The Coffee. Linked stories.

Greetings friends of Cinnamon Cup Coffee.

A little over a month ago the community proposed in Coffee Conversation Event 86 (Oct 5 - 7) as a topic of conversation, that: if we could plant in our backyard what would we plant, coffee or tea?

The proposal excited me, however, that week was particularly full of family commitments, so I was not able to take the photos I wanted in time to make my commentary. Today I share with you two short stories intertwined by the labor involved in coffee processing.

I live in a space that for a long time we called “the family village”, because it is a large piece of land that when my mother bought it, she did so dreaming that her children would build their homes on it, and so it was.

Another of her dreams was to have a great variety of fruit trees in that immense patio, so she planted mango, tamarind, avocado, orange, gabbana, guava and as a good coastal girl, among many others, coffee and cocoa, two shrubs that grow very well under the shade of the big trees, could not be missing.

My mother loved all the work involved in transforming a beautiful coffee bean into a product fit for consumption and of course, she had her small army of workers to help her, her five children.

In her last two years, for health reasons she stopped tending to her plants and by now both the coffee and the cocoa have suffered, there is an old belief that if you do not harvest the fruits, the plants suffer and stop producing them, something like that has happened and in the patio you can see how the plants have been disappearing.

Part of the remaining plants are in their production period, I see the red beans and I know that soon it will be time to harvest them, I also think that I have a small back patio, I could take the seeds and sow, perhaps, a dozen coffee plants, and with this safeguard his dream and perhaps part of his legacy, but the truth is that I do not see myself taking charge of this small sowing and much less follow the work that means the transformation of the bean.

And speaking of this task, there is a beautiful and sad song, that although it is relatively new in the timeline of our people (1958) is part of the Venezuelan folklore, it was composed by José Manzo Perroni and its first version interpreted by the also Venezuelan, Hugo Blanco, and I say first version because this piece of music, soon crossed our borders and has been covered by famous singers and groups, among them: Julio Iglesias, El Trio los Pachos, Mina Mazzini, Javier Solis, among others and its rhythm is so sweet, cheerful and catchy that it has become the inspirational “anthem” of various soccer teams worldwide, its notes being heard in stadiums.

Yes, there is a contradiction, on the one hand I say: sad song and on the other hand happy rhythm and the music invites you to dance, to move, but its lyrics tell us of a sorrow of love, the one that carries the zambo Manuel and that every night when he starts to grind coffee, his sadness envelops him. I imagine him, there in the solitude of the night, doing a job as repetitive as grinding coffee, engrossed in his thoughts of an absent love.

I share with you his verses and the video with the music.

When the afternoon languishes, the shadows are reborn,
in the stillness the coffee plantations feel again,
this sad love song of the old milling machine
that in the lethargy of the night seems to say ...

A sorrow of love, a sadness
carries the zambo Manuel in his bitterness,
he tirelessly spends the night grinding coffee, eh eh eh eh eh.

*zambo: In the caste system of the colony, group that arises from the mixture between the aborigine and the afro-descendant.