I’d always loved a green-and-red striped shirt she used to wear. The day I turned sixteen, she literally gave me the shirt off her back, leaving herself with nothing. I don’t know whether this thing of becoming like someone else is a way of boosting a fascinating personality in the eyes of the world or whether it represents a desire to rid the world of that personality and replace them, though not with the same intensity, the same appeal, or maybe I mean not with the same success. What I do know is that people started telling us, ‘You’re so alike that going out with one of you is like going out with both.’ Before, when I was just starting out, Mariángela was the one who knew most and gave least of herself. I never got to know more than she did, I just caught up with her; I learned that rumbas were happenings organized solely for my benefit and that I and I alone had the painful duty of understanding them completely and the right to enjoy them all. So it wasn’t a pleasant sight, seeing two peladas dancing together, each one utterly alone; all the more so since their every gesture was not just similar, it was so indistinguishable that it was impossible to tell who was copying who, which girl had become so like the other that she was losing her identity and which – given they were so alike – was stealing the other’s persona, because she improved on the original or copied it so faithfully that one or other, the original or the facsimile, would eventually be superfluous.
The thing is, this rock ’n’ roll thing puts a whole bunch of crazy ideas in your head. A lot of shrieking, a lot of well-sung choruses, a lot of studio polish and then silence and solitary confinement … I went out so I could see Mariángela, but after a while, all I got were messages from her and in the end not even that. By now the guys were used to people disappearing. By now Pedro Miguel Fernández had poisoned his sisters, and it doesn’t matter how young you are, that sort of shit leaves you believing in everything and worshipping nothing.
I’d call round to her house but no one would answer, knock at the door but no one would come. I assumed she was in the country since she’d talked to me about maybe taking a trip to the mountains: ‘To see this city from above.’ How was I supposed to know that her mamá took a massive overdose of 10mg Valium tablets one night and never woke up, that Mariángela decided from that day forward to live life to the hilt, that she asked around for me but no one would listen because, when she was standing there, they’d forget my fascinating personality! Later, when I asked after her, they’d stare at me gormlessly and say they hadn’t seen her in ages, that I was the one they’d seen, they didn’t remember her at all. It was fucking complicated!
She’d unplugged the phone. Every time I banged on the door, she’d bite down on her pillow. I don’t know how long her solitary confinement lasted but when she finally re-emerged, the people who saw her didn’t dare ask questions. ‘She was really pale,’ they told me. ‘But everyone’s so pale these days, you don’t ask questions.’
She walked slowly to the centre of Cali, saying hi to everyone she passed. When she reached the Telecom building, she took the lift to the top (she was always terrified of lifts), and head first, cupping her hands over her ears, she plunged from the thirteenth floor.
Aaaah! Don’t say anything! I’ll keep quiet, I won’t say another word. We’re all part of the same thing, we’ve all had the same opportunities; it’s not our fault if we were born into an era where we’re constantly seduced and then abandoned, where flies don’t settle on us because these days we’ve invented incense that smells like cherry, we’ve invented a thousand perfumes for rumbas. I don’t like that we give the impression that we’re losers, kids who have no fucking clue what we’ve got ourselves into. Thinking about it, I decided that what Mariángela did was not the act of a loser, that when she jumped, she knew she had every chance of winning. And then I wept tears of relief, because grief is soothing and it’s pleasurable; I spent the whole day listening to ‘I Got the Blues’ and thinking, ‘Maybe she was trying to set an example, trying to make some sort of statement.’ Whatever it was, like Mariángela the day her mother died, I never felt more alive.
Alive, alive! And to celebrate we went out for the night. I bid you, gentle reader, pay careful attention because that night was to herald a radical change. A friend of Leopoldo’s, recently unpacked from the USA, was throwing what people were saying was going to be ‘a cosmic rumba’ in Miraflores.
I spent the day wandering around like some spoilt little rich girl, rummaging through piles of clothes, picking out the best items, predicting fabulous things for the night ahead, because the very idea of going out, of going to someone else’s rumba, was a novelty, so I tousled Leopoldo’s hair while he looked at me neurotically, awkwardly, stupidly, nervously, jealous of my boundless stamina.
I wore flowers. He wore stripes. I didn’t exactly encourage the combo but I didn’t object either, because every day his mood was worse, then he calmed down and was like an empty shell, a deflated balloon. In the car I made a racket, heading up Avenida Sexta, calling out to the poor friends who didn’t go looking for new things to do these days, not even on Saturdays, making sure strangers noticed me, remembered my presence (to tide them through those sleepless nights).
Arriving at the rumba, I felt half dead but so young, hair washed and pristine, a total rumbera, tongue not too numb from the effects of the charlie, sweetened with strawberry syrup, ready to kiss someone new.
I had a thousand plans in my little head. I’d already decided to dump Leopoldo, though he’d be the last to know. I’d get a new boyfriend, someone who travelled, we’d go to La Guajira, to the Galapagos Islands and I wouldn’t be too fussy about the sound system – an ordinary two-speaker stereo would do.
As we got out of the car, I realized I couldn’t even hear the music. The door was opened by some tall, lanky guy I never saw again who, with an almost imperceptible wave, pointed the way. And so we found ourselves in the living room with people sprawled all over the place. Chicago was playing on the stereo, but so quietly you’d have been better off with a transistor radio clamped to your ear.
‘I don’t believe it,’ I said to Leopoldo, but he was already waving to some guy he knew, some washed-out nobody who didn’t even stop to say hi, then he looked round for somewhere to crash, somewhere he could lie back and close his eyes. Close them and listen to the sounds, but what sounds? From what I could hear there were no sounds. It was completely inaudible. My nostrils flaring with pure rage, I stomped over to the stereo, which looked to be state-of-the-art and seriously powerful. I crouched down, respectful but curious. I worked out the dials: reached out, grabbed the button marked Volume and cranked it up full blast.
I heard the roar of a vast brass section. Everyone else felt a thousand thorns prickle all over their bodies and there were outraged screams of ‘Bitch!’ while I twirled across the floor, ready to begin my dance; they pushed me aside and someone scuttled over to the stereo like his life depended on it and, in a flash, killed the volume.
I stared at Leopoldo, then I said, ‘Music’s supposed to be played loud, isn’t it?’ This was the first truth he’d taught me. He didn’t get up, he beckoned and I went over.
‘We’re completely out of it,’ he said. ‘These people, they’ve been through a lot. A bit of quiet wouldn’t do us any harm …’
‘Okay then … Peace out, as they say.’
‘Come lie on my shoulder,’ he suggested through a moronic haze.
‘And by peace you mean no volume. This is what we’re reduced to.’
‘Too much, too much volume, too much speed,’ he said, struggling to get to his feet and moaning that every time he stood up his spine hurt. Barely moving away from the wall (I mean he was hugging the walls), he set off in search of our host; I don’t know if this was to apologize for my appalling behaviour or to try and score some kind of stimulant. Whatever the deal, he got his stimulants. Everyone except me h
ad slunk back to where they were before, and there I was standing in the middle of the room going crazy. All my brilliant plans were useless now. I wouldn’t get to kiss somebody new; here was I, the flower of youth, in a world of withered people.
‘Why not just turn it off? Why not just go to sleep?’
No one answered. I turned my head this way and that, convinced that checking out the house would ease my pain, because it was always good to see the blue of night glittering on a patio, the cemetery of unchanging walls, Dutch furniture, Chinese porcelain.
But nothing … There was nothing in that house, or if there was it didn’t make me feel alive.
I spun around again, plagued by the thought that there was nothing for me to do now but slump down amid these ashes, forever a prisoner of the shifting shadows. I decided to walk right over to my tired lover and insist that he give me another English lesson.
But even as I thought this, I heard the sound of new chords, deep but distant. They weren’t coming from inside this house, and you should have seen me, I was a sight, staggering and reeling, trying to get my bearings as I worked out it was coming from the south, this music that was music itself, and I walked – a long way, I think – trampling over knees and shins, mercilessly stepping on heads that didn’t complain. Could they not hear it? Did they not realize as I drew near to the source, that just south of here someone was listening to music cranked up to a bestial volume? Ear-splitting brasses, strings, skins … yet it was the piano that guided my steps, exposing my smile tooth by tooth. I reached the front door, and as I flung it open, I heard lyrics.
Who knows who maps our path through this world or how they do so; here in beautiful Cali I am the queen of guaguancó.16 I stepped out into the street, into a sky so clear! An enormous moon and a deep wind from the mountains bore witness to my devastating revelation in that moment: that everything in life is lyrics, is words. Maybe my words here are of a different order. Maybe the moment he stops reading, my gentle reader will head out for a drink, and instead of writing things down, maybe I’d have been better off speaking my story, because I love to talk, even if my words are just filaments in the air, hackneyed lines. It doesn’t matter: I open my mouth to speak and no one stops me, and all that comes out are lyrics, because before me came a musician, someone infinitely more powerful and more generous, someone happy to let people sing his lyrics without having to take responsibility, and so I wake up in the morning with a lyric that will run through my head, over and over all day long like a sort of talisman against every miserable moment, on one of those days when I set out to do the most miserable thing of all: take the train to La Cumbre, a village that, like, a thousand years ago was the summer haunt of the bourgeoisie and is now a ghost town with a haunted house on the hill. The soil is not so red now, the air is less health-giving and less cool; meanwhile, slowly eroding, there are lyrics to love songs carved into the earth by boys and girls who now work for the tourist office or the town council and don’t remember. If we manage not to miss the train, who will greet us at La Cumbre? The little nuns who, every day for a thousand years, have been waiting for the five o’clock train, grimy now, its green paint peeling, the wooden train that’s still the main attraction here now that even the travelling Mexican cinema has gone. But I step down from the train, breathe in the village and find myself more alone than anyone in the world, so I wander aimlessly, singing that song going round in my head, going round in our heads, and when night comes we dream another song and tomorrow, for the first time, sing its lyrics, and so on, and so on.
The music I could hear was coming from a house, not some posh mansion, but a house on the far side of the street I was about to cross: the street where the district of Miraflores ends.
I don’t know what they call the barrio on the other side; maybe it doesn’t have a name, maybe the people there just call it Miraflores, but this is nothing like Miraflores. Little shacks scattered across the hillside, kids who don’t go to school at San Juan Berchmans, who don’t shut themselves away, and I was standing there thinking, ‘Given what I can see, they’ve no reason to shut themselves away!’ I could see two windows, an open door, glimpses of dresses ranging from vivid yellow to ochre, to sapodilla red, to purple, to lilac.
Already I’d set off, already I was crossing over. I swear I can hear within me echoes of a cry. And I didn’t look back, not once. The lyrics of the song said, ‘This little girl is so famous, they know her all over the world. She entraps men like a spider, they’ll do anything for this girl.’
I had only to surrender myself to the music, and so I flung my arms wide; everything was mine, everything was in my favour, ‘Take It and Give Me’.17 Some guys who’d stepped out in search of fresh air found me instead; one look and they were breathless: this was no street I was crossing, it was a river and how in this river sweeping me along could they get the air they needed? Half drowned, they stumbled back inside to the fiesta and, finding their voices, they spread the word: ‘There’s some weird chick heading this way.’ After they came outside and saw me, I never saw them dance; they hugged the walls, watching the other dancers, as though panicked by the state of the world. Had I stripped them of music merely by my presence? If I had, it was a mortal sin, because without music they were motherless children … that speak of pain and hope … I tripped over a brick … weep for my country … then over a bottle, came to a patch of unkempt lawn. I thought, ‘Inside this house are fabulous women. These guys are already suffering for them and I have yet to cross over.’
I became entangled in the long grass, tripped and landed in dogshit, struggled to my feet, a pilgrim; I didn’t even bother to straighten my hair as I strode in to the rumba – the rumba I carry with me is for me and me alone.
I’ve no idea how many guys were staring at me. Confused, I watched the confusion of bodies shaking to the bembé:18 one, two, three, hop, butín, butero tabique y afuero.19 I must have had eyes like a fish as I stared: not a single person was sitting down; this was music to be danced to on the tips of your toes, Teresa, on the tips of your toes,20 otherwise you can’t hop and that little hop is crucial, or you might as well be yokels – paisas – dancing a quadrille or a waltz.
None of the chicks were jealous of how pretty I was, let’s go back to my place and crank up the bembé, I took two quick steps and a couple accidentally elbowed me and I ended up, stunned, back where I was before, Hey, Piraña, release me from your clutches, this woman she breaks everything she touches. The pelada the song was dedicated to flushed bright red and turned away; she had beautiful hair, guaguancó pulsed, everyone whistled but I was whistling the melody – don’t mock her, her name’s Teresa, this Piraña – and she didn’t stay embarrassed for long because look, hear the trumpets ring, hear the congas sing, she just threw herself back into the dance yelling these were her people, so she was changing partners, saluting the great dancers of her youth; she had blue jeans, a red cropped T-shirt and a beautiful belly button. Then there’s the guy at the rumba, stand back and make way, he ain’t got much to say, just comes over to you and his hips, how they sway, and then two guys came over shouting over the music how they’d seen me around a bunch of times; I didn’t believe their bullshit – ‘I’d swear I’d recognize you guys though you’re wearing a disguise,’ is what I said, but I only said it to blend in, because I knew by now this was a battle of the sexes; the guys hassled la Piraña, I hassled the guys and they just laughed it off like always, and instead of asking for ID they asked me to dance and I was a bit flustered and I said, ‘I’d like to be introduced to the lady of the house,’ so they introduced me. She was busy with the hooch and the spicy meatballs, she was dressed all in white, which looked strange in this sea of sapodilla red. What was I planning to do, tell her I was a gatecrasher? Sambumbia! She didn’t take much notice of me, I shook her hand, our hands were burning up. ‘Mucho g
usto,’ she said and disappeared, play me, Richie, play me like an animal, and as I saw her back suddenly arch and heard the joyous roar of the next song, I realized – quick on the uptake as ever – that I’d spent too long in the shade, that I bore the mark of it on my face, that this was why all the guys were sniffing around me, surrounding me. Another guy turned up and then there were three – José Hidalgo, Marcos Pérez, Manuelito Rodríguez – all begging to dance with me, we know Tito’s all the rage and when he plays he owns the stage, so I danced with all three of them, each one a more delicious mystery, and it was my previous experience, my experience with death, that had me bending at the knees like this, giving them the slip, staring down at their shoes and at mine; at a rumba like this you come to dance and you’ve got to find ways to constantly be different, who was it said I couldn’t make it, who was it said I couldn’t fake it, it just poured out of me with astonishing intensity, with a shake of my hips, with a sway of my hips. Manuelito Rodríguez smelled of ink. ‘I make the stuff,’ he explained. ‘I’ve got a secret packing plant and rolls of INK labels’; Marcos Pérez looked like López Tarso,21 his face a mask of mute tragedy, and I clung to him during the boleros, a piece of wood from a sinking ship. ‘You smell like expensive drugs to me,’ he said. ‘I bet you taste bitter all over.’ And I clung harder to him, my bomba rica, oh, I’m just a soul in pain on a lonely shore, a wandering soul who can cry no more. ‘What I can taste is the sea,’ I whispered into both his ears like they were seashells and he went all quiet and breathed me in; I could have had him lie on his back on the waves of my waters. Most important of all was what José Hidalgo told me – I clung to him too, and I’ll conquer him; he was the one who gave me the low-down, who told me the three of them were volleyball players, and I told him I was a huge fan, and they all went wild, shouting, ‘Pelada! Pelada!’ and as they clapped, for no reason, I suddenly remembered the old days when Misery Guts Ricardito used to take me to watch the football on the pitch behind the Departmental Library, to watch some school grudge match between Liceo Benalcázar and Sagrado Corazon, and Ricardito would hold my hand; but this wasn’t me feeling nostalgic, ‘Get Sharp!’,22 this was me realizing I was still thinking on the level of the junkies crashed out across the road, whereas over here everyone was yelling for them to turn up the volume, turn up the beat. Someone shouted, ‘Enough with the boleros!’ and I glared at him and he skulked off into a corner with a face like a tango, come on, Ray, what’s coming next will blow your mind, yeah, the song they put on next was hardcore, the sound of congas, nothing but congas, and people said my hair was the wave that veiled the mystery of Guarataro, which should make any reader who’s been to a salsa smile. ‘Changó, bestow on us your sword; I got myself half cut and they gave me more drink.’23
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