Suzanne and the Buena Vista Social Club

One thing I forgot to put on my best-moments list that I posted last week is that I found a guitar teacher. I saw him one day when I came out of the Biblioteca Digital. He was playing in the park, his small bony frame hunched over the red body of his guitar, his dark wrinkled hands flicking dissonant chords out of the strings. I could tell he was playing musica de recuerdo (old folk music), and that he was good. A younger, whiter, rounder friend sat next to him. I didn’t have anywhere in particular to go, and the sun wasn’t hot although it was already late afternoon, so I decided to sit down on a bench nearby and listen. As he played, he began to sing in a nasal voice barely audible from where I was sitting. His younger friend started laughing and was rewarded with a crotchety frown from the guitarist. In Honduran fashion, I watched the two men with the utter lack of subtlety that comes from intense curiosity. They soon noticed and returned my gaze between songs. Finally I got the nerve to walk over and sit on the bench directly opposite them. We started talking, and then we started trying to find songs that we have in common. Musica de recuerdo? Ranchera? he asked me. Swing? Blues? Music in English? I asked him. Finally I asked, bossa nova? He smiled. La Chica de Ipanema? I requested. He started playing. I started singing. People stopped walking past us and instead stopped to listen.

Since then I have started taking lessons from Don Israel on the back patio of the Catholic church’s public health clinic, across from the park. He is retired, but he hangs out at the clinic because the friend I saw him with that day in the park is a doctor at the clinic. I arrive around 4 pm on whatever days I can, and Israel comes anytime within the next hour, and he teaches me musica de recuerdo. Right now I am learning Sabor a Mi, Bésame Mucho, Quiéreme Mucho, and Amor Amor Amor (which was also famous in the U.S. in the 1950’s in its English-translated version). These are the old love songs that are kind of jazz, kind of salsa, the old songs that old men sing.

When there are no patients, the doctor sits down on the patio with us and listens. So does a young guy more or less my age who plays guitar and sings for the Sunday church services. Sometimes another older man named Camilo comes by. Camilo sings, the doctor told me the first time he introduced us. We are going to invite you to sing with us one night, he said.

And so I was invited to hang out last night with the doctor, my guitar teacher and a few of their friends. They refused to tell me ahead of time what the plan was, but told me they would pick me up at my apartment sometime after 7 pm. I assumed they would come by a bit before 9 and sure enough, they showed up at 8:30. I joined the doctor, his very large father and an unidentified woman of the doctor’s age named Alexa in the cab of their pickup, while three older men including Israel and Camilo greeted me from the back. We drove to a liquor store to pick up supplies and then headed uphill to the feria in Agalteca, where I had ridden the beautiful horse Fuego two weeks previous. (Festivals go on for weeks here in Honduras, this being the third weekend of the festival of San Sebastian.) When we got to Agalteca, the doctor pulled the truck up onto the shoulder of the dirt road, directly across from the soccer field in the center of town where all the action was, and in the exact same spot where I met Fuego two weeks earlier. The old men went off in search of a few chairs for the doctor’s father, me and Alexa, who by that time I had realized was the (married) doctor’s mistress. They returned with two slatted wooden patio chairs for us women and an entire bench for the father, who managed to fill it rather uncomfortably. I was handed a Miller Lite, which I graciously accepted, appreciating it as one of the higher-class beers one can be served in Honduras even though I hate it. They brought me a sliced lime and a pile of salt on a small plastic plate that they requested from one of the many makeshift restaurants set up under temporary aluminum roofs on the bare patches of ground on the edges of the soccer field, and showed me how to dip my finger in the salt and rub it with the lime juice around the rim of my beer bottle. In the States we only do this with Mexican beer, I told them. They looked confused.

I sat there in the dark on the edge of the road with Alexa, the doctor and his father. The old men stood a short distance away from us by the truck, talking about old-men things. Troups of teenage boys and girls sauntered the street in front of us. Crowds of single men milled amongst the restaurants and beer tents set up under the field lights on the soccer field. Two plates piled with pieces of juicy meat showed up for Alexa and me. As I passed off my dish to one of the old men after eating only four delicious pieces, I regretted being a vegetarian for 3 years and still having a weak stomach for meat. Loud reggaeton thumped from a hundred feet away, echoing from inside a building that seemed to be a dance hall. Drunk men on horseback rode by, kicking at their mounts carelessly and causing the horses to trip and wheel confusedly as if it were the animals that were intoxicated and not their riders. The doctor and his father downed their second, third, and fourth plastic cups of Chivas whiskey with 7-Up and began to laugh loudly and to spontaneously burst into acappella ranchera songs. Every five minutes they asked me if I was ready for another drink, even though I had already finished my beer and was now working on my own cup of whiskey without soda. I can’t drink like you two, I insisted. I’m only a third your weight. The doctor roared and high-fived me.

Finally the doctor asked me to ask Israel to play. I did, and he said he didn’t want to, though he directed his grumpiness not at me but at the doctor. But within 5 minutes Israel pulled out his guitar and tuned it, Camilo pulled out a pair of maracas and the other man, José, surfaced with a conga-type drum. They opened the tailgate of the truck and I sat next to Israel. They asked me to sing first. So we played The Girl from Ipanema. I sang it in Portuguese and then in English and all three of them nodded approvingly afterwards. A small crowd of boys of various ages clustered around us, staring and seemingly not understanding what kind of circumstance would entice a young gringa to hang out with three old men. Then we played Ojos Verdes (Green Eyes), a song that was also once popular as a swing tune in the States that I suddenly remembered that I know in both its original Spanish as well as English. Though I had never played it before even with Israel, the four of us went through it without a hitch. Then the three men took over. Camilo wailed out Moliendo Café, almost acting, as his voice and body and maracas moved with the emotion of the song. The men sang another that I didn’t recognize, this time in three-part harmony. They sang another, and another, all musica de recuerdo. Even Israel, whose talent is with the guitar, sang Voy a Cambiar el Nombre solo. Various groups of teenage boys came and went, and between songs the reggaeton still thumped monotonously in the background, but the group of old men remained undistracted. The smell of cooking meat and the sound of laughter wafted through the air. Skinny street dogs nervously approached and retreated. A slight chill came into the January night air. I thought to myself, this is how the Buena Vista Social Club must have started. Not in a studio or a basement, but at a party in the midst of friends and community, playing for the enjoyment of sharing their own sound with each other and anyone else who cared to pay attention. The beauty of it all is that I don’t think Israel, Camilo or José have ever heard of the Buena Vista Social Club. This is just what happens in small-town Latin America. Old men play old love songs out of the back of a pickup truck at their small-town fair at midnight. And sometimes people stop to listen.