"Paul J. McAuley & Kim Newman - In Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

lifts the glass guitar above his head in both hands, strikes a groin-jutting
sambadero pose.

‘I got his guitar.’

‘I got a crucifix, but that doesn’t make me Jesus,’ says La Baiana. But
you can see he is just the littlest, tiniest, poco bit impressed. He indicates
the wall of banked-up amps speak-ers bins drivers mixers decks behind his
throne. ‘Let the sambada decide. Yo! El Batador!’

Rhythm answers. Complex, sinuous, muscular, many-layered rhythm
that strikes into the heart and finds its resonant frequency. El Batador is
seated on an empty beer-crate drumming on an upturned plastic bucket,
lifting the rim and slapping it against the pounded clay of the sambadrome
with his boney feet in counterpoint.

Q: How many men does it take to fill a sambadrome with one plastic
bucket?

A: One, but he must be muy muy sambadero.

HeesusHoséMaria, Annunciato has been waiting all his short life to
play with musicians of this calibre. This old black man, he makes the
massed batterias of all Birimbao Hill sound like kids kicking rhythms out of
the bus stops with disposable chopsticks. Annunciato picks up the beat:
Baile Mi Hermana, one of the standards, easy to play badly, hard to play
good. He will show this fat transvestite carnivalado. If they are gods, these
spirits in the computers, he will be worthy of them. He plays the theme high
and pure and holy and Ros’a’Jericho behind her deck comes in on a wave
of samples as he breaks into improvisations. And it lifts. It soars. It takes
off and heads from the Van Allen belts. It screams, high and holy and hot
hot hot and the cabaña bums and malandros are standing two four six
eight deep around the concrete-block walls mouths open eyes popping
what kinda merda this and Annunciato feels the thing in the guitar awaken
and open like a moonflower blooming and he looks inside and sees ...

‘Ai ai ai ai,’ shouts La Baiana dancing on his throne. ‘Enough enough
enough enough. I believe you, I believe you.’ And one of his body-boys
throws the master isolator and it all fails, it all falls, it all fades and comes
apart and Annunciato, soaked with sweat, feels like a crashed angel.

‘Hot dog, jumpin’ frog,’ says Ros’a’Jericho. ‘Muy guitarristo! Seu
Guantanamera!’ She kisses him on the mouth. She tastes of pork, like white
women are supposed to.

****

Crackin’ bottles, yabba yabba; long-necks from a tin bath full of ice up at La
Baiana’s place, which is cool and airy and has ceiling fans which Annunciato
has only ever seen on tele-vision and lots of things in terracotta pots on the