Maria Tănase – Whoever loves and abandons

Maria Tănase was a Romanian singer who performed many beautiful songs, but this one is monumental because its story is about all of us. It can happen to anyone, and it can be understood on so many levels.

But there is one level where the song becomes a curse.

Imagine an old woman dressed in black, who has lost everyone she ever loved. The words she speaks carry the weight of all her suffering. God help you if you ever become the target of her curse.

And only Maria Tănase could convey those emotions with such intensity. She doesn't merely sing the words. She makes you feel every one of them. Every word she sings pierces your skin.

The song begins with the reason for the curse: whoever loves someone and then abandons them shall be punished by God.

And then come these verses:

Should crawl like a snake,
Should walk like a beetle,
Should be hurled by the wind,
Should be scoured by the dust.

There is something else to it. The woman compares an ant to a man. The ant is tiny, with a body large in proportion to its head, yet it keeps its word. But a man, despite being baptized, cannot keep his promises.

And the curse repeats.

My father once told me a story that happened a long time ago in his village.

There was a teacher who had divorced his wife. Both of them had left the village, but the teacher kept returning from time to time because he still had relatives there.

He usually rode a bicycle, as cars were a rarity back then. The village was built on a steep hillside, and one day, while riding down it, something went wrong. Perhaps his bicycle chain came off. Whatever happened, he crashed into a pole so violently that he fractured his skull and died right in front of someone's gate.

When his brother came to collect his body, he told the person who had come to help him:

"This is the house where my brother's first and only true love lives. Parents wouldn't allow them to be together, so they went their separate ways and built their lives with other people. But they had a child together."

Then he pointed to a boy standing nearby and said:

"This is his son."

This story fits the curse from the song remarkably well.

Take care, and make sure you never fall under those words.