It’s been hard. See how the world you know slips away in a heartbeat and remains uncertain, absent, erased. The corners of the city are no longer the same; people are not the same and all the desolation fits into a look that searches and gets lost somewhere on the horizon. Only the stories remain. Memories. The nostalgia with which one fights to get rid of it but has the syndrome of persistence.
I have learned to live with nostalgia. It is true that having the weight of the body in the past is a tremendous drag on moving forward. But there it is. Like a sleeping animal that wakes up again with the sound of a song, an old series that is replayed on television or the familiar name of a friend. Nostalgia rises from the ground until you become a prey to yourself again. Of your story.
It is an indomitable beast like the bitter weight of hopelessness. I wonder, if those of us who were on this side of the memory building’s songs squeeze so hard, how will those who were the protagonists, the composers who somehow built a generation, experience it?
I think, for example, of Frank Delgado while listening to his album again Trovatur, thousands of miles from who I am and where I belong. It doesn’t sound the same. I don’t know if the emotions are different. If they retain the same capacity for evocation or if distance has taken away the possibility of being moved.
Frank’s case has been very peculiar in the Cuban music scene. For many it was censored; for others, not so much. With his hair on his shoulders, his hat and his own way of conversing with his audience, as if he were in the living room of his house, Frank was a regular troubadour on the national stages. And somehow he continues to be in the new spaces for the trova.
He has offered, at different times, memorable concerts in Cuban theaters to present his records. His songs caused laughter, joy and fury among that young audience that recognized itself as a generation. That he was happy. After the concerts there were very few reviews in the press about the previous night at the theater. Silence. And here nothing has happened.
On one occasion, I experienced firsthand what was happening to Frank. I’m not sure if it was that scathing censorship that others suffered from or a superior ignorance. The troubadour held a concert at Casa de las Américas and I, a boy moved to the core, delivered my review. It was one of my first comments about the musicians he had grown up with, who had trained me. They only returned me as an answer that, because it was Frank, it was not going to be published. I always kept the drafts of the plan because I already knew the process. I read that text again and I was only sorry for that decision, whatever it’s called.
For several years Frank did not have it very easy. Songs like «Trovatur», «Quinto centenario», «Veterano», «La otra orilla», just to name a few, were not music for the ears of certain leaders and censors. I don’t think the musician cared much. He only made songs and complied with what his moment dictated, his need for expression.
Thanks to that, he has given us notable albums not only for the quality of his songs but for containing the testimony that, in the end, is the most important thing. Have we wondered how he was able to place stone upon stone to understand those issues that built this monument to our generation, to what we lost or to what remained in the letter of a speech or to what never made the front page of the press?
It is simply the testimony of that (another) generation that was excited, that sang in concerts, that believed and today is searched for on a map. The emotion weighs like a stone again when I write. Frank could never imagine that his songs could also reach posterity through the most muddy roads, because memories would ambush us. The fortune teller, But what does the chorus say, My map, Havana is bullet They are another of those records that we keep on cassette or in digital format for as long as life allows.
In Havana in the 1990s, talking about a concert by Frank meant having a full-time weekend guaranteed. The concert, the songs, the screams, the hugs to friends, the girlfriends and the new loves at night. They had their own magic. When we left the concert we believed that the city was ours. That the night was tonight. We could end up anywhere. The same thing singing in a park until dawn or drunk in a party room full of strangers.
Everything was possible in that Havana to which Frank sang and was recorded on his records in which the country to which he spoke is no longer there, and other times it is repeated…
The maelstrom has been intense and the boys who were in the darkness of the theater or in the parks, or in the joy of those years, do not greet each other on the same corners, in the same theaters. Some of us have lost all contact and many have reinvented themselves in countries they only knew by name.
I can’t remember the last time I heard Frank live. I think he went to a club in Parque Almendares. A good space that disappeared when it had to be maintained at all costs. It happened before the new shipwreck and before the solitude of the new absences prevailed.
There’s nothing better than running into Frank on any street corner when you’re having a slow day. He is an inveterate talker. In an hour he can give you a class on the history of Cuban music, full of dirty jokes and anecdotes that, due to their weight, should not leave there.
The last time I ran into him in Nuevo Vedado in the middle of a pandemic. I’ve never asked him but any day, any year I will. I want to know how he feels, if he thinks about loneliness, if he doesn’t miss some of his generation mates. What causes him deep down to look at his audience and not see the same faces that he saw growing up as a generation.
Frank is 62 years old and perhaps has some pending debts with the legacy of his early influences and with his audience. He is no longer the trovatur in Havana. He is no longer the same person who often lived on the margins of the press or the institutions, although he never boasted of censorship. But Frank, luckily for our memory, for our present, is still around every now and then, on some night, he puts our loose ends back together. And that is already a good beginning for us to believe again, for a few hours, that the night is ours.
