In Cuba, if you are corpulent in body they usually tell you “you are Hemingway”, if you are good looking they compare you with Delon and if you are very glib and elusive with Fouche, that minister of Napoleon who later became chief of police of the restored Bourbons.
But if you sing well, are elegant and have a smile worth a million dollars, they
tell you right away that you are a Gardel.
No one more loved in Cuba than the morocho del Abasto
, no one more covered.
His song that says “goodbye, boys, companions of my life” was performed by the most diverse Caribbean voices, female and male, of great artists and poor drunks who crossed the lonely streets and stood in front of the boardwalk of Havana or Cienfuegos singing “Goodbye , guys.
I'm leaving and I'm resigned / against destiny, no one can measure it."
We loved the idea of recognizing that no one can defeat destiny because after many years of Cuban political decline it seemed almost a consolation to know that destiny was always the winner unscathed and we knew that we just had to wait for the fate of those leaders who acted as If they were gods it would be fulfilled and they would end up lying in the cold cemetery, while the wind would carry all those signs that they ended up proclaiming forever.
I also felt like a Gardel for a little while.
At the age of 17, I walked around with a metaphorical flower in my buttonhole and sat in the Palatino, an old inn in Cienfuegos, ordering a glass of wine and a portion of cheese, then a well-known old saxophonist would arrive and play for the pigeons in the square, two or three European tourists, the bartender and I to the music of some old tango by Gardel.
That saxophonist served as my inspiration for
Sitting in Her Lime Green
, one of my first novels, so I am very fond of his Gardelian rhythms and his good vibes.
He played because I asked him to and the afternoon stretched slowly and rhythmically and everything seemed to be going smoothly
because Gardel lived in Cienfuegos
.
I also lived in Santiago de Cuba, where I went to study, and afternoon after afternoon I went to Santiago Boulevard where there was a tango club and old artists sang with scarves tied around their necks despite the heat of the Caribbean and Santiago almost seemed like Buenos Aires, a Buenos Aires of suburbs and sadness and few joys.
Tejedor, José Feliciano, who was banned, and Ana Gabriel were Gardel's competition, at a time when the Cuban was suffering.
But none of them made you suffer with such elegance, almost as if you were a descendant of Quevedo.
Listening to it, the verses came to mind “they will be ashes, but it will make sense;
dust they will be, more dust in love.”
My grandmother also listened to tangos.
I remember her sitting in the living room of my house in Cienfuegos, looking at the blue of the Caribbean while “her eyes closed” played on the record player.
I remember her like this while the world keeps moving and she and Gardel live in my memory.