Senora’s Songs Are Memories of Life Set to Music

On the morning we met, I knew little about Lydia Olmedo Fuentes. A co-worker had told me she played the piano every Thursday at a senior citizens center in Fullerton. I heard she was the life of the party, a delightful and dignified lady of 84. Oh, and she came here years ago from El Salvador.

But when she opened the door to her impeccable Orange home, Sra. Fuentes allowed me into a world that has almost disappeared. A world of old-fashioned manners. Of personal advice offered to a stranger with just the right touch of intimacy. Of crinkled sheet music with hand-written notes and chicken consomme served up with the recipe for my health.

She sang songs to me and shared her memories. I glimpsed a life of privilege, private boarding schools and coffee plantations. But also a life of loss. As a girl, she lost her mother to insanity and her brother to suicide. As a young woman, she lost her first baby to a miscarriage, her first husband to an early death and, eventually, her affluent way of life.

She came to this country as a widow in 1948. Today, she is the only survivor of seven siblings. She lives alone but she’s not sad. She says she never feels sorry for herself. She keeps too busy for that.

The night before my visit, she announces, it was almost midnight when she took a bath. An hour later, she was exercising in bed, rotating her ankles, doing bicycles with her legs.

She knew she would have a lot to do in the morning. Prepare the vase of fresh daisies from her garden for the coffee table. And put together the files for me, with old correspondence and newspaper clippings of her volunteer work in Santa Ana, where she lived for 15 years.

“No dejes para manana lo que puedes hacer hoy,” she said, using one of the Spanish dichos, or sayings, so popular with women of her generation. “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today.”

No Don Juans Allowed

The yellowed clips capture her love for People to People, the Eisenhower-era program that established international sister cities. Sra. Fuentes was an ideal ambassador for the program, traveling with others from Orange County’s Santa Ana to her birthplace of the same name in El Salvador.

She looked pretty and poised in those pictures. She was a single mother at the time, raising two daughters from her second marriage. She was so strict she wouldn’t let her girls use makeup even after they started high school. But she discovered that some civic-minded men had less rigorous moral standards.

One of them, a married gent, showed up at her house one day and made an indecent proposal. He offered to discreetly ensconce Sra. Fuentes in an apartment if she agreed to be his mistress.

“I am not the type of woman who hides behind the curtains,” she told the cad before showing him the door. When he tried to kiss her, she firmly resisted.

Sra. Fuentes demonstrated for me how she blocked the advances of this Don Juan. She stuck her head out defiantly, tucking her lips under her teeth with her mouth tightly closed. The nerve of this interloper! Her two husbands are the only men she’s ever kissed.

“Nunca fui coqueta,” she said. “I was never a flirt.”

The experience gave rise to a song. She made her way to the Steinway in her living room and played the playful notes to a ditty she entitled: No,no senor!” And it goes like this:

No, no senor!

Yo no lo beso.

No, no por Dios!

No pierda el ceso.

Porque usted besa con falsedad.

Cuando yo bese, cuando yo bese,

Sera verdad. Ole!

(No, sir, I’m not going to kiss you/No, by God, don’t lose your head/Because you kiss with falsehood/When I kiss, it will be true.)

One of her dreams, she confided, is to have one of her compositions recorded by a famous singer, like Julio Iglesias. Yet her songs are as old-fashioned as chaperoned dates. They remind me of the delicate, melancholy melodies of Agustin Lara or Maria Grever, romantic songwriters of my parents’ era.

She put a tape into a small portable player and we stood listening to her tunes recorded by a trio. They weren’t created to sell, she says. They just came out of her heart, inspired by her experiences.

“Each song has its moment,” she explained.

She sang along with some of the verses of “Asi Sone” (I Dreamed Like This), written after dreaming of her first husband who died of cancer before turning 40, leaving her widowed at 33.

“Veo retratos de aquellos tiempos/ Que yo sonaba tenerte siempre.” (I see pictures of those days/When I dreamed of having you always.)

His name was Rodolfo Daglio, a dark-skinned law student who later became a political rebel and a city councilman. He was 18 when they met in Santa Ana, El Salvador; she was just a girl of 13, raised to be a proper young lady of leisure and honor. Their puppy love was stunted when she was sent to a Catholic boarding school, but her persistent beau showed up there one day on the pretense of scouting the campus for his sister.

The lovebirds were happy just to get a glimpse of each other from afar.

Rodolfo was the one who taught Lydia how to kiss. But her guilt made her feel like a Mary Magdalene and motivated her to become a nun. He was heartsick, but eventually he stole her away from the Lord. She was 19 when they married in 1934; last Wednesday would have been their 65th anniversary.

“I had thought that we were going to get old together (hacernos viejitos juntos),” she said.

During her four years away at boarding school, most of the time in neighboring Honduras, Lydia never had vacations and never went home. Not even for Christmas. There was little for her to go home to.

Her mother had lost her mind when Lydia was 3, she said. When Lydia’s brother killed himself at age 23, her mother went even more mad. In those days, therapy meant building a separate room for her behind the house and not letting her come out. Astoundingly, she says her mother remained there until she died in 1975 at age 92. She had outlived Lydia’s father, Horacio Olmedo, by almost four decades.

Her father was well known in town; he owned coffee plantations and built a house behind the cathedral in the central square. Life was not all tragic.

The kids often went to see silent movies (peliculas mudas) where music was provided by two marimbas renowned for their fine wood and tonal qualities. Her father would say Lydia could pick out the melodies by ear on the piano, which she was playing before she turned 6. She also loved to dance and perform in school plays.

Her father tried to maintain a semblance of order and harmony at home. He had this rule: “At the dinner table, nothing disagreeable should be said. (En la mesa no se dice nada desagradable.)”

Order still reigns in her domain.

Sra. Fuentes has lived in the same house in Orange for more than 30 years. She keeps it compulsively neat, from the precisely spaced mini-blinds to the little knickknacks and framed photographs placed just so. It seems like moving any one object would throw the rest off balance in a sort of ecology of tidiness.

Though the day was hot when I visited, the house was cool and quiet. The only sound is the ticking of a wall clock marking the passing of precious time. There is no television for entertainment in the living room, only the piano and a bust of Chopin near the window.

Sra. Fuentes served me lunch at her dining room table. She brought me her special nonfat consomme, served in a china cup to sip like tea. She also served Sanka with skim milk and soda crackers with perfectly cut squares of “veggie” cheese, good for those of us who need to watch our cholesterol, she said. It sounded more like subtle advice.

Men shouldn’t be so touchy, she says. If your wife tells you to watch your weight, don’t get mad at her. She does it because she loves you and wants to keep you. (“Es que lo quiere, y lo quiere conservar.”)

She brought me more crackers and sat down next to me. The problem with men, she explains, is that they want a faithful wife but they also want to fool around.

“Excuse me for me speaking in plural,” she says, “but you men just don’t know who to love.”

Surviving on Her Own

She was still expecting her second daughter in 1953 when her short-lived second marriage ended in divorce. After her inheritance ran out, she supported herself and the girls by giving piano lessons and taking in tailoring at home. Later, she got a job with I. Magnin in Santa Ana, doing alterations and sewing wedding gowns for $1.75 an hour.

The skills cultivated for a life of luxury had become her means of survival.

“Were you in love with your husbands?” I asked.

“Since they never gave me true love, I never felt it,” she said. “But, thank God, I never needed a man to get ahead.”

Her only therapy, she said, has been music. Her only true partner, her piano. By heart, she recited the lyrics to a song she wrote called “A solas con mi piano (Alone With My Piano).”

It was the only moment during my visit that she shed a tear.

The song says that only her piano knows the secret of her sorrow, and it counsels her to keep on singing without thinking of her suffering.

Solo mi piano sabe el secreto.

A el le cuento todas mis penas. . .

. . . Y me aconseja seguir cantando

Sin importarme nada mis sufrimientos.

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.