Pina and the Chinese slaves in Cuba

A man shaves meticulously in a puddle by the side of a road, a woman dressed as a Playboy bunny runs panting through a freshly plowed field, a boy dressed in women's clothing walks slowly down a hallway, an attractive young woman in a bathing suit drags a goat, a ceremonious man sets a table in a torrential downpour; another, with wings, scampers naked through the snow in which he had been lying moments before, a girl sits impassively in the middle of the traffic on a busy street, an elegant gentleman trudges through a garden carrying a wardrobe on his back... In Die Klage der Kaiserin (The Empress's Lament), Pina Bausch's only film as a director, the choreographer weaves together seemingly unconnected scenes, linked by subterranean currents (sex, memory, cruelty, strange human habits) in which we recognize something of ourselves and are left elated and shattered.

Since the first time I saw it, I have been obsessed by some verses I read on the back cover of the DVD (“I'm not surprised that people die in front of their loved one's store/What surprises me is that we love and stay alive”) and a great song on the soundtrack that is pure trembling: Aurora en Pekin, by Sexteto Boloña, a Cuban group led by a musical giant barely a metre tall who in the 1920s turned elegant dance halls upside down with son, until then considered low-class.

Aurora en Peking was recorded in 1926 in New York and is a joyful combination of nostalgic lament and contagious Cuban flavor. The problem comes when you try to understand what the hell the lyrics say, barely intelligible in the voice of Abelardo Barroso. There are lustrous instrumental versions, such as that of Marc Ribot and Los Cubanos Postizos, and on the Internet you can find more or less delirious transcriptions that never coincide. Does he sing “eraser your face” or “borracho el semblante”? The only thing that is clear is that the singer is upset that his girl is in Peking and wants to go find her by tram. By tram?

Read also 'Aurora in Peking', by the Sexteto Boloña, is a delicious and delirious song, a pure tremor

I was reminded of Aurora in the exhibition at the Museu Maritim on Catalan participation in the slave trade. In passing, there is a mention of the Chinese with whom the Spanish colonists replaced the labour of African slaves when the ban on the trade spoiled their party. Between 1848 and 1874, 150,000 Chinese arrived on the island under false pretenses. They paid their passage in exchange for eight years of work and were subjected to miserable living conditions, with the aggravating factor that they were all men. They managed to free themselves in 1877 and created the largest Chinatown in Latin America, where there was surely a Peking bar where a mulatto woman called Aurora performed.