Polo Montanez

Polo of the Mountains and from Beyond the Grave (by Philippe Lançon)Some musicians seem born to fuse the mind and body of a people. Sometimes, they die too young. Then their songs lull those who survive them with an inconsolable pleasure. Fernando Borrego Linares, aka Polo Montañez (Polo of the Mountains), died after a nocturnal road accident in November 2002. It happened as he was coming back from Havana, heading for his home in San Cristobal. The roads of Cuba are gulfs of darkness. Carts, cyclists, animals, holes in the road and unlit trucks leap at you like ill-timed ghosts. At night, they kill. For Polo, it was a truck. He was 47 and his musical career had lasted barely 3 years. His first record, Guajiro Natural (Natural countryman), was released in 2000; his second, Guitarra Mia (You my guitar), had just come out. Few have sung traditional Cuban folk music as well as Polo. He instinctively revitalised it with foreign, particularly Colombian, beats. Polo’s songs, as on this third, posthumous record, speak only of the man himself, the nature around him and his life, loves and melancholy overlaid by talent, sincerity and that acute, generous romanticism that grows throughout the island with the force of a mango tree. It casts a shadow over emptiness and the fruit that falls from its branches is heavy with sensuality. But if Polo were a fruit, he would rather be a ‘fruta bomba’, as they say in Cuba: a papaya renamed ‘bomb fruit’, green outside and orange-red inside, its powerful combination of flavours on the edge of sugar and sweetness, and verging on the overripe. The ‘fruta bomba’ seems to exude its inner passions, dissolving them in the blood of others.To understand Polo, you must start out from the place where he was born and lived: the Pinar del Rio region, located in the west of Cuba. Known locally as Vueltabajo, it is the coolest region on the island. There, small mountains covered with forests and tobacco and coffee plantations overlook plains where Spanish sugar growers once built their great ‘ingenios’. The area’s magical geography was cultivated in the violence of slavery. But nature is its permanent redemption. It picks back up what life strikes down, like flesh become chlorophyll through pleasure. And all this is in Polo’s voice. His lightness does not signify a lack of concern, but a sentimental escape in song. The son of a woodcutter, he became a woodcutter himself, cutting firewood until the age of forty. He could sit in the forest and watch birds or flowers for hours. He already wrote songs, which he put away in drawers. He did not forget them, though, but sang them at home in San Cristobal or out in the wild. As a famous Cuban poem goes, he could hold “a cigar in one hand and a firefly in the other”. In the song he is best known for in Cuba, Guajiro Natural, Polo says, “I know the story of the cafetal better than you / And I can go by horse to the place where El Cucalambe lived.” The ‘cafetal’ is the coffee plantation, linked in Cuban tradition to the great 19th-century Hispano-Cuban novel Cecilia Valdés. In contrast to the sugar industry, it is an oasis of tranquil beauty. And Polo’s mention of El Cucalambe is no accident: he was Cuba’s greatest folk poet. The Cuban people have adopted a good number of his ‘decimas’ or ten-line poems. Born in 1829 at the other end of the island, near to Las Tunas, he vanished mysteriously in 1861. He may have committed suicide or been killed. He may even have fled incognito to Germany. But his verse remained to resurface in rural songs. Polo lived according to his tradition. The novelty and energy of his music should not obscure how deeply he knew - and felt for - his country’s culture. He combined the lyrical song of ‘trova’ with the country spirit of ‘son’. His voice exposed calluses of despair and tenderness.In the nineties, the crisis of the ‘special period’ brought him into contact with tourists (everyone has to earn a living, after all). He gave up his woodcutting to play with a few friends at the magnificent tourist complex of Las Terrazas, facing the Viñales mountains. His guitar had only four strings, taken from fishing nets, and his drummer used old x-ray film to cover his drums. Just like anything else, the music was cobbled together. So it was there that Jose da Silva saw and heard him. Just for fun, Polo improvised a song about the bicycle, the island’s main vehicle and the cause of the population’s powerful calf muscles. Like any good Cuban folk singer, Polo knew how to ad-lib. There are improvisation contests in Cuba. Under his words and voice, he dreamt the rest: more guitars, violin, maracas, other vocals… His rapid success enabled him to bring these dreams to life, instrument by instrument. When he went into the studio for the first time, he wore his Sunday best, as if for a gala evening - he did not realise there was no audience - but he immediately made his presence felt through the force and precision of his musical choices. In his head, everything was already in its place, so it all naturally fell into place around the microphones. Like Orpheus in the forest, he had planned every detail among the beasts and flowers. Those who played were all part of his family. In Cuba, a man with money is worth a hundred without: all fall over each other to get to him. And he gives. Towards the end, Polo was as generous as ever, but seemed tired on occasion. He sometimes missed his solitude as a woodcutter-artist. Of course, his communicative joy and energy should not obscure his subsidiary quality of melancholy, reflected in two songs on the second record: Desde Abajo (From the bottom) and La Ultima Canción (The last song). In the first, he imagines his death - or a sort of coma similar to the one in which he would find himself between the accident and his death (artists invent their premonitions). Taking stock of his past life and his future destiny, he mixes his tenses as if he were floating somewhere between the two, firm yet indecisive. “Between the space bordered by death / and the short period for which life lasts / I spend my time gambling / waiting to win one day / And the years that remain to me / led me so soon / to be silent / at the proper moment / that must come.” In the second, he buries himself under a slow, intense song, “that must be romantic”, “a sentimental song that bears so much love / that it bathes the heart in tears”. It must sing of “the only truth”, made “of love, of the death of love and of disillusion."The entire island kept watch over him during his coma. Cuba had taken two years to recognise him (after a triumphant detour through Colombia and Europe) and it took just three records for him to take his place with El Cucalambe, anagram of Cuba clamé (I cried Cuba), in the island’s heritage of poetry and song. And it is because he is so Cuban that, riding on his light, romantic horse, Polo of the Mountains and from Beyond the Grave naturally crosses oceans, mountains and borders.