But kanji (漢字) remained the linguistic Everest I never quite ascended.

To read a Japanese newspaper one needs to know around two thousand kanji, the same number Japanese students are expected to have mastered by the end of high school. A literacy threshold that felt less like education and more like an initiation rite.

To my eyes, the language felt like a system built on a series of concealed hazards: four writing systems: hiragana, katakana, kanji, and romaji (western script), operating simultaneously like overlapping jurisdictions. Bonus: a dizzying array of counters. The number “1” alone had more incarnations than a Hindu deity: ippon, hitotsu, hitori, ichi, ichimai, ichiban, ichigatsu, ichiji, ikko…

And that was just “one.” Nineteen more numbers to go before a pattern emerged.

Katakana didn’t help. It’s a Japanese syllabary, perfectly respectable in its general purpose, which is to flag foreign words as foreign, to put them in linguistic quarantine so readers could identify the outsiders at a glance. Fair enough. Sensible, even. But somewhere along the line, Katakana was dragooned into service as a pronunciation guide, a job for which it was about as suited as a kazoo in a string quartet.

English words get squeezed through its vowel‑heavy machinery and emerge sounding like their own slow‑witted cousins: black becomes “bu‑rah‑ku,” Sports World becomes “Su‑poh‑tsu Wahredo,” which to my ears sounded less like a sporting goods store and more like a malfunctioning robot. Onomatopoeia masquerading as language.

Students dutifully memorised these Katakana approximations, because that’s what their teachers pronounced too, and the whole enterprise became a linguistic hall of mirrors, each reflection slightly more distorted than the last, until the original English words become faint outlines, rumours passed from mouth to mouth.

Still, the Japanese were enamoured with foreign slogans, English especially. These appeared on T‑shirts, shopping bags, snack wrappers, and anything else with a printable surface. The content was irrelevant; the mere presence of English conferred a kind of fashionable internationalism. Branding as incantation.

Companies and government agencies alike churned out slogans in a nomenclature best described as Janglish: “Lonesome carboy,” “Snowtopia,” “Humanification,” and the unforgettable “My Life, My Gas.” Each one a tiny linguistic miscarriage of justice.

Menus offered no respite. The local I‑HOP presented a poetic overture on the menu, complete with avant‑garde punctuation:

“Oh! What’s a wonderful

world. Boy meets girl

and today. Everything

happens to me!

The street of dream

with a song in my heart.

It’s always you.”

One coffee company, not content with naming its product “Jive Coffee,” printed this on its can of espresso [reproduced exactly as printed, errors, line breaks and all]:

“Enjoy the freshly roasted flavour of r-

ear coffee beans prepared with imp-

ortance to authentic manner!”

And on its slender cans, “Mac Fresh Ice Coffee” delivered a manifesto of sorts:

“Nice ladies, so busy. Whenever she

feels blue, she needs chic and stylish

mood to refresh herself. Now being

alive, healthy, beauty and sexy girl

is ready for streets.

Mac Fresh Ice Coffee, just for you!”

⁂

Back in LA, I had just ended a long relationship when I was introduced to a Japanese tourist who seemed to be her opposite in every measurable dimension. My ex was six feet of blonde hauteur, blue eyes capable of a silence that felt like a verdict. This new woman was small, dark‑haired, dark‑eyed, and moved with a shy, deliberate grace; when she laughed, she covered her mouth, as if laughter were something delicate that might escape.

We began seeing each other. She spoke almost no English; I spoke no Japanese. Yet she stayed with me for two months before returning home, and her departure left a quiet aperture in my life, a space shaped not by drama but by the sudden absence of a presence I had not fully understood until it was gone.

Around that time I relied on a couple of pianists to cover my nights when I couldn’t play. One of them was a Frenchman who called himself Matt, a concession to the American inability to pronounce “Martín” in the French manner, with the “i” sounding more like a flat “a.”

One afternoon he mentioned an opportunity to play in Japan for the same outfit that had hired him. They wanted him back; he wasn’t interested.

Would I be?

I said yes immediately, never considering that this might have been his way of sliding into my chair at the restaurant. The moment felt less like a choice and more like something already in motion, a current forming beneath my feet. I simply stepped into its path.

And so began the slow unmooring from Los Angeles, where I had spent more than a decade, the longest stretch of my life in one place. I let go of most of my possessions, parceling them out or giving them away, and stepped away from my six years at 72 Market Street and also, Maple Drive.

The shift felt seismic, as though the ground was quietly rearranging itself beneath me. I hated leaving, but Tokyo exerted its own gravitational pull: a country reputed to be jazz‑friendly, full of respectful audiences with impeccable manners. And, of course, there was the Japanese woman I’d met in L.A.

Some of it turned out to be mostly true, and all of it was sometimes true.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

⁂

Bar’s BAR, the club where I’d be playing, was perched above a brasserie called Cozy Corner, a name that suggested the proprietor had only a passing acquaintance with either coziness or corners. The place was a Neo-Greco/Belle Époque fever dream: etched-glass partitions, counterfeit marble columns, mirrors multiplying themselves into infinity, all of it illuminated by what seemed like several hundred individual lightbulbs, each burning with the self‑importance of something that had read too much Ayn Rand and taken it personally. The overall effect was not unlike dining inside a gas station that had been designed, at extravagant expense, by Liberace.

On a deadline.

For atmosphere, they played music. Loud. Mantovani loud. The kind of schmaltz so thick you could ladle it, violins swelling like the sea or like something the sea had tried to drown and failed.

Cozy Corner did brisk business. It was popular with girls; young women, really, though the dessert menu made no such distinction. The menu offered confections of almost architectural ambition: four flavours of ice cream buried beneath a snowdrift of whipped cream, the entire structure crowned by a pudding eased from its caramel mould to resemble a hat. A papal hat, perhaps. A crown for something. And at the summit, placed with ceremonial precision: the cherry. Small, red, load‑bearing. Doing a disproportionate amount of symbolic work for something so tiny.

Bar’s BAR was owned by the son of the Cozy Corner founder. It labeled itself a “Champagne and Piano Bar,” though the phrase felt ceremonial rather than descriptive, the words like labels randomly affixed to a dream. A title bestowed on a room that never quite found its purpose. Its elegance was the elegance of embalmed pharaohs: immaculate, airless, preserved against time. The staff moved with the pale gravity of museum attendants, or those working in a temple of unsettling calm. One could imagine a novel’s entire atmosphere—Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, say—settling there without disturbing a single surface.

Yet beneath that lacquered calm lay the faintest glint of something more ancient and ungoverned, the residue of marginalised Toyoko childhoods and Kabukichō streets. In the bar’s subdued light, that history became an undertone, a low hum in the atmosphere, the staff’s former lives lingering as a faint pressure in the air. Like neon remembered after it has been switched off.

Champagne was in the branding, though it was rarely poured. Single Malt Scotch, the owner’s preferred libation—that was the axis around which the room quietly arranged itself. All the regulars knew this. They were mostly business associates or friends of friends. And in Japan, the preservation of group harmony—Wa—extends into everything, including what one orders to drink.

⁂

I had landed in Tokyo in the small hours, jet‑lagged, slightly bewildered, and carrying a ravenous hunger that felt larger than the body. We drove toward Roppongi, the district where I would work and, for a time, live: an enclave of lights and late hours, a constellation of clubs and bars.

My first meal in Japan was Okonomiyaki, in a tiny place with steam rising from the grill in slow, deliberate spirals, the air thick with a sweetness I could not yet name. It was 1:30 in the morning. I remember stepping inside and feeling, with the clarity of a bell struck in winter, that I had crossed into another world.

Which, of course, I had.

— Raphael Antonio Nazario, (writing as Raphaël de Saav).

© 2026, All Rights Reserved.

Roppongi signage photo by Drcwright at English Wikipedia

Early morning in Tamarama.
Not yet the sun, but the trembling edge of light
A fracture where the infinite spills itself.
That northeast corner of the world, 
where the sun comes from, ablaze…
An orange band splitting sky from sea.
A Rothko sky.

He stood at the veranda, observing, listening
trapped by the drama of waves
each crest a declamation, each trough a pause.

The surfers had yet to appear, 
those dreamers who resemble black specks 
floating on the sea, 
each one in love 
with the sea's indifferent promises

The sea spoke of eternities,
its spray, ancient salt and surf 
mingling like unbidden truths;
salty gloss against his lips,
briny revelations.
“You need to choose between him and me,”
he heard himself say. 

The voice was his but unfamiliar, 
rising from somewhere deeper,
self-revelation cresting, 
breaking into words 
that arrived before he did
her heart, a coveted coast, 
a shoreline he would not possess,
yet could not stop returning to.

Her heart a wave; 
now his, now not, 
bestowed and withheld 
on terms he could not negotiate, 
only wait for, the way surfers wait 
eyes on the horizon, 
faithful to the unseen.

⁂

He had been here before, 
in a former season; 
Kate.
Her hair rippled 
like wind over sand.
Her sighs cleaved the moment.
It passed through him
as if the sea had found its voice in her
and was using it gently.
When it vanished, it did not leave silence, 
only the hum of remnants, 
drifting far off, 
past the edge of what can be recalled,
where whales migrate not by purpose 
but by the compass of memory…

Two horizons: the one reason keeps, 
the one desire cannot release. 
Rothko in their striations.

⁂

He dipped his pen 
into the ink of loss, 
painted his sea not in blues 
but in absences: melancholy, 
the colour of everything,
everything gone missing. 
Letters he never sent, 
words floating like clouds 
that have forgotten where they were going.

Such was his quiet undoing.
Small moments.
They hovered,
tinged with desperation.
Walking through the valley of unknowing 
faith, fragile and wavering,
pulling him forward,
towards the crepuscular edge

The struggle with learning,
sifting the probable 
from the possible,
the circular from the clear,
ends not in revelation, but silence;
a silence that bestows itself
as sunlight confers
its colour upon the sea.
The moment you know
or think you know
is the only horizon that matters.
The Now.

And for now,
there was nothing more to say.
There still isn’t.
That was long ago, but never quite far away.
Far away, but never long ago.
Always there.
And not.

Even so,
the past opens its coat
and flashes the present
a shimmer, not a glare
a distraction you cannot resist.
Two horizons:
one that fades,
one you cannot look away from.

⁂

Boy meets girl, Kate.
Her name a syllable that lifts, then falls, 
the tide collapsing, 
an exhale on a rocky shore. 
For a time their worlds aligned, 
verses intertwining, 
fleeting perfection, 
love scorching the horizon. 

But she fled 
as if happiness were jagged glass, 
too sharp to hold. 
She returned to the ache she understood, 
to the house where light refused to stay.

Two years passed. 
Then she reappeared, 
a wave untethered from its source, 
a tsunami at the gate. 

She appeared as apparitions do, 
unannounced, 
the past at the door of beginnings. 
She smiled, bright as sun-glitter on water. 

But it was late, 
a little too late. 
His house had shuttered its windows, 
the dream dismantled, 
the lines erased, 
verses scattered like gulls in the sky. 

Regret became geography,
and geography, regret. 
He had moved on, 
by need, not want. 
Tides of agony, 
the ache of waiting for dawn.

She lingered,
in the quivering silence of the moment,
salt and light braiding her hair,
the swell of her belly; a quiet revelation.
Her life, too, had flowed onward.
The father-to-be waiting elsewhere
Perhaps watching the horizon
From a hotel window.

And yet, she stayed, 
her shadow quivering, 
dissolving into the fragile stillness 
of all things unrealised,
the closing of a world 
that was nearly ours, 
left mostly imagined. 

Sand dunes 
where a castle once stood
How does one mourn 
what one never had?

⁂

He stood, 
in the middle of the street, 
as she departed, 
the rear window of the taxi 
framing her silhouette. 
Air before the rain, 

When the car paused at the corner, 
she turned, 
her gaze like the tide's pull, 
boundless longing. 
He was held in that moment, 
then let it all slip,
the yearning, the riptide. 
This was the only mercy left. 
It could not be otherwise. 

The taxi turned left, 
carrying her 
into the unknowing elsewhere, 
any future memory dissolving,
absence receding into the distance, 
folding back into absence.

He was a statue on the pavement,
silhouetted against the crackling light.
For a moment, all had paused, 
the traffic stilled, 
the air held its breath.
And in his chest, 
a hollow of silence.
Grief and learning
A mirror,
like sea and sky.

⁂

“You have to trust me,” she said.
This was just last week.
He didn’t know what exactly she meant.
Still, he didn’t question it.
How could he?
She was holding his face,
her lips pressing meaning into him;
a promise
a truth unspoken,
something trembling between them,
Who questions moments like that?

Then, last night, on the phone,
her words faltered:
“I’m not moving out after all,” 
she confessed, enigmatic, uncertain.
“It may take a little while.” 

Acquiescence, complete.

Then, after a silence,
“But I promise to move forward.”

Kate had also been moving out,
moving forward.
She had promised to return.
But promises are tides.
They ebb, they swell,
and sometimes, they head out to sea;
the taste of salt in their wake.

“It may take a little while…”
That could mean so many things 
in the sunlit clarity of ordinary days.
What Stevens called the malady of the quotidian. 
But in the prismatic, ungovernable world 
of a woman who sees moments in fractured planes of colour,
perspective shifting,
like a cubist painter’s canvas, 
capturing a moment from ten directions at once…
Well, there’s no telling what she meant.

Be as discerning as you are when tasting a new wine,
he heard himself say.
The words floated there, 
suspended in the darkness.
He couldn’t sleep again.
He called. No answer.
He waited. No riposte.
Later, he regretted not turning the phone off.
But only slightly.
Not too much.

He was, after all, working on not regretting things,
part of his new mindfulness program.
The Eternal Now.
Presently, also part of an ad-hoc, 
lie-awake-in-the middle-of-the-night program.

3:32 AM.
Am I being present enough? he wondered.

It was not that he mistrusted her,
he mistrusted the invisible man,
the one who shaped her thoughts, 
tempestuously spinning the air,
until it curdled with unreason.

He spoke these concerns into the stillness,
where the wall waited to be known 
by faith alone.
He rearranged the pillow,
as if to reform his world in miniature.

The life imagined, 
dressed, as he once was, 
in optimism, 
lay folded beneath him,
a map never opened to the wind.

He climbed a mountain 
he had built from wanting, 
Its peak, a mirage, 
its summit, nothing but air. 
He saw there was nothing to see, 
and named the void Yet. 

⁂

He could neither express nor tell her. 
His thoughts ran as rapids, 
the current arguing with its own direction. 
To steer required finesse, 
or courage akin to surrender, 
the kind that feels its way 
beneath the surface. 

He sought composure, 
to be not swimmer, but vessel, 
a one-man raft, threaded by light, 
each filament a sunbeam 
poised perfect. 
Channeling eternity. 
For even the sun is only 
a blaze rehearsing permanence.

This idea of becoming the sun
was not foreign to him.
He had rehearsed such fictions since boyhood.
Superhero at six, 
cape of bed-cover, billowing,
rooms traversed by winds imagined.
Or a knight of the round table,
whose blade of air
cut clean through dreams.

He relinquished it,
eventually, reluctantly;
a surrender signed with quiet grief,
bicorne hat sagging,
cape reduced to a wisp of gauze,
sword to filament, 
lit by the evanescent glow
of what might have been.

The child buried the bright sword, 
let his white stallion run into hills, 
grey with the remotely possible.

Yet heroism loitered.
It wasn’t done with him,
knocking softly, insistent,
demanding new departures.
Drawing him again
to leap once more into rescue,
answering the cries
of imperilled hearts.

The damsels in distress.
They kept finding him,
always leaping from higher cliffs,
and he kept leaping after them,
drawn by the light of their falling.

“Damsels in distress,”
a deceptive elegance on the tongue,
uncertain music in the air;
their peril, a swan song,
and he, its echo.
There were always others,
inevitably seeking, inevitably found.
He stood waiting
with the quiet dignity
of one who mends broken clocks,
and broken hearts,
beneath a bright and insistent neon:
Just jump. I’ll fix it!

Yet cliffs ascended, year by year, 
edges dissolving into arcs of flight, 
milkweed borne helpless 
toward a blue horizon, 
toward the sea, 
and silence, 
that of the ignominious end of quests. 

And there he stood again, 
the actor caught by inevitability, 
poised to dive. 
A joust began:
between desire and release, 
fixing and allowing, 
too firm a grasp transforms silk to sand. 
And between clenched fists, sand escapes, 
losing the very shape he sought.

Silence, he said, 
is salvation, not ruin.
And the thought held him, 
not as truth, 
but as the shimmer of truth, 
a belief rehearsed by candlelight 
before the mind was ready to believe.

⁂

And now a broadening,
light unfurling along the horizon’s edge,
azure above becoming 
blue beneath.
The sea stirring,
radiant foam,
the narrow rim of Tamarama,
drawing closer, spilling over,
waves splayed out, momentarily one with the light,
palms of brightness, opening
briefly merging with the trembling air,
crystal prisms drifting,
colour perfuming wind.

Farther out, clouds assembled, 
stately soldiers in procession,
migrating to distant dominions, 
other skies. 
Other damsels.

He imagined it a redoubtable quest,
for those intent on capturing waves,
or seizing the moment,
or whatever might be rescued,
or those who merely dreamed of capture.

For those.
For them.
For me.
For this.
For now.
The Eternal Now.
Always arriving, never here.

He pulled the silver pocket knife
his uncle once gave him,
and whittled sentences down to bone,
as if the act itself might disclose
wisdom from absence, 
epiphany from the spaces between.


Each line reduced to a whisper,
reduced to breath.
An exhale.

⁂

Silence and seawater,
to gather their essence
requires patience without end.
And so, he practiced attentisme,
the watchfulness of clouds,
the waiting of tides.

Yet waiting, as Beckett well knew,
becomes its own crisis.

And when the waiting is done,
it is tears that reveal
the brittle beauty, 
the salt truth of all;
the truth tasting, 
always,

of the sea.

Text and photographs by Raphael Antonio Nazario, (writing as Raphaël de Saav).

© 2026, All Rights Reserved.

Llovía. Era tarde. Ahora o nunca, como si el reloj tuviera un filo y me lo acercara al cuello con una paciencia de verdugo. Crucé el umbral, giré a la izquierda y eché a andar, afirmándome contra un viento empeñado en corregirme la espalda como se corrige a un soldado torpe.

El paraguas de última hora, endeble y desleal, un artefacto barato comprado para salir del paso, se agitó con la dignidad de los pobres objetos condenados. O sea, ridícula. La lluvia venía de lado, luego de abajo hacia arriba, luego de todas partes a la vez, como si el cielo hubiese perdido la educación y el suelo, de pronto, se hubiera vuelto cómplice. El pobrecito paraguas no tenía ninguna posibilidad contra el agua y el viento, una intemperie decidida a reescribir el guion con tinta fría.

Las tardes se habían vuelto ecuaciones. El crepúsculo era un teorema ensayado hasta volverse pesado, mi propio principio diminuto de equivalencia. Y yo, que no soy físico, lo sentía en el pecho como se siente una piedra en el bolsillo. La costumbre me jalaba hacia adentro. La posibilidad me impedía derrumbarme en la costumbre. Resultado: órbita como empate. Iniciativa muerta en una puerta. Además, ¿cuántas veces se puede releer El extranjero sin que el propio extranjero termine siendo uno mismo?

La Tierra es atraída al Sol por la gravedad y, sin embargo, no choca con él por esa fuerza que llaman centrífuga, que es inercia en realidad, una obstinación de materia que empuja hacia afuera. Así que la Tierra guarda distancia, encerrada en su órbita, como quien guarda una tristeza antigua para no romperse. No hay otra opción. Como yo, estancado en el quicio. Varado a mitad de paso.

Hola, Principio de Equivalencia.

La procrastinación imita a la física con un talento de impostora. Yo llevaba tiempo en mi propia estasis orbital, un pie adentro y el otro afuera, aferrado a lo conocido, la habitación del hotel, sus lámparas obedientes, su cama que no pregunta. No era retroceso, exactamente, pero tampoco era fuga. Suspendido entre el tirón del pasado y el empuje hacia un futuro desconocido, aunque ese futuro fueran apenas unos minutos y una o dos manzanas más allá, ese futuro minúsculo que igual asusta, porque toda distancia comienza con un primer paso de timidez.

Quizás era España, donde la noche no cae tanto como llega con retraso elegante, perfumada de colonia y, por alguna razón, esperando aplausos, como la actriz que entra tarde para que se note. Aquí las noches no empiezan antes de las nueve y media. Para cenar. Un dato que le pone a la expresión cultura nocturna un regusto ligeramente sociopático, como si el país entero hubiese firmado un pacto contra el sueño.

Era la lluvia, seguramente.

O tal vez era yo, con esa inercia mía tan bien educada, pulida durante años hasta volverse casi arte. Mira, mamá, sin manos!

La indecisión como oficio. El retraso como abrigo.

Aun así, allí estaba. Mi última noche en Santiago de Compostela. Hora de romper el limbo que había perfeccionado, mitad vacilación, mitad pretexto de mal tiempo. No era el hijo pródigo y, desde luego, no era peregrino. Pero salí, estaba fuera, y estaba en marcha. Un cometa suelto. Rumbo: algún sitio adonde ir. Ninguno en particular, que es la forma más sincera de los rumbos.

Eran las diez y caía un diluvio digno de Rudyard Kipling, monos y tigres cayendo del cielo, el zoológico del agua desatado. El viento me devolvió a la cubierta de un velero, tirando nueve nudos que se sentían como dieciocho, con la lluvia azotándome la cara, lavándome la expresión, dejándome sin máscara.

Seguí adelante hacia el casco viejo y su catedral, la misma hacia la que los peregrinos han ido arrastrándose desde tiempos inmemoriales con determinación sisífica, con convicción, claro, con esa fe que no se discute porque ya viene escrita en los pies. A arrepentirse. A rezar. Y a llorar. Y, más recientemente, a hacerse selfis, como si el dolor o la penuria también necesitara comprobante digital.

Yo no. Ningún pecado que expiar. Ningún milagro necesario. Aunque tampoco hubiera dicho que no a uno, sobre todo ahora, con este temporal que parecía una prueba de resistencia. Pero no había venido en busca de milagros. Buscaba otra cosa, menos palpable, más elemental. Aire.

Probablemente no habría sabido decirlo bien, porque el aire es una entidad invisible. El aire y la atmósfera de Santiago fuera de horario, su “yo”con la corbata floja, el perfume que sueltan los pétalos cuando nadie los mira. El pulso de la ciudad, su latido. Esa es mi naturaleza, en el fondo, ir a la caza del corazón de las cosas, aunque a veces el corazón se camufle como un ave del paraíso, pájaro mojado, en este caso.

Pero primero tenía que encontrar el pulso de ese corazón. La ciudad no estaba precisamente palpitando con joie de vivre. De hecho, apenas temblaba. La gente se movía con el decoro grave de lacayos de palacio o, como mínimo, de una nobleza menor, ojos bajos, expresiones medidas, como si la alegría estuviera fuertemente gravada o quizá desaconsejada por ley. Empecé a sospechar que sonreír era un acto privado, reservado solo para los bebés. O los perros. La felicidad como un secreto doméstico.

Los días habían sido uniformemente grises, de ese gris apagado y pálido que parece casi moral. Cielos color de peltre en penitencia, sombríos, con las mejillas hundidas, las nubes conteniendo el aliento. Calles que parecían tejidas con estropajo de acero sin luz. No era melancolía tanto como resignación vuelta meteorología. Y la gente parecía haberla absorbido, llevando la tristeza como un abrigo heredado, demasiado pesado para tirarlo, demasiado familiar para cuestionarlo.

Claro, esta siempre había sido una ciudad de penitencia, de arrastre espiritual. Millones de pies mojados, llenos de ampollas, empujando hacia las puertas santas a lo largo de los siglos, susurrándole sus mea culpas a la piedra como mensajes cifrados, como si la piedra fuese una oreja infinita.

Per mea culpa, per mea culpa, per mea grandíssima…

Al parecer, a nadie se le había ocurrido decirle a toda esa gente buena que se bajaran de la cruz. Que había otras personas que necesitaban esa leña. Con desesperación.

¿Podían siglos de penitencia acumulada pesar sobre un pueblo de este tamaño, una aldea en realidad? Todo ese equipaje espiritual, arrastrado desde puestos remotos, culpa y redención sudada, tenía que dejar una huella. Seguro. Claro que sí. La historia no pasa en puntillas. Arrastra barro.

Y no solo en sentido figurado. Piénsalo. Tantas almas sedientas y sus pecados reprimidos. El choque disonante entre el incienso y la boca reseca, piedra marcada de sal, ese tufo eclesiástico, austeridad perfumada estrellándose contra la fragilidad humana. Una especie de tristeza santificada que se metió en el mortero.

Aquí, el sonreír puede que alguna vez contara como herejía, evidencia de que uno no sufría lo suficiente. La risa, una señal de alarma. Mejor flagelarse por adelantado, antes de que llegara alguien con la túnica penitencial, el sambenito, el saco amarillo que se llevaba como cartel.

Confiesa y prometemos no matarte.

Ups. Torquemada dice que igual te toca irte. A la hoguera.

Y el fuego, ya se sabe, tiene una manera de hacer a la gente obediente.

Con el tiempo, aprendieron a llevar la piedad como quien lleva un hábito viejo, gris, pesado, y profundamente desconfiado de la alegría. ¿Resultado? Imagínate a tu tío menos querido apareciendo sin avisar. No para cenar, para décadas. Plantado en el sofá bueno, deshaciendo la maleta de sus quejas, narrando en voz alta todo lo que está mal en la familia y en el mundo. Al final, las opciones se te reducen. Saltar al Atlántico, emigrar, o echar mano del vaporizador de partículas que reservas para conductores groseros y baristas narcisistas. El daño colateral se arregla después, se explica luego. Seguramente Mamá lo entendería. Ella conocía a su cuñado.

Yo caminaba por las callejuelas quietas de Santiago, dándole vueltas a ese temperamento gallego de tono bajo, esa reticencia que también había encontrado en el norte de Portugal. Un claroscuro del oído. Timbres graves, bordes en legato, el habla pintada con pinceladas difuminadas keeps, consonantes amortiguadas, como si hablar a pleno volumen fuese, no sé, de mal gusto, una falta de respeto a la humedad.

Sus caras y miradas, sombrías, piadosas incluso, podrían haberse escapado de un cuadro tenebrista de Zurbarán, todo tierras y alma. Me pregunté si ellos lo sabían, esa cualidad de salir de una pintura, si alguna vez se sorprendían a mitad de conversación pensando, ojalá hoy me esté quedando bien otra vez esa luz barroca…

Como quien se mira al espejo y encuentra, por accidente, una sombra digna.

Me di un tironcito de orejas, sonriendo. Como si alguien pensara eso. Me entretenía solo. Hundiéndome en la lluvia. La ciudad me respondía con su silencio mojado, con su paciencia de piedra, las paredes respirando agua.

Y estaba la lengua, el gallego, herencia viva, hablado por todos. Una lengua color sepia, afinada no en un La 440, sino en algo entre el castellano temprano y el portugués, como si esta esquina de la península hubiera zumbado alguna vez en ese registro y unos cuantos pueblos aún recordaran la melodía. Incluso el nombre, Santiago, llegaba flotando con algas etimológicas pegadas, un lapso de siglos metido en sílabas.

Sant Iago, la España medieval, luego Iago o Yago, las letras intercambiándose como solían hacerlo, como peces que cambian de dirección en el agua. Iakobos en griego, Ya’akov en hebreo, Jacobo en el álbum familiar. Un nombre pasado de mano en mano como una moneda muy viajada, santos y marineros y eruditos, y el resto de nosotros asintiendo mientras cambiaba de dueño.

De Sant Iago o Sant Yago, los nombres primeros de Santiago Apóstol, era solo un salto breve hasta Santiago, y en ese salto, como en todos, algo se pierde y algo se queda brillando, mojado, terco, respirando.

⁂

Bien.

Pero, ¿por qué este rincón del noroeste de España?

La leyenda dice que aquí está enterrado el apóstol Santiago, y que una estrella brillante le señaló a un pastor el lugar de la tumba. Sí, ese mítico hito celeste, tan manoseado ya por la leyenda, gastado de tanto repetirse. Y, sin embargo, le queda bien a un lugar que vive de la fe, incluso cuando la fe llega en zapatillas y con mochila. El nombre Compostela, dicen, quizá venga del latín Campus Stellarum.

En castellano, Campo de Estrellas.

La Compostela de hoy.

Campo de Estrellas. Un nombre así, nacido de ese modo, en otras circunstancias me habría dejado boquiabierto, aplastado por su poesía. Esta noche, en cambio, sonaba menos a verso del cielo y más a avería en la fontanería del firmamento, una tubería rota allá arriba y nosotros abajo, mojándonos con el resultado.

Lluvia bíblica, del Antiguo Testamento, y además, raramente invertida, como si subiera desde los adoquines. Como si lloviera de abajo hacia arriba.

Pesada. Chisporroteante.

Gotas gordas que golpeaban el suelo con algo parecido a la violencia, como si cada una viniera con un pequeño resentimiento personal. La teoría del caos en forma líquida. Cada gota, un suceso diminuto, impredecible, y aun así reunido en dibujos que solo el caos sabe trazar. Caprichoso.

Una tormenta, millones de gotas cayendo a su aire, ajenas al orden secreto que vive debajo del desorden. Un océano suspendido en el aire, y yo caminando dentro de él como quien atraviesa un velo de agua.

Y yo, distraído en la física de lo físico, la densidad relativa de las gotas y todo eso. Ya sabes. Todo eso.

La ciencia como consuelo barato.

Seguí adelante, con cuidado de no resbalar. ¿Cuántas manzanas más? ¿Cuánto faltaba?

Los de delante eligieron una solución más simple, más determinista. Apretaron el paso. Caminaban como si obedecieran un principio y no una calle, los tacones marcando un staccato sobre la piedra lisa. Sus pasos iban a doble tiempo, grabando un ritmo en las losas mojadas, como si la ciudad les estuviera dictando la partitura y ellos, obedientes, la ejecutaran.

Sombras largas se inclinaban hacia los muros de arenisca y temblaban sobre el empedrado, como si persiguieran a la pareja, figuras de origami que se lanzaban y se encogían en ángulos bruscos, casi alcanzándolos. Casi. Las sombras siempre son así, eternamente a punto de tocarte sin tocarte nunca.

Yo también ajusté el paso y seguí, aunque sin la convicción de las sombras.

Podía haber sido una escena de cine negro de los cuarenta, adoquines mojados, pasos rápidos, un hombre que parece huir, perseguido por sombras, o por sí mismo, que suele ser peor. De niño me fascinaban esas películas antiguas en blanco y negro, de guerra y espionaje. Siempre me imaginaba dentro de una, trabajando para la Resistencia, claro, corriendo por callejones en mi Citroën 11CV, no del todo discreto.

El de los agujeros de bala en las aletas traseras, naturalmente.

Mensajes cifrados cosidos al forro del abrigo.

Una Luger P08 a mi lado.

Ya me entiendes, sombras, adoquines, toda la fantasía monocroma, la vida reducida a contraste y claridad moral, como si el bien y el mal vinieran ya enfocados por el director de fotografía.

A veces me preguntaba, si hubiera sido yo en ese mundo de blanco y negro, si en 1943 en París hubiera pertenecido a la red Prosper del SOE, ¿habría mantenido la compostura bajo un interrogatorio de la Gestapo? ¿O me habría quebrado, soltando nombres, casas seguras, puntos de encuentro, todo ese inventario triste?

“Nunca”, me oí decir.

A nadie, salvo a la lluvia.

La lluvia me siguió la corriente, como si estuviera de acuerdo conmigo por puro cansancio.

Aceleré. La calle antigua apenas tenía el ancho de un autobús. No había sitio para coches. Ni sitio para la incertidumbre.

El agua que caía hablaba en reproches contra las fachadas. Los ecos quedaban suspendidos, capa sobre capa, como memoria de movimiento pegada a las paredes. Era una coreografía entre lo tangible y lo insinuado. Una conversación de superficies. Pasos aplaudiendo.

Un cuanto de terquedad.

Algo que Joe MacDonald o Gregg Toland habrían tallado en humo y luz de farol: sombras y fulgor, hombres de la Resistencia, gabardinas empapadas y traiciones susurradas. Adoquines relucientes. Sombreros ladeados en los portales, caras de media luna sonriendo desde la oscuridad, ensayando el doble juego. Muros barnizados de humedad.

Promesas en voz baja tragadas por la lluvia.

Mentiras, lavadas.

Fundido a negro.

⁂

El casco viejo de Santiago, sellado por la UNESCO hace ya treinta y tantos años, ha permanecido milagrosamente intacto. No hay Tommy Go Figure. No hay Hugo Bigboss. No hay boutiques vendiendo perfumes con nombres de celebridades ya embalsamadas. La hidra de las franquicias, al parecer, ha sido mantenida a raya.

Por ahora.

El lugar se niega, sin rodeos, a convertirse en esa idea de algún sitio europeo pulido y brillante, el escaparate global donde las ciudades empeñan el alma, reetiquetada en Helvetica Neue Thin y humo de capital riesgo. Donde los escaparates silban la misma melodía corporativa, Seúl se disfraza de São Paulo chic, y la historia se reempaqueta como mural para influencer, pasteles y hashtags, flanqueados por un helado de diseño que te juran que está para morirse.

O, qué sé yo, un puesto de yogur helado asiático llamado “Muú-fir”. Pegadizo.

Y tan, tan probiótico.

Esos sitios donde la mañana llega con el sonido de pasos y maletas rodando, un coro de acentos, y uno se despierta no tanto en una ciudad como en la sala de espera de una. En Compostela, en cambio, lo que hay es algo más raro que el encanto: textura. Una terquedad particular. Un ostinato distinto, repetido por la piedra, por el silencio, por las persianas bajadas.

Los edificios de piedra siguen en filas ordenadas, solemnes, alineados en obediencia a lo largo de calles estrechas como lo han estado durante siglos, calles que caen en un silencio casi monástico entre las tres y media y las seis y media, cuando el comercio se ablanda y el día se repliega como un animal cansado.

Aquí los tenderos aún viven encima de sí mismos. Un cuarto detrás del mostrador. Una luz detrás de la cortina. La calle no se vende, respira y suspira.

Claro que hay señales de modernidad.

Y hay turistas.

Y peregrinos. Bastantes peregrinos, de hecho.

El turismo, al fin y al cabo, es su propia clase de peregrinación, un rito secular, con rituales, reliquias y colas. Solo las colas, pensé, ya explican por qué Sócrates nunca viajó.

⁂

Me acercaba a la plaza central, donde la Catedral convive con varias iglesias más, cada una como arrancada de un siglo ligeramente distinto, como si la piedra guardara calendarios superpuestos. Tenía los pies helados. Las pantorrillas, empapadas. La lluvia se había vuelto personal, insistente, con esa saña íntima que solo conoce el agua cuando decide que uno es su tema de la noche. Un asalto a los sentidos, una bofetada líquida.

Así que recurrí, como hace uno, a esa medida que solo parece desesperada cuando el día está a 28º y hace sol. Giré en seco a la izquierda por un callejón, sin saber adónde iba. Me daba igual. Tocaba encontrar refugio, cualquier techo con vocación de tregua.

En la esquina me detuve bajo un rótulo, Rúa da Acibechería. El nombre parecía una contraseña, una frase corta dicha al oído. Nada más que tiendas cerradas a cal y canto, persianas que miraban al suelo como párpados cansados. Y entonces, un poco a la izquierda, un toldo. Una luz tenue derramándose desde dentro, como si alguien hubiera dejado un vaso de ámbar sobre el alféizar del mundo. Eso tenía que ser algo.

Ahí. Ahí.

Caminé. Casa das Crechas, un bar restaurante de aspecto modesto. Entré, plegué el paraguas, lo dejé junto a la puerta y me quedé mirando con esa vacilación que tiene el náufrago cuando por fin toca madera firme, dudando todavía de su suerte.

Venga. Haz como si esto hubiera sido a propósito, me oí decir.

Mientras avanzaba hacia la barra, mis ojos recorrieron el local como los de un hombre que busca salidas por si acaso. Bien puesto, bien iluminado. A la izquierda, un comedor lleno, voces apretadas como uvas. Una barra larga, bien surtida. Detrás de mí, una pared de espejos, por si se me olvidaba quién era, o por si la noche quería recordármelo con insistencia. El lugar era mucho mejor de lo que parecía desde fuera.

Me senté en la barra. Exhalé despacio. Santuario, por fin. Un pequeño país interior donde la lluvia no tenía jurisdicción.

Las camareras, dos chicas jóvenes, se movían una alrededor de la otra con la fluidez de un baile ensayado, anticipándose, rozando el aire con eficiencia y juego, intercambiando comentarios al vuelo para entretenerse. Hacían buena pareja, con chispa. Y sí, atractivas, agradables a la vista, aunque venía de pasar más de media hora mirando piedra mojada. A esas alturas, hasta un parquímetro con pintalabios me habría hecho girar la cabeza.

Porque la belleza es también cuestión de clima.

A los pocos minutos, unas manos impecables me sirvieron un Lagavulin, single malt, exactamente lo que la noche venía reclamando.

Mi propia forma de expiación.

O, por lo menos, una manera de sentir que la noche no había ganado del todo, que aún se le podía arrancar una sílaba de calor.

La camarera era de Madrid, una madrileña lejos de casa. Las uñas la delataban: perfectas, trabajadas al milímetro. Las madrileñas, por lo que yo he visto, tienen un don para la presentación que a veces roza la compulsión.

Me acordé de mis años en Tokio, donde la gente vivía en pisos diminutos y abarrotados y, aun así, salía a la calle impecable, diera igual el género. En Italia pasaba algo parecido.

En Madrid, más de una vez había notado grupos de mujeres, jóvenes y adultas, vestidas con una cohesión casi coreografiada, como si se hubieran llamado antes: ¿Tú qué te pones?

Un sábado por la mañana, en Sol, vi a un pequeño pelotón de chicas de veintitantos bajar del tren con un aire sincronizado: chaquetas, bufandas, vaqueros, botas, todo en la misma clave. Tal vez ellas habían hecho un juramento. Y el pelo, mientras tanto: largo, deslumbrante, planchado a la perfección.

No pude evitar preguntarme si eran una agrupación musical. Si iban a una sesión de fotos. Cuando pasaron, estuve a punto de gritarles: "¡¿Eh, ¿dónde puedo comprar vuestro CD?!

De vuelta a la barra, el Lagavulin resultó ser el antídoto perfecto contra ese frío lento y empapado que ya vivía en mis espinillas, con la lluvia instalada como inquilina fija. Bebí despacio. Dejé que el whisky abriera una grieta de sol dentro del cuerpo.

Hablé con ellas a trompicones, en arranques y pausas, con cadencias marcadas por el ritmo del servicio. Vosotras, cuando haga falta, a lo vuestro, les dije, y lo dije en serio, como se dicen las pocas cosas serias entre una ronda y otra. Nos lanzábamos medias frases y chistes cortos por encima de la barra, entre tragos y pedidos, intentando, aunque fuera por un momento, entender el mundo, o devolverle algo de sentido. Una práctica antigua cuando uno se sienta en una barra, como si el bar fuese una pequeña embajada de lo humano.

Y entre una frase y otra, el Lagavulin. Llegó como humo con modales. Tenía ese dulzor oscuro que parece venir de fruta seca y caramelo quemado. Algo de cáscara amarga, un destello, y luego la costa entera, pegada al paladar como sal en la piel. Rotundo y, a la vez, sedoso. Y el final, largo y cálido. Obstinado.

Estaba considerando las virtudes de una segunda ronda cuando vi un flujo ordenado de gente entrar y bajar por una escalera cerca de la entrada, como si el suelo abriera una invitación.

¿Hay un comedor abajo?, pregunté.

Está a punto de empezar la música, contestó una de ellas.

¿Música? ¿Abajo?

Sí.

Música en vivo un miércoles por la noche, y el primer compás a las once y media. Intrigante.

No había ni un solo cartel que anunciara un escenario y, aun así, la gente llegaba y se movía con esa certeza tranquila de quien sabe exactamente adónde va. Había algo ceremonial en su naturalidad, la coreografía de un gesto casi ritual.

Tuve la sensación de haber tropezado con algo. Pagué la cuenta, bajé por una escalera pulida por siglos de pisadas, aboné el euro con cincuenta de entrada y me uní al gentío.

El local, lleno, chisporroteaba de energía. Tenía aire de speakeasy, no en el sentido de la Ley Seca, sino en ese de “me lo dijo un amigo de un amigo”, dicho en voz baja, casi como si nombrarlo lo estropeara. Un descuido convertido en institución. Sin letrero. Sin marquesina. Sin aspavientos. Solo boca a boca e instinto. De esos sitios que no encuentras si no tienes la suerte de equivocarte en la noche exacta. Una de tormenta, quizá.

Dentro, todos parecían saber. No solo a dónde ir, sino cómo estar. La sala traía una energía conspirativa, como si estuviéramos metidos en algo raro. El aire se sentía suspendido, una quietud cargada, una nota medio oída, medio sostenida, temblando justo debajo de la superficie.

En un escenario pequeño, a la izquierda, un grupo de músicos afinaba: violines, gaitas, un tambor, un clarinete. Alguien estaba sentado en un cajón, marcando unos ritmos de prueba. Uno o dos ajustaban cañas, apretaban cuerdas.

Nadie tenía prisa.

La anticipación era espesa, cargada no de duda sino de la certeza de que lo que venía era nuestro. A la derecha, y más al fondo, un pequeño estanque de espectadores, algunos sentados, la mayoría de pie.

Entonces empezó la música.

Y, con un arranque que iba creciendo como viento en una vela, la sala comenzó a vibrar con una alegría de pies golpeando el suelo.

Era, sin duda, una jig, en un 6/8 vivo: la muiñeira gallega. Con los ojos cerrados habría jurado que estaba en Irlanda. A Dave Kelly, mi vecino en Australia, esto le habría encantado. Nació en Irlanda y, sin duda, habría señalado las diferencias. A mí me daba igual.

Yo asentía. Había encontrado mi noche, una que me llevaba a otro espacio y a otro tiempo.

Ahora sí que sonreía de veras.

En Sídney, un miércoles frío y de tormenta, música en vivo de músicos locales, en una zona peatonal, con el primer compás a las once y media, y encima, lleno... Prácticamente inconcebible. Pero aquí venían. Y se quedaban. Y lo estaban disfrutando. Y yo también.

Me abrí paso hacia la barra, zigzagueando y amagando como un medio scrum buscando la línea de ensayo, esquivando codos, agachándome bajo conversaciones, deslizándome por costuras estrechas entre la multitud. Cuando por fin llegué, encontré un hueco pequeño a la izquierda, con vista de reojo al escenario.

Allí, por fin quieto, escuché, miré, y me dejé llevar, como si la sala me estuviera soñando.

Aquí no había Lagavulin, más bien un montaje de barra rápida. Una de las camareras de arriba había bajado, moviéndose detrás del mostrador con manos veloces y precisas, trabajando a toda máquina.

Lo mantuve simple: vino blanco.

Albariño, por favor.

Cuando en Galicia… pensé, y volví la mirada al escenario.

Había una corriente que salía de ese pequeño arco de proscenio. El aire alrededor de los músicos parecía afinado, casi eléctrico. Todos quedábamos enganchados a eso.

Cuando miré de nuevo hacia la barra, el vino ya estaba ahí. Lo que yo había tomado por dos latidos se había estirado, sin aviso, en minutos. La condensación perlaba el cristal, dándole una incandescencia suave, un resplandor nacarado. Allí estaba, paciente, sereno, como si hubieran vertido luz de luna en una copa.

El tiempo se había doblado sobre sí mismo sin que me diera cuenta, como tantas veces cuando la belleza me miraba. Era la música. Tiraba de la tela de la realidad, torcía la secuencia.

El tiempo, ya no lineal, se estiraba y se curvaba, los momentos entrando unos en otros como humo blanco de ceremonia. Una plasticidad de los sentidos.

Así es la música, arrastra el mundo a su alrededor hasta que uno pierde la brújula. Y cuando salimos, parpadeando, preguntamos: ¿de verdad ha pasado tanto?

Me quedé mirando la copa con una especie de asombro. Luego la atención se me fue a las manos de la camarera, rápidas, continuas, seguras. La vi encadenar vasos y servir con una destreza limpia. Pensé en ese dicho viejo: que tanto la cautela como el arrojo empiezan y terminan en la yema de los dedos.

Mi vida, reflexioné, había sido un equilibrio abstracto entre ambas cosas. O eso me gustaba creer.

La verdad era que, inexplicablemente, había vacilado más veces de las que me habría gustado. Me había echado atrás más veces de las que quiero admitir.

Pero también me había lanzado, y me había salido, de cosas que la mayoría ni se plantearía.

¿Saltar de un avión? Hecho.
¿Rápidos de clase V? Hecho.
¿Acrobacias en un Pitts Special? Afirmativo.
¿Salir con una mujer alta, preciosa, de ojos como deshielo de glaciar... y bipolar? Hecho.
¿Vivir con ella casi tres años? También.

Vacilación y arrojo. Comienzos tímidos, salidas abruptas. Un empate silencioso entre el impulso valiente y la quietud, todo parte de la mezcla.

Yo ya había dejado atrás la timidez paralizante que me definió de niño, y bien entrada la adolescencia, pero a veces todavía me emboscaba. Como un músculo dormido que despierta. O un recuerdo olvidado. Un agente durmiente en un umbral, esperando su momento.

Salir del hotel esta noche, por ejemplo.

Esos empates silenciosos que nadie veía, esos eran los momentos que yo conocía mejor.

Y dentro de mi cabeza, siempre se montaba un monólogo, envuelto en terciopelo aplastado de cavilaciones filosóficas. A veces era un combate: contradicciones interiorizadas tirándose de la cuerda. Mi propia versión del Principio de Equivalencia, jalado por fuerzas opuestas.

¿Saludo y me arriesgo a la torpeza?

¿O me quedo callado?
¿Me voy, o me quedo?

Esta vez me quedé.

Era la música. Me sostuvo.

Gravedad, creo que se llama.

© 2026 Raphaël/Rafael Antonio Nazario (escribiendo como Raphaël de Saav).
Todos los derechos reservados.

It was raining. It was late. Now or never, the clock said, pressing its cold edge against my throat. I stepped out, turned left, and walked into a wind with ideas about straightening me out. The umbrella, a last‑minute, economy‑model apology, flailed with the flimsy dignity of doomed little artefacts, the storm’s natural prey. The rain didn’t fall so much as attack: sideways, upward, then from every direction at once, as if the sky had forgotten its manners and the ground had decided to help. The hapless brolly folded in my grip. It had no hope against weather intent on rewriting the script.

Evenings had become equations. Dusk arrived like a theorem rehearsed too often, a small principle of equivalence I carried in my chest like a stone in a pocket. Habit pulled me inward; possibility kept me from collapsing into it. Result: orbit as stalemate, a man held between motion and retreat by forces he couldn’t quite name. Still life in a doorway.

Hello, Equivalence Principle.

Earth keeps its distance from the sun through a balance of pulls: gravity inward, inertia outward, a quiet argument neither side ever wins. A person can live like that too, circling an old sadness to keep from breaking free.

I walked on, caught between the night’s intentions and my own. Besides, how many times can one reread The Stranger before the stranger ends up being you?Procrastination mimics physics. I’d been stuck in my own orbital stasis: one foot out, the other clinging to familiar ground—the hotel room, its obedient lamps, its bed that asks no questions. Not quite regression. Not yet escape. Suspended between the pull of the past and the push of an unknown future, even if the future was only minutes away..

Perhaps it was Spain, where night doesn’t so much fall as arrive fashionably late, draped in cologne and somehow expecting applause. Here, evenings don’t begin before 9:30 PM—for dinner!—a fact that imbues the phrase late-night culture with a faintly sociopathic edge.

Or… Maybe it was the rain. Or maybe it was just me—my particular brand of refined inertia, honed over the years into something approaching craft. Look, Ma—no hands!

Indecision as vocation. Delay as overcoat.

Still, there I was.

⁂

I had taken the train up from Porto. And it was my last night in Santiago de Compostela. Time to break free from the state of limbo I’d perfected, part hesitation, part climatological surrender. I wasn’t the prodigal son, and I certainly wasn’t the pilgrim. But I was out, and I was off. A comet on the loose. Somewhere to be. Nowhere in particular.

It was 10 PM and a veritable Rudyard Kipling deluge was underway; monkeys and tigers falling from the sky, along with a small trace of imperial metaphor. The wind reminded me of standing on a sailboat deck, rain blasting my face, pulling 9 knots that felt like 18.

I pushed forward toward the old town and its cathedral, the same one pilgrims had trudged toward with Sisyphean determination since time immemorial, To repent. To pray and weep. With conviction, preferably—the undebated kind, already written with the feet.

And more recently, to take selfies.

Not me. No sins to expiate. No miracles required. Still, I wouldn’t say no to one. Especially in this weather. But miracles weren’t what I’d come for. I was after something else, something less palpable. The town’s off-the-clock self. Whatever perfume lay beneath the petals. The city’s pulse. Its heartbeat.

But first, I had to find a pulse. The town wasn’t exactly throbbing with joie de vivre. In fact, it barely trembled. Everyone moved with the grave decorum of palace footmen, or at the very least, minor nobility, eyes downcast, expressions measured, as if joy were heavily taxed or possibly discouraged by law. I began to suspect that smiling was a private act, reserved only for babies. Or dogs.

The days had been uniformly grey, the kind of dull, pallid grey that feels almost moral. Skies the colour of tarnished silver, the clouds holding their breath. Streets seemingly woven from lightless steel wool. It wasn’t melancholy so much as resignation, rendered meteorologically. And the people seemed to have absorbed it, wearing the gloom like an inherited coat, too heavy to discard, too familiar to question.

Of course, this was a city of penance. Of spiritual trudging. It always had been. Millions of damp, blistered feet pressing toward the holy doors over the centuries, whispering their mea culpas into stone like coded messages.

Per mea culpa, per mea culpa, per mea grandíssima…

⁂

Could centuries of accumulated penance weigh down a town this size, a hamlet really? All that spiritual baggage, dragged from every far-flung outpost of guilt and sweat-soaked redemption, must leave a trace. Surely.

Not just metaphorically, either. Think of the salt‑streaked stone, the faint clash of incense and human breath, the way austerity and frailty mingle in the air. All those parched souls, their sins murmured into walls. A kind of sanctified dreariness settling into the mortar.

Perhaps smiling here might once have qualified as heresy, a sure sign you weren’t suffering enough. Joy, therefore, would only delay your absolution. The beatings, as they say, would have continued, at least, until morale improved. Perhaps that old chestnut originated right here.

Laughter? A red flag. Probably best to self-flagellate in advance, before they show up to haul you away, force you into the penitential tunic, the infamous San Benito, a yellow sack as billboard, ritualised guilt and spectacle. Punishment staged as theatre.

Confess, and we promise not to kill you.

Whoops, sorry! Torquemada says you’ll have to go.

Burned at the stake.

Inevitably, the local citizenry learned to wear their piety like an old habit: grey, heavy, and deeply suspicious of cheer. Result? Imagine your least favourite uncle showing up uninvited. Not for dinner. For decades. Parked on the good sofa, issuing a rolling commentary on what’s wrong with the family. Eventually, your choices narrow: emigrate, or reach for the particle vaporiser you reserve for rude drivers and self-important baristas. Fallout could be managed, explained later. Surely, Mum would understand. She knew her brother-in-law.

I wandered the quiet lanes of Santiago, musing on the soft-toned Galician temperament, a reticence I’d also encountered in the northern reaches of Portugal. A kind of aural chiaroscuro: low timbres, legato edges, speech seemingly painted with feathered brushstrokes. Conversations in hushed tones and murmurs, as if full volume were somehow gauche.

Their faces, sombre—pious even—might have wandered out of a tenebristic Velázquez scene, all earth tones and soul. I wondered if they were aware of it, this stepping-out-of-a-painting quality; if they ever caught themselves mid-conversation, thinking, I hope I’ve got that Baroque lighting thing going on again.

I grinned. As if anyone’s ever thought that, I half-chided myself. I was keeping myself entertained. You know, sinking in the rain.

And then there was the language: Gallego. Still spoken by everyone. Linguistic inheritance. The Galician dialect is a sepia-toned tongue, tuned not to A-440, but to something between proto-Spanish and Portuguese, as if this corner of the peninsula had once hummed its melodies in that key and a few places remember the tune. Even the name, Santiago, drifted in with etymological seaweed still clinging to it. A time-lapse in syllables.

The word Santiago is derived from the medieval Sant Iago, which came from Iago or Yago, both from Latin. In those centuries the letters I and Y traded places. Today the Y is simply I–griega (“Greek I”).

And behind Iago, or Yago, stood the Greek Iakobos…

Offspring of the Hebrew Ya’akov; Jacob.

From Sant Iago or Sant Yago (the names first used for Saint James), it was a short skip to Santiago.

That’s right, Saints, sailors, scholars, and plebes, all nodding politely down the centuries, tossing the name along like a well-travelled coin.

Fine. But why this northwest corner of Spain?

Legend holds that the apostle James was buried here, and a bright star guided a shepherd to his grave. Yes, the celestial waypoint, that well-worn bit of lore. Fittingly, the name Compostela likely derives from the Latin Campus Stellarum.

In Spanish: Campo de Estrellas.

Today’s Compostela.

Field of Stars.

⁂

The possibilities of such a name evolving that way would normally have left me awestruck, flattened by the poetry of it. Tonight, however, it felt less like heavenly verse and more like a celestial plumbing issue.

The rain was biblical, and oddly inverted, as if it were rising from the cobblestones. Heavy. Crackling. Fat drops striking the ground with something like violence. Chaos Theory in liquid form: each raindrop a tiny quantum event, distinct and unpredictable, yet somehow part of a pattern only perfect chaos could arrange. An ocean suspended midair.

Relative density of raindrops and all that.

You know, all that.

I trudged onward, careful not to slip.

How many more blocks of this? How much farther?

The folks ahead had settled on a simpler, more deterministic solution: they sped up. They moved as if following a principle rather than a street, their heels tapping out a theorem across the slickened stone. Their footsteps clicked in double time, etching a rhythm into the wet flagstones.

Long shadows leaned into the sandstone walls and rippled across the cobbles, as if chasing the couple, like shape-shifting origami figures that darted and contracted at jagged angles, not wanting to be seen, nearly catching them. Never quite. I adjusted my gait, and moved too, though not quite with the same conviction as the shadows.

It could have been a scene out of a 1940s Noir, wet cobblestones, rapid footsteps, a man seemingly on the run, chased by shadows.

As a boy, I was enthralled by old B&W espionage films. I’d often imagine myself in one of them, working for the Resistance during the War, racing down alleys in my not-quite-discreet Citroën 11CV. With the bullet holes in the rear fenders, naturally. Coded messages stitched into the lining of my coat. A Luger P08 by my side. You get it: the whole monochrome fantasy.

Sometimes I’d wonder: if it had been me in that black-and-white world, had I been part of the Prosper SOE network in Paris in 1943, would I have held my composure under Gestapo interrogation? Or would I have cracked, given up the names, the safe-houses, the rendezvous points?

“Never,” I heard myself say.

To no one except the rain.

The rain indulged me.

I quickened my pace. The ancient street was barely wide enough for a bus. No room for cars. No room for uncertainty.

The rain sparked in staccato rebukes against the façades. The echoes did not return so much as hover, layering wall upon wall with a dense, shifting texture. Less weather than choreography; substance and suggestion moving together.

It was the perfect setting for a B-grade noir, in high-contrast black and white, something Joseph MacDonald might’ve rendered, conjured from smoke and lamplight: resistance fighters, wet trench coats and whispered betrayals. Rain-slicked cobbles. Fedoras leaning in doorways, half-moon faces smiling from the dark. Walls glistening. Soft reassurances drowned by rain.

Lies, washed away.

FADE OUT.

⁂

Santiago’s Old Town, UNESCO-stamped these past thirty-odd years, has remained miraculously unsullied. No Tommy Go Figure. No Hugo Bigboss. No boutiques flogging perfume named after celebrities long since embalmed. The global high-street hydra of commerce, it seems, has been kept at bay. For now.

The place refuses, point-blank, to be scrubbed into the idea of a glossy nowhere, the global showroom where cities pawn off their soul, rebranded in Helvetica Neue Thin and venture-cap hype. Where storefronts whistle the same corporate medley, Seoul goes São Paulo chic, and history is repackaged as an influencer’s mural: pastels and hashtags, flanked by designer gelato you were assured is to die for.

Or perhaps, an Asian frozen-yogurt stand called “Moo-fir.” Catchy. And oh-so-pro-biotic. The sort of places where morning arrives with the sound of luggage rolling on the sidewalks, a chorus of accents, and you wake not so much in a city as in the holding pattern of one. Not the city, but its memory—projected, performed, sold back to you as itself. Pity you never knew the original.

In Compostela, what you get instead is something rarer than manufactured charm: texture. A stubborn particularity. A kind of ostinato.

The sandstone buildings remain in neat rows, lined up in solemn obeisance along narrow streets, as they have for centuries, streets that fall into an almost monastic silence between 3:30 and 6:30 p.m., when commerce softens and shutters fall.

Here, shopkeepers still live above themselves. A room behind the counter. A light behind the curtain. The street isn’t a proxy for itself; it has life.

There are signs of modernity, of course.

And there are tourists.

And pilgrims. Quite a few pilgrims, in fact.

Tourism, after all, is its own kind of pilgrimage, a secular rite, complete with rituals, relics, and long lines. The long lines alone, I thought, could explain why Socrates never travelled.

⁂

I was nearing the central plaza, where the Cathedral coexists with several other churches, each one seemingly drawn from a slightly different century. My feet were cold. My lower legs, soaked. The rain had become personal. I made a hard left down a side alley, with no idea where I was headed. I didn’t care. It was time to find refuge.

At the corner, I paused beneath a street sign: Rua da Acibechería*.

Nothing but shuttered shops.

Then, just to the left, an awning. Dim light spilling from within.

That had to be something.

There. Go there! I told myself.

Casa das Crechas, a modest-looking restaurant-bar.

I walked in, folded my umbrella, placed it by the door.

I paused, taking it in.

‘Go on. Pretend this was intentional.’ I heard myself say.

I made my way to the bar, my eyes scanning the place like a man checking for exits he might need to use. Nicely appointed, well lit. A fully seated dining room to the left, the sound of clinking cutlery and conversation. A long, well-stocked bar. A mirrored wall behind me, just in case I forgot who I was. Much nicer than it had looked from the outside.

I took a seat at the long bar. Deep exhale. Sanctuary at last.

The bartenders, two young women, moved around each other with the fluid ease of a well-rehearsed dance, anticipating one another’s movements while trading offhand commentary to keep themselves amused. They made for a lively duo. Easy on the eyes, too, but then again, I had just spent thirty minutes staring at wet stone. At that point, a parking meter in lipstick might’ve turned my head.

A few minutes in, a pair of well-manicured hands poured and served me a Lagavulin Single Malt, exactly what the evening had been clamouring for.

My own form of expiation.

Or at least a way to feel like the night hadn’t entirely won.

The bartender, the one serving me, was a Madrileña, a transplant from Madrid. Her fingernails confirmed it: perfectly coiffed. Madrileñas tended to these and other details of presentation with a fastidiousness bordering on obsession.

It reminded me of my years in Tokyo, where people lived in cramped apartments but emerged onto the street impeccably dressed, often in clothing that cost more than the rent. This was not considered a contradiction. Presentation was the priority. The apartment was just where you slept. Same thing in Italy.

In Madrid, I’d often noticed groups of women stepping off the train in synchronised sartorial splendour, as if they’d called ahead: What are you wearing? Their hair freshly ironed to perfection. I couldn’t help but wonder if they were in a band. As they passed, I was tempted to shout, Hey, where can I buy your CD?!!

Back at the bar, the Lagavulin was proving the perfect anodyne for the slow, soaking cold that had taken up residence in my shins, the rain now a permanent tenant.

I chatted with the bartenders in pauses and cadenzas dictated by the rhythm of service. ‘Just walk away when you need to,’ I told them. We volleyed half-sentences and one-liners across the counter, trying, however briefly, to make sense of the world, or put sense back into it. A time-honoured practice when seated at a bar.

The merits of a second round were under gentle consideration when I noticed an orderly stream of people entering the restaurant and heading down a stairwell near the entrance.

‘Is there a dining room downstairs?’ I asked.

The music’s about to start, one of them replied.

‘Music? Downstairs?’

Yes.

Live music on a Wednesday night, with a downbeat at 11:30 PM…

Intriguing. Slightly baffling.

There wasn’t a single sign indicating a performance space, yet the crowd entered with the quiet certainty of people who knew exactly where they were going. There was something ceremonial in their ease, a choreography, an almost ritualistic movement.

I sensed I’d stumbled onto something.

I settled the bill, made my way down a staircase polished by a thousand pilgrim soles, paid the whopping €1.50 cover charge, and joined the assembled throng.

The venue was crackling with energy. It felt like a speakeasy, not in the Prohibition sense, but in that murmured-under-the-breath, friend-of-a-friend kind of way. An afterthought turned institution. No sign. No marquee. No fanfare. Just word of mouth and instinct. The kind of place you don’t find unless someone tells you where to look, or you stumble in on the right kind of night. A stormy one, perhaps.

Everyone inside seemed to know, not just where to go, but how to be. The room carried that conspiratorial energy, like we were all in on something rare. The air felt suspended, a charged stillness, a note half-heard, half-held, trembling just beneath the surface.

On a small stage, off to the left, a group of musicians were tuning up: fiddles, gaitas (Galician bagpipes), a drum, a clarinet. Someone sat poised on a cajón, tapping out a few test rhythms. One or two others adjusted reeds, tightened strings. No one rushed.

The air was thick with anticipation, charged not with doubt but with the certainty that what came next already belonged to us. To the right, and farther back, a small lagoon of spectators, some seated, most standing.

Then the music started.

And in a slow-building wind-up, the room began to thrill with foot-stomping joy. It was unmistakably a jig, in brisk 6/8 time: the Galician muiñeira.

Eyes closed, I might’ve sworn I was in Ireland. My neighbour, Kelly, back home in Australia, was Irish born. He would’ve certainly loved this. He would have no doubt pointed out the differences. But I didn’t care.

I was nodding. I had found my nightlife, one that managed to transport me to a different space and time.

I was grinning hard now.

Back in Sydney, a venue offering live music by local musicians, on a cold, stormy Wednesday night, in a pedestrian-only zone, with a downbeat at 11:30 PM, and somehow packed?

Pretty much inconceivable.

But here, they came.

And they stayed.

And they were loving it.

And so was I.

I made my way to the bar, weaving and feinting like a halfback headed for the goal line, dodging elbows, ducking whispered comments, slipping through narrow seams in the crowd. When I finally reached it, I found a small nook tucked to the left, with an eyeball view of the stage.

There, finally still, I listened, watched, and let myself drift into a dream zone of my own making.

No Lagavulin here, more of a speed-bar setup. One of the bartenders from upstairs had migrated down, moving behind the counter with quick, precise hands, working at full tilt.

I kept it simple, white wine—’Albariño, por favor.’

When in Galicia… I thought, as I turned my gaze back to the stage.

There was a current coming off the tiny proscenium arch. The air around the musicians was alive, palpable, tuned to something unseen, yet urgent. It felt as though the room were being bombarded with charged particles: ions, electrons, music turned plasma, everyone caught in a kind of solar wind. It wasn’t just music, it was atmosphere reshaped, motion made luminous.

When I turned back to the bar, perhaps two seconds later, the wine was already waiting. What I’d assumed had been a couple of heartbeats had somehow elongated into minutes. Time had folded in on itself, unnoticed, as it always does when beauty looks my way.

The condensation on the glass had given it a soft incandescence, a pearly glow, resting there; patient, serene. As if moonlight had been poured into a goblet.

It was the music. It tugged at the fabric of reality, warping my internal chronometer, bending perception. Time, no longer linear. It unspooled, stretched and curved, moments wafting into one another like ceremonial smoke. A plasticity of the senses. Music can be that way, it tugs at the world around us until we lose track of what points where. And when we emerge, blinking, we ask: Has it really been that long?

I stared at the wine glass with a certain astonishment. Then my gaze was pulled away by the bartender’s hands, her movements swift, unbroken, and assured. I watched as she deftly assembled glasses and poured. I thought of that old adage: that both caution and daring begin and end at the fingertips.

My own life, I reflected, had been an abstract balance of both. Or so I liked to believe. The truth was, I’d inexplicably hesitated more often than I would have liked. Talked myself out of more than I’d care to admit. But I’d also jumped in, and out, of things most people wouldn’t dare consider.

Jumping out of a plane? Check.

Class V whitewater rapids? Check.

Aerobatics in a Pitts Special? Roger that.

Living with a tall, beautiful woman with eyes like icy glacier melt? Check.

I had long since outgrown the paralysing shyness that once defined me, but it still ambushed me from time to time. Like a dormant muscle reawakening. Or a memory I’d forgotten. A sleeper agent in a doorway, biding its time, waiting to strike. Leaving the hotel earlier tonight, for instance.

The quiet standoffs no one saw, those were the moments I knew best.

And inside my head, a monologue always played out, wrapped in the crushed velvet of philosophical musings. Sometimes it was a wrestling match: internalised contradictions having an argy-bargy, a tug-of-war. My own version of the Equivalence Principle, pulled by opposing forces.

Do I say hello, risk clumsiness—or stay silent?

Do I go, or do I stay?

This time, I stayed.

It was the music. It held me.

Gravity, I think it’s called.

Text and photography by Raphael Antonio Nazario, (writing as Raphaël de Saav).

© 2026, All Rights Reserved.

*A bit of irony: Rúa da Acibechería is a street named for the old azabache carvers; the jet stone amulet sold to pilgrims for centuries as protection against the evil eye and whatever else the road might throw at them.

Moral: if you’re going to hide from malevolence or ill-tempered weather, you might as well do it on the street that’s been selling protection since the Middle Ages.

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Uncle Ruben pulled up at 5:15 in the morning, earlier than I had ever been awake. I was certain of it. When I opened the door, he flashed his thousand-kilowatt smile. “Qué hubo, Tubo?” he said, as he slipped inside, breezy as ever. I never quite understood that phrase. He pressed a stick of Dentyne into my hand as he passed, like sealing a small, clandestine deal. A secret handshake.

Ruben always chewed Dentyne. That red pack with its cinnamon sting, it meant something. This was grownup stuff, not like those gaudy gumballs in supermarket machines. Dentyne had presence. A code of honour, kinda. And Ruben always carried it. He chewed it like a man with somewhere to be, even when he wasn’t going anywhere. If he chewed Dentyne, it must’ve been cool. And if he gave me one, even before sunrise, it meant I belonged.

Gum was verboten in our house, deemed undignified. My father said it made people look like cows. Empty-headed chewing, he’d declare, with a kind of disdain. But Ruben was our diplomatic immunity.

Ruben was one of my father’s younger brothers and carried the same rugged blueprint, a sort of worn-in, well-loved novel of a face. Handsome in the way tweed is good-looking. Of my father’s fourteen siblings, Ruben, Jimmy and Tony, the youngest three, were the crown princes of cool. Uncle Victor wasn’t far behind in that sweepstakes. Naturally, anything they did had that air. Truth is, they could’ve chewed leather and I still would’ve considered it cool.

We all piled into Ruben’s midnight-blue ’56 Ford Fairlane Victoria, which gleamed like a showroom promise. I loved that car. Its dashboard was like an old-time Wurlitzer jukebox: chunky knobs, chrome toggles.

My mother and sisters took the back seat. I was pressed between Ruben and my father, my feet tucked beneath a boxy, blue heater Ruben had installed the previous winter. It hung over the centre hump, like a mute radio, radiating warmth and obstruction in equal measure.

I remembered the story of that heater, Ruben in the kitchen, crowing about driving the Fairlane up from southern Florida, where heaters were superfluous. Said he’d gotten a deal. My father nodded with the solemnity men reserve for practical triumphs. They hadn’t seen me, listening from the doorway. But then, I lived in the margins of the page. That soft, almost invisible space where children hover. And remember.

Now, the heater under my feet felt like a memento from that overheard memory, a warm obstruction. Fitted after the fact. I was the aftermarket child, after all, wedged in the middle, making room where there wasn’t any.

We drove in the kind of contemplative silence that hangs between indecision and action, the world still padded with sleep. The houses we passed were dark. Jersey City hadn’t yet stirred, as if unsure whether to rise at all.

The horizon above was a Rothko-like band of cold silver cut beneath a wash of navy and black. Maybe we were the silver, the razor slicing through the sky.

The houses kept drifting past, afloat on a sea of imagined life. I pictured voices behind those shaded windows, low pitched, nearly whispered. Movements deliberate. Coffee freshly made, steam curling in the half-light. Perhaps poured from the cup onto a saucer, then sipped slowly, like Billy Flanagan’s father did.

Billy was my best friend. My only friend, really. He and I had made a pact, with pricked fingers and solemn nods. Blood mingled in belief. It was never play. We fully believed it. And now, with the engine carrying me elsewhere, the thread of it pulled taut. But would it hold? In his newsy-but-not-really letters, he’d always sign off,

‘Your pal forever, Billy.’

I’d pondered that impending loss daily, but I didn’t speak of it, or of anything else. Words wouldn’t help. My sisters and I had been informed barely two weeks earlier that we were leaving Jersey City. Our protests were met with pursed lips, signalling us to be quiet. And now, filling the air with chatter wouldn’t change anything. Besides, in our house, the policy was ‘You speak when you’re spoken to.’ Management preferred it that way.

They also didn’t welcome noise. We were meant to be seen, not heard. And even then, only briefly.

The orange needle of the speedometer trembled, sometimes slow-dancing across the arc to the right, then to the left. The little white numbers in the centre kept ticking forward in silence. An odometer of exile. The last number to the right always seemed to be turning. I watched the tenths roll by. Distance was accumulating. My life turning in odometric moments.

Dawn spilled wider. Just as we crested a hill, the New York City skyline materialised, rising like a gigantic billboard in the sky: imposing, unavoidable. We were nearing the Holland Tunnel. That was when it really began to sink in: we were leaving. We only crossed the tunnel for events: occasional weddings, distant cousins in Brooklyn, the rare Sunday out in Connecticut. But this wasn’t Sunday. Even if my sisters were dressed as if they were on their way to Easter Mass.

My memories of the toll booth live on the fringes of surreal dreamscape: a liminal space staffed by men in crisp uniforms and milkman hats. Ruben handed over the fare with his breezy charm: ‘Good morning!’

Then he looked at me. ‘Excited?’

Had I responded, the answer would have been ‘no!’

‘It’s a new kind of plane,’ he said. ‘A jet!’

His buoyant tone made it sound like a spaceship.

‘Three hours! That’s all!’

He tried again, in a gravelly voice. ‘Three hours!’ as he elbowed me playfully.

The pause at the toll became a season.

In the tunnel, I focused on the pale-yellow tiles. Thousands of them. Millions, possibly. My favourite pastime when crossing the tunnel was to track one tile and try to follow it as it sped past me, like playing tag with geometry.

Who put them there? Did those workers know they were underwater? Did it scare them? And the guard booths inside the tunnel, they were always empty. What were they guarding? The tiles?

I wondered these things, usually. But not today. Today I was memorising. Imprinting every curve, every dent.

⁂

Moments later, we emerged into the city’s early light. I saw my first real rat. It darted across glistening stones, a slick cobbled street, disappearing into the base of some building. I had never seen a rat before. Not outside of a Jimmy Cagney movie. In those, the rats wore suits. And fedoras.

Those dirty rats.

A few turns later, we were headed for Idlewild.

My father, keeper of trivia and firm believer in the authority of facts, explained the name. His information, like his silences, was always delivered as edict: the airport had once been a golf course, he said. I filed the salient detail away. It would later be renamed JFK.

Billy Flanagan loved Kennedy. He was first-generation Irish, after all. That’s how I came to love Kennedy too. Well before the election, we stood on corners chanting, ‘Nixon, Nixon, boo boo boo! Kick him in the ash can, two by two!’ Followed by, ‘Kennedy! Kennedy! Yay yay yay! Put him in the White House too-day!’

The kind of earnest activity that gave a couple of nine-year-olds a sense of belonging. Besides, we actually thought we were helping Kennedy.

I was lost in that reverie when Ruben gave me one of his side-grins. ‘You’re gonna be on a pretty fast plane,’ he said again, warming to his role as cheerleader.

From the backseat came my mother’s voice: ‘Pan Am built a terminal just for those jets.’

‘Boeing 707,’ my father corrected. Of course he did. They liked correcting each other. It was their version of affection.

My sisters appeared entirely nonplussed by any aeroplane conversation. They were resplendent in their Easter finery, ready for Mr DeMille’s close-up.

Ruben saw me looking over my shoulder. He glanced into the rearview mirror. ‘You alright back there?’ he asked, soft as a peach.

What were they supposed to say? It’s not like we could stop the car and reverse the morning.

⁂

The road slid under the car like a carpet, the little chrome bird at the edge of the hood gently bobbing up and down as the Ford surged ever forward.

I recalled how Ruben once helped my father practise in this very car, two men circling the edges of a morning. I would not learn until decades later that my father had driven trucks in the Army in Hawaii, waiting for a war that never reached him. He was meant to be part of the first wave to invade Japan, though the tide receded before any such invasion came ashore. That tide had a name: ‘Little Boy.’

Afterwards, he apparently never bothered with a civilian licence. Perhaps the act of driving had already fulfilled its purpose. Besides, he had returned to his parents’ farm in Puerto Rico, to a place and time where no one bothered with such formalities. Yet, there he was, years later, dutifully tracing slow loops through a park in Bayonne, the blue Ford Victoria coasting. In the rearview mirror: a rectangle of my father, his expression one of melancholy.

The park itself seemed to exist only to confirm the ordinariness of things. Older folks feeding pigeons, children on swings … would-be bucolic in an urban setting. But then, Bayonne was mostly unremarkable, its humility a kind of permanence. As if cowed to be in view of Manhattan.

And now here we were. Departure day. No fanfare. No ‘fare thee well’ send-off party. No special breakfast. Only the stomach-churning crescendo of anticipation, and the small blue box above my feet, radiating only the idea of warmth, as if the car itself understood we were leaving.

Then came the heat.

The Stain of the Plantain — a memoir. To be released November 2026.

© 2026 Raphael Antonio Nazario, writing as Raphaël de Saav.

All rights reserved.

Thank You for reading.

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In June 1981, when vineyards were largely private estates, before wineries learned to gild their grounds with cafés and over-curated gift shops, my friend Greg Zancanella and I arrived at Hotel Le Cep in the hived heart of Beaune, the emotional epicentre of Burgundy, its beating glass heart. Another leg of our long pilgrimage through France and Italy was uncoiling. Introductions had been secured, letters written, names exchanged, appointments inked; small ceremonies in the liturgy of the vine.

Our first day had belonged to Maison Louis Latour, a chapter told elsewhere on this Substack in “On Wine and Friendship.” Yet the road ahead gleamed with promise, sun pooling in its water-patched ruts: Rousseau, Dujac, Faiveley—nouns and syllables like saints on a procession banner carried by us, wine-besotted pilgrims. And today, the prospect of ascent, to that narrow band of earth where eagles turn in their own reflections: the revered Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, casually known as ‘DRC’ among wine cognoscenti.

‘Cognoscenti,’ of course, is Latin for “wine geeks like us.”

The tour so far had been a tapestry of quiet enthralment. Before Beaune, we had drifted through Champagne and Bordeaux, meandering at first into Épernay, where we were regaled by the impeccable hospitality and witty banter of Christian Pol Roger. At one point, he opened a cabinet of telegrams from Winston Churchill, dispatches of gratitude and of horses victorious. Churchill had first met the house in the early 1900s and never quite left it; his faith was counted not in prayers but in bottles; one or two each day, bubbles rising like applause in the dark, the Luftwaffe circling above, metallic vultures with bombs.

Ah yes, the horse. Pol Roger, a bay colt foaled in 1950, gallant under the old lion’s colours. A racer. He ran well: Chester Vase, Ascot Trial, and in 1953— Coronation Year—the Kempton Park Stakes, each stride a small empire reclaimed. Churchill was immensely proud of him.

As for me, I don’t horse around. Much.

Later that day we ventured into the catacombs of Moët et Chandon, because, if in Épernay, why not. Labyrinthine tunnels carved into chalk (craie), the same geology that informs and defines its wines’ minerality. Endless rows of bottles lay asleep in their chalk cradles, like monks in meditation. The air was cool, mineral, faintly chalk-scented, as if the wine were wrapped in recollection, remembering what it once was: grape, rain, wind and silence. As if the earth itself were fermenting memory.

We too completed our Épernay cycle and returned to Paris, a rehearsal in seeking perfection, gazing out the rain-washed glass of mornings. It was June, after all, a time when the city is often described as half-luminous, half pewter skies. The city hanging between radiance and restraint. Afternoons lingered in their amber drift; evenings dissolved almost tenderly into their own reflection.

And yet, the sky’s mood could turn irascibly, an exhale of grey, a muted grief, and then the fine mist began. Not a proper rain, really, more like the air deciding where to weep, discreetly.

Parisian rain carries a kind of ritualistic theatre. Ceremony is conferred upon the ordinary: streets lacquered to a mirror, café awnings trembling, the Seine acquiring in its composure, a grey sheen. The kind of weather that helps you understand why so many painters—those we know, and those we never heard of—returned obsessively to reflection; why poets wrote about distance and longing. And so beauty, inevitable as the aftertaste of wine, conspired to delay our leaving.

We headed southwest, first by train, and then in a rented Renault 4L, the gear shift drawn straight from the dash, a small act of faith, initially. The countryside’s contours seemed to hum in repose, the road unfurling in long lyrical cadenzas, green-hemmed rolling mantras of hedgerow and cloud-shadow, the land itself intoning its refrain. We were pilgrims, self-appointed knights of no order but our own, questing for enlightenment and gravitas, bound for the land once given as Eleanor of Aquitaine’s dowry: Bordeaux, where earth, history, and inheritance still exchanged glances.

At first, the town appeared ordinary, the afterimage of Paris still too vivid in my besotted mind. Only later did I learn—O slow enlightenment!—that its stones schooled Haussmann, that those streets rehearsed empire, that geometry could dream itself grander.

Pauillac.

You could feel it, the ground wasn’t still, not really. The stillness was a disguise, the kind that comes from long habit. A slow, persuasive rhythm moved beneath the soil, a pulse that had nothing to prove. Along each row, a rosebush stood with the formality of ceremony, its purpose half beauty, half sentry. The first to fade if mildew were to arrive. The old system still held: a delicate, almost courtly système d’alarme.

The roses moved as if remembering. Their small hum wafted through the air, a sound too fine for hearing, yet the wind knew the measure and carried it along. The land, old and listening, seemed to nod, the wise one who had heard the tune before, in other centuries.

The vines keep their own account. They remember what came late and what never came at all. Rain, if at times reluctant, still lingers in their marrow. They have learned to speak without words, to offer patience.

And fruit as proof.

It was a kind of still music. It wasn’t language exactly, but an idiom of grace, a quiet resilience shaped by repetition, by an attention that borders on devotion. It was as if each vine were absorbed in its own meditation, repeating a mantra it had never needed to translate. Vineyards hum; anyone who has lingered there knows this. A field of slow respiration, the air itself turned instrument.

It is a quiet music, neither prayer nor speech. The kind that moves through everything that breathes. I think the vines repeat what the soul forgets. That endurance is a form of grace, and that silence, too, is alive.

Sometimes the air trembles with it. Not a song, precisely, but something near to dreaming.

“Ohmmmm,” someone once said, half in jest. Not wrong.

There are vineyards, and then there are vineyards. Wineries, and then something else. Château Mouton Rothschild was not a destination so much as a threshold, a point of entry between the remembered, the imagined, and what I chose to forget. That ’62 Mouton with Roberto Matta’s label declaring « Son tendre velouté séduit les plus rebelles » marked a shift in my perception, the faint click of a hinge. At first, I liked the label more than the wine; by the end of the bottle, it was the other way around.

So, “Its soft, velvety texture seduces even the most rebellious” was indeed true. Somewhere in that slow unfurling, something shifted. It was the moment I began to understand that beauty could live in the ordinary. A wine label with art on it. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did.

What followed was a gradual, almost imperceptible transition, a drift from mere habit to discernment, a gentle course correction, from reading mostly history books to noting its billowing echoes in literature. The same stories told sideways, refracted through language. And I discovered books on wine! André Simon, Cyril Ray, Lichine—each one not so much about consumption as about consciousness. Mouton, by then, had ceased to be a place. For me, it had become an ideal, an axis of attention, my Bodh Gaya of the palate, where perception, a kind of perspicacity, began to take shape, unsteady but awake. And today, if I were a pilgrim, I have arrived.

We were received by Raoul Blondin, the legendary maître de chai and given a personal tour of the barrel room and a tasting. I felt quietly honoured to taste from the barrels but also to act as translator for my friend Greg. What I remember most is the stillness, and the astonishment of being there.

Later came an afternoon tête-à-tête with Jean-Michel Cazes at Château Lynch-Bages, still etched in memory like a photograph left too long in the sun, conversation and oak bathed in light, a photograph that’s been fading ever since. But not too much.

And then there are those moments that transcend both time and place. One of ours came while wandering through the cellars with Jean-Michel, where the air was cool and smelled faintly of yeast, oak and memory. When he pressed into my hands an unlabelled bottle of clear liquid; what he called, with a smile, Rikiki (the spelling may elude me), a Marc distilled from the estate’s own pomace by his grandfather during the Nazi occupation, the scent of sun and survival sealed within. He also gifted us a bottle of the estate’s white wine, made in quantities so small it never reaches the market. Treasure. The entire day felt like a gift.

But let’s return to Burgundy. We set out with the best intentions, focus intact, as if the act itself required discipline. A kind of solemnity hung in the air, as if we were off to our first Holy Communion, or Bar Mitzvah, and the air tinged with promise. We arrived early, of course. We wondered about that: how many before us had done the same? Were we just another pair of over-eager souls knocking on the door of the prettiest girl in town, not realising that five thousand had already tried, and another two-hundred-and-fifty were queued behind. A bit tragic, really.

So finally, at Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, we felt a reverence that was almost liturgical, the land suddenly both pilgrim and altar, in spite of being too early.

Did I say brimming with anticipation? Over-eager? Perhaps. Or perhaps it seems that way now, seen through the concave lens of self-judgement, looking back on what was still an innocent stage of my life, with the kind of bemused irony that only the passing seasons can offer. I should probably stop doing that.

We wandered the rows at La Tâche and took a few perfunctory photographs. They were only placeholders—of the emotional kind, for nothing could quite capture the place or our feelings about it.

La Romanée lay just beyond, with Richebourg a little to the north. The two are bound by more than geography; twins, in a way, separated in 1764, when the Prince of Conti affixed his name to what was already legend. In Burgundy, borders don’t always promise kinship. A few metres of soil can alter everything.

It’s easy to imagine that La Romanée carries the residue of its years under the Church, when the Abbey of Saint-Vivant held much of what would become the Grand Crus of Vosne-Romanée. But the truth is simpler, older. The name is Roman. Burgundy once straddled a main artery of the empire, the route that ran north from the Mediterranean to Lutetia (Paris before it was Paris), cutting straight through what is now the Côte d’Or. The vines have been listening ever since.

By 1631, when the vineyard passed by marriage to Philippe de Croonembourg, the names already carried weight. History had begun to cling to them: La Romanée—later also Romanée-Conti—Richebourg, La Tâche, Romanée-Saint-Vivant. The lineage was intact, the hierarchy unspoken but understood.

Even so, the place felt consecrated, touched by something older than ownership. All that was missing was a chapel. We took photographs, ordinary ones, the kind people take when they don’t know how else to hold on to a moment. They seemed small at the time, unremarkable, but memory edits its own negatives.

In the end, they felt like relics.

(continues…)

—Raphael Antonio Nazario, writing as Raphaël de Saav.

(de Saav is a compression of ‘de Saavedra,’ my grandmother’s maiden name.)

© 2025. All Rights Reserved.

Photographs by Greg Zancanella or myself.

La Tâche—photograph by Tomas er (Wikimedia commons)

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At dawn, as the sun burns the silvery mist from the hills of Querétaro, a lone horseman tightens his saddle cinch. The leather creaks. His horse exhales a thread of steam into the pale light. A battered makeshift lance rests upright against the stirrup, its point catching a faint glint. Below him the valley lies quiet, a still life of sorts, and, more tellingly, a would-be empire in collapse. He adjusts his hat, gazes east, and waits.

They called him a Chinaco. The word once carried a deprecatory edge: the ragged, unofficial cavalry of the countryside, men in patched charro jackets and borrowed pride, armed with lances, sabres, and whatever rifles they could scavenge. Poor, often mestizo, sometimes ex-bandits or dispossessed rancheros. Their enemies mocked them as a cavalry of scarecrows. But the scarecrows had teeth.

During the War of Reform in 1857 and the later French Intervention, the Chinacos emerged from necessity, shaped by the pressures they resisted and the ones they outran. A loose brotherhood formed in the narrow space between desperation and resolve. Their warfare carried the terrain’s signature: an ambush in a canyon, a crack of gunfire that faded as quickly as it came. They rode without uniform or hierarchy, answering only to one another and the land. To Mexico’s peasantry they were heroes; to its landed gentry, dangerous men in tattered elegance.

That elegance had deep roots. The word charro first appears in Iberian usage—in Galician and Portuguese—in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Later in Castilian Spanish as well, a derogatory term for the rustic and unrefined, and for things overly decorated or in bad taste. On the Salamanca plains, the “Campo Charro” became a local identifier, the countryside’s own name for itself. There, the rural horsemen and cattlemen took the word on, roughening it into pride.

Crossing the Atlantic

Once in Mexico, the meaning shifted, finding new soil: vast haciendas, Indigenous labour, unfamiliar horses, a wilder light. The Spaniards had brought the horse to ‘New Spain’, as Mexico was then known, in the sixteenth century, but the Viceroyalty forbade most Indigenous men from riding or owning horses, granting that privilege only to Tlaxcaltec nobles and allied chieftains. Over time, the mestizo vaqueros (from vaca—cow, as in cowhands) of New Spain developed their own mastery of riding and roping, their own code of skill and ceremony. The rustic insult of charro was thus inverted, becoming a title, a kind of defiance on horseback.

These riders adapted Iberian tack and attire to local needs. The short jacket (to avoid snagging), the tight, high-waisted trousers, and the sombrero (which evolved from the broad-brimmed Andalusian hat into something grander and more practical under the Mexican sun), all became part of a uniquely Mexican evolution of Spanish equestrian culture.

By the eighteenth century, these riders were unapologetically known as charros, inheritors of Salamanca’s name and Andalusia’s style, but now distinctly Mexican in rhythm, colour, and attitude. Their charrería, the ritual of cattle-handling, roping, and riding, was at once sport, spectacle, and social code.

From that culture of horse and pageantry came another word: caballero. Literally, a man of the horse. In medieval Spain, to own one was to rise a few steps nearer heaven, the animal itself conferring rank. Over time, the word shifted from status to conduct: caballero as gentleman, man of principle, knightly in bearing if not in birth. To ride well was to live well, to move through the world with a cultivated grace, held in check. Even in war.

But history has a habit of inverting its symbols. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Mexican caballeros—the landed charros—wore splendour like armour, their clothing a pageant of class. The Chinacos, banned by caste from such finery, wore it anyway. Torn, patched, re-sewn: both parody and reclamation. In their hands, the embroidered jackets of the colonisers, the landed gentry, became rebellion’s costume, a form of defiance. They were caballeros of another kind: without estates, without heraldry, but with all the dignity that courage affords.

The “Empire” Arrives

Into this world of horse and honour stumbled Maximilian of Austria, a Habsburg, a man of letters, chamber music and gardens, unsuited to conflict and conquest. He was the unwitting pawn of Napoleon III of France, who had seized upon Mexico’s instability after Benito Juárez suspended foreign debt payments.

It’s actually a bit more complex than that.

The Mexican Debt Crisis

After a decade of wars and political upheaval following independence (1821), Mexico was essentially bankrupt. By the 1850s it had borrowed heavily from European creditors—Britain, France, and Spain—to finance its governments and conflicts.

In 1858, the Reform War flared up, Mexico’s defining 19th-century struggle between colonial conservatism and liberal modernity. It was the bloody conflict which finally broke the Church’s grip on land and politics, established secular governance, and enshrined constitutional liberalism. The fighting was savage and chaotic, almost gutting the soul of the nation. Benito Juárez, a Zapotec lawyer and liberal reformer, emerged victorious as president in 1861. But he inherited a devastated economy and foreign debts totalling roughly 80 million pesos.

That number represented a colossal financial burden; in today’s terms, tens of billions of U.S. dollars. A daunting sum for such a poor country at the time. So, on 17 July 1861, Juárez issued a decree suspending all foreign debt payments for two years. It wasn’t an act of hostility but a pragmatic, if desperate, attempt to keep the country afloat. To the European creditors, however, it looked like default and defiance.

The “Tripartite Alliance”

The three countries holding Mexican bonds reacted quickly. They signed the London Convention (October 1861), agreeing to send a joint expedition to gently pressure Mexico to resume payments. The plan was officially humanitarian and financial, not territorial.

In December 1861, Spanish troops landed in Veracruz, soon joined by British and French forces. Their initial occupation was relatively diplomatic, until Napoleon III’s imperial ambitions began to show. Under the guise of collecting what was owed, he launched an invasion, his empire’s Latin gambit, a Catholic counterweight to the Protestant United States, then preoccupied with its Civil War.

A year earlier, in Trieste, Napoleon’s envoys had paid a visit to Archduke Maximilian. They arrived armed with flattering reports, curated petitions, and a sales pitch polished to a shine: Mexico, they insisted, was begging for a European monarch. It was persuasion by velvet glove, conducted in drawing rooms that looked out over the Adriatic, each conversation designed to make Maximilian feel not merely chosen, but inevitable. They sold him a mirage—an empire pre-wrapped in consent, tied up with a ribbon of destiny.

He believed them. Of course he did.

A gentle, reform-minded man, Maximilian arrived in 1864 with his wife Carlota, imagining himself a saviour. She—ever the more ambitious one—imagined herself an empress and did much of the convincing. She even travelled with bolts of fabric and redesign schemes for the palace she fully expected to reign over. At last, an empire of their own, no longer those idle afternoons in Miramar, wondering what to do with all that finery. But the dream dissolved on contact. Maximilian became the figurehead of an occupation, his realm extending only as far as the reach of French bayonets; beyond that narrow radius, the Chinacos ruled the dust. Juárez refused to bend. From the north, he led a government-in-exile and waged a guerrilla war that refused to stay buried.

Maximilian tried to govern with compassion, abolishing peonage, supporting education, dreaming of harmony, but his temperament was too mild for governing, especially when an iron fist was required. The conservatives who had invited him despised his liberalism. The liberals saw him as weak, a foreigner playing emperor in borrowed robes. He meant well, of course. They usually do.

When the United States emerged from its Civil War, it cautioned Napoleon with the Monroe Doctrine, a courteous reminder that empires were best kept on their own side of the ocean, diplomacy and threat sharing the same glass of sherry. The American message, delivered with a smile, amounted to: Lovely fleet you’ve got there. Shame if something happened to it.

France withdrew, leaving Maximilian alone to face a republic and a culture he had never really understood. His was a 19th-century, Teutonic mindset of empire with the bonus addition of regal entitlement—as right, not privilege. God-given right, at that. His wife, Carlotta, meanwhile, embarked on an ill-fated trip to France to personally appeal to Napoleon to return the troops to support her husband. It was not to be, and Carlotta never returned to Mexico. In fact, she went mad. But that came later.

Meanwhile, Maximilian was captured by republican forces, comprised of troops and many a Chinaco. He was taken south, to Querétaro, which became his final tableau. On the eve of his execution, a fellow prisoner offered to help him escape, but he declined. Perhaps it was resignation, or perhaps because he knew there was nowhere to go. In accepting the Mexican assignation, he had agreed to sign away his rights to the throne, and with them any possible return to Austria, precisely what his brother—who had the agreement drawn up—desired.

Franz Joseph had never wanted the younger, gentler Maximilian back to steal his light. And so as he stood in front of the firing squad, his last desultory words, “Viva México,” dissolving into gun smoke. He had even refused a blindfold. At dawn on 19 June 1867, on the Cerro de las Campanas, the Hill of the Bells, the emperor was executed, ending not only a life but a farce—Napoleon’s conceit of grandeur. For France it was humiliation; for Mexico, a rough rebirth.

Brass and Dust

Maximilian’s soldiers fled north, carrying their brass instruments, the tubas, cornets, trombones, marching band relics of a dream of Empire, European-styled. In the borderlands, those instruments, along with the accordion, found new breath. Within a generation, the rhythms of the old continent—waltzes, polkas, Bohemian schottisches—fused with local sentiment. The result was Norteña: brass and longing, Europe and exile turned into music that belonged wholly to the land.

And if you listen for the first forty seconds of that ‘accordion’ link, a recording of “La Duda” by Ramón Ayala, you might think you are hearing an spirited Alpine intro: the accordion opens with a bracing, Tyrolean swagger, the sort of lead one associates more with Bavarian beer-halls than with the arid latitudes of Nuevo León. Then the melody pivots, the voice comes in, and you are unmistakably in Northern Mexico.

The Chinacos themselves faded into legend, their names carried in corrídos sung around campfires. (A corrído is a Mexican narrative ballad, part history, part legend, sung to recount the deeds of heroes, bandits, and the hard truths of ordinary lives.) But their spirit endured, in defiance, in music, even in the way a rider on a horse still moves through open country. When Pancho Villa rose half a century later, he inherited that ghost. His División del Norte, wide sombreros, bandoliers crossed in Xs of rebellion, rifles slung across saddles, was Chinaco reborn. Villa admired their tactics, their audacity, their refusal to bow. Even his image, the outlaw-turned-general, echoed theirs.

By the Revolution’s end, the line between charro and Chinaco had blurred into myth. The charro suit, once the regalia of the hacendado—a wealthy landowner in colonial and 19th-century Latin America, proprietor of vast estates (haciendas) and the social order that supported them—became the national costume.

The charro’s finery was reborn in silver braid and black wool, the aristocrat’s pride. The Chinaco’s patched finery, by contrast, was that same pride made ad-hoc democratic. It embodied a national temperament: creative pragmatism born of scarcity and pluck, a characteristically Mexican trait that endures to this day.

In the mariachi band and especially the Norteña ensemble, one can still hear the long echo of that transformation: Maximilian’s brass bands turned insurgent, the music of conquest rephrased in a new key. In Mexico, it is known as Banda.

Another Lineage: “Charro” as Loud or Garrulous
Some trace the word not to the fields of Salamanca but to its speech. In old Castilian, charro may have sprung from charrar—to prattle, to chatter, to talk too much. From that verb came charlar, the modern Spanish “to chat.”

From Derision to Distinction

Over time, that insult began to invert. Those same charros, the rural horsemen of Salamanca, turned their supposed roughness into identity. They were boastful in the best sense, proud of their speech, their clothes, their horsemanship. In that reversal lies the seed of the Mexican transformation: a word once used to belittle rustic noise became a synonym for poise and swagger.

On many a night in Mexico, the music starts late and refuses to stop. Brass blares at two in the morning, the tubas breathing like beasts, the trumpets slicing through sleep. The speakers usually face the street, rarely inward, because the music isn’t meant for those who already hear it, the same way the gleam of silver buckles isn’t meant for those who wear them. It’s meant for whoever doesn’t hear the sound. For the neighbour trying to rest. For the silence itself.

It used to irritate me, what I considered sonic arrogance. And here, years later, I realise it wasn’t arrogance at all. It was inheritance. The same defiant instinct that made the Chinaco wear his torn charro jacket with pride, the same need to be seen in a world that tried to make him invisible. Loudness, here, is an old ritual, sound as survival, music as declaration.

There’s no irony in it. Mexico plays its music loud because it remembers being silenced. The empire might have once spoken in Castilian, or French, but the land spoke Nahuatl, and the people learned to shout in brass. What seems like noise is, in fact, a kind of dignity. A continuation of that ancestral theatre of presence, the silver jacket gleaming under a desert moon, the chinaco standing tall in his borrowed splendour, the speakers now replacing the horse, the sound replacing the banner.

Every blast of Norteña, every tuba note ricocheting down an empty street, is a callback to that same creed: visibility as redemption, audibility as proof of life.

A music loud enough to keep history awake.

© 2025 Raphael Antonio Nazario, writing as Raphaël de Saav. All Rights Reserved.

(de Saav is a compression of ‘de Saavedra,’ my grandmother’s maiden name.)

La perdí en algún lugar.
En algún lugar del tiempo.
No sé cuándo, ni cómo.
Ni siquiera su nombre.
A menos que fueras tú.
Tú sabes quién eres.

Y así sigo buscando,
esperando encontrar...

No tengo testigo de mi pena.
Solo el corazón del viento,
latente en mi nostalgia.
Un peso constante,
un affair sin cierre.
El carrete desenrollado,
la historia partida
antes de que entrara el héroe,
una vida deshabitada,
un papel sin asignar.

Ahora hay una nube
siempre sentada a mi lado.

¿Es un deseo
que he tomado por necesidad?
¿O una necesidad
que he bautizado en fe?
¿Una adicción a la esperanza?
Como aquellos mineros de 1849
que fueron hacia el oeste con las manos vacías,
no encontraron oro,
pero siguieron cavando
en la noche,
en el desamor y la penumbra,
en una oscuridad tan azul
que devoró sus propias sombras.

Hasta que incluso los árboles
las tragaron por completo.

Y sin embargo, en mis huesos, lo siento:
en alguna parte, alguien espera.
Tal vez me espere a mí,
a que las puertas se abran
por sí solas,
a que una mirada cruce la sala
como por accidente,
dos espejos que encuentran la luz del otro,
multiplicándose en una sola imagen.

Hasta que, contra todo pronóstico,
los dos quizá lleguemos
a reconocernos,
y sonriamos,
como diciendo,
por fin.

—Raphael Antonio Nazario

© 2025. Todos los derechos reservados.

Gracias por acompañarme en la lectura. No busco suscripciones de pago en esta casa de palabras.

Mi música se puede encontrar en línea en YouTube, Soundcloud, en Apple Music: aqui, aqui, et aqui; con selecciones más limitadas en Spotify y también Bandcamp.

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English wasn’t English when Geoffrey Chaucer picked up his quill. And Chaucer wasn’t quite a writer yet either. Born between 1340 and 1345, the son of vintners with wealth but no title, he came of age pouring wine in the court of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster. A butler in livery, more servant than poet, but one who could spin a verse or sing a tune when the nobles needed diversion. His earliest models were French, the court still steeped in it, the poets still singing in it, even if the countess herself was Anglo-Irish. And so, it was his first works echoed their cadences. The Book of the Duchess. The Parliament of Birds. Both heavy with French flourishes. By all accounts, he was a man headed toward the polished courtly life of French verse. And yet, improbably, Chaucer turned to the rougher tongue heard in the markets, the stables, the taverns. The language of Saxons who raised sheep rather than the nobles who feasted on mutton.

He wrote in Middle English, that awkward teenager of a language; half-Saxon grunt, half-French flourish, with a few Viking tattoos still showing up for dinner. Not a complete vocabulary. Not yet. More like a messy kitchen-sink stew bubbling on the back burner, its lexicon nothing more than chicken feet and bones half-submerged. Ragged scraps of a language in the making.

Languages do this. They squat, they scrawl on the walls, they layer like old paint. They don’t replace each other politely. Dutch isn’t just “old German,” though some people contend it is. In fact, Dutch split early from the larger West Germanic family. Martin Luther, a Saxon from Eisleben, later translated the Bible into his own dialect, East Central German. That local tongue, by accident of history and the printing press, became the basis for Hoch Deutsch, aka ‘High German,’ an illusion of unity. But Dutch had been growing in its own direction all along. Stubborn that way.

Quebecois French tells another story: it froze in place. Listen closely and you’ll hear 17th-century Paris preserved on the banks of the St. Lawrence. What might sound quaint to Parisian ears today is simply the sound of a language caught in amber, a bit gruffer for all those intervening years. Don’t say that to a Quebecois, though, unless you want trouble.

Even Latin in the Roman Empire had learned from this story. The emperor Hadrian, fresh from the Iberian peninsula (which would one day become Portugal and Spain, plus a small rock that somehow ended up as a duty-free shop for the English) arrived in Rome and was teased for speaking Latin with a provincial burr. Like a coarse cousin showing up late to the wedding, muddy boots to prove he wasn’t invited. He had been born there, so he knew no other form of Latin. Hadrian prevailed, of course, and there’s still a wall in northern England to show for it.

Spoken proto-English of its day had no such wall to anchor it. Bit of a free-for-all. The Vikings left graffiti on the map: Nottingham, Durham, Buckingham, all carrying the Norse ham, meaning ‘home.’Meanwhile, Yorkshire is studded with ‘by’ towns like Grimsby, Whitby, Derby. While villages ending in ‘Thorpe’ (Scunthorpe, Cleethorpes) mark the countryside like runes. By the time Chaucer dipped his quill, English was already a quilt, patched and scarred.

Arabic went the other way: anchored by the Qur’an, its classical form stayed remarkably steady for a millennium, even as dialects sprouted across the Middle East.

Dialects. It all begins with slang. Slang is the graffiti in the alley before it gets invited into the parlour. At first, it’s shocking, vulgar, not the kind of word you’d let your daughter date. But then it hangs around, gets name-dropped at dinner. Forms complete sentences. Eventually marries into the family. Next thing you know it’s wearing a tuxedo and sitting in the Academy dictionary. That’s how languages shift; the ruffians at the door end up running the house.

Then came the real ruffians at the door: William and his Norman brigade. 1066. Sure, he won the battle of Hastings in a few hours, but it took him another twenty years to really gain control of the country. I doubt he expected the results: three hundred years of French lording over English. Nobles dined on beef and mutton. Peasants raised cows and sheep. Same animals, different classes. By Chaucer’s time, English had been more or less stitched together: Germanic bones, Norse scars, French jewellery. A potluck tongue, until Chaucer made it sing. Pilgrims, millers, wives, pardoners. Gossip and curses. Middle English strutted onto the stage, cracked teeth and all.

Then the vowels packed up and moved. The Great Vowel Shift, 1400 to 1600: a tremor that tilted English away from its German kin. Words changed addresses, some Middle English mail never delivered. Hūs became house. Mūs became mouse. By the time Shakespeare arrived in 1564, the table was set: Germanic skeleton, Norse tattoos, French manners, Latin jewellery, Greek philosophy at the far end of the table. Shakespeare didn’t conjure it. He baked and frosted it. Chaucer was the recipe maker.

Persian offers a different kind of lesson in survival. You could say it cheated history. Seventh century: the Arabs came charging in, waving the new language of God. Arabic became the law, the courts, the big leagues. Normally, that sort of colonisation kills a language. Farsi just shrugged, took in a few thousand Arabic words, rolled them around, spat some out, kept most. But the bones? Still Indo-European. Closer to Berlin than Baghdad.

The surprise: Persian didn’t just survive. It flourished. For centuries, it served as the cultural and literary language from Anatolia to Bengal, from the Caspian and Caucasus down to the Deccan plateau. It was the velvet tongue of kings and courtiers, the accent of ambition. Like French in England after 1066: foreign polish that stuck, became part of the furniture. Prestige smells the same in every century. Someone looks up and says, “I want to be more.”

Then along came Abolqasem Ferdowsi Tusi—Ferdowsi. He’s remembered almost entirely for one thing: the Shahnameh (the Book of Kings). Like the Ramakien and the Ramayana, it was a user’s guide to being Persian, a scripture of identity, tragic and immense, almost Biblical. Took him thirty years. One man, one pen, one long poem saying: screw your conquest, our language lives! Without him, Persian might be lying in the graveyard with Aramaic and Old Prussian. With him, it stayed alive.

Like Chaucer, Ferdowsi died a pauper. There’s irony for you.

In some ways, Chaucer managed a similar sleight of hand a few continents away. Day job: customs clerk. Night job: bawdy pilgrim stories. Things overheard, things he invented. He could have written in French or Latin, the respectable tongues. Instead, he chose Middle English, the patchwork tongue still in the stables. The onion slurry he heard every day.

Ferdowsi wrote to keep a language from dying. Chaucer wrote to show one how to sing. Both bet on the common tongue. Both struck a nerve, a deep well, offering a path for the unseen and unacknowledged—the mud-spattered many—to feel seen, to be recognised.

And now us. So, every time you order beef instead of cow, thank the French. Every time you say sky or egg, thank the Danes. Every time you say house instead of Haus, thank those restless vowels. And every time English manages to juggle wit, filth, irony, and grandeur in a single sentence: thank Chaucer, the bean-counter with ink-stained fingers, who turned leftovers into a feast:

Literature.

Chaucer never finished The Canterbury Tales. Why he left it unfinished is still the stuff of academic parlour games. Perhaps he grew tired. Perhaps the sheer scale defeated him. His final effort, “The Complaint to his Purse,” was not a sonnet to love or God, but to coin, frappe de monnaie. A begging letter to King Henry begins:

To yow, my purse, and to noon other wight /
Complayne I, for ye be my lady dere; /
I am so sory, now that ye been light, /
For, certes, but ye make me hevy chere, /
Me were as leef be leyd upon my bere…

He addresses his empty purse as if it were his lady, then pivots to Henry IV, calling him “my lyfe, my lust, my lord, my soverein.” Over the top, of course, as custom demanded.

And it wasn’t a one-off. In those final years, Chaucer was rattling his tin cup at whichever Henry happened to be in charge. It worked. Maybe it was the Lancastrian ties. Either way, the man secured a royal “mercy stipend.”

And yet, poet laureate or not, he had to shuffle into lodgings on the Westminster Abbey Close, because living on consecrated ground meant the creditors couldn’t claw at him. Sanctuary by real estate. From this grubby detail, Chaucer hiding from debt collectors, comes one of England’s more exalted traditions: Poets laid to rest in the Abbey.

Chaucer died in 1400. A year after Henry IV took the throne, and a year after John of Gaunt, his patron—and Henry’s father—bowed out. He was buried in the Abbey not because he was a national treasure, but because he was already on the property, living under the old right of sanctuary (ius sanctuarii), the church’s shield that could shelter anyone from creditor to king. Only later, as tends to happen once poets and composers are safely in the ground, did the nation decide he was indispensable, rebranding the real estate around his tomb as Poets’ Corner. And ever since, the immortals of English letters have been laid to rest around him.

He was buried there by chance, but what rose around him was the nation’s love for its own tongue, the one he helped them discover. From that grave, Chaucer and English itself seemed to echo the same ancient plea: “I want to be more.”

© 2025 Raphael Antonio Nazario. All Rights Reserved.

Thank You for reading. Support for this channel via PayPal is always welcome. With gratitude.

My music can be found online at YouTube, Soundcloud, on Apple Music: here, here and here (🤷🏻); with more limited selections on Spotify and Bandcamp.

Subscribe now

When trees dream of clouds,
the night folds in,
the branches reach upward
to find their mirror in the sky,
a canopy not of leaves
but of drifting shadows,
the wind barely moves.
The leaves flutter,
as tea bags
steeping the sky in longing,
the moon becomes a halo,
no longer a body, 
but a thought,
an emotion held in light,
dwelling in our own dreams
of becoming trees.

—R.N.

The photo: I forget where I took it. Somewhere with palm trees. Mexico or Hawaii, maybe.

Photo and text © 2025 Raphael Antonio Nazario. All Rights Reserved.

Thank You for reading. Support for this channel via PayPal, or Patreon is always welcome.

Raf’s music can be found online at YouTube, Soundcloud, on Apple Music: here, here and here (🤷🏻); with more limited selections on Spotify and Bandcamp.

Subscribe now

Maybe there is no normal.
Or maybe we misplaced it,
rolled it up in a bale of hay,
folded inside a brochure,
left behind at a bus terminal in Bakersfield,
or somewhere similarly middle-of-nowhere,
Where it cannot be found or seen.

Or buried beneath the Terms & Conditions,
of a loan we never meant to sign,
one we never asked for,
one prescribed by a witch doctor,
perhaps.

They told us normal looked like a driveway,
generic, predictable,
with trimmed ordinariness, 
clumps of anaesthetised grass,
near a strip mall,
the dollar store with fluorescent aisles 
casting a blue pall
over glum faces on a lunch break,
watching a clock that watches them
and forgets nothing.

We wore Normal like pants two sizes too tight,
pretending the seams weren’t cutting.
We called it structure.
We called it progress.
But progress was only sedation,
a drip in the arm,
collapse disguised as purpose.
It’s just how things were:
tacky by design,
manicured mediocrity.
A day-glow hum in the blood.

But if it left us breathless, aching,
was it ever anything else?
Is anything ever?

Maybe what passed for normal
was only a script,
curling at the edges,
untouched, 
in the summer heat,
meant to be read aloud
by everyone,
even people you didn’t know,
who might never have believed 
a word of it.

Perhaps there never was a measure.
Only the notion of order:
chairs aligned on a lawn
before the wind arrives.

What we call ‘normal’
is merely an agreement to agree,
a shadow cast 
by the same sun
we trusted would return.
But weather shifts.
It does that, you know.

I’ve been walking around
with your last note
turning over in my head,
a piece of amber
in the pocket of a coat 
I no longer wear.
I reach for it, instinctively.
I turn it,
without realising,
then turn it again.
Not for answers,
but to touch the absence of something,
what once felt clear.
Amber. A souvenir.
I see my heart trapped inside.
Fossilised.

Would that be normal, too?

What I want, of course,
is something that comforts,
a phrase, a balm, 
a pulse, a temperature…
something to soothe the fever
of an ache that has no name,
a placebo for the soul.
Because sometimes
the idea of something
works almost as well.

But language often collapses,
yields only metal on the tongue.
The trouble with this kind of pain,
—cellular, maternal—is that it lingers.
It settles into the air like fog,
clinging to thought,
to the outline of morning,
steam hovering 
over coffee 
on its way to forgetting.

We were told that not speaking
to one’s mother
was not normal,
a defection,
a trespass against the natural order,
as if Nature herself
were built of promises and certainty.

But even Nature absconds with the truth.
It forgets its own seeds.
It devours its own children. 
Cruelty is no accident: it is law.

Sometimes, there is no great wound.
Nothing visible to heal,
no swelling the eye can see,
“no localised edema,” the good Doctor might say.
Only the slow erosion,
a thousand gestures,
grains of sand slipping
through our fingers,
as we clutch and cling to an idea,
until that well finally empties.
But that’s desperation for you.

It’s worth remembering
that love is not license 
to endure harm.

Pain. 
It hurts.
No one prepares you for that.
The ache after the amputation.
The phantom limb…
A relationship
never fully inhabited,
yet insists on being missed.
Maybe that’s all normal ever was:
the ache of what we were told to expect
held up against what actually arrived.
Absence as filler.

And now, in this quiet moment,
coffee not entirely forgotten,
cooling on a windowsill,
headlines peeling from the wall,
I ask again, in a low voice:
What if there is no normal?
Only a notion once trusted,
a pulse in the dirt,
before the asphalt came,
before the air 
that will not be breathed
came into view.

© 2025 Raphael Antonio Nazario. All Rights Reserved.

Thank You for reading. Support for this channel via PayPal, or Patreon is always welcome. With gratitude.

My music can be found online at YouTube, Soundcloud, on Apple Music: here, here and here (🤷🏻); with more limited selections on Spotify and Bandcamp.

It was April, and Richard I, aka Richard the Lionheart, son of Eleanor of Aquitaine, lay dying. A crossbow bolt in the right shoulder as he inspected a wall, sans armour. Late March. And all for a pocket of coins not worth the melting.

Jeez, Richard. What were you thinking?
The wound had quickly become gangrenous.

The year was 1199. There were no surgical procedures available. Medicine in those days was mostly mysticism. The boy who shot him, a nobody with a crossbow, was hauled in. Richard, rotting from the shoulder down, is said to have pardoned him. A king’s mercy, the stuff of legend. But legends don’t last long in the hands of mercenaries. Within days, the boy was flayed and hanged, maybe quartered too, while the oaks around Châlus kept their silence.

Châlus-Chabrol was the name of the castle, a small and not particularly important knuckle of stone near the Limousin forest, close enough to smell the forest if the wind was right. Richard was felled not in some grand battle or crusade, but during a low-stakes siege for a disputed treasure, one that may not have ever existed. Chasing rainbows, really. A decidedly unheroic end for the crusader-king whose legend had been built on distant wars.

The forest, of course, outlived all of them. Broad oaks with loose-grained hearts, drawing in and giving back to the air around them. They would one day be marked by coopers, split into staves, and left to season in the open air until they forgot the rain but not where they came from. For it would be Limousin oak—porous, talkative—the very thing that would give Cognac its identity. (Armagnac, too.) Burgundy prefers the quiet types, so they look to the tight-grained oak of the Tronçais or Allier forests, woods that whisper rather than speak out loud.

The voice of Cognac was born of Dutch thrift. In the 1600s, the Dutch ruled the sea lanes, their fat-bellied ships groaning with goods from Java, the Caribbean, the Baltic, and the Ivory Coast. They regularly stopped in Bordeaux for wine, but barrels ate up cargo space, and wine spoiled. With typical Dutch logic, neat as a ledger and just as cold, they reduced Bordeaux to cargo: boil the wine, distil it to spirit, ship it like timber or tar.

They called it brandewijn, “burnt wine” (from whence our ‘brandy’ was born). The genius plan was to water it back into wine once it got to the other side, wherever that might be. By the 18th century, though, this accident had become an industry. Brandy houses sank their roots in the Cognac region of south-west France, ageing this distilled eau-de-vie — “water of life” — in wooden barrels. And somewhere between the still and the hold, between Holland and the Indies, oak and time took over, and the oak had the last word, breathing into the spirit until thrift came back as character, and character was aged into velvet.

In time the velvet found its vessel: the cognacaise, tall and straight-shouldered, a bottle as austere and disciplined as the spirit it carried. Bordeaux had its rounded slopes, Burgundy and Rhone their curves, but Cognac stood upright, self-contained, as if the glass itself meant to remind you that endurance was its true signature.

Bordeaux itself had been Eleanor of Aquitaine’s wedding portion to Henry of Anjou (Henry II), back when the Angevin “Empire” was really just a patchwork of grudges and marriage contracts. She had inherited the whole duchy when her father died in 1137, making her one of the greatest heiresses of the Middle Ages. She was fifteen.

Fifteen.

Instead of pearls and gowns, Eleanor brought half of southwestern France: Bordeaux, Poitiers, Gascony—vineyards, rivers, castles, taxes. Anjou (from whence we get ‘Angevin’) was already Henry’s, by the way. He didn’t need her to give him that. But when they married, the map got ridiculous: the Plantagenets owned more of France than the French king.

So, Louis VII had been promised her first, the French crown seizing her inheritance the instant it was available; then Henry II married her second. And both of them suddenly looked a lot richer than the day before. ’Tis the way marriage contracts worked back then: whole kingdoms gone in the shuffle, just because someone said, “I do.” (Even if they meant “I won’t.”)

And for three hundred years, Bordeaux kept shipping its wine to England. The trade was the city’s heartbeat, a ledger written in half-remembered Anglo-Norman, and its châteaux wore Englishness like an inherited coat; conical towers, crenelated silhouettes, names that still sound as if they belong to Sussex or Kent: Haut-Brion, Léoville-Barton, Palmer, Talbot, Brown…

The English got drunk on Bordeaux, their beloved ‘claret,’ and called it love.

In the 18th century, Louis-Urbain Aubert de Tourny, a royal intendant, decided Bordeaux needed to look as prosperous as it was. He cut broad new avenues, lined them with trees, oversaw elegant squares, and extended the city toward the Garonne with harmonious façades in pale stone. His crown jewel was the Place Royale—today the Place de la Bourse— designed by Ange-Jacques Gabriel, Louis XV’s architect. Bordeaux went from medieval port to Enlightenment showcase, its wealth underwriting a classical, orderly grandeur.

That wealth was not only wine but also the traffic with the Americas, sugar, coffee, indigo, and the darker profits of slavery. The city’s limestone façades were scrubbed bright by trade that was anything but.

Enter Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who had arrived in Bordeaux as prefect in the 1840s. He was struck by what Tourny had accomplished: a city that seemed to exhale. Georges took notes. When Napoleon III unleashed him on Paris a decade later, Haussmann, with unperturbed Alsatian sangfroid, took the Bordeaux model and scaled it up to imperial proportions, tearing down large swaths of the city—thousands of lives displaced with the rubble.

He didn’t care. He never did. The mission left no room for compromise. Wide boulevards instead of alleys became the norm, uniform façades instead of jumble. Perspectives that seemed to stretch toward eternity. Façades along the boulevards clad in creamy, uniform Lutetian limestone, the so-called pierre de Paris. Haussmann had Paris shaved at the crown, its mansard roofs clipped at a precise forty-five-degree angle, the top floors set back so as not to block the light. It was an Olympian undertaking, not only avenues and monuments, but aqueducts and the vast waterworks rising north of the city.

It opened the stage for the boulevardier and the flâneur alike—the peacock and the observer—and the Paris we know today, a city made for walking, with sweeping avenues and endless sightlines, still carries beneath its skin the blueprint of Bordeaux.

Which is to say: Eleanor’s “dowry” city, once stamped English, then reshaped French, became the prototype for modern Paris. A line runs from her marriage bed in 1152 to Haussmann’s demolition crews in the 1850s. It just takes a few centuries, and perhaps a taste for side trips, to see it.

And Eleanor? She wasn’t one to stand in the background and wave from balconies. No mannequin for decoration, that woman. She could ride, hunt, hold her own in debate, and play politics with the same unflinching poise she brought to a chessboard. She could outlast kings.

And she did. Kings came and went. Eleanor remained.

She might even have appreciated the dark irony: her duchy’s wine, once shipped under English dominion, later distilled by the Dutch into “burnt wine,” aged in the very oak that stood nearby, as her son lay dying for a bag of imaginary coins.

The world would come to know burnt wine as brandy, and later, by its place of provenance: Cognac.

History likes kings to go out big. Sometimes it’s just a tired wall near Limousin and a treasure that maybe never existed.

History does that: folds a battlefield into a drinking glass, lets you inhale the fumes of an empire that thought itself immortal. They never are. It’s the soil that remains. And the grapes remember. And so, the flavours linger, breathing through the wood, as if it remembers too.

Meanwhile, the “burnt wine” of Cognac grew so renowned that it lent its fame to the very ground it came from. In time, product and place traded names, until they were indistinguishable. No brands, no slogans, only a town and its spirit, each wearing the other’s identity. In those days, things—even people—often came to be known by the soil that bore them.

The soil has its own dialect, and in Cognac it divides the vineyards into ‘champagnes,’ a word that’s a leftover sandal from the Roman Empire: Campania, meaning open country, scuffed and reused until it somehow dressed both a battlefield and a bottle. Grande Champagne, Petite Champagne, Fine Champagne… they share the same root with “Champagne,” that of the rolling hills where the bubbly wine is born, and with “campaign,” for the field of war or politics. (Words like campus and the Spanish campo—both meaning “field” or “country”—are among its descendants.)

And in Cognac, the term fits the land as much as it does in the land of pearly bubbles: soft, chalky slopes that break the sunlight into pale dust and shadow, a relief both regions share, the topography speaking an older language that long predates the beverages. And in Eleanor’s Bordeaux, the land kept its name through every banner that flew above it, proof that the tongue remembers what empires forget.

There’s even a Grande Fine Champagne, just in case you weren’t already confused—a subset of Grande Champagne. It’s used by certain houses to emphasise a Cognac that comes entirely from that cru and meets even stricter internal quality standards. It’s partly a marketing flourish, partly a signal to connoisseurs. And connoisseurs are rarely shy about parting with money if convinced it buys them a rarer tier of knowledge. They’ll pay extra for the promise of extra, which is usually just extra promise—but with better stationery.

The land and its categories, the marketing flourish and its stationery, are only backdrop. The real show is on the palate, still Cognac—with Eleanor somewhere in the back story. Cognac can be pale, light or dark amber, and like Eleanor, it is always patient, always carrying that steel of resolve beneath its silk.

Everything else is just what’s in the glass. And somebody trying to keep their job or get a promotion.

But the palate tells a truer story, one where Cognac moves like a slow tide, carrying oak and loss in equal measure, neither one willing to go first. Echoes of vanilla and spice that the Dutch themselves carried on their ships from those tumultuous times, so long ago, work their way into the conversation; flavours steeped in history, as if the glass itself had been seasoned by centuries.

Like her duchy’s vines, Eleanor weathered siege, scandal, imprisonment, and release, gathering depth rather than losing it. And if Cognac has a soul, it is this: a quiet, unyielding persistence. The way oak and time temper raw spirit into something velvet-lined, yet formidable. A glass of it can be as soft as silk and still hold the tempered steel of resolve.

Not unlike Eleanor herself. A woman who, at 80, commanded the defence of a castle against the attacks of her own grandson, Arthur of Brittany. Story for another time.

⁂

EPILOGUE

Eleanor of Aquitaine died in 1204 at the age of about 82, which was simply remarkable for the 12th–13th century, especially given her turbulent life of travel, political intrigue, imprisonment, and repeated childbirth—ten in all. She spent her final years at the abbey of Fontevraud in Anjou, where she was buried alongside Henry II and her son, Richard I (the Lionheart).

Eleanor’s imprisonment by her second husband, Henry II, lasted roughly 15–16 years in varying degrees of confinement. It began in 1173 after she supported her sons (including Richard) in a rebellion against Henry. For most of that time she wasn’t kept in a dungeon but moved between royal residences under guard, sometimes allowed to attend court functions.

She was released when Henry died, in 1189, and she went straight back to political life, effectively ruling England while Richard was on crusade and later in captivity.

At fifteen she had inherited Aquitaine; at thirty she was queen of England. For fifteen years she was held under guard, yet she emerged unbowed, outlived them all, her steeliness folded into her regal tunics.

She moved through courts in flowing bliauts of silk the colour of deep wine, belted low with gold and hung with small, deliberate jewels. Her mantles were edged in fur, her veils pinned with filigree clasps, her sleeves trailing like the wake of a ship. Even in captivity she dressed as though the world were still hers.

And in a way, it was.

Today, all Cognac is brandy, but not all brandy is Cognac. And while brandy of one type or another can be distilled anywhere (Grappa in Italy, Pisco in Peru, Metaxa in Greece), using wine made from a variety of fermented fruits (Poire William from pears, Calvados from apples, Pálinka from plums), the precise vineyard location, grapes and methods that define Cognac production are tightly controlled to ensure it remains so lauded. In other words, Cognac is to brandy what Champagne is to sparkling wine: a name inseparable from its soil.

© 2025 Raphael Antonio Nazario. All Rights Reserved.

Thank You for reading. I do not offer paid subscriptions via this platform.

Rafael’s music can be found online at YouTube, Soundcloud, on Apple Music: here, here and here (🤷🏻); with more limited selections on Spotify and Bandcamp.

Support for this channel via PayPal, or Patreon is always welcome. With gratitude.

Subscribe now

Avevo diciannove anni e vivevo a Salisburgo, in Austria. Il nostro gruppo fece un viaggio a Roma, tutti insieme, con gli occhi ancora stanchi e vestiti troppo pesanti per la primavera. A un certo punto, forse per fame, forse per noia, ci staccammo in cinque, come pellegrini affamati di qualcosa di più salato della cultura. Non era previsto. Le cose che contano, quasi mai lo sono.

Uno di noi aveva un padre, Doug. Ma il padre di Doug non era un padre qualunque. Era un uomo di Hollywood, di quelli con le giuste conoscenze, con clienti i cui nomi non richiedevano presentazioni, solo un cenno d’appartenenza. Il tipo d’uomo che non fa la fila. Che sa quali porte non solo si aprono, ma spariscono del tutto per chi ha le chiavi giuste. Doug portava con sé quel passaporto fatto di accessi sussurrati.

E così, in una sera calda e incerta (Roma non si concede mai a un solo umore) ci ritrovammo a vagare per via del Corso alla ricerca dell’Alfredo originale. Non un Alfredo qualsiasi.

O almeno questo è ciò che Doug continuava a dirci.

L'aria romana era piena di promesse.

Passammo davanti ai soliti sospetti, ristoranti i cui insegne trasudavano troppa vanteria: «Autentico… Dal 1908… L’Originale…» come tanti imitatori di Elvis a Las Vegas, tutti pronti a dirottare la nostra attenzione, a trascinarci in un altro matrimonio finto.

Doug li congedò con la sprezzante noncuranza di un principe in esilio. C’era già stato. Al posto giusto. La Betlemme culinaria. Lui sapeva.

La storia delle origini suona così: nel 1914, anche se alcuni la fanno risalire al 1908, nella trattoria di sua madre Angelina in Piazza Rosa, là dove oggi si apre la Galleria Alberto Sordi.

Come per tutte le storie sulle origini, la data è oggetto di dibattito.

Eppure, in quel tempo, Alfredo di Lelio, uno chef romano con un innato talento per la scena, creò un piatto per restituire l'appetito alla moglie dopo il parto.creò un piatto per restituire alla moglie l’appetito smarrito dopo il parto. Un piatto semplice di fettuccine fresche e leggere, amorevolmente immerse in un’emulsione di burro e Parmigiano-Reggiano, una ricetta così antica da sembrare dotata di ricordi e capricci propri. Un gesto d’amore. Un piccolo miracolo caseario.

Sì, la versione ufficiale è che lo fece per la moglie: donna dolce, appetito fragile, malinconia post-partum. E probabilmente è vero, fino a un certo punto. Ma non dimentichiamo che Alfredo, forse, coltivava anche… altri interessi. Un uomo non monta un atto d’amore burroso con tanto zelo se non spera che lo porti da qualche parte — e, diciamolo, soprattutto a quei tempi. Un po’ di affetto. Forse un pizzico di romanticismo; un ritorno tranquillo nello stesso letto. Sì, le fettuccine possono suscitare affetto.

Un preludio culinario.

Magari immaginava le sue mani tra i capelli dorati di lei, come fossero fili di pasta. Perché una parte intrinseca della grande cucina è amare il processo e gli ingredienti come si amerebbe una persona. L’intenzione passa. I sapori assorbono l’emozione, la trattengono.

È per questo che ci si sente amati quando qualcuno cucina per noi in un certo modo. Il calore non è solo nel gesto o nelle mani, è nel cibo stesso.
In ciò che non ha nome, ma si sente sulla lingua—e nel petto.
Come una mano che ti si posa lieve sul torace, in silenzio, per dire: ti amo.

Qualunque cosa fosse, funzionò. Lei adorò quel piatto. Tanto da insistere perché Alfredo lo offrisse anche agli altri. Così un gesto privato diventò un rituale pubblico. Succede spesso. Qualcosa di intimo, di sacro, riceve applausi… e all’improvviso finisce sul menù, servito ogni sera, vestito di cerimonia e prezzato come un ricordo che non ha prezzo.

Perché eccomi qui, cinquant’anni dopo, a ricordare quella sera: il ristorante, il piatto, il cameriere che saltava la pasta, quei sapori...

Certo, ciò che nasce nella tenerezza, raramente vi rimane. Una delle seduzioni era che Alfredo saltava le fettuccine davanti ai clienti. Da una grande ciotola di rame (meglio per trattenere il calore, un dettaglio essenziale). Finezza nel gusto e un certo senso di teatralità, combinazione che non passa inosservata. La gente cominciò a notare. Gli imperi notarono.

E presto, il piatto, come tutte le cose belle, divenne famoso, poi esportato, diluito, industrializzato, e infine travisato. Negli Stati Uniti l'amore alla fine diede origine a una strategia di marketing.

Il piatto nacque dall’amore, non dall’impero, ma l’impero arrivò lo stesso.

Quella sera, però, noi camminavamo verso l’origine. O verso l’idea dell’origine. Che, a Roma, spesso è la stessa cosa.

Arrivarono Douglas Fairbanks e Mary Pickford, nobiltà di Hollywood in luna di miele in Europa nel 1920. Erano la coppia del loro tempo, i primi veri divi del cinema ad ascendere verso un tipo di celebrità globale che il mondo non aveva mai conosciuto. Ovunque andassero, venivano assediati; Mary era quasi stata travolta a Parigi.

Adorati non solo dal pubblico, ma anche dai capi di stato. Aristocrazia non ufficiale. I reali e i dignitari stranieri in visita negli Stati Uniti non sognavano la Casa Bianca, volevano un invito a Pickfair, la loro tenuta a Beverly Hills, dove il cinema muto incontrava l’eleganza europea, sotto quella luce californiana lavata di azzurro e rosa.

Mary e Douglas visitarono Roma, cenarono da Alfredo, si innamorarono delle fettuccine e divennero evangelici della sua gloria. Tornati negli Stati Uniti, divulgarono la notizia come apostoli culinari dei tempi moderni.
Più tardi, in una visita del 1927, regalarono ad Alfredo una forchetta e un cucchiaio d’oro massiccio, incisi, cerimoniali. Sono ancora esposti al ristorante, e a volte ancora utilizzati.

La loro devozione trasformò una trattoria romana modesta in una sensazione discreta, nota in quel che oggi chiameremmo cerchie gastronomiche.

Vennero tutti, da Sophia Loren a John F. Kennedy, da Ava Gardner a Papa Giovanni Paolo II. Troppi per nominarli tutti. E lungo il percorso, emerse una schiera di imitatori. Per difendersi dai falsi, il ristorante alla fine aggiunse Il Vero Alfredo al suo nome, prendendo le distanze dalle versioni americane che avevano trasformato la semplicità poetica del piatto in un pastiche denso e intriso di panna.

Per non parlare degli sfacciati impostori a pochi passi di distanza, sperando che la sola vicinanza potesse conferire legittimità.

Arrivammo. Il ristorante era incastonato in Piazza Augusto Imperatore, modesto nelle pretese ma incrollabile nel peso. All’interno, la sala da pranzo sembrava sospesa nel tempo, emanando quell’opulenza sbiadita che pare sempre una cospirazione di memoria e affetto. Foto di volti celebri correvano lungo le pareti. C’era qualcosa nell’aria, non esattamente nostalgia, ma la sensazione che la storia avesse profumato l’intonaco e che l’aria fosse in qualche modo tinta di seppia: una pennellata ad acquerello, appena sbiadita, i colori ancora scintillanti attraverso la garza della memoria.

Doug fu riconosciuto come il figlio di un cliente importante, e ci fecero accomodare rapidamente.

Arriva il Grande Momento: un carrello si avvicinava, trasportando un’enorme ciotola di rame, scintillante come un oggetto di scena di Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston, dove sei?). Dal suo interno, il vapore si alzava in languide spirali, lasciando intravedere le fettuccine arrotolate, in attesa, impazienti, come un pubblico prima che si alzi il sipario, con una presenza quasi liturgica. Poi apparvero la forchetta e il cucchiaio d’oro, scintillanti come se fossero stati tirati fuori dalla cripta di un museo del cinema muto. Sulla forchetta: Douglas Fairbanks. Sul cucchiaio: Mary Pickford. La coppia d’oro originale, i loro nomi impressi nell’oro. Immortalati proprio qui — non sulla celluloide, ma nel teatro della cena.

Sulle posate una dedica: “Ad Alfredo, il Re delle Fettuccine.”

Il cameriere e il suo aiutante, veterani del mestiere, si muovevano con aggraziata solennità: uno lanciava la pasta, l’altro aggiungeva il burro e grattugiava il formaggio. Gli utensili dorati si sollevavano leggeri, afferrando e ruotando. Burro e Parmigiano-Reggiano si fondevano nei fili; il formaggio si scioglieva come neve sul marmo caldo. Il vapore si alzava in una cortina fluttuante. Il burro profumava l’aria. Il calore e il gesto trasformavano burro e formaggio in un’emulsione setosa, lucida, corposa.

Un pizzico di sale. Qualche macinata di pepe, stagionato quanto le storie che si raccontano qui.

Tutti.

⁂

Nella cucina francese, la tecnica per incorporare il burro in una salsa fino a formare un’emulsione si chiama beurre monté, burro “montato.”
Lo stesso principio vale per una salsa beurre blanc: mescola, agita, fai ruotare la padella, e il burro si incorpora da solo. Ma se smetti di muovere, si rompe. Il burro si separa, galleggia, e torna a essere ciò che è: una pozza di grasso, in cima a ciò che sembrava una promessa.

A diciannove anni non avevo le parole per capire ciò che stava accadendo davanti a me. La mia idea di raffinatezza culinaria si limitava a bacon croccante (“Bacon Bits”) su un’insalata condita con salsa Thousand Island. Preferibilmente spremuta da una bottiglia con l’etichetta che si staccava.

Tragico, lo so. Ma l’adolescenza è spesso così: un’ignoranza sfacciata scambiata per gusto, una sicurezza che arriva anni prima delle sue credenziali. Vivere in una febbre di certezze, scambiare l’imitazione per esperienza, adottare atteggiamenti come fossero passaporti capaci di farci entrare in un’età adulta immaginata. Credevamo di capire il peso di un momento solo perché sapevamo nominare i protagonisti e citare le storie. In realtà stavamo soltanto provando le battute, ignari che lo spettacolo fosse già iniziato.

E così eravamo seduti lì, davanti a noi un racconto evocativo servito nei piatti, convinti di appartenere a quel luogo, come se la vicinanza fosse già un arrivo. Forse parlammo troppo forte, forse ridemmo con troppa facilità, appoggiandoci a aneddoti presi in prestito come se fossero nostri. Passi incerti verso un’età adulta che credevamo colta.

O almeno così volevo che fosse.

Ricordo i sapori della pasta, il modo in cui offriva un assaggio di lusso, il modo in cui il burro e il parmigiano si aggrappavano alle tagliatelle, dando loro una lucentezza materica, una sorta di smalto. Ma più di tutto ricordo la sensazione di trovarmi sulla riva di qualcosa di immenso, mai visto prima, fingendo di saper già nuotare.

Non sapevo ancora che l’adolescenza è un teatro in cui si interpreta il proprio ruolo prima ancora di aver incontrato la persona che si diventerà. Che le sue tragedie non stanno negli errori in sé, ma nella fede luminosa e incrollabile con cui li si commette.

E il sapore di quelle fettuccine, quel momento spalancato e vertiginoso. Ricordo di aver pensato: Dove sono stato finora?! E, avrò mai di nuovo qualcosa di così buono?!

Era meglio del sesso. Almeno, del sesso la prima volta. Perché nessuno mi aveva mai parlato di quelle fettuccine. Non ero stato avvisato. Mentre il sesso, quando finalmente succede, è già stato pensato e ripensato fino a diventare un’astrazione delirante, di solito consumata in una nebbia di nervi e in un monologo mentale ansioso:

Lo sto facendo. Lo sto facendo!

Senza sapere se fosse esaltante o, in fondo, ancora più tragico.

La pasta, però, non chiedeva nulla.
Era arrivata senza annuncio. Nessun prologo. Nessuna grande entrata.

E per questo, fu una sorpresa completa. Un agguato gentile.

Sublime.
Fuori dal mondo.

⁂

Qualche tempo dopo, lessi che Douglas Fairbanks era morto per un infarto, nel 1939. Era il secondo. Aveva 56 anni. La versione ufficiale parlava di cibo troppo ricco. Una vita vissuta un po’ troppo bene.

Ma è sempre un po’ più complicato di così, no?

Quel libro diceva anche che passava ore da solo, accanto alla piscina.
Oppure guidava fino a Pickfair, la villa che lui e Mary avevano costruito, per farle visita.
Si erano separati nel 1933.
Lui aveva divorziato (e si era risposato) nel ’36.
Eppure, sedevano lì. In silenzio. Per lunghi tratti del pomeriggio.
Non proprio allontanati. Solo… qualcosa di più silenzioso.

Forse non fu il colesterolo.
Forse fu la donna che amava ancora e che non poteva più avere.
Un cuore spezzato, che cedette tre anni dopo il divorzio.
O forse fu qualcos’altro, del tutto.

A volte, le cose reggono.
E a volte, per quanta cura tu ci metta, non reggono.

Vedi, la loro emulsione si era rotta.
E quando si rompe, qualunque promessa conteneva
scompare.

EPILOGO: Ascesa e declino della panna

Sebbene la panna non sia mai entrata nella ricetta originale di Alfredo di Lelio, non è mai stata del tutto estranea alla cucina italiana. In effetti, è stata una presenza silenziosa, seppur controversa, nei piatti di pasta fin dai primi dell’Ottocento, quando gli eserciti di Napoleone si trattennero nell’Italia settentrionale occupata, portando con sé non solo cannoni ma anche panna.
E burro, da una Francia che, per un periodo, contava tra i propri territori sia il Piemonte che la Toscana.

Negli ultimi due secoli, la panna non ha mai abbandonato del tutto la tavola, raggiungendo il suo vero periodo d’oro tra gli anni Sessanta e la fine dei Settanta, quando invase le cucine sospinta dall’ondata di prosperità del dopoguerra. L’ultimo respiro di una salsa Velouté deflorata. (Sarebbe più corretto dire “defarinata”, ma perché entrare nei dettagli tecnici?)

Per un certo tempo sembrò indispensabile, la base dei tagliolini al salmone, delle farfalle con «le tre P» (panna, prosciutto e piselli), e delle penne alla vodka. E non solo pasta: le salse alla panna comparivano ovunque, dal pesce al manzo al maiale, finché l’eccesso non generò stanchezza. È un grande veicolo di sapore, ma è così semplice che è quasi come barare. Nei decenni successivi, la panna venne silenziosamente esiliata dalla maggior parte dei piatti di pasta, la sua presenza ormai malvista dai puristi. Io compreso.

A meno che non vi troviate in una trattoria turistica di Venezia.
In tal caso, siete irrecuperabili.

© 2025 Raphael Antonio Nazario. Tutti i diritti riservati.

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When I was nineteen and living in Salzburg, Austria, we took a trip to Rome, the group of us, bleary-eyed and overdressed for spring. At some point, maybe out of hunger, maybe boredom, a few of us peeled off, five pilgrims in search of something saltier than culture. It wasn’t planned. Most things that matter aren’t.

One of us, Doug, had a well connected father. Doug’s father wasn’t just any father. He was a Hollywood man, with clients whose names needed no introduction, only knowing nods. The kind of man who didn't wait in line. Who knew which doors not only opened, but disappeared for the right people. Doug carried a passport issued by familiarity.

And so, on a warm, uncertain evening, Rome never commits to one mood, we found ourselves drifting down the Via del Corso in search of the original Alfredo’s. Not an Alfredo’s. The.

Or so Doug told us.

There was promise in the air.

We passed the usual suspects, restaurants whose signs reeked of boasting too much: “Authentic… Since 1908… The Original…” Like so many Elvis impersonators in Las Vegas, all clamouring to hijack our attention, to pull us into another sham marriage.

Doug waved them off with the dismissive nonchalance of a prince in exile. He had been there before. To the place. The culinary Bethlehem. He knew.

The story of origin went like this: in 1914—though some accounts have it as 1908—in his mother Angelina's trattoria in Piazza Rosa, where the Galleria Alberto Sordi now stands. (As with all origin stories, the date is up for debate.)

Nonetheless, Alfredo di Lelio, a Roman chef with a flair for the dramatic, put together a dish to help his wife recover her appetite after childbirth. A simple plate of silken, fresh fettuccine, lovingly swathed in an emulsion of butter and Parmigiano-Reggiano, a preparation so old it had already spawned generations of offspring. It was a gesture of love.

A minor miracle of emulsified dairy.

Yes, the official story was that he made it for his wife, sweet woman, fragile appetite, postpartum melancholy. And that’s probably all true, as far as it goes. But let’s not pretend Alfredo might not have entertained other motivations. A man doesn't mount a buttery act of love with such zeal if he doesn't hope it will take him somewhere, especially in those days. A little affection, perhaps or a hint of romance. Maybe even a peaceful return to the same bed.

Yes, fettuccine can lead to affection. A sort of culinary prelude.

Maybe he imagined his hands running his fingers through her golden hair as if they were strands of fettuccine, waiting to be gently tossed. Because an intrinsic part of great cookery is to love the process and the ingredients as if you were loving a person. The intent gets transmitted in the final product, the ingredients become conduits, capturing the emotion.

This is why people feel loved when someone cooks for them in a certain way. The warmth isn’t just in the hands or the gesture; it’s in the food itself. In what can’t be named, but can still be tasted—and felt. Like someone putting a palm of their hand on your chest as if to silently say "Ti amo."

Whatever it was, it worked, apparently. She loved the dish. Loved it so much she insisted he serve it at their restaurant, so that everyone could taste. Which is how a private offering became a public ritual. That’s how it happens, often. Something personal and sacred gets applause, and suddenly it’s on the menu, served nightly, dressed in ritual, and priced like memory that has no price.

Because here I am, over fifty years later, still recalling that evening; the restaurant, that dish, that waiter tossing the noodles, those flavours…

Of course, what begins in tenderness rarely stays there. One of the seductions was that Alfredo tossed the fettuccine in front of the customers. Out of a very large copper bowl (the better to retain the heat—an essential detail). Finesse of flavour and a measure of theatricality usually make a splash, an irresistible attraction. People started taking notice. Empires noticed. And soon, the dish, like so many beautiful things, became popular, famous, even, was exported, diluted, mass-produced, mangled and distorted.

In the US, love eventually gave rise to a marketing strategy. The dish was born of love, not of empire. But the empire came anyway.

Still, on that night, we walked toward the source. Or the idea of it. Which, in Rome, is often the same thing.

⁂

Enter Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, Hollywood royalty, honeymooning in Europe in 1920. They were the it couple of their day, the first true movie stars to ascend into a kind of global superstardom the world had never witnessed. They were mobbed wherever they went, as if celestial beings had descended from the Sistine Chapel to earth. Everyone wanted to touch them.

Mary had nearly been trampled in Paris.

They were adored not just by the public, but by heads of state, as well. Unofficial aristocracy. Visiting royalty and foreign dignitaries arriving in the United States didn’t dream of the White House; they wanted an invitation to Pickfair, the famous estate in Beverly Hills where silent film met old-world glamour under that dreamy wash of California light—azure and pink at once.

Mary and Douglas visited Rome, dined at Alfredo’s, swooned over the fettuccine, and became evangelical about its glory. Back in the States, they spread the word like modern-day culinary apostles. Later, on a return visit in 1927, they presented Alfredo with an oversized fork and spoon of solid gold—engraved, ceremonious. These are displayed at the restaurant and, on occasion, still used.

Their reverential patronage turned a modest Roman trattoria into a quiet sensation, known in whatever passed for "foodie” circles in those days. Eventually everyone found their way there, from Sophia Loren to JFK, Ava Gardner to Pope John Paul II. Too many to name. And along the way, a parade of imitators emerged. To fend off the fakes, the restaurant eventually added Il Vero Alfredo, “The True Alfredo,” to its name, distancing itself from the American versions that had turned the dish’s poetic simplicity into a heavy cream-drenched pastiche. Not to mention the brazen impostors just steps away, hoping proximity alone might confer legitimacy.

We arrived. The restaurant itself was tucked into the Piazza Augusto Imperatore, modest in its claim but unshakable in its weight. Inside, the dining room felt suspended in time, exuding the kind of faded opulence that always feels like a conspiracy of memory and affection. Photos of famous faces lined the walls. There was something in the air, not nostalgia exactly, but the sensation that history had perfumed the plaster and the air was somehow sepia-tinged, a watercolour wash, now only slightly faded, the colours half-shimmering through the gauze of memory.

Doug was recognised as the son of a notable customer, and we were seated quickly.

Enter the Big Moment: a cart rolled toward us, bearing a massive copper bowl, gleaming like a prop from Ben-Hur. Steam rose in languid spirals from within, hinting at the fettuccine curled inside, waiting, impatient, like an audience before the curtain lifts, its presence almost liturgical. Then came the golden fork and spoon, shining as if pulled from the vault of a silent-film museum. On the fork: Douglas Fairbanks. On the spoon: Mary Pickford. The original golden couple, their names pressed into gold. Immortalised here of all places; not on celluloid, but in the theatre of dining. In Rome. On a side street that became a kind of Mecca.

The cutlery also carried a dedication: To Alfredo, the King of Noodles.

The waiter and his assistant, veterans of the trade, moved with graceful solemnity — one tossing the pasta, the other adding butter, grating the cheese. The golden utensils leapt lightly into the air, catching and turning. Butter and Parmigiano-Reggiano melted into the strands, the cheese dissolving like snow on warm marble. Steam rose, a drifting curtain. The butter perfumed the air. Tossing and heat coaxed butter and cheese into a silky emulsion, glossy and rich.

A pinch of salt. A few cracks of pepper from a mill worn smooth with years.

Tutti. Served.

⁂

In French cooking, the technique of folding butter into a sauce to form an emulsion is called beurre monté, “mounted butter.” It’s the same principle in a beurre blanc sauce: stir or swirl constantly, and the butter incorporates automatically. But stop stirring and the spell collapses. The butter separates, floats, becomes what it is, a puddle of fat on top of whatever promise it once held. The magic breaks.

At nineteen, I didn’t have the vocabulary to understand what was happening in front of me. My idea of culinary sophistication consisted of salad and bacon bits over Thousand Island dressing. Preferably squeezed from a bottle with the label peeling.

Tragic, I know. But then, adolescence is often like that: brash ignorance mistaken for taste. Confidence that arrives years before its credentials. Living in a fever of certainty, mistaking imitation for experience, adopting affectations like passports that might admit us to some imagined adulthood. We thought we understood the weight of a moment because we could name the players and quote the stories. In truth, we were only rehearsing the lines, unaware the play had already begun.

And so we sat there, gilded cutlery before us, an evocative story served on plates, believing we belonged, that proximity was the same as arrival. We perhaps spoke too loudly, maybe laughed too readily, leaned on borrowed anecdotes as if they were our own. Tentative steps into sophisticated adulthood. Or so we thought.

Yet I still remember the flavours of the pasta, the way it provided a taste of luxury, the way the butter and parmigiano clung to the noodles, giving it a textured sheen, a sort of enamel. But most of all, I remember the feeling of standing on the shore of something immense, never seen before, pretending I already knew how to swim.

What I did not yet know was that adolescence is a kind of theatre where you play the part of yourself before you’ve met the person you will become. That its tragedies lie not in the mistakes themselves, but in the luminous and unshakeable faith with which one makes them.

And the taste of that fettuccine, the mind-blowing, wide-open moment. I remember thinking: Where have I been? And, will I ever have anything this good again?

It was better than sex. At least, first-time sex. Because no one had ever told me about that fettuccine. I hadn’t been warned. Whereas sex, by the time it happens, has already been over-thought into a kind of delirious abstraction, usually first performed in a fog of nerves and internal, anxiety-ridden monologue:

“I’m doing it. I’m doing it!”

Not knowing whether it was thrilling or even more tragic.

The pasta, though, it asked nothing. It arrived without announcement. No prologue. No grand entrance. And in that, it was complete surprise. A gentle kind of ambush.

Sublime. Otherworldly.

⁂

Some time later, I read that Douglas Fairbanks had died of a heart attack in 1939. It had been his second. He was 56. The official story blamed rich food. A life lived a little too well. But it’s always more complicated than that, isn’t it?

That same book mentioned how he would sit alone by the pool for hours, or drive out to Pickfair, the mansion he and Mary built, to visit her. They had separated in 1933. He had divorced (and remarried) in ’36. Still, they’d sit in silence for long stretches of the afternoon. Not estranged, exactly. Just… something quieter than that.

Maybe it wasn’t cholesterol. Maybe it was the woman he still loved and could no longer have. A broken heart, giving way three years after the divorce.

Or maybe it was something else entirely.

Sometimes, things hold.
And sometimes, no matter how much care you take, they don’t.

You see, their emulsion had broken.

And once it breaks, whatever promise it held is gone.

⁂

EPILOGUE: The Rise and Fall of Cream

While cream never entered Alfredo di Lelio’s original recipe, it has never been entirely foreign to Italian cuisine. In fact, cream has been a quiet, if sometimes controversial, presence in pasta dishes since the early 19th century, when Napoleon’s armies loitered in occupied northern Italy, bringing with them not just cannons but cream.

And butter, from a France that, for a time, counted both Piedmont and Tuscany among its territories.

Over the last two centuries cream never entirely left the table, reaching its true heyday between the 1960s and late 70s, when it swept through kitchens on the rising tide of post-war prosperity, everyone giddy with their ability to use profligate amounts of the stuff. The last gasps of a de-flowered Velouté sauce. (De-floured would be more accurate, but why get technical?)

And for a while, it seemed indispensable, the foundation of tagliolini with salmon, farfalle with the “three Ps” —Panna, prosciutto e pisseli (cream, ham, and peas ); and penne with vodka. And not just pasta: back then, cream sauces appeared on everything, from fish to beef to pork, until the excess bred fatigue. Cream is a fine vehicle for flavour, but so simple it's almost cheating. By the following decades, it had been quietly exiled from most pasta dishes, its presence now scorned by purists (like me).

Unless you’re at The Olive Garden.

In which case, you’re beyond saving.

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If wine grapes were actors, Chardonnay would be the one who never says ‘No.’ It’s played everything from austere monk to would-be Malibu starlet with self-esteem issues, Botoxed lips in a near-whimper, “Please like me.”

It shape-shifts. From Chablis to Chassagne, to something buttery and no doubt over-oaked, served in a stemless glass at a suburban book club. Or at brunch, with ladies in floppy hats, Vivaldi fading beneath the gurgle of a stone fountain.

It’s the world’s most planted white grape, and possibly its most misunderstood.

Origins
Chardonnay was born in Burgundy, on a patch of soil between myth and limestone, where silence has flavour, and chalk listens to history. A crossing of opposites: Pinot Noir, the Dauphin grape who would become Burgundy’s pedigreed prince, and Gouais Blanc. It was the viticultural equivalent of aristocrat meets peasant girl with the social grace of a shovel. (But the girl had land!)

And yet, from that unlikely tryst in a field somewhere came not only Chardonnay but a minor riot of varietals—Aligoté, Gamay, Melon de Bourgogne—all running around the landscape like half-siblings from a Renaissance soap opera. It was, genetically speaking, the Hamilton of grape crossings: unexpected parents, explosive results.

The word Chardonnay traces back to a modest Burgundian village near Beaune—population: a few hundred, global impact: enormous. The name likely evolved from the Latin Cardonnacum, meaning “a place of thistles” (chardon = thistle in French). Thistles! Something prickly you wouldn’t want between your toes. Which is somehow perfect.

Chardonnay was being cultivated in Burgundy as early as the 12th century—likely by monks with too much time and not enough hobbies. There, it thrived in chalky soils and monastic—if not altogether celibate—silence.

In Chablis and the Côte d’Or, Chardonnay shed its rustic beginnings and learned to speak in whispers and knowing looks. It grew up fast, took on nuance, got expressive as it matured, and became fluent in all forms of minerality. Names like Meursault, Puligny-Montrachet, and Bâtard-Montrachet became the passwords to wine cellars and sommelier cults.

In those geological nether-parts, it yields wines of serious pedigree, anchored by a creamy, concentrated Chardonnay core. Dense layers of ripe stone fruit (peach, apricot), citrus oils, toasted brioche, cream, a brush of vanilla from oak—all encased in what can only be called sculpted minerality. If stone could emote—and love you back—this would be it. You’re not just drinking it. You’re being tasted, too.

The plot thickens.

But then Champagne entered the conversation, and the world went mad for bubbles. Well, the English, first. They didn’t just drink it; they controlled the machinery behind it. Trade routes, shipping, bottling, branding—the distribution mechanisms by which alcohol moved and seduced the globe. We're talking nearly everything worth drinking: Champagne, Bordeaux, Port, Sherry, Marsala, Madeira, Scotch and Irish Whiskey, Gin, Rum, Ales—basically the entire liquid library of colonial desire.

But back to Chardonnay.

It became a star. The lead in Blanc de Blancs, the scene-stealer in countless Champagne blends.

From there, it went everywhere: California, Australia, Chile, Argentina, South Africa. Some regions turned it tropical; others toasted it in oak. It handled fame badly in the '80s, cleaned itself up in the '90s, and now, in a world full of Sauvignon Blanc selfies, Chardonnay has rediscovered the art of restraint.

Again.

Because that’s its secret: it adapts, without ever quite apologising.

Flavour Profiles & Styles
Here’s where things get theatrical. Chardonnay can be:

• Lean and laser-cut (e.g., Chablis): all green apple, lemon zest, wet stone. Like licking a slab of slate wet with wine.

• Creamy and oaky (Napa or Meursault or any of the Montrachet cousins): tropical fruit, vanilla, toast, toasted brioche, lashings of Beurre noisette—rich, round, and ready to be noticed.

• Textural and mineral (cool-climate Australia, New Zealand, Oregon): grapefruit pith, citrus, almond skin, and perhaps, something faintly smug.

• Sparkling (Champagne): Chardonnay is one of the Holy Trinity of Champagne grapes. When made solo, as a blanc de blancs, it’s elegance with nerve. High strung, like most great beauties.

Its chameleon-like nature is both its gift and its curse. Winemakers love it. Sommeliers debate it. Drinkers think they know it. Until they don’t recognise it.

How It Got to the U.S.
Chardonnay’s American debut was less than glamorous. It arrived in the mid-1800s via cuttings, probably mislabelled and under-appreciated. The wine world in the U.S. had yet to learn to spell vinifera. Most white wines were simply labelled “Chablis.” It didn't matter what grapes went into them.

But then came Wente Vineyards, circa 1912, with a suitcase full of vine cuttings from Burgundy. The “Wente Clone” took root in California and, after Prohibition’s buzzkill intermission, began its quiet conquest. Much later, others were nearly fanatical in their pursuit of bringing their favourite clones. For example, the great Martin Ray brought cuttings from Corton Charlemagne. (Sidenote: Jean León did the same thing with his estate in Penedés, Spain. After his death, the winery was purchased by the Torres family.)

Flash forward to the Judgment of Paris, 1976, aka, “The Spurrier Tasting,” when a Napa Chardonnay TKO’d a fistful of French white Burgundies in a blind tasting judged by Frenchmen. Cue press. Cue planting frenzy. By the 1980s and '90s, American Chardonnay was full of oak, and misappropriated swagger. They began to taste the way cars in the late 50s looked, all bloated curves and a few fins.

Today, Chardonnay has settled a little; less ostentation (oak), more balance. It’s gone from Dynasty shoulder pads to something more Céline. (If you didn't watch TV in the 80s, you might not get that. I didn't watch it, but I still wrote it. Go figure.)

Regardless, its adaptability remains unmatched. It can thrive in cold climates or warm ones, in limestone or loam, in Burgundy or Burbank.

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Chardonnay Clones: The Many Masks of Madame Chardonnay

Chardonnay is the Meryl Streep of grapes—chameleonic, everywhere, and capable of turning in wildly different performances depending on script, stage, and director. From lean and mineral to lush and oaky, Chardonnay has a clone for every mood, book club, and midlife crisis.

CLONE / STYLE PROFILE / BEST KNOWN FOR

Dijon 76

Elegant, citrus-laced, good acidity. Like a freshly pressed white shirt—classic, flattering, maybe a little safe.

Found widely in Oregon and cool pockets of California. Often the backbone of “serious” Chardonnay.

Dijon 95

Floral, rich, occasionally flirts with tropical excess. Think vacationing in Capri with a suitcase full of kaftans and Hawaiian shirts.

Popular in California and Australia. Brings perfume and a touch of drama.

Dijon 96

Full-bodied, age-worthy, and structurally ambitious. It has plans. Long-term ones.

Used by those going for Grand Cru gravitas. A wine that might sigh audibly when poured.

Dijon 548

Minerality meets poise. Think white peach on slate, delivered with restraint.

Up-and-coming in cooler regions. The darling of sommeliers who wear linen year-round and think they read Proust.

Wente

The American classic. Creamy, textured, sometimes tropical. Chardonnay with a tan and a résumé in real estate.

Ubiquitous in California, particularly in more golden-lit, oak-happy expressions.

Robert Young

Round, lush, and ripe. Like Chardonnay after a week at a Napa spa.

Often used for full-bodied styles—plush and generous, occasionally verging on opulent.

Old Wente (or “Shot Wente”)

Descended from cuttings smuggled in from France circa 1912 by Ernest Wente. The nickname “Shot Wente” comes from the erratic berry and cluster size—what viticulturists call millerandage, or “hens and chicks”—meaning it produces uneven berries: some plump and large, others tiny and tannic, all on the same neurotic cluster.

This vine has never been accused of trying too hard.
Result? Less juice, more skin, lower yields, and a flavour profile with actual punctuation.

It’s a pain in the ass to farm, but the payoff is serious.

Wines from Old Wente have texture, quiet confidence, and a sort of lemon-curd, leesy depth that doesn’t announce itself so much as poker-face you from across the table. For winemakers who prefer character to consistency—and don’t mind a little chaos in the vineyard—it’s the clone of choice. Not crowd-pleasing. But then, greatness rarely aims for that.

Cultish. Prized in California, used by producers like Hanzell, Mount Eden (the original Martin Ray property), Stony Hill, and Littorai. Low yields, high payoff. The clone of choice for winemakers who use words like reductive élevage—and mean it.

Musqué (809)

Aromatic, floral, borderline flirty. Sometimes smells more like Viognier than Burgundy.

Used in small doses. A seasoning, not the meal. Adds exotic notes; pineapple, honeysuckle, and maybe a little mischief.

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And lastly, a few words about Terroir

(Pronounced “Teh”…now say “wah," but with a soft gargled sound, ending in more of a gargled “R”— with just enough phlegm to clear a French throat, “Terrroirgh.”) Now, wasn’t that fun?

Terroir: A Definition for the Rest of Us

Terroir is the wine world's favourite four-syllable incantation. It means “place,” but with a lot more attitude. It’s the idea that where a grape is grown—its soil, climate, topography, and even the general vibe of the place—leaves a fingerprint on the wine. And not just any fingerprint. We're talking long-lost-uncle-in-a-Genealogy-DNA-kit levels of specificity.

In short:
Same grape + Different patch of dirt = Whole different personality.
One might be brooding and mineral, the other fruity and loud.

Blame the terroir; the earth.

⁂

OMG, this is so confusing! How do you distinguish?

Nobody said it would be easy, kiddo. Possibilities include:

• Soil: Clay, limestone, gravel, volcanic—imagine the difference between reading Proust on a velvet chaise vs. on a bed of nails.

• Climate: Hot vs. cold, wet vs. dry. Grapes hate surprises, but terroir loves them.

• Slope & Elevation: The angle of the sun, the drama of the hill. Terroir loves suspense, it doesn’t care for vineyards with a flat personality.

• Microbiome: Yes, even the invisible fluff counts. The stuff that floats and lands on grapes and lives in the white powdery surface… Yeasts, bacteria, ancient spores fomenting intrigue in the palace, whispering, “Be complex. You could rule.”

It’s what makes a Burgundian Chardonnay taste nothing like a California Chardonnay (same thing with Pinot noir), even though genetically, they’re siblings.

Or more to the point, like twins raised in very different households—one by a retired librarian in Dijon, the other by a semi-retired surf instructor in Santa Barbara.

Is terroir real?

Winemakers swear by it. Scientists sort of agree. Drinkers? They nod solemnly while scanning the label for the alcohol percentage. Or they refer to whatever stupid “score” it received, so they can feel good about themselves. (“98 pts – a wine that pairs best with your own ego.”)

Final Word:
Terroir is the ghost in the glass. You can’t see it, but if you squint (and sip slowly), you might just get a sense of the weather that year, and how it affected the wine. If you're really lucky, you’ll also get the dust on the boots that harvested it, and maybe even hear echoes of the argument the winemaker had with their spouse the morning of bottling.

“You never give me any attention…”

“You prefer to be with your yeasts!”

It's the same the world over.

Welcome to wine. It’s all a bit ridiculous.

That’s why we love it. 🥂

© 2025 Raphael Antonio Nazario. All Rights Reserved.

Thank You for reading. I do not offer paid subscriptions via this platform.

Rafael’s music can be found online at YouTube, Soundcloud, on Apple Music: here, here and here (🤷🏻); with more limited selections on Spotify and Bandcamp.

Support for this channel? If you’re feeling so inclined, contributions via PayPal, or Patreon are always welcome. With gratitude.

Gewürztraminer (“geh-VOORTS-trah-mee-ner”) is what happens when a grape decides to dress in costume jewellery and announce its entrance: over-perfumed (sometimes), flamboyant and simply unmistakable. It’s the wine world’s version of a scented letter, drenched in lychee, rosewater, and just a hint of grandma’s face cream.

Despite sounding like the name of an experimental Drag-Queen German techno band, Gewürztraminer hails from northeastern France, specifically Alsace, where the Rhine politely separates it from Germany (which still claims partial custody).

It’s a mutation of the ancient Traminer* grape, with “Gewürz” tacked on somewhere along the line to mean “spicy,” a less-than-adequate stand-in for “perfumed.” Somewhat out of character, really: the Teutonic temperament at its most poetic. (Würz, for the record, means spice. Gewürz means spicy.)

Historically, it’s been something of a shapeshifter. In Alsace, it’s treated with reverence, structured, usually bone-dry, contemplative, humourless, even. A bit like the Alsatians, themselves. However, when handled with artisanal reverence, it’s chiselled into a wine of quiet gravitas, the kind that leaves you contemplating a passage from…not Jacqueline Susann, mind you, Nabokov, or perhaps Goethe, depending on your mood and how deep is your bookshelf.

In Germany, it tends to lean into off-dry whimsy. But elsewhere, California, New Zealand, Chile, it’s been known to let its slip show: a bit sweet, a tad loud, a bit too much lipstick, and a tad too eager to please. In some cases, it has been known to lose all sense of decorum and slide into just, plain vulgar-adjacent. Not so much Marlene Dietrich as Vegas residency—with sequins, big floppy hat tilted just so, and a feather boa that enters the room five seconds before she does.

It’s unpredictable in the vineyard, too: early budding, late ripening, prone to rot, heat-sensitive, and can clock in with the alcohol of a cocktail. But when it works, it’s unforgettable. Gewürztraminer is one of the few white wines that pairs beautifully with spicy foods (Thai, Vietnamese, sweet & sour anything), strong cheeses, and maybe even, difficult conversations with your ex-mother-in-law.)

Old World vs. New World Gewürztraminer

Old World (Alsace, Germany, Trentino-Alto Adige):

Style: Dry or off-dry, spicy, aromatic, but disciplined

Fruit & Floral Notes: Lychee, rose petal, ginger, Turkish delight

Alcohol: Moderate (12.5–13.5%)

Acidity & Finish: Firm acidity, long mineral finish

(Note: Gewürztraminer and lychees share the same aroma compounds.)

New World (USA, NZ, Australia, Chile):

Style: Often sweeter, lush, and more overtly perfumed

Fruit & Floral Notes: Lychee syrup, ripe mango, gardenia, orange blossom

Alcohol: Often higher (13.5–14.5%), especially in warmer climates

Acidity & Finish: Softer acidity, rounder, shorter finish

And in South Africa? She’s planted in small amounts, mostly in cooler pockets like Elgin and Walker Bay, where the ocean breezes keep her from falling apart in the heat. They produce versions that are less bombshell, more poet; tropical fruit and spice, with just enough acidity to keep the perfume from taking over the room.

*For those of us keeping score with a laminated map and a little propeller on our hats, please note that Traminer still exists, usually as Savagnin or the pink-skinned Roter Traminer (Red Traminer). To add subterfuge to this cocktail of etymological mystery, Gewurztraminer is considered a mutation of Savagnin blanc—also named Traminer in South Tyrol, that liminal Alpine region where Austria and northern Italy continue to politely disagree about who gets to name the grape (because once upon a time, the area belonged to Austria. Just sayin’).

© 2025, Raphael Antonio Nazario, All Rights Reserved.

Thank You for reading. I do not offer paid subscriptions via this platform.

Rafael’s music can be found online at YouTube, Soundcloud, on Apple Music: here, here and here (🤷🏻); with more limited selections on Spotify and Bandcamp.

Pinot Noir is ancient, fussy, and thin-skinned, qualities it shares with many of its most devoted drinkers. Genetically delicate and temperamentally high-strung, like a torch singer in a wrinkled velvet dress, lighting her last cigarette with the stub of the first. It mutates on a whim, producing offspring like Pinot Gris (Grey) and Pinot Blanc (White), as if unable to commit to a single personality. Commitment issues, but with pedigree.

It’s moody that way. It’s mercurial. It’s the grape you fall for even though your friends say you should know better.

The grape equivalent of a literary genius who changed names, cities, and lovers with each new manuscript. Troubled, brilliant, a little feral, and often late on the rent.

It’s the Miles Davis of viticulture. It turns its back on the crowd and still gets a standing ovation.

The etymology is pure Gallic literalism: pin for pine, noir for black. Because the clusters look like little pinecones, dark and tight, hanging like secrets.

Of course they do.

The grape hails from Burgundy, where it’s been swanning about since the Romans were still arguing over sandals. This one grape props up an entire cultural mythology; an aristocracy of soil dressed in mud and miracle. Romanée-Conti, La Tâche, et al: names that now trade hands for the kind of money usually wired offshore. (You know, Warren Zevon’s in jail and the Colonel with the oversized hat is starting to sweat. The stupid grin, the glasses and the gun; the whole tropical dictatorship starter pack. Cue “The Goodbye Look.”)

Wilted by heat, spooked by wind, prone to sulking in poor soil. Like I said, it’s moody. But when it works, when it really works, as it does in Burgundy, it plays you like Yo Yo Ma playing a cello; slow and low.

Burgundy’s hierarchy—Grand Cru, Premier Cru, Villages, then Regional—is famously not about whose château has the bigger moat or taller turret. That’s more the Bordeaux playbook, where feudal pageantry meets export strategy—thanks in no small part to the formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine, who handed the region to the English as part of her dowry. Thus began centuries of English ownership and unwanted influence.

In Burgundy, by contrast, it’s all about which exact scrap of land you're standing on. Literally. A few metres in any direction and your wine could drop a tax bracket or two. Move again and it potentially qualifies for government assistance.

We can all raise our glasses to the Napoleonic Code, France’s great equaliser and the agent provocateur behind Burgundy’s jigsaw-parcel madness. In his zeal for fairness, Napoleon decreed that land be divided equally among all heirs (the male heirs, of course; different times, different blind spots). Which is how Burgundy got diced, spliced, and re-diced into a madman’s quilt of cartographic chaos. And eventually, some poor soul ended up with three rows of Pinot and a wine press no bigger than a toaster oven.

The result? A patchwork of micro-parcels where terroir isn’t a concept, it’s become scripture. Two neighbouring plots, two reputations worlds apart, and quite possibly two vintners who haven’t shared a word since the Carter administration.

In Burgundy, the land speaks. Pinot just translates. And if you get it wrong? It sulks

Pinot doesn’t shout. It doesn’t swagger. It lingers in the corner booth, humming something melancholic with violets on its breath. And somehow, that’s enough.

And when it’s fabulous, it sings.

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Pinot Noir: Burgundy vs. The New World
A Tale of Two Temperaments

Climate:
Burgundy runs on a continental climate with mood swings: hot days, chilly nights, and autumns that show up like last-minute plot twists.

In the U.S., it varies wildly. California is sun-drenched and selfie-ready, all high cheekbones and golden light. Oregon, by contrast, is also cool at night, brooding, rain-soaked, like a Bergman film; unresolved longing. With subtitles.

Common Names:
In Burgundy, it’s Pinot Noir. Always. No embellishment. You don’t mess with tradition. In Germany or Austria you might find it labeled Burgunder or Spätburgunder.

Pinot Nero in Italy.

In the New World, it’s still Pinot Noir, but sometimes with a surfer’s tan and a new zip code.

Old World Style
Burgundy doesn’t explain, and it doesn’t shout. It alludes; violets, terroir, roses, black cherry, scents of forest… The rainbow sheen on a bubble; there, then gone. But not quite. Because it lingers. And sometimes stays with you. Like a lover you can’t forget.

New World Style

New World Pinot tends to be lusher, louder, more fruit-forward. More sunshine in the glass. Think boxing glove versus winter glove. Cherry cola, all fins and curves like a ’59 Caddy. A touch of Hollywood Botox. It’s had work done, but tastefully. Mostly.

Winemaking
n Burgundy, the vineyard does the talking. The winemaker listens, nurtures, tops up the barrel, racks, and eventually bottles. Minimal intervention is the default setting, sanctified into philosophy. The micro-vignerons often rent a bottling truck that rolls in, bottles, and corks. And while these mobile lines are common, especially among the smaller domaines with more history than infrastructure, they’re hardly universal. Some still bottle by hand; others may share facilities or have access to cooperative setups. It’s varied.

It’s Burgundy.

In the U.S., while many artisanal Pinot Noir purists are doing their level best to honour the grape, things often tilt toward the bigger, the more uniform, the engineered. Less nuance, more product-market fit. The larger the winery, the more you feel that “Top 10 Flavour Tiers” vibe. Consistency pursued with evangelical, if not corporate, zeal. And those numbers on the label sticker? The “93” or “95”…? High scores, courted like papal benediction, tend to arrive from Robert whomever, or the usual Spectators and Enthusiasts. No one seems to get a “76.” Funny that. And thus, terroir, with all its unruly specificity, tends to get eased offstage by the glossier appeal of brand.

Because in America, everything—including wine—is really just an audition for your attention. And shelf space.

The wine? Well, for many it’s technology-forward: oak powders, nutrient packs, acid rectifiers. That’s just for starters. Modern beauty, coldly calculated. A kind of paint-by-numbers algorithm is in place. Then it’s filtered once or twice. (Because people who drink cola like wine that glistens. You know, like frosted lipstick on the teenager working the Dairy Queen counter. Side of fries, optional.)

The winemaker is the auteur, and the director’s commentary comes standard. It was probably written by a PR firm anyway.

Vineyard Ownership
Burgundy is famously fragmented. One plot might have ten owners. You inherit a few rows and hope your wife knew what she was in for when she married you.

In California and Oregon, things are more consolidated. One winemaker, one vision. Someone managing the brand. A tasting room. An “event” space. A Wine Club. A restaurant. A gift shop. And one very curated Instagram handle. It’s a jungle out there.

Oak Usage:
French oak in Burgundy is gently toasted and doesn’t wear hiking boots. Like cashmere lining on a well-tailored coat.
New World oak is more of a mood ring, sometimes subtle, sometimes a full lumberyard. Usually French, but American is not unheard of. Even neutral, depending on the winery’s vibe: aspirational, or just tryin’ to get by.

The Terroir Factor
In Burgundy, terroir isn’t a concept. It’s scripture. A few metres this way and your bottle ascends to Grand Cru sainthood. A few hundred metres that way and it’s demoted to vin du pays and quiet despair. Feuds have flared over less.

Because the finer the wine, the more specific the geography. Back when wine didn’t have a story, it had a slope. A patch of land. Sometimes hardly bigger than a postage stamp. There was no label design, no tasting notes, just…the land. The grapes were planted centuries ago, but in time, they noticed: Pierre’s wine from the upper slope tasted better than Gaston’s from the flats. And François, whose vineyard looked like it was stapled to a cliff, was bottling the stuff of minor miracles.

Thus began the hierarchy; less marketing brainstorm (there wasn’t one), more a slow Darwinian sorting of soil and slope. Grand Cru, Premier Cru, Villages… a classification system dressed in location and longing. An accident of geology and gossip-turned-truth. Local liturgy.

Take Chablis. For centuries, its barrels were floated downriver into Paris. The name became synonymous with white wine, not just among Parisians, who knew a good thing when they drank it, but across the Atlantic. Eventually, the word Chablis got conscripted to represent almost any white wine, much to the chagrin of actual winemakers in actual Chablis.

Ironically, the grape itself—Chardonnay—was once locally called Beaunois, a nod to its origins in Beaune. Again, it wasn’t the grape that gave the wine its name. It was the ground it grew in. Location, location, location.

Later, American winemakers, giddy with gold digger money, started using those names—Burgundy, Chablis, Champagne—for everything from jug wine to, a century later, supermarket sparklers. Eventually, the French government finally had had enough. They sued. And won. That practice was mostly shut down by the 1970s. Place names went back to being sacred. Or at least respected.

In the U.S., “site” matters, but often it’s the winery—the brand—that does the talking. American wine is still finding its theology. Yes, still. Some place names have taken on the glow of branding: Napa Valley, for instance, carries far more cachet than, say, Livermore. Even if the wine says otherwise.

Food Pairing:
Burgundy pairs with duck, roast chicken, or nothing at all if you’re feeling spiritual and a little aloof.
New World Pinot goes with salmon, chook, burgers, mushroom risotto, or even pizza, even if it’s Tuesday and you’re in socks.

Market Perception:
Burgundy is legendary. Ethereal. Priced like art and treated like sacrament.

New World Pinot is the rising star. Democratic. Sometimes sublime, sometimes erratic, but never boring.

A quick mention of my favourite New World Pinots from down unda:

By Farr (Bannockburn, Geelong, VIC)
Simply one of the finest Pinot producers in the country—or anywhere. Nick Farr makes hauntingly beautiful, layered Pinots that are fleshy, yet with immense finesse.

Lethbridge Wines
Biodynamic, cerebral, and quietly radical. Their Pinots are mineral-driven and textural, Burgundian in spirit, but on a road trip through the outback.

Bannockburn Vineyards (Geelong)

A marquee Geelong name, Bannockburn (est. 1974) consistently delivers benchmark Pinot Noir of elegance and high vinosity. Crafted from vineyards planted by founder Stuart Hooper and now helmed by winemaker Matt Holmes, their Pinot is celebrated for its raciness, earthy complexity and refined structure.

© 2025, Raphael Antonio Nazario, All Rights Reserved.

Thank You for reading. I do not offer paid subscriptions via this platform.

Photo of wine in glass with the trees reflected: 2009 Beaune Les Epenottes, Louis Boillot — by the author.

Ownership of other photos is retained by the respective companies. Used only for purposes of disseminating information.

Rafael’s music can be found online at YouTube, Soundcloud, on Apple Music: here, here and here (🤷🏻); with more limited selections on Spotify and Bandcamp.