A drink with the Cimarron

Give me a drink, Willo, this Monday looks like those Mondays when one should have died, I tell Vivanco who has put on his guitar and sees how the husks of the day slowly descend to the floor. He lives in Mejorana, near the Tivolí, a place named by the French where the house of traditions is located. There, boleros are sung and if you listen, you feel the pulse of Pepe Sanchez in your chest.

It is the 2000's, the country failed to fulfill the promise that the trains would go through the air; there is no money, but not because of an incalculable development but because of its opposite. Dystopia is near us. However, the island has had singers who save.

I look at Vivanco in his house in the highlands, he has a small room full of melodies. I went to see him to tune in for the day, as I would have done with Compay Segundo, who also lived nearby, after moving from Siboney. Vivanco is an enviable host, he places his cigar in my hands and we smoke the rough Monday. He clutches his guitar and begins to quote some verses:

"Magic night, I have your warmth.

I cradle my desire and my sound mind with lips of alcohol."

He sings and I see his hands placed on the guitar arm. They say that Sindo would sometimes turn around so you wouldn't see the chords. Vivanco, on the contrary, shows a fearsome skill, those chords I would never play. The song ends and another one comes up, the smoke sustains us, there is a mystery of bread and light coffee on the small table, we sit on the edge of the bed like someone who sits with his back to the abyss, a man shouts: there are peanuts, there are peanuts, there are peanuts, there are peanuts.

"I'm still on the road in a millennial dream.

Since I live my own way, I have luxury and scenery".

He sings and I look at his dreadlocks falling towards nothingness, I smoke again when my lungs lack everything and I look Monday in the face. Vivanco is the guitar or the guitar is the bard who knows how to uncork the wonder.

"Gente arrabalera de guitarra vieja para amanecer.

It doesn't need any more".

Damn it, William, I tell him, this song is going to be forever, and he doesn't listen to me because he's in the mood, and he does nothing but taste the little bit of rum we have left. I turn off the autopilot and go from hallucination to hallucination, as the poet would say, because Vivanco keeps putting wonders on the table.

I don't forget him because we friends used to go to his little house in Los Altos to propose things like Chano Pozo, Machito and the Afro-Cubans, and he would play songs.

This happens almost everywhere in the country, friends go to the bards to be surprised. In this case, he is a man who seems to drink from every source, in him lives and coexists the Haitian, the national, even the Tyrolean song or the joropo. Nothing is spared when he proposes the song.

The night is flowing outside, I am cold, the smoke has crushed the tedium. Vivanco did not imagine that a beautiful song of a maroon in love would give him total recognition and that, even when the machines arrived and installed the external chips called telephones, many nationals would follow his song. I gave him a hug, coughed the final smoke and thanked him.

Many Mondays were annihilated in that room, listening to wonders, scaring away the tedium in the same neighborhood where Ñico Saquito composed the best guarachas of life.

I went down to the street whistling those songs, I had to go out to Céspedes Park, up Enramadas Street imagining that when God laughs, these songs come up and Monday manages to laugh with him.