Liveforever by Andrés Caicedo

Author:Andrés Caicedo
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141968452
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

THE CITY OF CALI REJECTS

Los Graduados, Los Hispanos

and the various exponents of

Sonido Paisa made to measure

for the bourgeois

in all their boorish brashness.

Because it’s not about

‘Suffering is My Lot in Life’.54

It’s about ‘Get sharp, people, because they’re watching you.’

Long live the Afro-Cuban feeling!!

¡¡Viva Puerto Rico libre!!

WE MISS RICHIE RAY

But there was nothing to be done. Richie Ray never did come back, and in his absence an emptiness grew in Rubén’s soul, one that consumed him, ate away at his most genuine, most vital emotions. But none of this could compare to the fact that he had lost his head just when he most needed it. And so he was forever marked by a terrible feeling of loss. Listening to music, getting people to dance was the fire that fuelled his damnation.

It goes without saying he flunked out of school halfway through the fifth year. One of his uncles got him a job in a record shop called Paz Hermanos – Peace Brothers – where he proved to be a brilliant salesman, but every now and then he would suddenly freeze and stand stock-still in front of some astonished customer, his index finger hovering over the record like a shooting star as some fragment of memory returned to him: a red rag waving in the spotlight, calling for another song.

He squandered all his wages on records (he got discount rates), bought a high-tech hi-fi and spent his Saturday nights holed up, irritable and unable to sleep. He never expected rumbas to bring him salvation, and as soon as he hooked up with Don Rufían, he refashioned himself as an angel of misrule and miscalculation, someone who brought music into people’s homes, there to sow discord and division. He was never friendly to the kids who danced to his music. ‘Just wait till they’re a bit older,’ he’d say. ‘I’ve been groping my way through life without light or happiness since I was fourteen.’ He constantly popped pépas as a way of staying loose-limbed for those (very rare) occasions when he felt like dancing, and as an effective means of revisiting those already recovered memories (of which there were no more than four), but he was kidding himself, going around thinking that at any moment he might manage to reconstruct his little story. His shtick of vomiting all the time was because he thought he could retch up memories to burn his throat, a miserable trickle of misspent time. But it never produced any results.

I yawned, end of story, and he pushed me away from him. Stumbled a few steps and lay face down on the floor. I came behind, following his zigzag movements, and kissed the back of his neck. Hungry for his skin, I licked around his ears in the modern style. He purred something in protest, but I marshalled all my forces – this was not some kids’ party; I climbed on top of him and he rubbed himself against my hard, punishing protrusions, scraped himself off the floor

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