A borrowed key and a stained rug: the house of «Tu mendigo»

A key that isn't yours. That's how the house begins.

Not the song, which opens with a and you, so sure of yourself that sounds like a complaint muttered on a landing. The house, which is what I want to talk about today. Because «Tu mendigo» is a lyric you can walk through like a flat: it has a front door, a room that isn't called a room, a corner with a rug, a chair that's missing and, at the very end, a room I still haven't entirely left.

It's on the second album of the trilogy, «Ojalá se pudiera viajar a GAYFOLK», and on the Planeta Gayfolk singles list it's track 92 of 273. It comes after «I Am Yurena» and before «El abrazo de Pitufo». Two songs with more sparkle and more mischief on either side, and in the middle this one, which barely laughs at all.

On the song's own page I explained what it's about. Here I'm going to play estate agent, a job I never imagined I'd have. Let me show you round. Damp patches and all.

The entrance hall

Before we go in, a word about the tone.

This isn't one of my songs about Mercadona and dick pics. There's no brand joke here, no TV celebrity. When a lyric is about someone who kept you on your knees for years, the humour stays downstairs in the entrance, smoking, waiting for you to come out. It doesn't come in.

I mention it because a lot of people find me through the cheeky songs, then stumble on this one and feel a bit thrown. That's fine by me. That's how I work. I laugh at my exes until there's one I can't laugh at, and then I write slowly, in short sentences, like someone feeling their way down a dark corridor with one hand on the wall.

The door with a borrowed key

The first room is the front door. And the door is already wrong:

«Me abriste la puerta con llave prestada, y dijiste que era mi refugio, pero era una celda alquilada.»

(You opened the door with a borrowed key, and said it was my refuge, but it was a rented cell.)

The borrowed key was the first thing that came to me, and it's still what I like most. Whoever opens a door with a key that isn't theirs is offering you something that doesn't belong to them. They're saying "come in, make yourself at home", and the home is someone else's. The bank's, the family's, the company's. Or nobody's, which is worse.

Anyone who has been with a narcissist recognises this straight away. At first they offer you an enormous refuge, beautiful, with a view. They tell you it's different with you, that you're safe here, that at last someone understands you. And you walk in with your suitcases because you've come in from the cold. You don't ask whose key it is. Who asks that when someone finally lets them in?

Look at the verb, too: "said". It wasn't a refuge; he said it was. The whole house, from the door onwards, is a house made of words. A show flat. The furniture is cardboard and the books on the shelf have no pages.

The rented cell

Inside, the room has a prison's name.

I spent a long time looking for the word. I could have used cage, which is more poetic. But cages are for birds, and birds look pretty on album covers. Cell is uglier, more brick, more Netflix prison drama with orange jumpsuits. And rented, because it isn't even a cell you own. It's temporary. They let you have it for as long as you're useful.

That's the part I found hardest to understand while I was living it, and hardest to write: that someone can lock you inside a place they can also throw you out of. Both at once. You're a prisoner and you're a tenant. You can't leave and you can't settle.

Further on, there's a line in the lyric that says it without any metaphor: in captivity I'm still in that room. I put it near the end, when it seems the song has left the house behind. It hasn't. The cell travels with you. That's what nobody tells you about these relationships: you carry the room around on your back, like a wet coat.

The corner with the stained rug

Now we come to what I think is the saddest part of the whole flat, which is also the smallest. The corner.

The lyric says he offered me a corner with a stained rug and a silence full of self-serving friendship. It's a line that, read aloud, has a smell. It smells of student flats, of roadside motel carpet, of that sickly-sweet smell of rugs nobody has cleaned since Expo '92.

I like the rug because it's what you get when you don't get a bed. It's the dog's spot. That's where you go when there's nothing else, and they tell you it's a lovely touch, look how nice, you've got your own little corner. And you're grateful. That's the part that embarrasses me most, to be honest: I was grateful. For a long time, the stained rug felt like a gift.

And then the silence. A silence full of self-serving friendship. Here I'm talking about other people, not just him. The circle around him. The friends who keep quiet because it suits them, because the man with the key opens the door for them now and then, too. I'm not naming names. There's no need. Anyone who has lived in a corner like that knows exactly who was in the living room, laughing, glass in hand, never looking towards the rug.

Leaving names out of this song was deliberate. In others I let rip and even tell you the neighbourhood. Not here. Here the house is what matters, not the people who lived in it.

The office next door

There's one room that doesn't seem to belong to this house, and that's exactly why it interests me: the business.

The lyric says he looked after the company but not the trembling of my hands. It's a line that says everything about priorities without needing to explain any further. In the house of «Tu mendigo» there's an office, and the office lights are always on. The desk lamp, the laptop, the phone calls. And in the room next door, someone with shaking hands who never appears in any meeting.

It's followed by another line I adore for how twisted it is: he used to say the cold came from the sun and not from my shivers. I laughed a lot when I wrote it, out of sheer rage. It's textbook gaslighting, but told backwards, with the logic of a drunk weatherman. You're cold and they tell you it's the sun. You're shaking and they tell you it's hot. And you, no longer trusting your own thermometer, end up putting on sun cream in the middle of January.

That trembling, by the way, is the same one that turns up in other songs of mine. I didn't plan it. I only noticed later, sorting through lyrics, that I've got a whole collection of shaking bodies scattered across the catalogue. It must be my way of saying what I don't know how to say any other way.

The chair that wasn't there

And now, the room that gives us the chorus. A chair that doesn't exist:

«Y yo, sin hacer ruido, me senté donde no había sitio.»

(And I, without making a sound, sat down where there was no room.)

It's the line in this song that weighs on me most, and I think I know why. Everyone has, at some point, been at a table where there was no chair for them. Somebody else's family lunch. The wedding of someone who didn't want you there. A work dinner where you're somebody's boyfriend and nobody knows your name.

What matters to me in that line is "without making a sound". I didn't plonk myself down. I didn't claim the chair. I eased myself in little by little, not bothering anyone, not asking, into a gap nobody had made for me. And even so, as the lyric says right after, I got kicked for not asking permission.

It's a double punishment, like the rented cell. They punish you for taking up space and they punish you for not asking. If you ask, you're a nuisance. If you don't, you're a squatter. There's no right way to sit at that table.

Then come two twin lines that work like a mirror: smiling out of duty, crying with no witnesses. The smile for the living room, the tears for the bathroom. That's the choreography of anyone living in a house like this. A different face for every room.

The broom cupboard

There's a part of the lyric that still gives me the shivers, even though I wrote it. The one about wanting to save me and then sweep me away.

It's a house with a broom. He wanted to save me, the song says, and then sweep me up as if I were the most insignificant piece of shit. From hero to cleaner in two lines. That's what happens with the saviour type: he needs someone to rescue, and once you're no use to him any more, he scoops you off the floor with the dustpan and tips you into the bin.

I thought about cutting the word shit. It felt like too much. In the end I kept it because it's the only swear word in the lyric, and a single swear word in the middle of so much restraint weighs more than twenty. If I'd surrounded it with insults, it would have got lost. This way, on its own, it lands like a plate smashing on the floor of a silent house.

A little further on there's a line that answers all of this, and it cost me a lot to write because it says it the opposite way round from how it's usually said: you weren't the villain, you were the saviour. Normally it would be the other way round. But in these relationships the problem isn't the villain, whom you can see coming a mile off in his black cape. The problem is the one who arrives as a saviour, with his borrowed key, and opens the door of a cell telling you it's your home.

That type turns up in other songs in the catalogue, by the way. In «Ni con un palo» I wrote about him without metaphors, in dry, diagnostic sentences. They're cousins. One is the house; the other is the landlord's report.

The kitchen clock

Every house has a clock, and this one reads twelve years.

«mientras perdía doce años enteros»

(while I was losing twelve whole years)

I'm not going to tell you more than the lyric does, because a song isn't a case file and I'd rather leave it there. Twelve whole years. I put "whole" in because I wanted them to have weight. Not twelve-odd years, not roughly a decade. Twelve, complete, with their summers, their winters and their Christmases in other people's houses.

And in the same line, the flip side: my feelings were shrinking while he, the lyric says, latched on to the first thing that came along. I don't spell out what. There's no need. Whoever needs to understand it will. What matters is the proportion. One shrinks and the other clings on. One loses years and the other gains time.

When I write about these things, I try to keep the numbers few and concrete. A concrete number hurts more than any adjective. Twelve whole years doesn't need "terrible" or "endless" next to it. It stands up on its own.

Chaos, the lodger

There's a line in the lyric I love for the way it turns the accusation around: you said the chaos came with me, and you were the one who brought it.

It's the ghost lodger in so many houses. That chaos that's always yours. You're the messy one, the intense one, the drama queen, the one who cries at everything. And meanwhile the one hauling in boxes full of trouble, the lies, the silences, the self-serving friendships, is the other person. But he leaves the boxes in your room, so they look like yours.

And then comes the line that stays with me most: my way of being hurt made you angry, my joy offended you. Both. If I was down, I was a bother. If I was fine, I was an affront. There was no acceptable mood in that house. It was like living in a flat where every light switch gives you an electric shock.

My art hurt you, the lyric says right after. That one I'll keep to myself. I'll leave it there, like a crooked picture on the wall that I have no intention of straightening.

The window

Every house has a window, even if it only looks onto the inner courtyard. In this song, it's the line that gives the whole thing its name:

And today I'm telling you I'm not your punching bag, and I'm certainly not your beggar.

It's the first time the lyric really speaks in the present tense. Up to that point everything was past: you opened, you offered, you looked after, you said. And suddenly, today I'm telling you. That's the moment I open the window. I'm not out yet, but I'm leaning out, breathing the air from the street, watching the neighbours opposite hang out their washing.

The punching bag came on its own. The beggar, on the other hand, I thought about a lot. A beggar is someone who asks at the door. Someone who depends on the charity of whoever walks by. And he, so sure of himself, still believes I'm sitting there with my plastic cup, waiting for him to toss me a few coins of affection. That's what the chorus is: his conviction. Not mine.

I like that the song's title is his line, not mine. «Tu mendigo» ("Your beggar") isn't what I am: it's what he thinks I am. It's like naming a song after the nickname they gave you at school, to snatch it out of the hands of whoever came up with it. You say it first, in capital letters, on the cover. And suddenly it isn't his any more. It's yours, and you can do whatever you like with it, even build a whole song around it, with its own page and its own story.

The visitors

A house like this gets visitors too, and they're worth talking about because the lyric lets you glimpse them out of the corner of your eye.

There are the people in the living room, the self-serving friends we've already met. But there's another kind of visitor who never appears by name and whom I had very much in mind while writing: the one from outside, who sees the pretty house, the key in the lock, the freshly painted refuge, and leaves thinking how lucky you are. That visitor never sees the rug. Nobody shows them the corner. They're poured a glass of wine in the good living room and told how well the two of you are doing.

That's part of the cell, too. That from outside it looks like a villa with a pool. That your mother, your old school friend or the neighbour across the way tell you how fortunate you are. And you, smiling out of duty, nodding, passing round the bowl of olives.

I don't blame those visitors. I'd have thought the same. Other people's houses always look tidier from the hallway. But I wanted the song to be, in a way, the visitor who does go all the way in, who opens the door to the corner without being invited and stands there staring at the stain.

If you listen to it like that, like someone wandering into the kitchen without asking, maybe the same thing will happen to you that happened to me when I reread it: you'll want to throw every window open at once.

The full floor plan

If I put all the rooms together, I get a pretty ugly floor plan. I'll draw it in words, which is what I know how to do:

• A door with somebody else's key.
• A rented cell they tell you is a refuge.
• A corner with a stained rug.
• An office with the lights always on.
• A table with no chair for you.
• A broom cupboard with a dustpan.
• A clock that reads twelve years.
• A window onto the street.

It's a house a lot of people know from the inside. If the song is any use to anyone, I don't think it'll be because it's original, which I couldn't say, but because they'll recognise the corridor. They know where the light switch is without having to feel for it.

How you write a house like this

The lyrics are mine, written without AI. The music and the vocals are made with artificial intelligence tools such as Suno, which I direct. I explain it on About Mike and I always mention it, because in a song like this I think it matters to know who put the words there. The words are mine. And so are the walls.

I wrote «Tu mendigo» in short sentences, as I said, with a chorus that repeats a lot. In this song the repetitions aren't there to make it catchy. They're there so you feel the confinement. You come back again and again to the same chair, the same kick, the same dutiful smile. It's a song that paces around a room, like a prisoner measuring his cell in footsteps.

If you're curious about how these things get made, I went into more detail in my lyric notebook: with the serious lyrics, I cut adjectives until it hurts, and then I cut one more.

The way out

The song doesn't end with a removal van. It ends with the same line it started with, the one about him being so sure of himself. No final slammed door, no van parked outside.

That felt more honest. Leaving a house like that isn't a moment. It's a very long process, the kind where one day you take out a box and the next you come back for another, and sometimes you stay one more night because it's raining. The song was written in the middle of that process. With the window open and the suitcases half packed.

If you're in a house like this too, I'm not going to hand you breakfast-mug advice. I'll only say that the key wasn't his, that the cell wasn't your refuge and that the rug wasn't a gift. And that there are people outside. If you'd like something more practical, the catalogue has «Manual de escape de un narci», which is practically this song's moving-out guide.

You'll find the full lyrics on gayfolkplanet.com and in this site's lyrics archive. Play it once, calmly, and see whether you recognise any of the corridors.

I don't live there any more. But I know the floor plan by heart.

Frequently asked questions

What is «Tu mendigo» about? It's about a long relationship with someone who presented himself as a saviour and treated the other person like someone begging for affection: a refuge that turns out to be a cell, the kick for taking up space, the dutiful smile and the tears with no witnesses, right up to the moment of telling him you're no longer his beggar.

Which album is it on? On «Ojalá se pudiera viajar a GAYFOLK», the second album of the GAYFOLK trilogy. On the Planeta Gayfolk singles list it's track 92 of 273.

Who writes the lyrics and how is the music made? The lyrics are mine, written without AI. The music and vocals are produced with artificial intelligence tools such as Suno, which I direct. I'm a lyricist, composer and music producer from Madrid, and the first AI songwriter.

Where can I read the lyrics and listen to it? The full lyrics are on the song page and on gayfolkplanet.com. You can listen to it on Spotify.