'Mortal and Rose', Umbral's great book, is also music

Alejandro Pelayo hadn't read Mortal y rosa by Francisco Umbral until a few months ago, maybe a year ago. He was busy with other things: the piano, musical composition, soireés with poets for whom he invented music for their verses, the echo of what was his group, Marlango, with the actress Leonor Waitling ... That's what Alejandro Pelayo (Santander, 1971) was doing when the phone rang and on the other end was Marián Bárcena, driving force behind the music production company Maelicum and a writer. She asked him exactly that: "Have you read Mortal y rosa ?... Well, you should read it."

And Alejandro Pelayo bought a copy , let it sit for a few weeks, and one day he opened it to read this: "Children are lamps of life. Change the lamp, buy a lamp. And the fire, the fear, the insomnia, the terror, the child, the fever, the fear. Lying in the darkness, alone, I see my life as a story of clouds. Nothing exists, nothing has existed, and I write it all down so that it may exist in some way." A fragment chosen at random from the book.

Pelayo couldn't tear himself away and immersed himself in the funereal and different prose of Mortal y rosa . He called Bárcena and told him it was impressive. And now what? "Well, now, put it to music." The musician took up that torch. He's a pianist of boundless talent. And after months living in Umbral, composing, performing what he read, enthusiastic and fearful, he finished a work he titled Donde el amor invento su infinito , the second part of the mythical verse by Salinas that gives body to the book's title: En esta corporalidad mortal y rosa ... 50 years have now passed since the publication of that testimony of mourning, of entrails, love, damage, illness, death, and cold.

In the Chamber Hall of the National Auditorium (Madrid, at 7:30 p.m.), Pelayo premieres this vibrant adventure tomorrow, in which he plays the piano and with the collaboration of Josep Trescoli (cello), José Antonio García (bass, vocals), Pablo Pulido (programming and electronics), and Laura Porras (mezzo-soprano). And three songs by Guille Galván, composer and guitarist of Vetusta Morla: Tú y yo , Si esta noche me atreviera, and Les diremos que no contamos con nosotros . Pelayo says: " I was neither prepared nor forewarned for what was coming my way and what this reading has meant for my music and my life. I started reading it one night last summer and finished it that morning. It was the first of many days in which I have returned to the book with the hope of leaving it behind, but it is a literary artifact that is never finished and that always accompanies you, like wounds or fears ."

Mortal y rosa is the exorcism in words that Francisco Umbral chose to understand and avenge the premature death of his son Pincho, aged five, from leukemia. Alejandro Pelayo constructed the music in parallel with the text, but needed a structure with which to organize and understand. "I found it in the tradition of sacred music, in the requiem masses I have studied, focusing primarily on the formal aspect, although here I include electrical elements." It will not be a conventional concert. There is a specific intention from the staging: the musicians will be in a circle, the light will shine upward , and the music will permeate in all directions.

--What does it mean to do something like this with a book that is practically untouchable, where everything is already music?

--For me, it's been a liberation, a refuge. I hope the music serves to protect the listener from whatever is assaulting them. I like to think that we create spaces where everyone can enter with their pain and share it, take care of themselves, so that the music fulfills its healing function and the concert serves as a collective catharsis.

The musician calls this expedition "a requiem mass and contemporary electronic suite." And he gives a little more insight into the concert: " It's a sonic journey inspired by Umbral's intimate and dazzling diary , because Mortal y Rosa is a diary of intimacy and helplessness." With gusts of chills like this: "I only found one truth in life, son, and it was you. I only found one truth in life and I've lost it. I live to cry for you in the night with tears that burn the darkness. Little blond soldier who ruled the world, I lost you forever. Your eyes coagulated the blue of the sky. Your hair gilded the quality of the day. What remains after you, son, is a fluctuating universe, without consistency, as they say Jupiter is, a nauseating vagueness of summers and winters, a promiscuity of sun and sex, of time and death , through all of which I wander only because I don't know the gesture one must make to die. If not, I would make that gesture and nothing more." This concert is dedicated to those who left before their time.

Alejandro Pelayo is clear about one thing after spending a year in the pages of Mortal y Rosa . The book is a music box. "That's exactly what it is: a timeless, circular music box , without time, beginning, or end, an irascible and sorrowful mood, and above all, a poetic text of dazzling beauty." Perhaps the best-known of the many works written by Francisco Umbral , the one that most appealed to the nakedness and fragility of someone who had created a mask like a fortress.