«Tengo un agujerito…»

«Tengo un agujerito…» is a celebrated risqué cuplé lyric secretly written by Don Guillermo Medina, the narrator’s grandfather. Its importance lies in the double life it makes audible: the respected police commissioner and serious playwright also earned money from clandestine popular entertainment, and that hidden work materially supported his family.

The Song and Its Hidden Author

The lyric begins with a small hole that speaks at night and will not let its owner sleep. Its suggestive refrain turns that image into a comic plea to cover the hole, a phrase that became widely known. The song’s playful innuendo contrasts sharply with the solemn historical dramas Don Guillermo publicly wrote and staged under his own name.

A Respectable Public Life and a Secret Income

No neighbor at Hermosilla 49 would have suspected that the cuplé, or other even more provocative lyrics, came from Don Guillermo. By day he worked as a police officer; in his spare time he pursued playwriting and invited his neighbors each season to premieres of serious dramas in verse or prose. Those plays, however, represented only a small portion of the income he received from writing under pseudonyms.

The clandestine output included vaudeville pieces, scripts for daring revues, and, above all, cuplé lyrics such as this one. Don Guillermo enjoyed writing that material far more than his dramas, though he felt guilty about the pleasure. The song therefore registers not merely a hidden source of income but a private artistic preference concealed behind his respectable public vocation.

The Family’s Material Security

The secret writing paid for the family’s well-being, a small house in Zarauz, the narrator’s medical education, and the principal-right apartment in the building at Hermosilla 49. The narrator associates the quiet, affluent home with the proceeds of his grandfather’s triple life: police work, public playwriting, and pseudonymous popular writing. What seemed like respectable security had been financed in part by work the neighbors would not have imagined.

That apparent comfort is set against Madrid in November 1936. Bombs sound in the distance and flashes light the sky over other districts, while the Salamanca neighborhood remains outwardly undisturbed. The narrator explains that the Condor Legion’s pilots had orders not to bomb the district where the city’s wealthiest families lived, including his grandfather, who had bought a good apartment there through the hidden earnings of his multiple careers. The apparent calm, like Don Guillermo’s public respectability, conceals the conditions beneath it.

Narrative Function

The song’s recurring image of a small, troublesome opening works as an apt emblem for the secret life behind the household’s polished surface. The lyric is comic and suggestive, but its consequences are concrete: it helped pay for the home and education that shaped the narrator’s life. The passage first presents a protected apartment as if it belonged to another reality, then turns from its quiet interior toward the distant bombing and the story’s approaching disruption. The hidden song thus links private concealment, family comfort, and the unstable world outside.