Conde scrutinized the singer’s mummified face. Katy Barqué was bordering on eighty though perhaps you could agree she was well preserved for her age. But her efforts to look twenty years younger, including surgery to give her face an artificial tautness, were rounded off with several layers of cream, swathes of re-energizing blusher, eyelashes like fans, lips stuffed with silicone and a foulard anchored in the middle of her forehead to pull back towards her skull the most rebellious folds of drooping skin.
“The bolero is feeling, pure feeling with lots of drama. It speaks about tragedies of the soul and in language that goes from poetry to reality. That’s why you can sing just as well about a cloudy sky, say yours is a strange way to love, or shout ‘be gone, the heat’s gone from between your legs’… The important thing is for it all to come from your soul, making it seem credible, you know?… That’s what I do, and I’m a big star; I’ve done films, musical theatre, operetta, lots of shows… Does your film producer know all this?”
She accompanied her harangue with florid gestures, would-be intense looks and melodic support from snatches of old boleros, as if she were facing the most critical of audiences.
“Europeans and Americans are very cold, that’s why they don’t understand what a good bolero is, and lately they’ve been going for records full of versions sung by pretty boys, versions that make you want to shit your pants. But really shit them. The bolero is from the Caribbean, that’s why it was born in Cuba, and took root in Mexico, Puerto Rico and Colombia. It’s the love poetry of the tropics, always telling the truth, rather thickly laid on at times, but then we are thickly laid on, nothing we can do about that. Listen to Arsenio Rodríguez’s lyrics and tell me what you think:
After you’ve lived
twenty disappointments
what does one more matter,
after you’ve seen
life in action
you shouldn’t cry.
Just accept
everything is a lie,
nothing is true.
Just live for the moment,
learn to enjoy what’s there,
(She shakes her head, endorsing Arsenio’s deep truths. Her intense gaze devours Yoyi’s exultant youthfulness.)
because all considered
life is a dream
and nothing sticks.
Only birth and death
are for real
(A second, more categorical affirmation. She gazes at Yoyi again, more suggestively.)
why get so anxious,
to live is to suffer eternally,
the world’s a place… without joy.
“Hell, look at my hair standing on end… Do you know when poor Arsenio wrote that? When New York’s best doctors said there was no cure for his blindness and he realized he was going to be blind forever…”
Conde looked at Yoyi and, as if by prior agreement, they both nodded. The old diva had more malice than voice, but there was something pathetic about how she sang Arsenio’s memorable bolero, from behind that face mask, wrapped in a kimono covered in Chinese or Japanese characters.
“As I was saying… There was terrific rivalry at the time, you had to be really good to get a slice of the action. You couldn’t imitate anybody, you had to find the best composers, get the arrangers to work to your style, and be lucky enough to put on a good show and then shift to television, which was already in colour here when in Spain they had one television set for Madrid and another for Barcelona… I got it all, purely on the strength of my lungs and talent, because I was the best and everybody knew I was the best. By the way, did you read the last interview I gave to Bohemia?”
Right then Conde had a flash of insight as to why he’d always spontaneously rejected Katy Barqué: it wasn’t, as he’d previously thought, down to the almost masculine timbre of her voice, the ridiculously aggressive, at times filthy lyrics she often wrote herself in her self-appointed role as self-sufficient-woman-able-to-scorn men, or even the opportunist versions of revolutionary anthems and political eulogies she’d slotted into her repertoire at different stages, or the facile poses she adopted on stage – and not only on stage, as he now saw. In fact, his rejection was altogether more visceral, down to the singer’s patent disregard for any sense of historical boundaries and her attempt to cling, against the wind, tide, logic, time and fear of the grotesque, to a pre-eminence that was no longer hers and that for the last twenty years or more had turned her into a singing caricature of herself, a kind of circus act. Unlike others Conde knew, Katy Barqué would never get off her high horse: you’d have to unsaddle her or be resigned to watching her die, disastrously, holding the reins, leaving no heirs and playing the worst of roles in the theatre of life: that of the buffoon.
“Then Violeta appeared from nowhere all ready to snatch what was mine by right. She was young, with a good body and heart on her, I think, but lacked ovaries… and a maestro to teach her how to sing. Poor woman, at times she sounded like she was about to choke… But she was a cunning bitch! She landed herself a lover who was mad about her and gave her a push up to get her name in lights. Just imagine an upstart like her as the star on the second bill at the Parisién, when that cabaret was the place to meet those who decided who was or wasn’t any good in Havana, in Cuba…”
From the moment they reached the well-lit penthouse in that big house on Línea, Conde and Pigeon felt that they’d visually entered a kind of museum of bolero kitsch. An evidently amateur portrait in oils, of Katy Barqué at the height of her physical splendour, occupied the premier spot on the wall in a reception room crammed with china and glassware – the height of bad taste was a metal flower, now rusting, on a plinth that declared: Prize for the Most Popular – awarded in recognition of her fifty plus years in the business.
“Besides that she had a nerve. Really quite shameless. One day I found out she was saying things behind my back and I just had to put her straight: I grabbed hold of her and even told her to go to hell. Because it’s one thing to defend yourself as best you can, quite another to clamber over the heads of others to get some of the limelight. I wasn’t having any of that. We had some good singers here, Celia Cruz, Olguita Guillot, Elena Burke, a good number, but each trod her own path and nobody ever trespassed on somebody else’s terrain. It was like an unwritten law. But that girl didn’t understand a thing and was messing us all about. Do you know what singing all night in a club for no pay means? Excuse my honesty, but they were bad tactics and it was bad for business… Don’t you think?”
Yoyi Pigeon nodded: his trading ethics appreciated Barqué’s logic. But Conde pondered over the star’s thoughts, and remembered how in her interviews he’d never heard her mention any of the great boleristas, the really great ones, the ones who might make it obvious that Barqué’s rise had most to do with self-promotion and opportunism of every stripe, including the sexual and political varieties.
“I never found out who the man was behind her. There was a lot of gossip in Havana, but he never showed his face. He must have been a wealthy fellow and full of prejudices and he didn’t want to be seen with a cabaret singer, who, what’s more, certainly had a peculiar look about her: lovely hair and all that, but don’t anyone try to fool me, she looked like a nigger.”
The absence of a clinching name, however, confirmed the Count in his idea that the mysterious lover was none other than Alcides Montes de Oca. And that was reinforced by his suspicion that for some unknown reason Katy Barqué was avoiding identifying a person he was sure she knew, so intent was she on waging her individual war against Violeta del Río.