The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light Read Online Free

call me Trompudo.
    I’ve seen my birth name listed in some places as Carlos Augusto Alvez Santana—who the hell came up with that? My given name was Carlos Umberto Santana until I dropped the middle name Umberto. I mean, Hubert? Please. My full name now is simply Carlos Santana.
    Many years later my mom told me that she had a premonition of what kind of person I would be. “I knew you were going to be different from your sisters and brothers. All babies grab and hold on to the blanket when the mother covers them. They pull on it until they have a tiny ball of lint in their little hands. All my other babies would rather bleed than open up their fists and give it to me. They’d scratch themselves first. But every time I would open your hand, you let it go so easily. So I knew that you had a very generous spirit.”
    There was another premonition. My mom’s aunt, Nina Matilda, had a head of hair that was totally white, white as white can be. She would go from town to town selling jewelry like some people sell Avon products. She was good at it, too—a very unassuming old lady who would show up on people’s doorsteps and open up a bunch of handkerchiefs containing all this jewelry. Anyway, Nina Matilda said to my mom after I was born, “This one is destined to go far.
El es cristalino
—he is the crystal one. He has a star in him, and thousands of people are going to follow him.” My mom thought I was going be a priest or maybe a cardinal or something. Little did she know.
    People ask me about Autlán: what was it like? Was it city or country? I tell them, “You know that scene in the movie
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
when Humphrey Bogart is in a shootout in the hills with banditos who claim to be Federales? And one of the banditos says, ‘Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!’ ”
    That’s Autlán—a small town in a green valley surrounded bybig, rugged hills. It’s actually very pretty. When I lived there in the early ’50s, the population was around thirty-five thousand. Now it’s around sixty thousand. Only recently did they get paved roads and traffic lights. But it was more together than Cihuatlán, and that’s what my mom wanted.
    My memories of Autlán are those of a child. I was only there for my first eight years. At first we lived in a nice place in the middle of the busy town. To me, Autlán was the sound of people passing by with donkeys, carts—street sounds like that. It was the smell of tacos, enchiladas, pozole, and carne asada. There were chicharrónes and pitayas—cactus fruit—and jicamas, which are like turnips, big and juicy. Biznagas—sweets made from cactus and other plants—and alfajor, a kind of gingerbread that’s made with coconut. Yum.
    I remember the taste of the peanuts that my dad would bring home, still warm from being roasted—a whole big bag of them. My brothers and sisters and I would grab them and crack them open, and he’d say, “Okay, who wants to hear the story of the tiger?”
    “We do!” We’d get together in the living room, and he’d tell us a great story about El Tigre that he would make up on the spot. “Now he’s hiding in the bushes, and he’s growling because he’s really hungry.” We would start huddling close together. “His eyes are getting brighter until you can hear him go…
roar!!
”
    It was better than television. My dad was a great storyteller—he had a voice that triggered our imaginations and got us involved with what he was saying. I was lucky: from as early as I can remember I learned the value of telling a good story, of making it come alive for others. It permeated me and I think later helped me in thinking about performing music and playing guitar. I think the best musicians know how to tell a story and make sure that their music is not just a bunch of notes.
    We lived in a few different houses in Autlán, depending on how Dad was doing bringing in the money. There was one that was on a little run-down parcel of