Eating with Prince's girlfriend

She asked carpaccioI looked at the menu with the eyes of a scholar and accepted the steak and the congri. She ate the dishes one at a time, I ate them all at once: a full plate and a cold Cristal, which was almost splitting. I shouldn't have (I worked as a tour guide), but on Thursday I had fallen on myself with the full weight of the Orient and violated almost everything "legitimately" violable.

I had picked them up at La Alameda at eight o'clock in the morning and by noon we had toured part of the city. I had one jewel left in the afternoon: the terrace restaurant La Caridad, which was, along with Doña Aurora and San Pauli, the best in this city, at least a few years ago. I was about to unbutton the wings of the impossible nap, when the woman asked me, looking at a picture of Juan Formell, if I liked music.

"I love it"I said in my California English. "I was Prince's girlfriend." I said nothing, looked up from the almost crackling beer sweat and asked him to repeat himself. Instead of doing such a thing he pulled out his phone and scrolled through dozens of photos. In one of them, the man with the Purple Rain threw his hands to the audience and waved to a girl.

We enlarged the photo as much as possible. My eyes had his eyes, his eyes sought mine, and we looked at that image together. The husband said it in the deep voice of a guilty obstinacy: "Now, she won't stop talking". And the woman, Mi Ling, made me the story: she had been the muse that inspired me. Little Red Corvette. She told me that Prince was a nice guy; that she was writing a book where she would tell everything; that Prince loved her and she loved him, but that it was very difficult to sustain that, until he finished what should not have been finished.

She took another turn in life, married the husband who could hardly hear because he had already lost part of his hearing. And now she was a woman who walked with difficulty, but she did not always have this merciful age. She used to be young and beautiful and Prince wrote songs for her. She didn't tell me much more. I was shaken and we went to Morro to show them that the Yankees had gotten into the Mambi war with the Spanish and they even erased us from the articles in the New York TimesPaul McCartney and Emilio Bacardi had eaten there, long before, in prison.

Then we talked about the Buena Vista. She didn't want to say much because she was writing her book and promised me an interview later, which I'm still waiting for. In the evening, I took her to that restaurant and told Isidro, the owner of the best Chevrolet in Santiago de Cuba, to pick her up.

I left in a daze. I posted on YouTube several times Little Red Corvette, Purple Rain and that very commercial piece where Prince talked about the most beautiful woman in the world. I had eaten with Prince's muse; Santiago de Cuba became, also for me, a beautiful memory. That night I didn't want to eat rice and beans; I went back to the restaurant and ate carpaccio. The city was beautiful and sensual like a good bolero.