He felt his hands sweat as he ever so gingerly lifted up the pick-up arm between two fingers, and moved it backwards so the turntable received its electric go-ahead and started to spin. Then he lowered it slowly, trying to find, though shaking slightly, the first groove on the small acetate. Conde rubbed his hands on his trouser legs and closed his eyes, about to embark on that voyage into the past.
Bitten by the curiosity bug, Yoyi Pigeon had driven him to Skinny Carlos’s house, where the Count knew an old portable RCA Victor record player existed, that might still be coaxed into action. Thanks to that small machine, whose original speaker they once successfully swapped for a German democratic variety, Conde and his friends had listened hundreds of times to the plastic plaquettes on which Cuban engineers, helped by mysterious processes, pressed the music of Paul Anka, the Beatles and The Mamas and the Papas – now on the final strait to his fifties, Conde still got goose-pimply listening to “Dedicated to the One I Love”. Those distant years, when only such quaint methods enabled you to hear groups on the island that were all the rage in the decadent, capitalist remainder of the planet, where they made and broadcast their petty bourgeois music, unsuitable for the ears of a young revolutionary, according to the wise, Marxist decision taken by the state’s ideological apparatus that banned it from radio and etherized it from television. Only a few privileged children of what you’d hardly call groovy mamas and papas in government posts, who were occasionally allowed to set foot in Mexico, Canada or Spain, had access to the original records, which were so excessively used and abused that they often lost their grooves.
Like wizards before a mouth-watering brew, on unforgettable evenings and hot nights, Conde, Carlos, Andres, Rabbit and Candito, all without the privilege of carrying a single drop of leadership blood in their plebeian veins, resigned themselves to those worn-out discs and, gathered round that same record player, dived in and soaked up the hot sounds and words outside their understanding that could leave no trace of ideology but which nevertheless touched sensitive nerve ends. Several years later, when Carlos finally got hold of a small cassette recorder, his friends ratcheted up their enjoyment of music, on copies no less tatty than the previous plaquettes, recorded on corrosive Orwo cassettes – German and democratic to boot. They entered the world of Blood, Sweat and Tears, Chicago and, above all, Credence Clearwater Revival, and turned “Proud Mary” and the gravely voice of Tom Fogerty into icons of the blood ties they had forged from those harsh times, plagued by material shortages and restrictions and slogans that had to be rigorously obeyed, socialist targets and massmeetings to bolster political commitment. It was, nonetheless, a past that they’d think of as almost perfect, perhaps because of their romantic insistence on keeping it intact, as if hibernating in the favourable mists from the best years of their lives.
Conde and Yoyi had dropped by Carlos’s place with pizzas they’d bought en route and two bottles of rum to clear their throats and brains. While Josefina improved the so-called pizzas by adding a few slices of onion, tomato puree and slivers of green pepper requested by her son, the Count delved into the cupboard on the terrace to unearth the record player, fearing all the while it would be unable to produce a single note. After dusting it inside and out, he cleaned the needle with a handkerchief soaked in a high octane, recently purchased rum, and finally connected it to the current, to see if the turntable at least spun round.
The first bottle uncorked was already on its third round when Conde started to lower the arm and put the needle in place, to allow the gravel-throated speaker to emit a few preliminary crackles. Then, like big drops of rain heralding the heavy downpours of summer, the almost violent chords of a piano, and only a piano, reached their ears, with no excessive flourishes or trills, quickly joined by the beat of a bongo, the deep sound of the double bass and, finally, a voice that spoke rather than sang, imbued with an almost male heaviness, first pleading, and then with an aggrieved, demanding resentment, making you feel you didn’t need to see the woman to know there was something different about her rich, husky voice, intent on speaking to the inner ear rather than singing:
When the Count opened his eyes and silently lifted the needle from the virgin area of the acetate, he was absolutely confident that two days ago, when he’d been surprised by a hunch as he crossed the threshold of the library of the mighty Montes de Ocas, that it wasn’t impelling him to discover a fabulous book, as he’d believed, but was marking out a path so he could confront that voice sleeping in his past, a voice that waited only for him. Could that be right? Not thinking or looking at the equally silent and moved Skinny or Pigeon, the Count put the arm back over the first groove on the record and let himself be transported by the melody and voice, like a lover overcoming the delights from a first touch, and embarking on a quest for the more recondite essences behind that punchy vocal. He tried to grasp the drama suggested by a voice directed at a you who might be anyone: him, or possibly his own father, perhaps bewitched by the same woman, voicing a feeling that was too much like true suffering and that, at the end of the first stanza, adopted a pleading tone when it asked: “Be gone from me”. But then the voice ordered: “Don’t stop and look”, recalling distant echoes of the Bible, that made their full impact in the third stanza where the voice became slower, wearier, even more whispering, telling of its refusal to go on with that struggle to the death. The final act erupted with a fresh refrain where the voice anticipated a possible, if undesired, future, when its owner would vanish into the dense mists of yesterday. And concluded on an order that brooked no appeal, a last, heartbreaking “Be gone from me”, intent on silencing the music that only returned, as the voice’s last vibrations faded, hot and heavy, into a predicable total silence… but, a brief interlude opened before it reiterated its final wish beyond all appeal: “so, now… be gone from me”, a visceral demand that convinced the Count her way of singing was involved in much more than a game of mirrors with reality: wasn’t it in fact pure, genuine reality?
“What the fuck is all this about?” he asked, now out loud, and placed the pick-up arm on its stand, while the silent acetate continued to spin hypnotically. He raised his half empty glass and gulped down the rum trying to restore his composure. He slowly felt reunited with his anatomy and the place that had been blurred by emotions aroused by the music.
“You reckon that woman disappeared?” asked Skinny Carlos, his arms and hands exhausted by so much clinging, and now trying as best he could to sit comfortably in his wheel chair.
“Apparently… She never sang again,” the Count confirmed. “I don’t even know whether she’s alive or dead…”
“I tell you, her voice is…” Yoyi sought in vain for an elusive adjective to capture that strange miracle.
“No one else sings like her, that’s for sure,” Skinny concluded, pouring round what was left in the bottle. “Put
