Lullabies

There are fragments of memory that have no exact date. They return like a smell, a brightness, a repeated movement, a voice. In sa Pobla, and especially in Marjal, many of these memories have to do with the land, with the work, with the dust on the threshing floor and with that ancient way of living, when children were not separated from the lives of adults, but were present there, very close, from the first day.

I remember infants inside an esparto grass basket, hung with a rope from a fig tree. No one told me about it; I saw it and lived it. The basket remained raised from the ground, protected from animals, under the wide shade of the tree. The mother worked not far away and, when it was time, she would approach, pick up the infant, breastfeed them, and then return to the field. The fig tree provided the shade and a bit of coolness; and the basket, suspended, must have moved slightly with the east wind.

It is difficult to set boundaries for customs that for generations passed from one family to another without books or instructions, but we know that in sa Pobla it was done this way. The book Un Cuaderno de música folklórica balear, published in 1961 in Valencia and made by young people from sa Pobla, described this very scene: in summer, when farm work occupied the whole family, a large basket tied to a fig tree branch served as a cradle, moved by the midday breeze. And next to the cradle there was a voice and hands as rough as the earth and as soft as cotton.

That world was a more oral world than ours. People sang while they worked, tunes learned without quite knowing from whom were repeated, and many things passed from grandmothers to mothers and from mothers to daughters without ever having been written down. The song did not need a score; it was enough to have heard it. Perhaps a woman would change a word, lengthen another, add the child's name, or repeat a verse until the little one closed their eyes. This is how folk songs live: changing a little each time and being, at the same time, always the same.

The lullaby is one of the simplest and deepest forms of human communication. A mother sings to a child who does not yet understand words. Therefore, she does not speak to them exactly with meaning, but with something else prior to meaning: rhythm, repetition, breathing, proximity.

“Lullaby, lullaby… Sleep-a-bye, sleep-a-bye…”

They are words that almost do not need to mean anything. That is precisely their strength. They only surround and calm. The creature does not know what ‘vou-veri-vou’ means. But it knows —without knowing that it knows— who is singing. It recognizes that voice which it had already heard before being born, the heartbeat that accompanies the voice, the smell, the arms, the way the mother's body moves. The song turns all of this into a single thing.

Perhaps that is why lullabies have something of a mantra about them. They return again and again to a few syllables, with small variations, until the world seems to grow smaller. The house, the room, the cradle, and the mother. Or the fig tree, the basket, the breeze, and the voice. Nothing more. It is not only the child who needs the song. The mother needs it too. Singing regulates breathing. It gives a rhythm to the wait. It allows one to repeat a gesture until the exhaustion becomes a little more bearable. In a rural society, with long workdays and a motherhood that did not interrupt labor, that song must have also been a small, intimate space within a life full of obligations.

Federico García Lorca saw this other side of lullabies very well. When he studied them, it struck him that many of them were sad or melancholy. They were not just a sweet voice meant to put a child to sleep. Behind that voice there was also a woman with weariness, worries, absences and, sometimes, poverty. The song served to lull the child to sleep, but it could also become a space in which the mother left, almost unintentionally, a part of herself. Lorca spoke of that living tradition that passes from some women to others as if the ancient voices continued within them. It is an idea that helps to understand why some lullabies are so tender and, at the same time, have a shadow of sadness, there is no contradiction: there is life. The infant was her whole world.

The same Notebook of folk music, says something very beautiful, that the lullaby is the first poetry and the first music that reaches the human soul. It may seem like a sentimental phrase, but it is accurate. Before knowing what a poem is, we have already felt a cadence, a rhythm. Before understanding a story, we have already learned that repeated words can console.

And it is also the first gateway to a language. The child does not yet know what those words mean, but they are already learning their music, as well as the open vowels, the pauses, the repetitions, the particular way a Majorcan mother has of saying “sleep, little one, lullaby” or “Vou verivou, vou verivou, the stream runs, and the water does not move”.

In these verses there is the same movement of the cradle... back and forth, again and again, without haste, until the child falls asleep. The melody does not seek to get anywhere, it seeks to stay. To keep company. To repeat itself until the child's breathing becomes slow and the voice is almost no longer a song, but a murmur.

Today we still have children, they continue to need contact, calm, rhythm and voice. What has changed is the world that surrounds them. Perhaps we sing less. Perhaps we have delegated a part of that silence and that music to devices, screens and recorded sounds. It is not a question of saying that everything was better before, that is not it. The women of the past knew very hard work, motherhood without rest and lives that should not be idealized. But there was indeed a small wisdom.

Since my mother died, I emotionally reclaimed the house where I had my cradle. I look at the first floor, that wide and well-ventilated room. I see myself, and I see her. Rocking that rosy baby, the first child of a young and hopeful couple. The breeze moved the curtain that faced the street and my mother rocked me and sang: “Sleep, little one, sleep…”. Oh, mother!

Note: This is the 100th article that ARA Balears has published for me. It had to be a special one to celebrate it.