Songs are usually a product of imagination and circumstances, but sometimes they are inspired by real life events. Some days ago I was talking with a friend about the Mexican group Mana, and he mentioned the story behind the lyrics of one of their songs, \u201cEn el muelle de San Blas\u201d. The song talks about a girl in a wedding dress, waiting for his boyfriend to come back. They had an affair; he had to go, but promised to return someday to marry her, so she when everyday to the dock, during a lifetime.<\/p>\n
I had always compared this song with another one written by Joan Manuel Serrat, \u201cPenelope\u201d (that became very famous when Diego Torres versioned it), and I thought that they both talked about some kind of Ulysses, a journey, and a lover or wife waiting for him to return, but I was wrong. The real protagonist of the song is a woman called Rebeca, who died last year.<\/p>\n
There are different versions of the story, some more romantic, as the one that Fer used to write the song, and some more dramatic. We don\u2019t know if Rebeca had a fisherman boyfriend who died in the sea some days before their wedding day, so she became mad. Or if she met a foreigner, was completely infatuated by him, and believed his promise of a future marriage, broken because he died at war, or simply because he left her behind. Or if she lived with a boy who cared for her because she had a mental disorder, and she really believed him when he sometimes told her they were going to be married. So she went to the church dressed in white as a bride waiting for her bridegroom (yes, traditionally it is the other way round, but she was impatience…), and when he died knocked down, her mental illness made her though that he was away. She adopted this ritual of going to the dock every Sunday in her wedding dress to wait for him, because \u201cmy boyfriend is coming, I promised to wait for him by the seashore, and he will recognize me because I\u2019m his bride, and we will be married\u201d. It is said that some neighbors tried to send her to a psychiatric hospital, but it was impossible.<\/p>\n
Anyway, all Mana fans know about the madwoman from Saint Blaise dock, whose house we can see in their video.<\/p>\n