How to do the whoop dance

Carefully and carefully I put the disc on the player, press the lever that automatically lowers the pickup, and suddenly an ancient, piercing voice breaks off the disc, takes off like a needle. The music hurries behind the voice, and a tall black man with huge black eyes jumps out of the player, shouting the meaningless text "Tutti frutti", and the bass guitar sounds, and in the back of the stage the tenor saxophone blows out several harsh, gentle, hoarse notes, as if arguing with absurdity, and black hair, black as pitch, pomaded, falls on the Negro's forehead, curls on his forehead, and the Negro opens his mouth. Then he jerks his head, jerks his head, oh, how he jerks his head, and yells "oh, my soul" ¹ , and in front of him are black women, more beautiful than ever, sultry, with straightened hair, and they reach for him with all their bodies, with all their roundness, and shuffle the soles of their leather shoes on the polished parquet, and their hands are raised, and their legs are jerking, and how They move in such a way that a wave runs through their satin blouses and cream-colored linen skirts, and as if inadvertently show underwear, and squeal right under the nose of the singer, out of tune, to the savage rhythm of a saxophone platoon, to the rumbling of drums.

Oh, Lucille, Lucille, oh you black women, you can't be blacker, beautiful and pure, ready to give everything for an idol, deafened by tam-tom, which deafened Paul Robeson, and from this rhythm guitar, which is filled with trills, like a banjo , and from this piano, as old as the world, on the keys of which it was not Saint-Saens's cat that jumped, but black hands run around the keyboard from edge to edge and jump in rock and roll syncopations; so musicians always play in this dark corner of the night.

Little Richard plays them a fashionable passion on the piano, and they are exhausted, they surrender to passion and squeal, and therefore the dawn never comes on the disk. Everything is somehow silvery and unearthly, because we do not understand words. These are just words, and screams, and words, and commotion in the depths of the stage - everything is shaking.

Little Richard doubles over the piano, and suddenly there are those rainy days in Miramar when we listened to Lucille with our mouths open and smoked, smoked on all four sides in the twilight of the basement and the Havana fog that made its way through the barriers from the yard, a haze of exhaust soot, kerosene smells, and alien red-brick houses, cold outside, warm inside, and jukeboxes in outlying bars where César Costa's Prison Rock and Rock around the clock were still playing ( performed by Bill Haley and his "Comets"), and "Don't Leave Me" by Manolo Munoz.

In the basement of the house on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Sixtieth Street, light always entered through the left window. Wet with sweat, Obdulio asked us: "Sit quietly." We closed the door to the kitchen well, lowered wooden blinds with a chink instead of a broken plank, and only after that we put on Lucille. Cheeks and hands shining with sweat - Obdulio's cheeks and hands - and the Negresses surrender to the rhythm, pronounce the text in syllables, wave their hands (cheap rings on their fingers), arch their backs and necks, twist their heads so that Mexican silver chains sparkle - chains are even cheaper so that dark hair falls on the face, temporarily smoothed out with a hot iron comb, combed in the middle, so that it falls beautifully over the shoulders, silky hair, silky, and Little Richard said: "Rip it up", "walk, flaw", let's finish with this torture - stop being black in the country of whites, stop being poor and alone in Havana 1963 years old.

We sat together in the dark of the basement, we had Little Richard's disc, and we put on the first side, then the second. We had a light oozing from the left and we couldn't see but felt the dance of black fingers on black and white keys and the sounds of the bass guitar thumping unwaveringly behind the brass section and the drums and the darkness of the night gathering around the lights of the Aromas cigars. , which we smoked in a circle until only coal remained. Standing over the turntable, we sang along - did doo-wop ² , and Obdulio taught us to dance, and we walked around with a Negro gait, imitating Mokosisi, Richard, Barcelo, the guys from San Leopoldo - put only toes on the floor, stretched out their arms, stretched, on the wide streets that flow into Fifth Avenue, and over the quicksilver city lights sparkled at us, and stone eagles looked at us from above, from the facade of the Chrysler Building.

Empty streets, empty world, except for the little drugstore at the junction of Seventh Avenida and Forty-fourth Street with a glow of light, a drugstore selling marshmallow pills and lollipops. Over Miramar, over Sixtieth Street, the night spread wide, and in the basement, muffled, mute, as if from afar, a measured clatter is heard - in the basement, which already belongs to Little Richard, Richard is the master in it, Richard and Elvis, and "Los Safiros" and Paul Anka and we are so lonely.

Richard - not Little Richard, different - enters the basement after knocking twice, waiting and knocking twice more. He bends his head, breathes in whispers and smoke with his whole chest from the threshold, notices a new lamp hanging from the ceiling, covered with burlap. He tosses his head, waves his hand, tells us: “Turn out the light, they will notice - they will tear your balls off.” Richard has an innate gift for commanding, an innate looseness: the manners of a white man who looks like blacks, these manners are adopted from him by the black guys themselves, he is their hero. He immediately drags Obdulio to dance and shows how they dance pasillo in nightclubs - he learned last weekend at Lumumba. In the dance, they almost stick to each other either sideways or backs, turn into a profile, the right leg beats out its rhythm, the left one its own, and the hands move in some third. The pasillo is difficult, it’s immediately clear, and Richard orders Little Richard to be put in, shows his gold tooth: as if by chance, just like black women - underwear, and tells us how he made a date in the chemistry room with two of his girls - from the twenty-sixth group and from the twenty seventh, and stared at them, and they stared at each other, and then at him, and he said to them: "You are fired." Our jaws dropped - finally we hear about something that cannot be imagined, the guttural voice of an arrogant god in the final coda of "Long tall Sally" in the basement, which suddenly seemed like a real palace to everyone, and Esponda stares enthusiastically, and Roberto Natchar amazed.

It doesn't dawn, there is no dawn like no. Brache casually wraps his hand in a handkerchief, stands on tiptoe and unscrews the hot bulb.

The session is over for today, and the Miramar night is beginning to be heard: how the night birds fly by, how the grass rustles in the garden of the Methodist church opposite. Now we are completely alone - without music, with the memory of how ironically Richard looked at us, how crushing his eloquent indifference; we feel like timid insects: we have nothing but rock and roll, and Little Richard harasses us, makes us melancholy, longing for a pleasure that we have not known and will never know. We were thrown into fun, then into despair, when the night drove us into the basement or into the toilets at the back of the hostel, which were still washed with carbolic acid, and the doors in the cubicles were with bolts - for noble maidens. We inhaled deeply the acrid, lingering smell and remembered the inscriptions scrawled with a pen or cut with a knife on the toilet doors on the second floor of our school named after Manuel Bisbe ³ , and zealously worked with their hands, imagining the head teacher - arrogant, smiling and mischievous, with round breasts and brown eyes, her hair is silky, a la garcon haircut, freckles on her shoulders, and skin ... - and the image of the head teacher was superimposed by the memory of the sounds coming from her lips, the look, the wink, the orders, and the crossed legs of prostitutes from Coney Island: they have gold chains on their ankles. The gaze rushed upward, a fog thickened before my eyes, and a phrase from the toilet door in the lobby popped up in my memory, a real saying: “The head teacher Ada has a manda like an apple.” And then there was a buzzing in my head, an anthill in my head, an unstoppable stream of words, bodies, caresses, kisses, darkness, and sparks fly high into the sky and fall in colorful dots, dirtying the toilet bowl.

Sparks spread across the toilet in the dead of night, and we go to sleep. Valle, the head of the hostel, puts out the light. On the top bunk, above me, sleeps Esponda, a scrawny black man; he sings with me in the basement and also doesn’t know love, doesn’t know what it’s like to hug stunning mulattos who dance casino in the bear rueda in the Patrice Lumumba Palace - the best ⁴ . Almost every night Esponda daydreams about her cousin, and I can feel the bunk shaking and the wooden frame grunting. Every evening he tells me about Cerro and tells me to get out. The music runs through his fingers, and he longs for the parties, for the gentle melodies of Pat Boone, for the look of his sister - having listened to the music, she looks at him almost languidly. She is silent, polishing her nails with a file, crosses her legs, covered with red capri trousers, like a femme fatale. Sometimes she smokes, and the smoke clings to her face, and after listening to one side, she turns the record over to the other, and Esponda sits, swallowing her tongue. When she plays Elvis or Little Richard, a secret tenderness awakens in her, and, arching her back, she dances alone, trembles passionately, uncontrollably.

One afternoon, Esponda and I really hit the road without a leave of absence in Cerro, for Little Richard's record, and caught his sister at the moment when she had just come out of the bathroom. Her skin is swarthy, her hair is curly, her eyes are bright, and she has open sandals on her feet. She invited us to dinner, insisted directly, but we were shy. Then we ate at some diner - we took rice and beans for two, and we wandered together in the crowd, and we had no money, no girls, no sunglasses, no Del Shannon, no Steve Lawrence, no Tony Rendazzo, neither Chubby Chicker nor Paul Anka - this one betrayed us at all, began to record on stereo, and we carried only Little Richard, hidden in an envelope from the Aragon Orchestra record, carried along the deserted streets of that wonderful summer 1963 years, when Brian Hyland was on the first line in all the charts, crossing cha-cha-cha and calypso with rock and roll, when blond Brian Hyland strode along Calzada del Cerro between houses with majestic porticos, houses that were already starting to collapse.

But we never found out about Brian Hyland. We were on the sidelines, in the basement, dancing with Obdulio and Nicholas Leonard, who finally brought the Youth Hit Parade. That night we listened to Cliff Richard and drank rum and Coke for the first time. I brought a bottle of rum without a label from the city, from my dismissal, Brace. We locked ourselves in the basement to discuss the assassination of President Kennedy, the Profumo case, the resignation of Harold Macmillan, try on the first trousers without an eyelet, hear rumors that some English band plays even better than Elvis Presley.

Now we regularly smoked and drank under a new, blue light bulb, listened to Los Pletters, Blue Diamonds, Johnny Mathis, marveled at the pointed low shoes that Roberto Natchara had sent from abroad. We drank from the throat, ate coffee cakes stolen from the kitchen, brought borrowed records from Billy Cafaro, Luis Aguile, Los Camísas Negras, Tommy Sand, Chuck Robert, Richie Nelson, talked about nudist parties and parties with music, about dancing at the Salon Mumby, about the midnight prostitutes of Coney Island, about the blues from the Paseo del Prado, about the cosmonaut corps and the Lenin icebreaker, about Czech players like the one that Roberto Jimenez once brought along with the Everly Brothers disc.

Nicholas makes me dance the casino so that I can stop this stupid duck step, and he also convinces me to pick up Gloria, the green-eyed blonde from the twenty-sixth group. I fell in love with her at first sight, but in her company I felt like an idiot.

¹ Oh my soul ( English )

² doo-wop doo-wop ) - popular in the 1950s and 1960s. a vocal subgenre of rhythm and blues that originated in America in the 1940s under the influence of the tradition of church choir singing. Many doo-wop songs are sung acapella. ( Here and below the translator's notes. )

³ The hero and his friends study at one of the boarding schools for bright students that were established in Cuba after the revolution. When entering a school, a special scholarship is assigned, which can be withdrawn for poor performance or bad behavior. Exit to the city is allowed only on leave, to school from the hostel and back they go in a column.

⁴ Casino is a Latin American dance. The rueda, as applied to the casino, is a permanent group of skilled dancers who perform steps according to the instructions of the leader.

About the collection Ten Cuban Stories. The best stories of Cuban writers”

When they collide, the bees emit an “oh!” signal

Physicists from Nottingham Trent University found out that “oh!” signal - vibrating sound, which is emitted by working individuals of honey plants bees ( Ápis melliféra ) being in the hive, used in various contexts, including may indicate the fright of insects when colliding with each other. Previously, researchers believed that this "stop" - the signal that the bees emit, to warn the comrades of the danger. Study published in PLoS ONE .

Honeybees bees live in colonies may number in the tens of thousands. Most of the inhabitants of the colony worker bees that perform various responsibilities ranging from collecting nectar and pollen and ending with the construction combs and feeding larvae. To coordinate their actions, insects "communicate" with each other through dancing and sound signals of different frequencies and the duration they issue flapping wings. Dancing bees returned into the nest with nectar, show where they are found a source of food, and "call" in search of other individuals. Sounds can show state of the bee colony, for example, preparing bees for swarming overgrown population into two).

One from sound vibrations, scientists called stop signal. According to earlier research (1, 2), "dancers" begin to publish it, returned to the colony with food, and then "pick up" individuals remaining in nest. So the bees warn the comrades about the danger they faced obtaining food (for example, that at the place of collection of nectar there is predator) and what to fly to this place no need. According to another hypothesis, with the help of a "stop" signal, the bees choose suitable place for a new device nests, culling, in their opinion, bad.

Authors new study decided to investigate this sound signal in more detail. Since the scientists weren't sure that bees only use the vibration to warn of danger, they suggested calling it the "oops!" signal. For the study, the authors of the article chose two bee colonies and installed miniature bee colonies on frames with honeycombs. accelerometers that detected a signal at a distance of about 3.5 centimeters. The measurements were carried out during the active season of the bee colony in 2014 (from August to November) and 2015 (from April to December), then the scientists digitized the signals and analyzed their parameters. The researchers also installed video cameras in the hives and recorded the behavior of bees on them.

that the bees emit an “oh!” signal very often, sometimes up to 6-7 times per minute (average once every one or two minutes). At the same time, the largest the number of vibrations night hours when all insects remained in the hive. And vice versa during the day time the number of such sounds fell more than twice. It is known that at night the worker bees are in sleep-like state. That's why, it is unlikely that insects at night dance, calling others for nectar. In addition, the number of vibrations increased during the winter months when the bees never leave the nest and feed on stocks accumulated in the summer.

At analysis of the videos, scientists noticed that the bees emit an “oops!” signal after how they face each other heads, while dancing individuals no nearby. Such behavior consistent with researchers' observations — the more bees remain in the hive, the more often they collide. In other cases the bees made an “oh!” signal after trophylaxis (food exchange between individuals): when transferring each other eating insects also collide heads. Scientists believe that this sound may indicate anxiety insects. They confirmed this hypothesis with a simple experiment. The bee swarm was placed in a cardboard box and leave it alone. Through a few minutes the researchers raised her and heard a familiar vibration.

How conclude the authors of the article, judging by the results obtained, "oops!" - the signal can not be considered only as a signal of danger. All over Apparently, the bees make this sound in various situations, including they can express their fear from unexpected collision with each other.

Formerly scientists have identified relationship between the diet of bee larvae and division of insects into castes (womb or worker bees). Previously, it was known what if you feed the larva with uterine milk, the uterus develops from it, if same three days after hatching the larva begin to feed with honey and bee bread, she turns into a worker bee. It turned out, that it's all about p-coumaric acid, which is contained in honey and bee bread and affects the activity of many genes larvae.

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