“Agh… about fifteen years ago. Something odd happened to me: I couldn’t read music any more, but was able to play any piece I’d played before. If you said, Rogelito, we’re about to start, El bombín de Barreto, or Almendra, I’d start thinking and wouldn’t remember a thing… But if I waited until the paila, and the piano or double bass played the first notes, I’d pick up the drumsticks and start to play, almost without knowing what I was doing, but never missing a beat. My hands were doing the thinking, not my head. But then I lost it,” and he waved his huge hands at Conde, out of proportion in relation to the rest of his physique, “these sons of a bitch gave up on me.”
His great-granddaughter emerged from the oppressive kitchen with a cup for the Count and a plastic beaker for the old man. The would-be coffee smelt of burnt split peas, and the Count waited for it to cool sufficiently to gulp down the unpleasant brew in one, and observed how Rogelito, helped by his great granddaughter, lifted his container with both hands and took small sips. Conde lit a cigarette, shifted his gaze from that depressing spectacle to those erect nipples marooned on a woman who was certainly tired of caring for an old man in the faint hope she’d inherit those four oozing walls and would, thus, be ready to grant herself a couple of hours of pleasuring without too much agonizing. Nervous, as he usually was in such circumstances, the Count focussed back on the image of the premature chick, with equine teeth and elephantine ears, and cut straight to the point. “Rogelito, someone told me you knew Violeta del Río…”
“One day we were having a few drinks in the Vista Alegre café before heading off to Sans Souci, where we were on at eleven. It was… hell, two thousand years ago, just imagine, you could order a coffee with milk on any street corner in this country. The point is that Barbarito Diez, the singer in the orchestra at that time, and I agreed a wager: as he didn’t drink alcohol and ate well, and didn’t go whoring but went to bed when he finished work, and I was quite the opposite, we laid a bet on who’d live the longest, a black guy who looked after himself as he did, or a mad black like me, and our witness was Isaac Oviedo. Isaac was my age, Barbarito a bit more of a kid, five or six years younger, but I gave him the advantage and, you know, I’ve buried poor Barbarito and poor Isaac, and both died at a ripe old age, and now there’s not a brick of the Vista Alegre left standing, let alone any memories… but I’m still here, heavens know why or what for… More than sixty years playing in whatever orchestra came along, drinking in every bar in Havana, having a ball till daybreak seven days a week, you imagine all the people that I knew. From the twenties onwards Havana was the city of music, of pleasure on tap, with bars on every street corner, and that gave lots of people a living, not just maestros like me, for yours truly spent seven years in the Conservatoire and played in the Havana Philharmonic, but anyone who wanted to earn money from music and with the spunk to keep going… After that, the thirties and forties were the heyday of dance halls, social clubs and the first big cabarets with casinos attached, Tropicana, the Sans Souci, the Montmartre, the National, the Parisién, and the little cabarets on the beach, where my mate Chori ruled the roost. But in the fifties it all increased ten-fold: more hotels were opened, all had cabarets, and night clubs became the fashion, there were God knows how many in El Vedado, Miramar, Marianao, and they couldn’t handle big orchestras, they only had room for a piano or a guitar, and a voice. That was the heyday of the people with feeling and heart-rending boleristas, as I called them. They were very special women, they sang because they wanted to and left their hearts on stage, lived the lyrics to their songs, and what they did was magic. Violeta del Río was one of them…
“I remember seeing Violeta three or four times, I think, I didn’t have time to go and see other musicians. Once in the Las Vegas cabaret and another in The Vixen and the Crow, where they had a tiny little dance floor. That day she wasn’t performing, I mean, wasn’t on the programme there, but sang anyway because she really felt like singing and Frank Emilio was at the piano because he really felt like playing and as they were both so keen, what they came out with was something you’d never forget even if you lived to be a thousand. Did I say Violeta was a fantastic female? Well, she was eighteen or nineteen and at that age even Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s a looker. She was olive-skinned, a dark tan, but not mulatta, with jet-black hair, and a big, beautiful mouth, with good teeth, that gave her lots of character even if they were a bit chipped here and there. But her eyes were her best asset: they could chill you to the bone if she pointed them at you, checked you inside and out, like an x-ray machine. She used to sing for the sake of singing all the time, so they said: she enjoyed singing boleros, always very quietly, always with a hint of scorn, half aggressively, as if letting you in on things from her own life. She had quite a husky voice, like an older woman who’d had to put up with a lot in life, and never raised her voice much, almost spoke rather than sang, but when she let rip with a bolero, people went quiet, forgot their drinks, as if she’d hypnotized the lot of them: men and women, pimps and whores, drunks and junkies. She turned out boleros that were dramas and not ordinary songs, as I said, as if they came from her own life and she was telling the whole world, there and then.
That night I was blown away. I even forgot Vivi Verdura, a big, fat whore, over six feet tall, who’d got her claws into me and was swigging my drinks. And the hour, hour and a bit, two hours, or whatever time Violeta was singing, was like being off the planet, or very close, so close you were right inside that woman, and you never wanted to leave… Fucking hell! That day a photographer who was always round the clubs and cabarets, because he earned his crust from taking photos of artists for newspapers and magazines, told me: ‘Rogelito, Violeta’s miracle isn’t that she sings the best but that she can seduce anyone who walks in.’ It was so true. So much so, that picking up gossip here and there one day, I discovered that a very rich fellow, one of the really rich who never went to clubs, had fallen in love with her, wanted to marry her, the whole lot, although he was thirty years older. It seems this big shot was the one paying for the record to launch her big time, get her on television and on the road to an LP with ten or twelve songs…
“But Violeta didn’t need any such helping hand, because she was really good, I tell you, and that was why she began to make a name for herself with that kind of performance and, as always happens in this piss-pot of a country, people couldn’t keep the lid on their envy. Other singers began to stick their knives in and some said if it weren’t for the big shot she’d never get to sing, even in her own backyard. Katy Barqué was the most vicious. Katy was in her prime, but was always fucking venomous, and didn’t want any competition. She knew that Violeta could beat her in that bolero style, as the hard, contemptuous woman, because it came more naturally to her, and because as a female she was much better equipped than Katy. That fracas led to a big row, I discovered, as was to be expected: one day Katy created a scene and called her every name under the sun, but Violeta didn’t respond, just laughed a bit and said that if envy turned your hair yellow, Katy wouldn’t need to dye hers every week…
“Everybody was talking about the cat fight between Katy and Violeta and the mysterious rich guy intent on marrying the girl when that same cabaret photographer, the one they called Salutaris, because he looked like the guy in the advert for Salutaris soft drinks, told me one night: ‘Hey, Rogelito, Violeta’s not going to sing any more.’ He didn’t really know why, and he was the one who knew the tricks everyone was up to, but the rumour was she was going to marry the rich guy, and that the rich guy, after paying for the record and all, now wanted her to give up the club and cabaret scene, not appear on television and become a proper lady. I believed what Salutaris said, because it had happened a thousand times before and Violeta’s situation was nothing new: you bet, she was a girl from a poor background, even though she seemed gentle and good-mannered, and the fact was she lived by singing and if she could suddenly live like a princess, the songs, melodies, even the Parisién and the long, evil nights that do you in could go to fucking hell. Or do some people in, at least… Frankly, it surprised me, because I reckoned Violeta lived to sing rather than to earn a few pesos. She had so much passion, she wanted to sing so much, at any hour of the night, whether paid or not, unlike Katy Barqué and all the others, and that’s why I was surprised she’d accepted the condition that she had to give up singing, although women sometimes fall in love – men too, for fuck’s sake – and do what they have to do and especially what they shouldn’t do. All the same, it smelt odd, fishy, as Vicentico Valdés would say… The fact is Violeta disappeared from the scene, like so many people in that period, Salutaris included, who went north and I never found out what happened to him… That was the last I heard of her, it must have been early 1960, because I went to work in Colombia that year, stayed almost three years, and, you know, I’d not heard her name mentioned until today…’