In Mexico they kiss and caress at any time and in full view of everyone. It was one of the first things my friend Abel Somohano told me while we were looking for a place to have some chilaquiles for breakfast the morning I arrived in that country. Indeed, we had barely crossed the street and there they were, at the exit of a building, a couple of young people fused in a long embrace and pure kisses, while the people and the routine of the big city passed them by.
Precisely about the irrepressible desire for a kiss is a popular Mexican bolero, the song with the most versions in the history of Hispanic music:
Kiss Me Kiss Me a Lot,
as if tonight was the last time…
Kiss Me Kiss Me a Lot,
I’m afraid to have you and lose you later…
I want to have you in my arms,
look at me in your eyes, see you next to me,
Think that maybe tomorrow,
I’ll be far, far away from you…
Its author is Consuelo Velázquez Torres, Mexican composer, singer and pianist, born in Jalisco, on August 21, 1916.
From a very young age, Consuelito showed aptitude and talent for music. Her parents enrolled her in the Guadalajara conservatory. At the age of six, she was already appearing in public playing the piano and doing short concerts. She continued her career until graduating as a pianist at the emblematic Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City.
The young woman began to play classical music on the XEQ radio station. In the radio booths she spent long hours. In her breaks she relaxed and improvised melodies of popular music. When her classmates asked her about what she came out of her piano, she never said that it was hers but a friend’s. At that time, in 1938, she began to compose the melody of “Bésame mucho”. She was only 16 years old and, according to Consuelo’s own confession in several interviews, until then she had not experienced the passion and taste of a kiss.
“From a musical point of view, the theme seems to have been inspired by an aria from the suite goyescas by Enrique Granados, known as “La maja y el ruiseñor”, reveals in an article the researcher and specialist in arts, literature and cultural history, Andrea Imaginario.
For its part, the lyrics came later, in 1939, “Kiss Me a lot It is inspired by the outbreak of the Second World War, that is its root and heart, in addition to the fact that part of her family was opposed to dating my father. There was a constant threat of separation from the family. Those two camps are triggers,” declared Mariano Rivera, Consuelo’s eldest son, in an interview published by the Excelsior newspaper in 1972.
It is in 1941 when “Bésame mucho” is heard for the first time. It was in the program La hora azul and in the voice of the singer Emilio Tuero Cubillas. It was such a success and the demand of the listeners that Consuelo had no choice but, due to copyright, to confess that she was the composer of the bolero “Bésame mucho”.
“Consuelo bursts into this musical style that is not appropriate for a soloist, much less for a woman, since at that time the bolero was a genre strongly rooted in the image of men, who through it demanded reciprocated love or sang for the spite of a woman. Likewise, with this song Consuelo starts from the consideration of women not as an object within love, but as a free person to say and express what she wants in a relationship, ”can be read on the cultural blog of the Government of Mexico.
“Bésame mucho” transcended borders and traveled around the world. It was translated into more than 20 languages and performed in thousands of versions. Before her, The Beatles, Elvis Presley, Andy Russell, Frank Sinatra, Plácido Domingo, Andrea Bocelli, Luis Miguel, our Omara Portuondo and many more succumbed to love and recorded it. She also reached the seventh art. She has been part of the soundtracks of dozens of films, including the famous Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1979) and the recent Disney hit, Coco (2017).
In 1996 “Bésame mucho” was declared the most covered Spanish song in history. Two years later, in 1999, Univisión television declared Bésame mucho, “The Song of the Century”. During her lifetime, Consuelo enjoyed all the recognition and honors deserved by his famous piece and others less well known. She died on January 22, 2005, at the age of 84.
I loved arriving in Mexico and that a universal sample of pleasure, passion and love like a kiss, is, for my friend, one of the characteristics of this town. And that I verified, camera in hand, in my days in the city where, almost at every step there is a kiss that can be photographed. The homeland of that bolero that asks, implores as if it were the last time tonight, could not be another, a kiss.
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