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THE ITALIAN LEGACY IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
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ple, in the novel
Ritos de cabaret
(Cabaret Rites, 1991, which has served as the subject for studies by Fernando
Valerio-Holguín, Pedro Delgado Malagón, and others), the autobiographical background contributes to the
launching of a prodigious collective mechanism, a choir capable of mixing gossip and lyrical impulses, the
individual visionary precipices, and the general fresco of an era and a society, punctuated by the names of
streets and musicians.
Veloz Maggiolo’s pen is moved by the hum of heterogeneous and sometimes incoherent memories, with
their simultaneous chronology that makes times coexist, thereby proposing a more complex consequenti-
ality. Thus, in these pages, the voice of the main witness alternates with that of an external narrator, with
excerpts from newspapers and with the voice of the neighborhood chronicler, Persio, the bearer of memories
and to a large extent the author’s alter ego. And in the end, the possibility is even hinted that the whole skein
of stories is nothing but the result of madness. Yet, this fragmentation of discourse does not disconnect it
to the point of reducing it to the level of nonsense. On the contrary, the multiplicity of reflections gives us
a more vivid popular ballad that describes a nation through a neighborhood and its key place: the cabaret,
which is a mix of bar, dance hall, and brothel.
The cabaret is the kingdom of the bolero, an amalgam of street music, alcohol, and gloom; a dance cre-
ated from seduction and languor, which is danced on tiled floors, where one pursues one’s object of desire,
while besieged by oblivion and abandonment. The bolero is Papo Torres’s way of knowing, forcing his
restaurant customers to listen to past successes as he pours new liquor into the bottles of the scalding years.
And it is also the school of Papo Junior and the soundtrack of the death of Samuel Vizcaíno, during the heroic
days of popular resistance.
The novel takes place in the last years of the tyrannical Trujillo regime and culminates in the 1965 civil
war, a key juncture in recent Dominican history. Despite the defeat, it was no longer possible after 1965 to
rein in the sense of awareness and the demands for civil rights, which can flourish like the verses of a song
between the tables of precariousness, in the embrace of dance, in the tenacity of passion.
There is a feeling of fatal cyclicity in the son who repeats the story of his father, which descends into
incest, even physically helping him to regain his most remote and fundamental love. And there is a feeling
of despair in defeating democratic dignity. But in the whirlwind of the narrative, the symbols are wisely
open-ended and versatile: the cabaret, the tangle of music, sex, and politics, fromwhich emerges the image of
a prostituted nation, but it is also a space of freedom, dissent, and rebellion. And the bolero is not only about
nostalgia but also a way of understanding events and dreaming about the future.
Another deeply Dominican and ambivalent musical symbol—in the sense that it can transmit rebellion
or oppression, acceptance, or opposition—is the merengue. Veloz Maggiolo dedicates
El hombre del acordeón
(The Man with the Accordion, 2003) to a merengue virtuoso, Honorio Lora, who taught the dictator himself
to dance (this particular rhythm was considered something of an official soundtrack for the regime). The
novel describes the death of the accordionist and the theft of his accordion, but also the resurrection of his
corpse as a spirit by the work of two sorcerers through a Vodou ritual known as
desunén
, and, above all, the
love of Honorio, which always returns.
The narrator/researcher, who many years later must reconstruct what transpired, clarifies before begin-
ning: “All the characters in this story are true, except the author,” and then points out: “If I had started to
write wanting to distinguish the true from the false, I would never have achieved a more or less coherent
story, so the reader must agree with me that I sometimes use disjointed voices, phrases that, I imagine, were
logical at one time, road stories that came to me in various ways, and that I cannot justify without referring
to the stages of a common magic that is still practiced.” Indeed, the novel makes use of confusing testimo-
nies and discordant legends, memories and rumors, its main source being a
calié
, a storyteller at the service
of Trujillo. Therefore, many doubts remain, and many supernatural events are interwoven, associated with
the myths and popular beliefs of the Northwest Line, that border zone between the Dominican Republic
and Haiti, which, at the time of the events, had just suffered the terrible “Perejil Massacre” (1937), which is