Okay, we need a bottle, we got a bottle.
Right, we wanna welcome and compliment Okey que para Changó.
Right, now I want to introduce a man who made a real hit right here in New York, right from Brooklyn … we’d like to welcome [dark vibe of indecision of someone who has no faith and no shelter] … direct from Puerto Rico … [uuuuuuuuh, there’s a heavy rumour, someone says Ricardo didn’t want to come out on stage] … direct from Puerto Rico, how about a very, very good man in the past: Bobby Cruz and Ricardo Ray on piano – gimme heeeeeeey!!
The fact he didn’t hear the chord, didn’t matter: Bobby Cruz still hadn’t taken his eyes off him – who wouldn’t have jumped at the chance? – the crowd had cleared to give him a respectable space, the breadth of the pulsing rhythm until – Jesus! – until Rubén touched wood and Bobby Cruz’s patent leather shoe. Right here where you see me. And Bobby Cruz bent down and shook his hand. This is the way I pound out the beat, this is the way I land on my feet. And before he touched the singer’s yellowish hand, Rubén managed to recover some of his composure: he felt a thin strand of calm and remembered his friends – where were they? Or did he? Maybe he didn’t have it with him, the key to the key change to the memory, the Red Bird, the second Seconal. Would that heighten his pleasure? Slowly, surely, he slid a hand into his underpants and found the pill nestling in his pubes, and under the watchful eye of Bobby Cruz who lazily watched his every move, Rubén popped the pill.
Are you starting to dig me? Who could have imagined he wouldn’t remember a single thing. I made it all up. Like I said earlier: standing in the queue outside, Rubén closed his eyes and imagined the band, and all the stuff I’ve just told you is what he imagined in that moment. What actually happened, he never knew. Oh, his friends kept telling him stories about what a wild night it had been, stories that dovetailed with this rubble of memory learned by heart. ‘Bobby Cruz dedicated a song to you,’ they tell him to this day. But he can’t remember and he can’t forgive himself. That’s why I’m saying that this guy don’t know what he’s got himself into.
What happened next is the most open to conjecture, to speculations that try to fit the facts, given that this was a public concert everybody knows about, and I have to say that Rubencito’s experience doesn’t exactly measure up.
Richie Ray was apparently alternating with the laid-back sounds of Nelson y sus Estrellas and Gustavo Quintero’s pitiful combo Los Graduados. He was hardly likely to feel right playing alongside such rank amateurs. The way people tell it, Gustavo Quimba Quintero, the scrawny trumpet player, stepped up to the microphone and played a rising series of notes, then the piano comes in softly, then the keyboard and Bobby Cruz’s distorted voice in the background, subverting Quintero’s dumb bullshit, then the whole group joins in, Nelson (whose sound was a lot more salsa back then) helping out with the rhythm, with the backbeat – Nelson and Richie were forcing Los Graduados to jam! People talk about how that bunch of paisas were publicly humiliated, they didn’t stand a chance, they couldn’t hack the rhythm, go back to your school, little girl, because you can’t handle me; the poor bastards were forced to leave the stage broken-assed by the mellow sweetness of the piano, and their departure was greeted by whoops and cheering and foot-stamping above the thunderous throb of the salsa. ‘Have I got your permission,’ screamed Richie and three times the crowed roared, ‘Yes!’ You’ve got it, soul brother, give it to us, give us the taste of salsa and the rippling wave of relief, the excitement we feel when you sing, when we celebrate you.
‘That was the moment this city came into its own,’ Rubén used to say bitterly. ‘Ricardo Ray invented the myth.’
But they were still there, the fat bastards, the pigs, the censors; they hadn’t missed a trick and they didn’t like the idea of the half-assed group from Medellín being ejected from the stage, because they believed in the old slogan ‘Co-lom-bia, this is your music!’ – they were happy to listen to miserable drivel as long as it was Colombian. They didn’t take kindly to Bobby pulling out a handkerchief and – sniff! atchoo! – saluting everything that is, Abakuá, while the kids cheered his contempt, thinking, ‘What cojones, what a vibe; maybe they’ll pass round the coke at the end of the gig?’ Fantasies like that, Bobby loved them; he loved their innocence about this strange guaguancó. These people accepted him, whereas in New York, with all the nasty rumours doing the rounds, who knew if he’d ever be accepted? Here, they celebrated his peculiar ways if he chose to flaunt them. ‘When will it happen in New York, machos?’ Then he said to Richie, ‘These songs bring back memories, memories of the remote beaches of Puerto Rico we used to dream about under the bridges and in the subways of grey New York while we pictured the sunshine back home on the island we call Borinquen, while we were laying down new beats – remember? We’d imagine the wind in the canebrakes, in the palm trees, because we missed it – remember, Riquito? We’ve gotta go on living.’
And a memory came to them, a memory of New York at six in the afternoon, something that scared them and brought them closer together. ‘Hey, go easy with the rabble-rousing,’ Richie jokes like he’s playing devil’s advocate. ‘Hey, if that’s what the audience wants, that’s what I’ll give them,’ says Bobby. ‘And anyone who doesn’t like it, fuck ’em.’ And boy did he fuck ’em and that’s the truth. There was a mass exodus of angry ladies and furious gentlemen, the promoters: ‘To think we were bringing a group of homosexuals and drug addicts, we’d have been better off playing records’; and the promoters’ daughters: ‘Mamá, what’s boogaloo? You can’t dance to it, it’s so vulgar, I’m so sad for poor Pablo, you brought him all the way from Bogotá and Los Graduados didn’t even get to play a second set. Gustavito? Why don’t we go to a grill and listen to “El galiván pollero”?’49 And out they trooped, leaving the VIP tables deserted. This rumba has stirred up the common people and it’s going to go on till morning; you can hear the call: ‘You want more boogaloo? Who says no, who? Chow down on that piano, Richie.’50 Round here they say someone broke a table over the head of an official from the city council.
Where the fuck were his friends? Where were El Tuercas and Salvador?
‘Rubén, Rubéncito, there you are, we’ve been looking everywhere, yeah; we thought maybe the salsa had got to you – wow, the face on you, you’ve got eyes like saucers, you feeling okay? How did you get to the stage so quick? It’s taken us all night to get this far; obviously early on we had a table. Some mate of Salvador’s was ordering bottles of gin like it was going out of style: cost him an arm and a fucking leg. I’ve got half a bottle here – go on, have a little swig. God, this is good – the salsa’s fucking bestial, isn’t it? No better way to listen to this than being hopped up on pills. The rest of us have just smoked another Balino; we looked for you all over but no dice – you want another slug? Thaaaaat’s it, might as well enjoy life while we’re young and we’ve got time because pretty soon we’ll be dead: that’s the law of existence, no one can do fuck all about it … what’s the matter with you? Get off me, you’ve gone all pale, come on shape up, stand up, what’s with you? Hang on to my shoulder – too much excitement, that’s what it is, and you were there in the thick of the free-for-all – have another drink, take a deep breath and a long swig, thaaaat’s it, a little swig, see if that brings some colour to your cheeks. Jesus fuck! Your eyes! If your mamá could see you, the people you’ve been hanging out with; I tell you, this is a rumba I’ll never forget, best fucking salsa band in the world. Someone over there told me that Bobby Cruz was making eyes at you; hey, maybe we can hook up with them after the show and they’ll take us back to the Grade-A Coke Hotel. Hey, quit leaning on me – you really feeling that bad? You need to throw up?’
But by this stage, Rubén couldn’t even answer. Boils had sprouted all over his face, like noxious gases causing a commotion in
his left cheek. Somewhere inside a crushing shame welled up as he nodded at Tuercas’s question, squeezing his lips tight as he felt himself starting to swell. Before El Tuercas’s horrified gaze, Rubén’s boils began to bloat with viscous liquid, filling up his whole face so that his eyes were swimming in a sweltering ball of uncontrollable nausea.
‘You can’t upchuck here!’ Rubén pressed his lips together harder, his throat was already flooded with vomit searching for a way out; he looked down and thought, ‘All those cool shoes. I can’t throw up here.’ He imagined the yellow spatter, the flecks of green, the rising murmur of protest – that that would be the end of everything. He doubled over, almost touching the ground; what he wanted was to rub his skin against something, against the most delicious salsa. ‘Better get you out of here.’ El Tuercas glanced around but could see no way out: they were right in the middle of the crowd, getting out would take as long as getting in; the best thing he could do was to get gone – ditch Rubéncito, it was every man for himself, no point playing the hero – to Guarandaria with Suma and to Yemaya,51 the furious guaguancó. How long had it been since he opened his eyes? When he opened them, he found himself knee high to his peers, that subsection of humanity most responsive, most sensitive to the rhythms – was it an illusion or could he just make out a tunnel, between the swaying and the wild leaps, an empty space through which it might be possible to scramble on all fours through to the other side? Yes, the thousands of knees and thighs formed a sort of passageway of bones and fleshy pads. The explosion of a whisky-coloured trumpet solo set him off on his new mission: he scuttled into the tunnel carved out by the salsa, looking for a place he could throw up in peace. With the permission of the singers, he took up the position of a quadruped and, like a wild boar, like a hog, he trotted along and he never had a more perverse vision of the rhythm as it twitched through thighs and asses, through the kneecaps of these people. ‘Buried Alive by SALSA,’ he must have thought. There was a damp, acrid smell, and he could hear someone – was it Tuercas urging him on, shouting words of encouragement even as he abandoned him? Here he had hit on the truth, as long as the boils on his face didn’t explode, and then suddenly there was light, the light at the end of the tunnel, ’cos I’ll bring you a little of everything, but there was still some distance to go: the exit was a rhombus that expanded and contracted to chaotic rhythms, to the breath of the salsa, the jagged knees. Rubén scuttled faster: someone – with no malice intended – kicked him in the neck, someone stamped on his poor little fingers. ‘But I can’t complain,’ he thought. ‘All that matters is that this lung I’m crawling through expands enough for me to stick my head out.’ Because what would happened if it closed around his neck? What if the salsa got more bestial, and the melody suddenly shifted? ‘Decapitated by salsa,’ he thought and focused the last shreds of his consciousness on begging Richie to keep on playing, to unleash the pounding beat with no rhythm change, no false ending, as he crept closer and the edge of the lung seemed to heave a sigh of pleasure, a circular pleasure, a glorious commotion, the tiniest shift; there was no clamour, no shudder, and now it was opening, this glorious mouth, the last two dancers in the crowd withstanding the vibrations of a whole people, preserving the boundaries and sustaining the reason for the rhythm.
Rubén poked his head between the last two pairs of knees, thighs, buttocks; and in that moment the pure feeling of the rumba, the homesickness, was transmitted to him by simple contact. He imagined burning sensations that could be felt miles from here, days from now, dancing in the sun, the tang of beer and fried food, children of the future dancing next to their fat-bellied mothers, the clicking fingers, the pounding music, the sun flaying flesh all the way from the mountains, the salsa that could be whistled by anyone on earth, the choirs of ten kids gathering on a Sunday afternoon in front of a recently repaired stereo whistling along with feeling to the aching sadness, the lacerating lamentation of a high melody that speaks of a language invented in far-off Africa, of a man who’s not strong, of a man who falls but carries on … while all around stretches the city eaten away by the desolation of Sunday, and Rubén, I think, revelled for a moment in the limits of the spirit of music, waited for a moment before poking out his aching shoulders, and suddenly he was expelled with the cry and the sigh of a womb closing, because the song was over.
After that he would have realized that his body was drenched in some liquid other than the one he was holding inside, the bile that was still struggling to get out but hadn’t found a way. It was the slaver of the salsa. He stopped when he found himself in a world of people calmly sitting at tables and drinking. He glanced around, stood up, clamped a hand over his mouth and squeezed hard, telling himself he would just go away, throw up and come back to face the music. But where? A vast expanse of walls, a sea of heads, a haze where the darkness and the ghostly spotlights clashed. He ran around the tables, closed his eyes as he ran, didn’t trip. Behind the bleachers were some weeds, nettles and wild tomatoes. This patch of greenery, he decided, would bring him relief and he buried his head in it.
The boils began to pucker, his whole body made a noise like a drain emptying, like pipes recently unblocked; the muscles in his throat began a frenzied dance as vomit rose from his stomach like a tidal wave. His body went so limp that nettles brushed against his face. He squinted and focused on the wonders of nature and the colour of his vomit: yellow as the fruits and the treasures of our country, blue as her distant mountains and red as the blood of her fallen heroes. All this effluent was forming a hard shell over the plants, or, he thought, ‘In my head?’ He tried to think back, to recreate the sequence of events leading to the present, lamentable situation. He succeeding in calling up the image, only to forget it, faced with the resultant vomit. Comfort me, Adasa, give me your blessing. Then he slipped into deep but fleeting sleep, and he forgot Richie Ray’s satisfied smile as he performed, forgot about the wild gestures of Cándido52 as he played the congas – three verses of ‘Babalú’, the song he loved best. A girl had knelt in front of him and, with her body, gave him the perfect pick-up with which to sound the entrails of the blistering music – for a brief moment the shrubs and nettles were like the burning bush: he forgot Bobby Cruz with his arms flung wide, demanding greater adulation, he even forgot where, as, almost without realizing, he grieved the loss of the most significant experience on his life – pass me the cauldron, Macoró.53
From that moment on – to quote a particularly piss-poor bolero – Rubén was a rolling stone, flotsam from a shipwreck, a suffering soul wandering alone. He couldn’t commit himself to anything except his research, his investigation, until he’d recreated a more or less faithful picture (from what people said) of what happened to him that night. He made a few fleeting friendships with other salsamaniacs, and pimped the different forms of aggression caused by different tastes. He became a citizen of the night and a tormented thinker on Sundays: a suspicious, mistrustful character, destructively introspective, asthmatic and, to this day (as the reader has witnessed), prone to vomiting. He waited in vain for Richie Ray to come back, figured out the class prejudices that had led to the group being banned. He’d say, ‘And in New York he was attacked by Jews and Tito Puente fans, for his musical quality and his sexual peculiarity. And since he and Bobby Cruz never gave up on their in-your-face way of being and of dealing with others, and since Cruz was already getting tired of having to knock people on their asses, they decided to step aside, to shut themselves away, to become self-reliant. Later they made a genuine effort to adapt socially, introducing a female presence between singer and pianist – Miki Vimari – who could break the short circuit, allow their music to broaden to take on the viewpoint of the other sex. But did they get any credit for it? No.’ And Rubén would wail, ‘Ay, move like you, Ay, move like you, Ay, move like you. Viva Ricardo! He never forgot me,’ and shut himself away with his gri
ef. But he would emerge every December and have a bunch of posters printed that read:
THE CITY OF CALI REJECTS
Los Graduados, Los Hispanos
and the various exponents of
Sonido Paisa made to measure
for the bourgeois
in all their boorish brashness.
Because it’s not about
‘Suffering is My Lot in Life’.54
It’s about ‘Get sharp, people, because they’re watching you.’
Long live the Afro-Cuban feeling!!
¡¡Viva Puerto Rico libre!!
WE MISS RICHIE RAY
But there was nothing to be done. Richie Ray never did come back, and in his absence an emptiness grew in Rubén’s soul, one that consumed him, ate away at his most genuine, most vital emotions. But none of this could compare to the fact that he had lost his head just when he most needed it. And so he was forever marked by a terrible feeling of loss. Listening to music, getting people to dance was the fire that fuelled his damnation.
It goes without saying he flunked out of school halfway through the fifth year. One of his uncles got him a job in a record shop called Paz Hermanos – Peace Brothers – where he proved to be a brilliant salesman, but every now and then he would suddenly freeze and stand stock-still in front of some astonished customer, his index finger hovering over the record like a shooting star as some fragment of memory returned to him: a red rag waving in the spotlight, calling for another song.
He squandered all his wages on records (he got discount rates), bought a high-tech hi-fi and spent his Saturday nights holed up, irritable and unable to sleep. He never expected rumbas to bring him salvation, and as soon as he hooked up with Don Rufían, he refashioned himself as an angel of misrule and miscalculation, someone who brought music into people’s homes, there to sow discord and division. He was never friendly to the kids who danced to his music. ‘Just wait till they’re a bit older,’ he’d say. ‘I’ve been groping my way through life without light or happiness since I was fourteen.’ He constantly popped pépas as a way of staying loose-limbed for those (very rare) occasions when he felt like dancing, and as an effective means of revisiting those already recovered memories (of which there were no more than four), but he was kidding himself, going around thinking that at any moment he might manage to reconstruct his little story. His shtick of vomiting all the time was because he thought he could retch up memories to burn his throat, a miserable trickle of misspent time. But it never produced any results.
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