Hijo de la Luna

Hijo de la Luna 🌙

The melody is beautiful and almost hypnotic, but the lyrics are much darker than the music makes you expect. It is basically a tragic fairy tale told as a song. It was written by José María Cano and recorded by Mecano in 1986.

“Hijo de la Luna” means “Child/Son of the Moon.”

The story goes like this:

A young Roma woman desperately wants to marry the man she loves. She spends the night crying and calling upon the Moon, asking the Moon to grant her wish.

The Moon answers her:

You can have your dark-skinned man — but I want your firstborn child in return.

So essentially, she makes a pact with the Moon. 🌕 The Moon desperately wants to experience motherhood herself, and the woman’s unborn child becomes the price of the wish

Then the woman gets her wish and has a child with her husband.

But the baby looks completely different from his parents.

His father is dark-skinned, while the baby is extremely pale, with grey eyes.

The song describes him as an albino child of the Moon.

The father immediately believes his wife has been unfaithful. And this is where the beautiful song suddenly becomes horrifying.

He confronts his wife, convinced she has betrayed him, kills her with a knife, takes the baby into the mountains and abandons him there.

But the Moon hasn’t forgotten her bargain. She takes the abandoned child as her own son. And that explains the gorgeous ending of the song.

According to the tale, whenever we see a full moon, it means the child is happy. But when the baby cries, the Moon begins to wane, curving herself into the shape of a cradle to rock her child.

That’s the imagery behind the final lines — the changing phases of the Moon become the movements of a mother caring for her baby.

With love, coffee, poetry, and stardust,

— Maggie The Afterlove Voice 💫