CUBAN JAM SESSIONS IN MINIATURE: A NOVEL IN TRACKS by DIEGO A. RINCON B.A. Florida International University, 2005 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in the Department of English in the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Central Florida Orlando, Florida Spring Term 2009 © 2009 Diego A. Rincón ii ABSTRACT This is the collection of a novel, Cuban Jam Sessions in Miniature: A Novel in Tracks, and an embedded short story, “Shred Me Like the Cheese You Use to Make Buñuelos.” The novel tells the story of Palomino Mondragón, a Colombian mercenary who has arrived in New York after losing his leg to a mortar in Korea. Reclusive, obsessive and passionate, Palomino has reinvented himself as a mambo musician and has fallen in love with Etiwanda, a dancer at the nightclub in which he plays—but he cannot bring himself to declare his love to her. His life changes when he is deported from the United States at the height of the Cuban Missile crisis without having declared his love. Through the thirty years chronicled in the novel, Palomino does all possible in his quest to return to the United States to find Etiwanda despite the fact that he knows she has grown to be a fantasy, an obsession of his imagination. Palomino’s quest takes him to the United States and back three times, as he becomes more and more desperate, as he becomes involved with drug traffickers and for-hire murderers like Polo Norte, as he loses track of what it means to feel alive. Palomino is trapped in a tug-of-war between his rational desire for a normal existence and his irrational but inescapable longing for Etiwanda. In the end, his desperation to get to Etiwanda brings the underworld of Polo Norte to her doorstep. “Shred Me Like the Cheese You Use to Make Buñuelos” tells the story of Polo Norte, Palomino’s antagonist, on his last day on earth, as he is followed by a writer who has agreed to watch him commit suicide. Together, the stories explore the history and nature of the Colombian Diaspora in the United States, and the violent circumstances surrounding the relationship between both countries and the migrants stuck in the middle of it. iii For the Legends: Mr. Pedro ‘Cuban Pete’ Aguilar (1927-2009) The greatest of all Mambo dancers. Mr. Israel ‘Cachao’ López (1918-2009) Visionary bassist and inventor of the original jam sessions in miniature. Mr. Gilberto ‘Joe Cuba’ Calderón (1931-2009) The legend of the barrio. Mr. Ralph Mercado (1941-2009) The man with the vision to take this music to the world. For the followers of the worldwide movement they inspired, without whom I could not have written any of these words. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CUBAN JAM SESSIONS IN MINIATURE: A NOVEL IN TRACKS ......................................... 1 Side A .............................................................................................................................................. 1 Track 1—Yambú ..................................................................................................................... 4 Track 2—Cha-Cha-Chá ........................................................................................................ 28 Track 3—Guaguancó ............................................................................................................ 41 Track 4—Changüí ................................................................................................................. 68 Track 5—Guaracha ............................................................................................................... 95 BONUS TRACK: SHRED ME LIKE THE CHEESE YOU USE TO MAKE BUÑELOS ......... 99 Side B ...................................................................................................................................... 130 Track 6—Mambo ................................................................................................................ 130 Track 7—Rumba Columbia ................................................................................................ 172 WRITING LIFE ESSAY ............................................................................................................ 240 BOOK LIST ................................................................................................................................ 247 v CUBAN JAM SESSIONS IN MINIATURE: A NOVEL IN TRACKS Side A Descarga en Miniatura This I remember—over a decade too late—when El Jefe turns on the turntable and spins Cachao’s Deascargas en Miniatura—Jam Sessions in Miniature: I am sitting on the waxed floor of that apartment, back in the United States, back in Spanish Harlem in the Winter of 1960, thinking that as soon as you walk in, the snow on your boots will melt and it would no longer be pristine enough for you to dance. You knock on the door and I don’t move from my stool. Like a good detached musician, like a good combat veteran, telling you that I don’t care about your presence as much as I do, I answer your knock with a single slap of the quinto drum. You turn the knob, gathering your skirt so that the door won’t catch it. How I had craved this moment since 1957—being alone with you—but it wasn’t me who made it possible. It was you—your black skin glistening, shining under the mirror ball—who’d come up to me at the Montuno Street, after my palm was bleeding from playing a descarga for Willie Rosario and you said, in your fast and casual Cuban way “Palomino, no one makes me dance the way you do. I want to practice whenever you practice.”As if I were pressing my fingers against a gyrating vinyl record, I slow down your words and play them over and over again in my brain before I nod in agreement, because I have no words for you, a woman this beautiful, who could forget yourself and allow the music to possess you for hours without end. I’ve played my drums behind you for five years, but it’s at this moment that I know you know I exist. 1 What do I—crippled, scarred, deformed—say to you, Etiwanda, when you walk into my apartment for the first time and remove layer upon layer of clothing in front of me until I see the almond shape of your bare shoulders and the shadows that your breasts make when they come together? What do I say when you strap on your dancing heels and your calves look like they are ready to fight a war? What do I say when you put a gardenia on your left ear—telling me that you’re single? Do I say ‘I’ve loved you in silence’? No. I say nothing. This is sacred: You standing in front of me, ready to dance for me and no one else, and I will do nothing to scare you away. So I slap and slap the cowhide of the three tumbadoras and I create the most heartfelt tumbao anyone has ever played, and I disappear from your world—at least the image of me—because my hands are your world. And your knees bend, and the hem of your skirt flies, and the ruffles look like fighter planes having a dogfight over Korea. Your thighs are powerful, and I think you’re going to break through the floor with your next spin and that your black hair is darker than a moonless night in Bogotá, and then your eyes close, your mouth opens unconsciously, the way you do when the music is—I am—in charge. I wish I could step outside of myself, as you make the cramped space of my apartment yours. I wish there were two of me, and that at least one of me would have two legs, so that I could dance around you and thrust my pelvis toward you, making the vacunaos you are now imagining—but I can’t, because I have only one fucking leg. And then you are before me and you twirl, your heels tracing audible lines on the floor, and I catch a breeze and the smell of a bouquet of daisies when your skirt flies. You come too close to the salidor and I don’t want to disrupt you so I lurch back and the music stops, and I fall over my milk crate full of Mambo records and break in half the disc I am playing now— Cachao’s Cuban Jam Sessions in 2 Miniature—the whole reason I’m remembering this. And you say “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” and I remember where I am now, and that remembering you is useless. 3 Track 1—Yambú El Barrio, New York, NY, U.S.A. 14 Oct 1962 Had Palomino Mondragón known that on that day the FBI was going to arrest him and deport him under suspicion of un-American and subversive activities, he would have donned the uniform he wore when he lost his right leg to a Chinese mortar in Korea, and he would have jumped to his death from the observation deck of the Empire State Building. He would have done these things because he had promised himself in the summer of 1952 that he would return to Colombia only in a casket. Had he known, he would have paid a visit to the Italian widow who lived below his apartment and thanked her for enduring the endless nights of percussion. He would have settled his four dollar and seventeen cent debt at Rivera’s bodega on 116th Street, and he would have given Dick Loco custody of his ten milk crates of mambo records. But before anything else, he would have dragged his conga drums on the 4 Train toward The Montuno Street and played a final rumba—a Cuban jam session—for Etiwanda. Had Palomino not fallen once again prey to that accursed habit he’d developed in Korea—a habit he believed to be the reason for all the strife that had befallen him since his arrival in New York—the FBI agents would have never found him: Photographing road kill was the only means he knew for quenching the insatiable desire to capture death in a tangible manner. When he stumbled upon the dead pigeon’s body—its legs sticking straight up—while he was climbing down the fire escape, Palomino was clean shaven and dressed to play at The Montuno Street that night.