Summer Stories | September 12, 2021

The Passion of Don Julio

by Robert Oates

When I was a young man newly married, I came to Mexico City. I took an apartment in a building in the old quarter. I had a friend there, an older gentleman of means. He always wore suits of white linen and his hat was a fedora of straw. His name was Don Julio. 

Don Julio was a guitarist of considerable virtuosity and well known in the city those days. Even when modern materials came into fashion, the strings of his guitar were of gut. 

Twenty five years before, he had been in love with a woman in my building, the beautiful Carlotta. She was a widow and had a bird, a toucan which lived in a cage by the window. Each afternoon at two, he would come to her apartment and the sound of their love making could be heard on our floor. 

After many years, the toucan began to mimic the sounds that it heard every afternoon, until all other sounds were forgotten. From its cage by the window, the bird would perform the passion of Don Julio and the beautiful Carlotta for the street below. Boys would tuck their soccer balls under their arms and stare up at the window, mouths agape. Their grandmothers would make the sign of the cross and hurry along. Don Gildardo would make excuses to linger out front of his shop and indulge himself in reverie. He soon had to go back inside. 

One afternoon at two, Don Julio stepped onto our street. It so happened that the toucan was performing. Don Julio stopped, his eyes slowly reaching the window above our street. He did not recognize his own voice in the animal’s cacophony as it wafted down. But the voice of the beautiful Carlotta was as the very music of his soul, and unmistakable. The straw fedora fell away. He mopped his brow with red silk from his breast pocket. He pulled his guitar from its case, for he was never without it. And he played as never before, and he sang, so sad and beautiful that the bird fell silent. And then, when he was finished he took his pistol from his waistband, for he was never without it. He placed the gun to his temple and he was no more. Ever after the toucan sang only the passion of my friend Don Julio. Always, the song ended with the perfect crack of the gun. 

The beautiful Carlotta wept and wept. But she could never bring herself to place the white linen cover over the cage. The carpets on our floor were always soggy with her tears. After many years the water seeped into the foundation and the building was condemned and we had to move away. 

Robert Oates is a musician from California.