Dancing to Almendra.

On the same day Umberto Anastasia was killed in New York, a hippopotamus escaped from the zoo in Havana. I can explain the connection. No one else, only me, and the individual who looked after the lions. His name was Juan Bulgado, but he preferred to be called Johnny: Johnny Angel or Johnny Lamb, depending on his mood. In addition to feeding the animals, he was in charge of the slaughter pen, that foul-smelling corner where they killed the beasts that were fed to the carnivores. A long chain of blood. That's what the zoo is. And, very often, life.

Juan Bulgado isn't dead, he lives in al old-age home, he's forgotten that his nom de guerre is Johnny, and the nuns who take care of him call him Frank, later I'll tell you why. When I met him, in October of '57, he was close to forty. I think he turned forty in the middle of the crisis. But I was very young, I'd just gone through the calamity of my birthday party, number twenty-two, celebrated in a way that was very like the twenty-one that preceded it: Mama on her cloud, a little dizzy because of the Marsala All'uovo, the only liquor she was in the habit of drinking back then; Papa with his arm around my older brother, an engineer like him, both of them smoking their H. Upmann torpedoes; and my sister, seventeen and uncomfortable in her lace-trimmed dress. The three of us were very different from one another, with a father who was similar to my older brother, and a mother who wasn't similar to anyone: ungainly, tense, a smoker, with a voice like hysterical glass and hair that was totally white. As far back as I can remember, she'd had white hair, and probably turned gray even before she gave birth to me. She might have been an interesting woman, but the women who were her friends considered her tiresome. And the children of her friends, some of them my classmates, took care to pass that opinion along to me. Anastasia died, riddled with bullets, in the Park Sheraton Hotel at Seventh Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street in New York, sitting in a mournful barber's chair, his face still smeared with lather, like a partially decorated cake. The news came in on the Teletype. No one at the paper supposed it would interest me, because my job for the previous year and a hall and for who knows how much longer, had been interviewing performers: singers, dancers, actors. Comedians generally are conceited and have very bad characters. I didn't like what I did, I despised that kind of lightweight journalism, but I had no alternative when I began working at the Diario de la Marina, on the recommendation of one of my father's friends. All the positions I would have preferred were already filled, and all they needed was some moron who's be happy to find out what new plans were hatching in the empty little head of Gilda Magdalena, the blondest of our vedettes; or which harem Kirna Moor, a Turkish dancer who packed them in at night at the Cabaret Sans Souci, had escaped from; or which orchestra would accompany Renato Carosone, an Italian clown who sang the absurd "Marcelino Pan y Vino," which played constantly on the radio.

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From Dancing to Almendra, by Mayra Montero [c]2005. Translation by Edith Grossman [c]2007. Reprinted with permission of Picador. Illustration Fototeca Storica Nazionale.