¡Ya salió con su domingo siete!
It seems that one of last week’s numerical phrases, Fulanita salió con su domingo siete, struck a nerve. I wrote that I had no idea where the saying came from, and Annette Atkins — born and bred here in Mexico City — called to tell me the folk tale from which it most likely derives. The story goes something like this:
Once upon a time, there was a woodcutter who went out into the forest to do some chopping. He got so involved in his work that he lost track of the time and night was soon upon him. Realizing it was too dark to return home, he decided to pick out a high tree in whose limbs he could make himself comfortable and spend the night.
Just as he was about to fall asleep, he spied three witches come into the clearing. They built a fire and began dancing around it while singing, incessantly, “Lunes y martes y miércoles tres… Lunes y martes y miércoles tres… Lunes y martes y miércoles tres… Lunes y martes y miércoles tres…”
The man, entranced by the chanting — and perhaps a little bored by hearing the same line over and over again — chimed in with “Jueves y viernes y sábado seis.” The witches were so thrilled with the new addition to their little song, that they showered the man with all kinds of exotic — and expensive — fruit which sprang miraculously from the tree. When the man returned home, he told his story to a friend who, after seeing the riches in fruit bestowed upon the woodcutter, decided that he would also try his luck with the witches. After listening carefully to the description of the witches’ whereabouts, the woodcutter’s friend found and climbed the very same tree. And there he waited.
Surely enough, after a short time the witches came out, lit their bonfire and began to dance: “Lunes y martes y miércoles tres, jueves y viernes y sábado seis…”, ad infinitum.
The man up in the tree, anxious to receive his reward, blurted out rather unpoetically: “¡Domingo siete!”
The witches, upon hearing such a cacophonous addition to the song with which they were so pleased, caused the tree to erupt into a rainstorm, drenching the poor man from head to toe. From that day on, anyone who makes a serious mistake or a faux pas (mal paso), is said to have come out with his “Domingo siete.”
Another version, very close to Ms. Atkins’s, was e-mailed to me that very same day by the novelist Rafael Menjívar. In his version of the story, however, the woodcutter was rewarded with jewels and coins and other valuable objects, and his friend’s punishment, instead of a drenching, was a huge wart on his nose.
This might explain how the saying came to be so closely related to the mal paso of an unwanted pregnancy. A swollen abdomen in an unmarried girl would be, in traditional society’s eyes, as unseemly as a gigantic wart on someone’s nose.
Be that as it may, the saying is still used by some in its original sense of making a terrible mistake or a big mess out of things. A lightening poll that I took, however, shows that most people automatically equate salir (alguien) con su domingo siete with an unwanted pregnancy out of wedlock: the worst mal paso a young girl can take. Llevarse de a cuartos. This numerical saying didn’t get into last week’s article for lack of space. It means literally to get along with someone on a fifteen-minute basis, which — of course — doesn’t mean much of anything at all. The word cuarto means “quarter of an hour,” something which I will explain in the next paragraph.
If someone se lleva de a cuartos with someone else, it means they are bosom buddies, very close friends. The saying itself comes out of a rather adolescent game of rapping your friend innocently on the arm every fifteen minutes while exclaiming “¡Cuartos!” and lifting up your thumb. One had to be on his toes in order to be the one to do the rapping and not be the rapped, but he had to wait the full fifteen minutes. If one was quick on his toes, he could give the thumbs up sign before getting rapped. Only very good friends would put up with this sort of behavior, this kind of male-bonding ritual. But, alas, women as well can llevarse de a cuartos, even they don’t go around banging each other on the arm.
“Ah, but they do!”, chimbed in my wife, Josefina Estrada, also a novelist who grew up in one of the rougher neighborhoods of Tacubaya. “They don’t hit as hard, but tiro por viaje (meaning all the time) we’d end up with black-and-blue marks on our arms. And it could also be a co-ed thing, between girls and boys, but then the boys didn’t hit so hard.”
That’s a relief. Thumbs up…
If you would like to know more about any idiomatic expressions
you may have heard, or about any Spanish-language difficulties,
feel free to contact me at sandrocohen@gmail.com
And you can check out my blog at:
www.sandrocohen.blogspot.com
|
