Towards the middle of his life, from one day Xavier Cugat decides to wear a wig for good, and at that moment he ceases to be a person to be a character. A universal character, that everyone recognizes, and the fact is that even in the films he makes, he often plays himself playing the violin". The intersection between reality and fiction is the driving force behind Confeti (Proa), the novel about Xavier Cugat with which Jordi Puntí (Manlleu, 1967) won the Sant Jordi prize and which arrives in bookstores today.
Can it be understood as a biography of Cugat? Yes and no, or neither, because what Puntí defends, and he already writes in the first pages of the book, is that "forty percent of human life, I calculate, is a fiction. a lie An entelechy. A twist of the imagination, if you will. A novel A joke". "I was looking for this misunderstanding, for the reader to first know things about Cugat that are largely true, I would say that 80%, but I am more interested in this other 20%, and I was looking for the reader too, and make a reflection on the limits of biography. Even when it is canonical and serious, you always have the doubt that it is fiction. A very clear example is Marie Antoinette by Stefan Zweig, which these days is so successful that we read it like a novel, and it is a biography", says the writer.
In his first novel in fourteen years, after Maletes perdudes (Empúries, 2010), Puntí starts from tons of information collected over the years, starting with a grant in 2014 at the New York Public Library, the two autobiographies of musician, a novel by his ex-wife Abbe Lane based on their relationship, the biography made by Luis Gasca and anecdotes 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 read only once in the novel, in passing and without surnames – a little older than him. "Information is a springboard to be able to jump towards the imagination", assures the writer from the Palace hotel, the former Ritz where Cugat lived the last years of his life.
It's not that there are multiple faces of Cugat, but over the years he shaped the story of his from 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 the passage through Cuba and the trip to New York, with only fifteen years old, ready 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 North- americans is also his music, which first became a star on its own merits, and which later moved from the show pages to the laundry room columns: "The forms of journalism change and it becomes much more frivolous, which that suited Cugat perfectly, because he lived on this frivolity". This serves Puntí to "try to explain that fiction is part of our lives just like the toilet bowl, the toothbrush or the bowl of rice we eat".
In the USA, the musician – initially 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 much hidden by the Cugat of recent years, which arrives here right in the middle transition, when our society is dazzled by freedom. This glamorous gentleman arrives and tells you, in the decadence of his life, hard dinners with Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth, Al Capone... Some things are true and others are not, he is perfectly aware of the seductive ability of the words". And every time he told an anecdote, he improved it: "He embellishes the story. He is a narrator who works on the material he has to make it more seductive."
A seducer and a swagger of sorts, today he would be a completely canceled character, but "then in the world of show business everything was relations of male domination and exploitation, always, and that's also why my narrator, even though he has lived the same, he has more perspective, more awareness, because he has reached the 21st century, and he is doing the exercise of giving voice to one of his ex-wives to tell 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".
