Comodin's 52-stanza poem

Comodín’s 52 verses are a set of enigmatic lines tied to a deck of cards, carried across generations through recollection, handwritten copies, family custody, and flamenco song. Their significance changes over time: what begins as a mysterious performance becomes an inherited archive, then material that Ana María Maya and José adapt into a shared spiritual testament.

The Deck and the First Recitation

In one version of the tradition, El Planeta and the dwarf spent several days together among the harbor sheds in Marseille. One night, the dwarf tried to tell his story through gestures and drawings. He drew a French deck marked with hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades, then apparently recited a short verse for each of its 52 cards. The verses were spoken in German, a language El Planeta did not understand, but he remembered some of them.

The story connects the recitation to a surviving copper engraving by Francisco Lameyer. Many people believe the figure in the engraving represents a joker, or, in other words, a dwarf. The account does not establish the verses’ precise original wording; instead, it emphasizes the curious passage from an incomprehensible spoken performance to fragments remembered and recorded by its listener.

From Memory to Family Archive

El Planeta is said to have written down the verses as he heard them on a scrap of paper. According to José’s account, the scrap remained in the family until Manuel’s time. When the dwarf met Manuel in Triana, he produced both an old jacket that El Planeta had lent him and sheets bearing the 52 verses in Spanish. Manuel could compare them with the German verses El Planeta had written down and found that some were identical in the two versions.

That comparison gives the verses a history of transmission rather than a single stable textual origin. They are first heard in German, partly remembered by El Planeta, written down phonetically as he heard them, and later handed to Manuel in Spanish. The evidence identifies correspondences between some verses, not a complete surviving set of original manuscripts or an explanation of how every line was translated.

Manuel and the Inherited Verses

The family story places the encounter with Manuel in Triana, 52 years after the strange event said to have befallen Ana’s great-grandfather: June 1894. Manuel was a respected cantaor, a singer of flamenco, living in the neighborhood during what is described as flamenco’s golden age and the emergence of Seville’s cafés cantantes. Known as El Solitario, he was also remembered as an eccentric, an outsider, or a thinker, and several of his songs dealt with human loneliness.

Manuel was said to be a skilled card player who enjoyed playing solitaire, as well as a versatile artist and an adept reader of cards. This combination of family legend, performance, and card imagery gives the verses a place within the family’s artistic inheritance: they are not merely an old written relic but part of a story associated with song, solitude, and the reading of signs. The 52-year interval also makes the verses part of a recurring pattern in the account, linking the dwarf’s encounter with El Planeta to the later episode in Triana.

The verses remained in the family’s possession from Manuel onward. Some phrases eventually entered flamenco songs sung across Spain, while Ana knew the texts from childhood. Their inheritance therefore has two forms: a family-held body of sayings and a wider, dispersed presence in songs. The account does not identify which particular lines entered which songs, leaving the transmission audible in general but fragmentary in detail.

Ana and José’s Reworking

When Ana’s heart condition was discovered, she and José began to regard each second together as a gift. Doctors forbade her to dance flamenco and advised against pregnancy because of the risk. The loss of dancing, especially for a famous bailaora, made the threat to her life feel immediate. Ana believed firmly in life after death; together, she and José approached life as a miracle and played at finding new words and expressions for what they thought and experienced.

In that changed circumstance, they returned to the inherited verses. They kept some of the dwarf’s formulas and rejected others, gradually building new phrases around the old ones. The result was their personal manifesto on life: neither a simple preservation of the traditional text nor an entirely new composition, but a deliberate reshaping of inherited material through a shared experience of love, danger, and mortality.

A Text Meant to Outlive Its Makers

Ana and José intended the manifesto to survive them. They described it as their spiritual testament, giving the verses a final role beyond family memory and performance: they became a way for the couple to leave something made together. The original recitation had already crossed languages and generations; the manifesto extended that chain by transforming the verses into a personal work meant for an unknown future reader.

The text’s layered transmission is central to its significance. A dwarf’s performance is remembered by El Planeta, partly set down on paper, echoed in Spanish sheets delivered to Manuel, preserved in a family, folded into songs, and revisited by Ana and José. At each stage, the verses are both carried forward and altered. Their survival depends not on a single authoritative copy, but on acts of listening, remembering, comparing, selecting, singing, and rewriting.