Amor loco, y amor loco, yo por vos, y vos por otro

Amor loco, y amor loco, yo por vos, y vos por otro is an old song Montano uses to voice a painfully uneven love triangle: he loves Ismenia, while she remains in love with Alanio. Its refrain makes reciprocal longing impossible, setting Montano’s desire against Ismenia’s attachment and prompting her to defend the constancy of her own love.

The Refrain as a Formula

The song begins, “Amor loco, y amor loco, / yo por vos, y vos por otro.” The repeated address gives the verse the sound of a familiar saying, while its second line sharpens the imbalance: one person loves the listener, who loves someone else. Montano ends the stanza by likening Ismenia’s love for another to madness, completing the reversal between his desire and hers.

The narrator identifies it as an old song, not a private composition. That detail matters to its force: Montano draws on a ready-made lyric formula to name a situation that is personal to the listeners but recognizably common. The refrain compresses the triangle into a memorable opposition rather than explaining or resolving it.

Montano's Performance

The song enters a history already marked by betrayal. Ismenia says that Alanio’s cruelty and disloyalty might have avenged Montano if she had been capable of seeking revenge through the love she felt for Alanio. Instead, Montano turns his attention to her and sings the old refrain. His performance presents him as the rejected lover, but it also places Ismenia in the position of someone whose affection is directed elsewhere.

The scene is not emotionally neutral. Ismenia recalls that everyone present was caught in an extraordinary anguish as Montano tried to make her pleasure in looking at him carry the sting of his rivalry with Alanio. She rejects that substitution: her thoughts cannot be deceived by appearances. The song thus does more than announce unrequited love; in this encounter, it presses Ismenia to treat Montano as a possible object of desire when she does not.

Ismenia's Answer

When Montano finishes the final stanza, Ismenia takes up her zampoña and sings in turn. She says she means to show through her song that she has conducted herself better in love than anyone present. Her response shifts the scene from Montano’s claim of being the lover who longs for someone devoted to another, to Ismenia’s judgment of how the people in the triangle have behaved.

That reply distinguishes constancy from simple suffering. The old refrain makes the mismatch sound symmetrical—Montano for Ismenia, Ismenia for Alanio—but Ismenia insists that the parties cannot be judged by the same measure. Her performance claims a moral advantage without making her love for Alanio disappear. The exchange therefore remains unresolved as an emotional triangle even as Ismenia contests Montano’s framing of it.

Song Within the Pastoral Narrative

The episode belongs to a narrative in which songs are actions as well as expressions of feeling. Elsewhere, a sonnet is introduced as a shepherdess approaches the spring, three nymphs sing together with their instruments, and Diana sings a romance beside the fountain. These lyric performances give characters a way to disclose, test, or shape relationships in the hearing of others. Montano’s old song follows that pattern, but its borrowed refrain makes its intervention unusually direct: it names the romantic mismatch before Ismenia answers it in song.