My friend Juan Luis Serrano, a passionate reader of the British Thomas Quincey, Complete Works investigates a rainy night in October 2010. Holds the hope of finding difficult Castilian translation of the original Anglo-Saxon, which the Scot David Masson published in 1889, grouped in 14 volumes. Making it clear that end reaches some suggestive notes of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, a great admirer and student of De Quincey. Jorge Luis Borges comes to other notes, no less interesting, the Uruguayan Rodriguez Monegal. And finally, from Monegal RodrÃguez notes, does not quite know how, surprisingly, ends up delving into the literature of the Cuban peculiar Sarduy. At this point, Juan Luis completely forgotten the original purpose of the search and takes you instinctively thought to myself, I find myself in those days of traveling in Cuba.
Among many inquiries about the most representative of the work of Sarduy, which previously had never heard a word, my friend discovered a book that increases heart rate and puts a face of nostalgia on the lips: a novel entitled "De donde" written in 1967, which takes its title from one of the main lines of the song "Son de la Loma," composed by fellow Cuban Miguel Matamoros 1922, for the famous Trio Matamoros. The same song, oddly enough, with whom Juan Luis and I had discovered the Cuban son a year earlier, in the Mexican city of Merida in the Yucatan, by other exemplary trio of Caribbean folklore: The Nobles, the same song with a mariachi quartet had fired our last night of marimbas and sounds in the beautiful city of Veracruz, the quintessential corner most Cuban of Mexico, the same memorable song that had assimilated both as a soundtrack undisputed musical exodus that turned out to be our Mexican tour, which we had not spoken again since.
Well, all the vicissitudes of chance and concentric circles my friend described to me by e-mail from Spain, was astonished by the orders found between the geographical, literary and musical, his thoughts leading England to Cuba via Scotland, Argentina, Uruguay and Mexico, or whatever it is, of Thomas de Quincey to me, to Masson, B., Rodriguez Monegal and Sarduy.
What he does not know can not even imagine that rainy October night, is that on my first day in Havana, in a small place of dance in the Vedado neighborhood, just blocks from where Miguel Matamoros recorded "They are on the hill" for the first time in 1923, I returned to hear a more modern version, played by Willy Chirinos and Roberto Torres, so that when he sends me his email, I took more than a week Travel humming at all hours, sometimes in its most classical and sometimes in the most current version. Just the song, nothing else.
And what is even more surprising: I read your message from an Internet cafe in the city of Camaguey, in the interior of the island, just the city, not another. Over 1000 miles from where we hear "Son of the hill" for the first time, more than 500 miles from where I heard it last time, but just two blocks from the mansion where, on 25 February 1937 Sarduy born.
(As a general rule I do not believe in coincidences, then in the causalities. With my friend Juan Luis have shared some experiences that I preferred not to take it seriously before accepting them as dogmas of credulity, not of faith. For example The night we lost and arrived in Florence without intending to the birthplace of the poet Dante Alighieri, only revealed to the foreign tourist centers of the city. Or the time we lost a purse with 240 euros in Lisbon and met again a day later with a long list of unknowns events to uncover and 240 euros intact. O that night ... In short, these and other stories will someday for a book ...)
My friend Juan Luis discover this last great concentric circle when you read these words.
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