“Towards the middle of his life, from one day onwards Xavier Cugat decides to put on a wig permanently, and at that moment he stops being a person and becomes a character. A universal character, whom everyone recognizes, and even in the films he makes he often plays himself playing the violin.” The crossover between reality and fiction is the driving force of Confetti (Proa), the novel about Xavier Cugat with which Jordi Puntí (Manlleu, 1967) won the Sant Jordi prize and which hits bookstores today.
Can it be understood as a biography of Cugat? Yes and no, or neither of the two, because what Puntí defends, and he writes it already in the first pages of the book, is that “the quaranta per cent of human life, I calculate, is a fiction. A lie. An entelèchy. A giravolt of the imagination, yes voleu. A novel. A joke” (forty percent of human life, I estimate, is a fiction. A lie. An entelechy. A somersault of the imagination, if you want. A novel. A joke). “I was looking for this misunderstanding, that the reader would first know things about Cugat that are largely reality, I would say 80%, but I am more interested in that other 20%, and I wanted the reader to do the same, and reflect on the limits of biography. Even when it is canonical and serious, you always have the doubt of what is fictional. A very clear example is Marie Antoinette by Stefan Zweig, which these days is so successful and which we read like a novel, and it is a biography,” says the writer.
In his first novel in fourteen years, after Maletes perdudes (Empúries, 2010), Puntí draws on tons of information collected over the years, starting with a scholarship in 2014 at the New York Public Library, the musician's two autobiographies, one novel by his ex-wife Abbe Lane based on their relationship, the biography that Luis Gasca made and anecdotes collected here and there, but then he filters them and turns them into fiction, especially from the creation of the narrator, an almost anonymous music journalist – his name is barely read once in the novel, in passing and without surnames – a little older than him. “Information is a springboard to jump into the imagination,” he assures the writer from the Palace hotel, the old Ritz where Cugat lived the last years of his life.
It's not that there are multiple faces of Cugat, but rather that over the years he shaped his story after what he wanted, to convey a constant image of luxury and happiness. In the book, Puntí traces his biography, from his birth in Girona on January 1, 1900 to his death, on October 27, 1990 in Barcelona, with his passage through Cuba and the trip to New York, when he was only fifteen years old. willing to succeed, the man who was a very important part of the soundtrack of the United States from the twenties and thirties, with his orchestras popularizing Latin music to the point that today for many Americans it is also their music, which is He became a star on his own merits, first, and who later moved from the entertainment pages to the gossip columns: “The forms of journalism change and it becomes much more frivolous, which suited Cugat perfectly, because he lived of this frivolity.” This serves Puntí to “try to explain that fiction is as much a part of our lives as the toilet bowl, the toothbrush or the bowl of rice we eat.”
In the US, the musician – at first as a prodigy violinist – was a pole of attraction and a great cultural figure: “Here we know little about this dimension, which has been very hidden by the Cugat of recent years, which arrives here just in full transition, when our society is dazzled by freedom. This glamorous man arrives and explains to you, in the decadence of his life, Chinese stories with Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth, Al Capone... Some things are true and others are not, he is perfectly aware of the seductive capacity of words ”. And every time he explained an anecdote he improved it: “It embellishes the story. He is a narrator who works on the material he has to make it more seductive.”
Seductive and womanizer by nature, today he would be a completely canceled character, but "back then in the world of entertainment everything was always relationships of male domination and exploitation, and that is also why my narrator, although he has experienced it the same, has more perspective, more awareness, because he has reached the 21st century, and does the exercise of giving voice to one of his ex-wives to explain the other side of the story. "It's not about asking for forgiveness from Cugat or anyone, but about trying to understand it from the other point of view."
Catalan version, here
