At the end of the eighties, as a result of the Fania fever, there was a recovery of Afro-Cuban music from the forties and fifties. A record company in Barcelona called Palladium recovered the records of Tito Rodríguez, Machito, Eddie Cano, Emil Richards, Peruchín, the Jorge Hernández orchestra, Joe Loco, René Touzet and the first recordings of Tito Puente and Sonora Matancera. If one day you found a Xavier Cugat album in the Encantes or if you saw him in an old movie you had the impression that he was not at the same level.
The public image did not help much. The chihuahas, the caricatures that he drew, the girlfriends that he had or that he had had, that people said were pretty and that you thought were ham-fisted. That’s why when Jordi Puntí (Manlleu, 1967) began to explain that he was writing an extensive and well-documented novel about Xavier Cugat, he didn’t quite understand it.
Cugat is a triumph of will and trickery, of relationships and theater. In the novel that won this year’s Sant Jordi, Puntí reconstructs his career from the moment he arrived in the United States until the last few months, when he lived in Barcelona and was part of the social and media circus of the Universal Catalans. . Between both moments, marriages and divorces, big contracts, a lot of hotel life – in its most fortunate years the Xavier Cugat Orchestra was triumphing at the Waldorf-Astoria –, endless tours and the feeling, a little depressing, that musically and perhaps also I had personally lost Grace. Of my Palladium heroes, he had good memories of Tito Puente, but Miguelito Valdés quickly tired of him and sent him to hell.
We have a biographical novel of an artist who has left no work – no record is ever mentioned – his most important creation is his fantasy personality that Puntí associates, in a very accurate image, with confetti. Cugat is the man who always laughs and makes the audience laugh, virtuous and clown, in love with the good life: confetti is also the money that flows in abundance.
We have in our hands a highly documented, kindly critical, panoramic novel, a book that, as already happened in Maletes perdudes, Puntí’s super-success published almost twenty-five years ago, introduces a reflection on identity and the narrative voice, with a narrator who comes to be like a double: an entertainment journalist, son of a sugar industrialist, who met Cugat on the trip from Cuba to the United States and met him at different times in his life. He describes himself as a fly on the wall, a discreet messenger, a lucky walker, a burdensome mythomaniac and a tireless wiseguy.
When Puntí shines the most is when he has to invent. In the episode of the failed opening of a Las Vegas venue, the Flamingo, the murder of its promoter, Ben Siegel, and the mafia plot surrounding this crime. Returning to Las Vegas for an impersonator contest is a moment of comic decadence. The figure of Mrs. D’ Morello, Cugat’s Moneypenny, and the relationship of criticism and confidence that she establishes with the narrator also works very well. Bringing all these people from New York and Los Angeles back to life is a titanic task and has immense merit, despite the tedious moments.
“The fascination with the character led me to include every last detail, everything seemed relevant to me and deserved to be told,” says the narrator regarding a report he was commissioned to do in Vanity Fair. If the reader shares this fascination, he has an ocean of stories of fame and money, of jealousy and abandonment, of ambition and balance to not be left out of the game. Live the big world and fight to stay in it playing the violin, with a smile.
Jordi Puntí Confetti Proa Premi Sant Jordi 392 pages 21.90 euros
