In the late eighties, as a result of the Fania fever, there was a revival of Afro-Cuban music from the forties and fifties. A Barcelona record company called Palladium recovered the records of Tito Rodríguez, Machito, Eddie Cano, Emil Richards, Peruchín, the orchestra of Jorge Hernández, Joe Loco, René Touzet and the first recordings of Tito Puente and Sonora Matancera . If one day you found a record by Xavier Cugat at Encants or if you saw him in an old film, you had the impression that he was not at the same level. The public image didn’t help at all. The chihuahuas, the caricatures he drew, those girlfriends he had or had had, that everyone pretended were beautiful and that you thought were sloppy. That’s why when Jordi Puntí (Manlleu, 1967) started to explain that he was writing an extensive and well-documented novel about Xavier Cugat, I didn’t quite understand it.
Cugat is a triumph of will and deception, of knowing how to move and of theatre. In the novel that has won this year’s Sant Jordi, Punti reconstructs the trajectory from the moment he arrived in the United States until the last months when he lived in Barcelona and was part of the social and media circus of Catalans Universals. In between there are marriages and divorces, big contracts, a lot of hotel life – in the sweetest years Xavier Cugat’s Orchestra triumphed at the Waldorf-Astoria –, endless tours and the feeling, a little depressing, that musically and perhaps also personally he had lost Grace. Of my Palladium heroes, he kept a good memory of Tito Puente, but Miguelito Valdés got tired of him immediately and sent him to do punches.
We have a biographical novel of an artist who has left nothing behind him – at no time is there any mention of a record – whose most important creation is his fantasy personality that Puntí associates, in an image very right, with the confetti. Cugat is the man who always laughs and makes others laugh, a prodigy and a clown, in love with the good life: confetti is also the money that keeps the dojo running.
We have in our hands a well-documented, kindly critical, panoramic novel, a book that, as already happened in Maletes perdudes, Puntí’s superhit published almost twenty-five years ago, introduces a reflection on identity and the narrative voice , with a speaker who is a kind of double: a entertainment journalist, son of a sugar industrialist, who met Cugat on the trip from Cuba to the United States and who went on to meet him at different times of the life He describes himself as a fly on the wall, a discreet messenger, a lucky passer-by, a loaded mythomaniac and a tireless savant.
When Puntí shines the most is when he has to invent. In the episode of the failed premiere of a venue in Las Vegas, the Flamingo, the murder of its promoter, Ben Siegel, and the entire mafia plot surrounding the fact. The return to Las Vegas for an impersonation contest is a moment of comic decadence. The figure of Mrs D’Morello, Cugat’s Moneypenny and the relationship of criticism and confidence she establishes with the narrator also works very well. Bringing all these people from New York and Los Angeles to life is a titanic job and has immense merit, despite the tedious moments.
“The fascination with the character led me to include every last detail, everything seemed relevant and deserved to be explained” – says the narrator about a report commissioned by 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 balances so as not to be left out of the game. Living in the big world, and fighting to stay in it laughing and playing the violin.
Jordi Puntí Confetti Proa Sant Jordi Award. 392 pages. 21.90 euros
