19 días y 500 noches

About the song

«19 días y 500 noches» is the song that gives its name to the twelfth studio album by the Spanish singer-songwriter Joaquín Sabina, released on 6 September 1999 by BMG and Ariola. The record was produced by the Argentine musician Alejo Stivel, who had been the singer of the band Tequila, and it was recorded over roughly six months, between December 1998 and June 1999. It runs for about seventy-four minutes across thirteen tracks, and the title song sits second in the running order, right after the opening number. Sabina was fifty years old when it came out, and the album is usually described in Spain as the moment when his writing turned inward: less rock, more acoustic guitars, rumba, tango and the sound of a late-night bar.

The song has one of the strangest origin stories in modern Spanish pop, and it is documented by the people involved. Sabina was not writing it for himself. He had been commissioned to produce a rumba for Siempre Así, a cheerful and hugely popular group from Seville, and this is what he handed over. Their singer, Rafa Almarcha, read the words and told him plainly that he could not sing them: the piece talked about drink, gambling, cocaine and self-destruction, and that was the opposite of the sunny, family-friendly image the group had built. Sabina answered that he liked it too much to throw it away, that his producer liked it as well, and that he would record it himself. Years later Siempre Así went back and recorded their own version, which is how a song written to order for somebody else became the best-known thing its author ever wrote.

What the song tells is very simple, and the way it tells it is not. A relationship ends. The woman does not make a scene; she laughs, says hello and goodbye, and leaves in a taxi, blowing him two kisses on the way out. He is the one left kneeling. The rest of the lyric is his slide back into everything he had left behind: the bars, the card tables, the sherry, the company of people he does not respect and does not like. He insists he is not asking for forgiveness, because she no longer cares enough to grant it. Then comes the line the whole country remembers, the arithmetic of the title: the affair was short and getting over it was not. Nineteen days against five hundred nights. That asymmetry, and the fact that the long half is counted in nights rather than days, is the whole song in two numbers.

For a learner of Spanish this is a demanding but unusually rewarding text. The vocabulary is wide and very concrete — a vanity case, frost, a slammed door, costume jewellery, a brotherhood, a religious procession, a fairground-cheap version of something — and Sabina reaches for words that a textbook will never teach you. The grammar covers a lot of ground too: the preterite carries the story (she left, she threw, he went back, he took), the imperfect sets the background (they were right, he used to want), the conditional appears in a hypothetical vow, and the present subjunctive turns up after a clause about a future moment. There are gerunds everywhere, including one with a pronoun stuck on the end, and infinitives with object pronouns attached, one of them stacked three verbs deep in a line about wanting to want to love her.