Me (16 page)

In fact, what I wanted most was simplicity. When we stopped, it was not to find a fancy hotel, but instead to look for a campsite, and that’s where we would stay until it was time to get back on the road. We would drive in shifts. One day we were driving through a small town in Texas and I was at the wheel. Apparently, I had exceeded the speed limit and a policeman stopped me.

“Was I really going over the speed limit?” I asked him. “In this big thing?”

“Well, yes,” the policeman replied. “You were going thirty-five miles an hour in a thirty-mile zone.”

I gave him my driver’s license, and when he looked at it he couldn’t believe his eyes.

“Huh?” he said. “Ricky Martin? Here?”

“Yes,” I said, resisting the urge to laugh.

“But what could Ricky Martin possibly be doing in this little town?”

We spoke for a while, I told him about my vacation, and I asked him how to get to a motel. Later that evening I cracked up just thinking of how his family and friends at the police station would probably not believe him when he told them the story.

And that’s how the whole trip went. From one town to the next, without any luxuries or fanfare. I went with one group of friends, and along the way we met up with other groups of friends who lived in the various cities we passed through.

I traveled through the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Vail, Aspen, and the Mojave Desert. I went where I wanted and did what I wanted, with very little planning. I enjoyed the whole thing very much.

For the first time in a long time I felt completely free, powerful, able to do whatever I wanted, regardless of what anyone said or thought of me. I had spent so much time only thinking about work, about what was expected of me and what I had to do each day that I had forgotten what it was like to wake up in the morning without a fixed plan.

I also went to Asia a few times. I went to India on a trip that would change my life. I came back. I spent some time in New York and later went to Brazil in search of new sounds. I went to Egypt with a few friends, always trying to remain anonymous. I’d wear a hat, and when we arrived at the hotel, one of my friends would check me in and I would go straight to my room. Every day I would go out and people would look at me, saying, “Could it be him? No. It can’t be. . . . But it sure does look like him.”

One day in Egypt, we hired a guide to take us to the historical and tourist sites and explain to us what we were seeing. As we walked around she would look at me from the corner of her eye, but during the entire tour she didn’t dare say a word. At the end of the afternoon she couldn’t resist any longer and she asked, “Excuse me, sir. Are you Ricky Martin?”

Yes, I am. But not the one you know.

Now I am Kiki, nice to meet you.

Things were changing. Now I felt the need to dedicate as much time as possible to the little boy within me. I felt that I had to disappear for a little while and go deep inside to connect with my truest emotions, my deepest sense of self. I fell in and out of love, and I allowed myself to fully live through these relationships. With more calm and less fear, with less blame and more acceptance. I learned to love myself again and to be the spontaneous and joyful boy I used to be.

THE FIRST THING I did when I returned to work was record an album in English, which would be the first to be released since
Sound Loaded
. But it took forever to make. So when I was about halfway through, I stopped recording in English and went back to recording in Spanish. From that,
Almas de Silencio (Souls of Silence)
was born, with the song
“Asignatura Pendiente”
that I quoted earlier. I believe that album, and more specifically that song, are dedicated to the little boy inside me. The experience of making that record without any pressure, to make the album I wanted to make, that was a gift for Kiki. Actually, Arjona’s song
“Asignatura Pendiente”
pays tribute to that little boy, and the song comes from everything I lived through during those months.

For
Almas de Silencio
we didn’t go on tour, which was something totally new for me. Instead, I went to Europe, Asia, Australia, and Latin America, only promoting here or there—all of it on my terms, without any pressure. I also did some promotion, and somehow or other the album ended up selling close to 1.7 million copies in the United States alone and received platinum records in Spain, Argentina, and the United States. Of course, this does not compare to the success of
Vuelve
or
A medio vivir
, but I felt satisfied because it was a record I made with time and on my own terms, and for a Spanish-language album, the numbers were actually quite good. Afterward I came back to the studio to continue recording the album in English, which I had stopped working on halfway through. I had learned my lesson: I would never again go on tour while recording an album at the same time. It is unnecessary madness, and I’ll never do it again.

The name of the album in English was eventually
Life
, and the album was released in 2005. Even though it is without a doubt an interesting record that has a lot of influences and sounds, I have to admit that it isn’t my favorite album of all the ones I’ve made. I wanted to make an introspective, contemplative, and multifaceted record, just like life. I wanted to connect with my emotions. I think I did accomplish this, at least to a certain extent. But that album ended up being influenced by many different cultures, and some of the criticism was that although each song was good on its own, the album as a whole was lacking in coherence.

My answer was always, “That’s just how life is,” since every phase or period of one’s life is different. In that sense, I am not the same person I was one hour ago, or the same person I was yesterday or this morning. And that is exactly what makes life so interesting. But with all that said, I know the critics were right; the production was scattered, and in large part I attribute that to the fact that we released the album a full five years after we began recording it. If you start to work on something now, in five years you’ll probably realize that many things have happened to you. You have new emotions, new life experiences—and then there’s the new technology! It can be a computer or a change in the manufacture of an instrument, but technology creates a whole new series of sounds and influences. And all that affects the final product.

Regardless, the album we released was of impeccable quality. When I stop and think about why it took me so long to record it, I believe it was because I was hiding. To a certain degree, I think I was still hurt by everything that happened with “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” the sheer exhaustion that I reached and the intensity of the whole experience. It was almost like having a broken heart after being madly in love. I still loved the stage and the way I felt when I stood in front of an audience, but deep down I feared that what happened before might happen again. In a way I wanted to be there, but then again, I didn’t. Not at all.

It took me some time before I was ready to face the world again. But the time I spent out of the public eye was one of the most important periods of my life. I learned a lesson in humility: For a long time I saw myself as some kind of superman who was held back by nothing. I learned what my limits were, and even more important, I learned how to tell others what my limits are. I would no longer do
everything
that was asked of me; I could no longer be everywhere at once. I didn’t even want to. I learned to love my life again, and most of all I reconnected with the person I used to be. I realized that everything I had lived through those last few years had been without a doubt a dream—but along the way I had forgotten to be myself.

I learned that for me to be the master of my own life, I need to treat it with respect and responsibility. I need to be the one to decide what’s best for me; I need to look for what I need when I need it, and not let anyone else dictate what I should or should not do. My life is
mine
and I control it. To this day, this is an intention I hold on to tightly, because if I don’t look after my temple, or prevent others from invading it, then who will?

LIFE’S MOST VALUABLE LESSONS ARE LEARNED IN ABSOLUTE
silence. It is when we are deep in that silence that we have the ability to think about and connect with our most intimate nature, our spiritual being. We all go through life—some in more of a rush than others—searching for happiness. It seems so simple, right? But we soon realize that before we find happiness, even before we begin to look for it, we need to understand what we are made of. We must connect with the little boy or girl we each have inside to discover our deepest dreams and the means to make them happen.

I have had the good fortune of having a great life. Extraordinary. But just as there are moments when I have felt I was at my peak, there have been others when I felt I had sunk to my lowest, and when the craziness of “Livin’ La Vida Loca” came to an end, I was going through one of those moments. I was very tired and very sad. I was in the mood for nothing, and even though to the outside world it seemed I had everything, nothing material seemed to make a difference to me. The only thing I wanted was to stay home and do nothing. I had reached the upper echelons of the music industry—something for which I had worked tirelessly— but now I was fed up and had no interest in using that power. The truth is I was simply exhausted, worn-out, and I didn’t want to do a thing. So I isolated myself as much as I could.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was really on the brink of so many extraordinary things that were about to come my way. Even though I felt I had lost hope, everything in my life was aligning to bring me to this exact point of desperation in order to incite me to ask questions and find answers I would have never imagined. The thing I realized later is that I spent way too much time looking outward, as opposed to inward. I made decisions either purely based on what my mind told me—mechanically—or purely based on what I felt with my heart—passionately. Individually, both ways of handling life are incorrect, and what I needed was to find the balance between the two. I needed to find my center. I needed to go deep down to find those forgotten emotions, covered and sabotaged by the adrenaline and the euphoria I had lived through over the last few years.

After going through so much and having so much, what I wanted now was the polar opposite: I wanted to find absolute simplicity. As always, life sent me exactly what I needed when I needed it the most.

AT THE END of 1998, when I was in the middle of all the chaos of
“La Copa de la Vida”
and the preparation for my first English album, I gave a concert in Bangkok. We went from one place to another with very little extra time, which was our usual pace. At one point, after giving a press conference, I went through the kitchen of a hotel to get back up to my room unnoticed, and suddenly, in the midst of all the chaos in the kitchen, I saw a man who had a very special aura. He looked like a small Gandhi. Normally, I would have walked right by him, but there was something about him that grabbed my attention.

“Hello,” I said in English.

And he replied in Spanish:
“Hola!”

“Hola?”
I said. “You speak Spanish?”

“Of course,” he said. “I’m Puerto Rican, too.”

“Are you here on vacation?” I asked him, surprised.

Around us, chefs and plates came and went along with large dishes piled high with food. The security guards were waiting for me at the elevator bank so I could quickly return to my room to eat and rest a bit before the show. But at that particular moment I felt that time was frozen. The man emanated such a high level of peace and serenity that it was as if nothing else existed around us.

“No, no,” he responded, “I am Puerto Rican but I have lived in Bangkok for the past eighteen years.”

He told me that he used to be a Buddhist monk and that he had lived in India. As a monk he had traveled to Nepal and Tibet, and he later spent many years in the mountains of Thailand. But one day he fell in love with a Chinese woman and decided to stop being a monk so that he could get married and start a family. Now he worked at the hotel.

“Monkeys are born monkeys because they are meant to live up in the trees,” he said, “and human beings are born to reproduce. So I stopped being a monk, and now I am married and have two beautiful daughters. Even though I am no longer a monk, the experience helped me find my way.”

His words touched my soul. His story intrigued me as well as his wisdom, but most of all I felt something special in the presence of this man and I didn’t want him to leave so fast. I wanted to keep asking him questions, and to hear the rest of his story. I don’t know if it was because he was Puerto Rican like me, or if it was because he had such a special aura, but I felt that we had a very powerful connection. Maybe it was just intuition, but the fact is I wasn’t wrong.

“Wait a minute!” I said to him. “You and I have to talk. Do you have a moment to come with me? I would love to speak with you some more.”

He answered with a great big smile and came up in the elevator with me, to my room. Once there, we continued our conversation.

Recently I had begun to realize that there was a whole world of spiritual disciplines that until now I had ignored. A friend of mine, who was then one of my backup singers, was very immersed in the subject of esotericism, and he was slowly introducing me to this world. At that point it was enough for someone to say the word “yoga” or “karma” or “meditation,” and I was fascinated.

“This is so amazing. Right now, I am interested in these very subjects, and you show up in my world at this exact moment,” I said to the ex-monk.

After sitting there together for a while, I called my friend the backup singer to come and join us. And the three of us began to talk about life. We talked about so many things that I no longer remember any of the details, but I know they had a huge impact on me. By the time we were called for the sound check, my head was spinning. I asked my new friend to stay with us while we did the sound check, and once again, he accepted.