A Night in Manhattan

On the walls in the Bronx the gangs converse from one graffiti [tag] to another, from a wall to a balcony, from roofs dotted with little windows through which a dirty sky can be seen, as if a group of angels had placed an ashtray there that spreads out over the roofs, over the clothes hung out in the air. I can see it all in detail because I have the window open and I know that on turning onto the bridge it will be there, on the same fire escape — the little Puerto Rican flag the angelical ashes fell on, the one that flutters if there is wind from the river.

Arriving from Connecticut, the entrance into New York is through hell, or what is called the Bronx. I have a list of rooftop terraces that go passing by in accordance with the rhythm of my memory. The one that looks at the church, the one of the clock with a carillon where Ricardo Ray and Willie Colon stopped every morning before going to school, the one of the chewed up wall where a portrait of Queen Victoria is wearing away, an old Bombay Gin advertisement, those that are pointed toward streets where an all-consuming sun seems to announce, finally, the return of Jesus Christ over the roofs of the Baptist churches.

I look at the clock and it’s just a little past six o’clock; with trucks on all sides my wife becomes desperate. We have a dinner meeting at seven o’clock at the Algonquin, an “old fashioned” Manhattan hotel where Rita Moreno awaits us, the first female Hispanic actress who received the Academy Award back in 1961 for her performance in “West Side Story.” With the roar of the Bronx — this New York borough roars like a hungry tiger — I see Rita in some scenes from her glorious movie. She dances as they do in Carolina, on the outskirts of San Juan, and speaks in a quarrelsome English learned in the seamstress shops of the South Bronx. I also recall her arrival in Hartford to receive an honorary degree from Trinity College: a blue dress — Chanel — the same naughtiness in her look, and a Jewish husband from New York, Leonard, who laughs with each of her wisecracks.

Crossing intersections of the Bronx in the middle of rush hour is like running in front of a tiger without it being able to reach you, arriving excited on that island where neighbors on an avenue pay annually to plant red and yellow tulips in the central garden — Park Avenue — where dogs live the lives of tycoons and where the buildings’ doormen look like admirals. We cross the threshold of the hotel where we will stay, eager to take a shower that would cleanse us of the angel’s ashes. The Hyatt shone at that hour like an estate in Dubai. Arab sheiks, followed by entourages of women, passed by freely beneath the crystal lamps and the soft sound of the water down the walls.

When we arrived at the Algonquin it was almost nine o’clock at night. Dinner was already finished and Rita was perched on the piano singing “Moonlight in Vermont.” The setting duplicated a scene from a movie made in the 1930s. At the long table, faces were barely illuminated by the tiny lamps placed in front of each seat. And surprisingly, sometimes cinema seems like reality. I thought I was immersed in a scene from “Mambo Kings.” We carefully waited for the end of Rita’s song, and then we entered. The white haired man, seated at the end like a patriarch, came toward me with open arms as if he had known me for years. It was Tito Puente. “That is what happens to you for coming dressed in white, he thought you were a babalawo,”* my wife said. Rita melted into a hug with Lise, and we greeted Johnny Pacheco and his wife. The memory of that night in Manhattan sparkles to this day.

*Editor’s note: A priest or god in the Yoruba culture. In this sense it means a powerful person.