After a midnight movie, a couple sits together at a secluded corner table at La Rondalla, a Mexican restaurant on Valencia and 20th Street. He is slowly stirring a margarita and staring into her eyes. She dips a nacho into salsa and bites it, very slowly, looking back at him.
In the background, Luis Barajas the mariachi, strums a cinco, a short five-stringed guitar. He serenades with as much soul as possible alongside the seven others of the "Mariachi Jalicience" to hold that moment and make it the only past, present, and future a lonely man and woman will ever need. A bow glides across a violin as a musician's trembling fingers slide along its neck. The horns speak lingering phrases in a suave voice. The guitarron, the bass, is the only clock that keeps time.
Meanwhile, two male silhouettes at the bar listen to the music and talk, or rather complain, about women. "Right now, she won't even talk to me," says one. The other consoles him. Maybe the sad man would now rather be at the secluded corner table.
But Barajas, 46, knows and sees better from where he is performing. The pair is solemn and sad.
In between sets Barajas says, "As often as I do this, I always want to be able to transform a moment for customers. But I'm a musician, not a magician. I can't always pull a rabbit from a sombrero like one."
Mariachis are romantics. Their job is to lift a place's spirits. But some customers may not want to be somewhere romantic or cheerful. This does not put the mariachi out of business. Although mainstream Americans strongly associate mariachis with festive music, the Mexican listener may come to hear a sad tale, relive a personal moment or past era.
Barajas, cinco player and alternate lead voice, admits his job can be like that of a taxi driver. He and the band takes them to sad, exciting, holy, and hidden places that only they or the listener might know.
The fare is $10 a song. The restaurant pays for the first ten to put the place in the mood. Then customers pay for the rest. The mariachi's salary depends on how many sales are made. "Some nights we might play only three," says Barajas. Or, "There may be nights when customers may want to hear 50 songs." This equals $510 on a better night. But cut among eight musicians, each would only make about only $60. On this, he and his working wife support a family of five in Menlo Park.
Mariachi Jalicience work the restaurant from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m, Wednesday to Sunday, occasionally Tuesday, but never Monday, when the place is closed. Barajas, like all mariachis, is flexible to work moonlight and daylight hours for weddings, a "quincienera," a girl's sweet 15 of Mexican tradition, or a Palm Sunday mass. Sometimes mariachis do not sleep.
La Rondalla, a round festive gathering in Spanish, is actually three small restaurants in one. Each is partitioned, but accessible to the others. A diner retaining a 1951 atmosphere (when the restaurant was built), and a more formal dining room area, sandwich the middle section with a bar and some secluded, rear corner tables. The center section is where the band often plays.
Flashing back to 15 minutes before 9 p.m., Thursday night, Barajas steps out of the street and into La Rondalla, carrying his cinco in a short case. He passes regulars, greets the waitresses and the bartender, en route to the rear where he changes from street clothes to gray pants and an ornate blue waist length jacket with lapels, reminiscent of the style worn in the Mexico of the 1860s.
In 1862, men wore similar jackets while walking with musical instruments to a Vera Cruz hacienda, recently taken over by French colonial administrators. Mexico, especially poor then, was unable to repay the debt that gave Napoleon III the excuse to invade and put his ally, Maximilian of Austria, in charge of this occupation. The Mexican men in ornate waist length jackets with musical instruments were hired to entertain at a French wedding.
It has been commonly suggested in Mexico that the word mariachi was born from a corruption of the French word marriage, and used then to describe this music and its paid performers.
"No, that's not true," says Barajas, removing his instrument from its case. "The word already existed before the French arrival." No one is certain of the word's origin. Surviving letters from years before the French occupation mention and associate it with drinking and loud entertainment. Some discographies have also theorized the word stemmed from a celebration for a virgin saint called Maria H ("a-che," if pronounced in Spanish).
The band assembles together, observing this evening's crowd, tuning instruments, clearing throats, rehearsing vocals and briefly planning musical arrangements. Then the magnificent eight relax, sitting at an unoccupied table, discussing events and joking. They may cruise the tables for their fare.
One of the violinists signals to the others with two fingers to indicate two minutes. A passenger has just whistled for their taxi.
Often La Rondalla's listeners are young, white college students and counterculture types living around the area of the Mission from 16th to 20th Streets called "new bohemia," by some traditional residents. But the listeners at this very moment are middle-aged men in suits and ties. They want to hear a slow, sentimental ranchera from their youth about a man wanting to return to the only woman he loves.
The trumpet's mouthpiece meets the musician's lips. Barajas strikes a steady rhythm to the trumpet's opening phrases. The listeners look intently. New Bohemians stare and smile. A flower seller in her late sixties passes every table to ask, "Roses?"
The band is now playing the center section between the dishwashing area, kitchen and the restrooms. Waitresses with orders or finished plates, a dishwasher with clean glasses for the bar, and two new bohemian customers en route to the restroom all try to squeeze their way through the performing mariachis. The musicians allow everyone to pass while continuing to play.
The older sentimental listeners applaud. Barajas smiles, candidly enjoying the moment, as the band plays another. This one is loud and stirring. His right hand is a blur of fingers striking five strings. All of La Rondalla's eyes and ears are momentarily on the band. Some listen, while others resume conversations, romances, business negotiations, watching television, glancing at the opposite sex, or dining alone.
The set ends and the band takes a break in the diner. Barajas, a man playing professionally for 25 years, rests. The routine does not vary. They play. Then they take breaks, the length of which depend on listeners. But he is happiest when playing, having always wanted to be a mariachi since his youth in Tecomatan in the Mexican state of Michoachan.
He has heard of schools that formally train youngsters in mariachi music, but they never had that when he started at 14. "These young musicians do learn a lot. But the traditional way mariachis have always learned it is by eyes and ears, and with intense interest through many years." As much as students learn in six months, they still lack all the musical experience, and the huge repertory of songs learned by heart from years at it. "It (being a mariachi) would have to be your life," he says.
Of the macho image of the mariachis in movies, literature, and even the songs they themselves perform, he shrugs, "It's true." The others do not disagree that for some mariachis, the card playing, drinking, brawling, and numerous romances are true exploits with exaggerations.
It has been quite some time, if ever at all, since a mariachi has flipped a card table in a crooked game, punched the cheaters, collected his winnings and vaulted off a balcony to straddle a waiting horse. Nor do they carry guns in the streets anymore, although a stylish, violent 1993 movie, "The Mariachi," suggests otherwise. At 11 p.m., David Letterman is on television at the bar. But no one can hear him. Sandra the waitress, with a pen for writing orders still in her hair, is singing a ranchera into an old microphone, backed by the Mariachi Jalicience. "Golpe de Pecho," she singsÑa blow to the heart from a disappointing romanceÑslowly, sultrily from her own heart. They stop eating, talking, and drinking. Even those who do not know the language stop and feel emotional electricity in the air. She has been singing for 10 years, although never professionally. She finishes. La Rondalla applauds. She smiles and returns to work as if it never happened.
Moments later, near midnight, a man and a woman enter and walk to a secluded corner table. He is looking into her eyes and making a wish. The chips, salsa and margaritas arrive. The mariachis arrive.
A restaurant clock says midnight while music plays.
It changes to 2:30 a.m.
The secluded corner table is empty, and the midnight couple has left, as did the two complaining male silhouettes, diners, waitresses, cooks, the sentimental men in suits and ties, bohemians, drinkers and the bartender. Barajas puts away his cinco in the quiet of the restaurant. Sometimes the music continues until 5 a.m., but not this occasion. Very early in the morning at half past two, he steps onto the pavement and away from the world he works in, finished for now. But the world, and the clock, are round. He walks back in every night, except Monday.
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