Havana Blue

by Leonardo Padura

  “Fine, help him out,” said the Count, saluting and telling Manolo to drive on. It wasn’t cold, but the Count felt his hair stand on end. Drunks who’d lost their way upset him as much as street dogs, and unconsciously he ran two fingers through his hair to check out Tamara’s comment. Can it be true I’m also going bald? And when the car stopped by the Coca-Cola traffic light he took a peek at himself in the rear-view mirror. He probably was.

  “Manolo,” he said, without looking at his companion, “let’s get on with the business. Drop me at Foreign Trade, and I’ll find out who Dapena the Galician is and where we can find him if we need him, and you go and see Maciques and talk to him. Record the interview and take it gently please, you’ve been a bit heavy recently. Then we’ll meet up at headquarters . . . But are you telling me you wouldn’t fancy laying a woman like that?”

  “. . . I’d just like to ask whether I could record our exchange/that’s all right, comrade, whatever you want . . . /so, you’re René Maciques Alba and head up Rafael Morín Rodríguez’s office, the citizen who disappeared from his home on the first/yes, comrade, on the first . . . /and how long have you been working for him?/ . . . well, it’s almost the other way round, if I might explain, I was in charge of the previous director’s office and when they appointed Rafael I continued in the same post, you understand, it was two and a half years ago, in June 1987, and I can almost remember that day . . . /and how did you get on with him/with Rafael? . . . well, you know, it’s not the thing to say, but he and I were always like friends, right from the start, and how can one describe a friend, he was a fine leader, always concerned about his work and subordinates, the kind of person who’s liked, who’s very responsible . . . /you have any idea why he’s disappeared?/any idea? not really . . . he and I went to the New Year’s party held at the house of comrade Alberto, the deputy minister/what’s his full name? deputy minister for what?/oh, of course, Alberto Fernández-Lorea, deputy minister for industry, he sees to anything to do with the commercial work of the ministry, and as I said, we and our wives went to his place in Miramar, and were there from around ten o’clock to just after two or three, time flies when you’re at a party like that, and Rafael and I talked a bit and agreed to meet on Monday to prepare the contracts we had to send to Japan for an urgent deal/what kind of deal?/what kind? . . . a purchase, you know, bearings and other things to do with plastics and computers, you know the Japanese offer very good prices for this kind of thing?/and you say you didn’t notice anything strange?/well, to be frank, I didn’t . . . I’ve given it some thought but I don’t think so, he danced, ate, drank, ate an enormous amount, that’s for sure, he said the deputy minister did the best roast pork in the world/and was the enterprise in any difficulty?/not really, no . . . the accounts at the end of the year were very favourable, perhaps some worries at the amount of work we had on our plate, but that always worried him, and that’s normal given he was in charge, do you see? and besides with the socialist countries in difficulty, life can only get more complicated from here on, you know . . . /do you have any idea where he might be?/well, was it lieutenant?/sergeant/that’s right, sergeant, I don’t have a clue about what might have happened, he led his normal life/did he have any problems at work?/at work? . . . none at all, sergeant, I told you, Rafael had everything very well taped/and did he have lots of women friends?/what do you mean, lots of women friends? who told you that, sergeant?/nobody, I’m just trying to find out where Rafael Morín is, did he like women?/I know nothing about his private life . . . /but you were friends, weren’t you?/yes, we were, but more like work friends, you know? I’d pay the odd visit to his house, and he’d come to mine/did anybody at work have it in for him?/in what way? wanting to make his life difficult?/ yes, in that sense . . . / . . . no, I don’t think so, there’ll always be someone envious or resentful, they’re more common than muck in Havana, that’s true enough, but he wasn’t the kind to create enemies, at least at work, which is where I knew him best/who is José Manuel Dapena?/oh, right, Dapena, a Spanish businessman /how did he get on with Rafael?/well, let me explain, Dapena owns a shipyard business in Vigo, and he helped us to import various things, though he wasn’t really in the same line of business, more into the fishing industry/and what was he doing at the party?/at the party? I expect he’d been invited, right?/ invited by?/by the owner of the house, I expect, naturally /and what were relations like between Rafael and Dapena?/to be frank, they were purely business, I don’t know if I should mention this but . . . /do please feel free/one day Dapena made a pass at Rafael’s wife . . . /and did it lead to problems?/no, don’t imagine that for one minute, it was all a misunderstanding, but Rafael found it difficult to tolerate him after that/and is the Spaniard a friend of yours?/he’s no friend of mine, after what happened with Tamara, Rafael’s wife, the Galician guy is one of those who thinks he’s God Almighty because he’s got dollars/and what happened to the previous head of the enterprise?/so what’s the relevance of that? I’m sorry, sergeant . . . nothing, a spot of dolce vita, as people say, he set himself up, well, you know what it’s like . . . /and was Rafael so inclined?/Rafael was quite the opposite to the extent that . . . /to the extent that what?/he was different, I mean/what time did you leave the party?/oh, right . . . about three/and did you leave together?/no, well almost, when I went, he was bidding farewell to the comrade deputy minister and . . . /and what?/no, nothing, I left . . . /you say you’ve no idea what might have happened to citizen Rafael Morín?/no, sergeant, not a clue . . .”

  René Maciques must be around the fifty mark, balding, and wears glasses, the round sort, like a model librarian, thought the Count as he stared at the cassette recorder. Manolo’s work highlighted the man’s bureaucratic rhetoric and his strict ethics when it came to always defending his boss’s back until the opposite is proved to be true, wherever he may be, and now at least we don’t where the hell he’s got to, he told himself. Nevertheless, the sphere of Rafael’s relationships and friendships, the recorded interview with Maciques and his own conversation with Tamara were evidence of an important element in his search: Rafael was as squeaky clean as ever, and Conde shouldn’t let his prejudices get the better of him. His memories were scars from wounds he’d thought had healed a long time ago and a case under investigation was quite another matter, and investigations have antecedents, evidence, clues, suspicions, hunches, intuitions, certainties, comparable statistical data, fingerprints, documents and many, many coincidences but nothing as tricky and treacherous as prejudice.

  He stood up and walked over to the window in his cubicle. He’d looked out so often on that fragment of landscape that it had become his favourite vista. The leaves on the laurel trees moved slightly, rustled by a northern breeze bringing a patch of dark heavy clouds that were gathering on the horizon. Two nuns clad in dark winter outfits left the church and got into a VW Beetle with a naturalness that was simply post-modern. His empty stomach fluttered like the leaves on the laurel trees, but he didn’t want to think about food. He thought about Tamara, Rafael, Skinny Carlos, Aymara in Milan and Dulcita, who was God knows where, about the twins’ spectacular fifteenth birthday party and about himself, in that office which was so cold in winter and so hot in summer, contemplating laurel leaves and engaged in a search for someone he’d never have chosen to look for. Everything was so perfect.

  He rested his fingertips on the icy windowpane and wondered what he’d made of his life: whenever he revisited his past he felt he was nobody and had nothing, only his thirty-four years and two abandoned marriages. He left Maritza for Haydée, and Haydée left him for Rodolfo, and he couldn’t bring himself to look for her, although he was still in love with her and could forgive her almost anything: he was afraid and preferred to get drunk every night for a week, and in the end he couldn’t forget that woman; and the terrible truth was he’d been magnificently cuckolded, and his detective instinct had never alerted him to a crime that had been months in the making before reaching its grand finale. His voice grew hoarser
by the day because of the two packets of cigarettes he smoked daily, and he knew that apart from going bald, he’d end up with a hole in his throat and a check scarf round his neck, like a cowboy eating a snack, perhaps talking via an apparatus that would make him sound like a stainless steel robot. He hardly read nowadays and had even forgotten the day when he’d pledged before a photo of Hemingway, the idol he most worshipped, that he’d be a writer and nothing else and that any other adventures would be valid as life experience. Life experience. Dead bodies, suicides, murderers, smugglers, whores, pimps, rapists and raped, thieves, sadists, twisted people of every shape, size, sex, age, colour, social and geographical origins. A load of bastards. And fingerprints, autopsies, digging, bullets fired, scissors, knives, crowbars, hair and teeth extracted, faces disfigured. His life experiences. And the plaudits at the end of every case solved and the terrible frustration, disgust and infinite impotence at the end of every case that was filed unsolved. Ten years wallowing in the sewers of society had finally conditioned his reactions and perspectives, revealing to him only the sourest, most ornery side of life, even impregnating his skin with a stench of rot he’d never cast off and, worse still, one he only smelled when it was particularly offensive, because his sense of smell had gone forever. Everything as pleasant and perfect as a good kick in the balls.

  What have you made of your life, Mario Conde? he asked himself daily as he attempted to reverse the time machine and one by one right his own wrongs, disappointments and excesses, anger and hatred, cast off his errant ways and find the exact point at which to begin afresh. But does it make any sense? he also wondered, now I’m almost bald, and he always responded in the same fashion: Where was I? Oh, I mustn’t be prejudiced, but the fact is I love prejudices, he muttered as he rang Manolo.

  The story was called “Sundays” and it was a true story, autobiographical to boot. It began one Sunday morning when my character’s mum (my mum) woke him up, “Up you get, my boy, it’s half past seven”, and he understood how on that particular morning he couldn’t eat breakfast or stay a bit longer in bed or play baseball later, because it was Sunday and he had to go to church, as he did every Sunday, while his friends (“they’ll all perish in hell,” said his/my mother) spent the only morning when there was no school dossing around the barrio and organizing handball or baseball games in the alley on the corner or on the wasteland by the quarry. I felt very anticlerical, I’d read Boccaccio and in the Prologue they’d explained what it meant to be anticlerical, and the fact I was forced to go to church made me anticlerical as well because I wanted to be a baseball player, so I decided to write the story, merely hinting at the anticlericalism, not being in your face about it, like the iceberg Hemingway talks about. That was the story I took to the workshop.

  The feeling you are a writer is really fantastic. Although the workshop was more like a beggars’ banquet. There was a bit of everything: from Millán and black Pancho, the only two known queers at school, to Quijá, the basketball team captain who wrote the longest of sonnets; from Adita Vélez, who was so pretty and delicate it was impossible to imagine her in the daily act of shedding a turd, to Baby-Face Miki, the school Romeo, yet to write a line and still looking for a chick to lay; from Afón the black, who almost never came to class, to Olguita the teacher of literature, who was in charge, and myself and Lamey, who was the life and soul of the workshop. People used to say “he’s a real poet” because he’d published poems in The Bearded Cayman and wore white shirts with stiff collars and sleeves rolled back to the elbow not because he was a poet or anything of that sort, but because those white shirts were all he had to wear to school and he had to make the most of the splendid collars and ties his father had worn as a sales rep in the fifties in Venezuela when Lamey was born, who was consequently a Venezuelan living in La Víbora and he was the one who had the idea of doing a literary workshop magazine, and unawares he had let all hell loose.

  We met every Friday afternoon under the carob trees in the PE yard, and Olguita the teacher brought a big thermos of cold tea, and night would creep up on us as we criticized each other’s stories and poems to death and were hypercritical, always looking for the other side of things, the historical framework, whether it was idealist or realist, what was the theme and what was the subject and other idiocies they taught us in class to put us off reading ever again, although our teacher Olguita never mentioned such things and read us a chapter of Cortázar’s Hopscotch every week; you could see she really liked it because she would be almost in tears when she told us this is literature, and I thought she got more and more like la Maga, and I almost fell in love with her, although I was Cuqui’s boyfriend and in love with Tamara, and besides Olguita’s face was pockmarked, and she was ten years older than me, and she also agreed it would a good idea to bring out a monthly magazine with the best pieces from the workshop.

  That was the other bone of contention: the best pieces. Because we all wrote the most brilliant texts and we needed a book to pack it all in, and then Lamey said that with issue zero – and I was really surprised by that number zero, if it was in fact number one, because zero is zero and I couldn’t get it out of my head, that it was like a magazine with blank pages or at best a magazine that never existed, you following me? – we should be very demanding, and he and Olguita selected the pieces, and they got our vote of confidence just this once. And they selected “Sundays”; and I couldn’t keep my bum still, thinking I was really going to be a writer, and Skinny and Jose were very, very happy, and Rabbit was very, very envious: I would at last get into print. Issue zero also carried two poems by Lamey – power rules OK – and one by Lamey’s girlfriend – power etc. – a story by Pancho, the black queer, a critique by Adita of the play performed by the school drama group, another story by Carmita and an editorial penned by Olguita our teacher to introduce issue zero of La Viboreña, the magazine of the José Martí literary workshop, at René O Reiné High School. So exciting!

  Our little mag was to have ten pages, and Lamey got two reams of paper; we’d have a hundred copies, and Olguita spoke to the school office about the typing and copying side, and I dreamed every night I could see La Viboreña and believe that I was really a writer. To make sure it was ready, we spent one night collating and stapling pages, and the following day we stood outside the school entrance distributing it to people, Lamey didn’t roll up his sleeves and looked like a waiter, and Olguita our teacher watched us from the steps and was proud and happy the last time I saw her laugh.

  The following day the school secretary summoned us, classroom by classroom, to a meeting at two pm in the headmaster’s office. We were writers and so naïve as to expect to receive diplomas as well as plaudits and other moral encouragement for that magazine that was so innovative when the headmaster told us to sit down; already seated there were the head of the Spanish department, who’d never come to the workshop, the secretary for the youth and Rafael Morín, who was gasping as if he’d had a mild attack of asthma.

  The headmaster, who after twelve months and the Water-Pre scandal would no longer be in post, made a meal of it: what was the meaning of the magazine’s motto: “Communism will be a sun-sized aspirin”? So socialism was a headache, was it? What was dear comrade Adita’s intention when she critiqued the play about political prisoners in Chile, to rubbish the theatre group’s efforts and the play’s message? Why were all the poems in the magazine love poems with not a single one dedicated to the work of the Revolution, to the life of a martyr or to the fatherland? Why was comrade Conde’s story on a religious theme and why did he avoid taking up a position against the church and its reactionary dogmas? And above all, he continued – we felt as if we were all drunk by this point – and he stood opposite skinny Carmita, you could see her shaking, and they all nodded sagely, why did you publish a story with the by-line comrade Carmen Sendán on the theme of a girl who commits suicide for reasons of love? (He said “theme” not “subject”). Is that the image we should be presenting of Cuban youth today? I
s that the example we should be putting forward rather than one exalting purity, selflessness, a spirit of sacrifice to inspire new generations . . .? All hell had been let loose.

  Olguita our teacher stood up, a bright red, allow me to interrupt you, comrade headmaster, she said looking at her head of department who avoided her venomous glance and started cleaning her nails and at the headmaster who stared back at her, because I have something to say on all this: and she said lots of things, that it wasn’t ethical for her to find out about the subject of the meeting without prior notice (she said “subject” and not “theme”), that she was totally opposed to an approach which smacked of the Inquisition, that she couldn’t understand how there could be such a lack of understanding of the efforts and initiatives of these students, that only a bunch of political troglodytes could interpret the writing in the magazine in that way and, as I see there can be no dialogue, given these Stalinist accusations of which my comrade head of department clearly approves, please sign my resignation papers as I can’t continue here, even though there are sensitive, good and worthy students like the ones here, and she pointed at us and walked out of the headmaster’s office, and I’ll never forget how bright red she went; she was crying, and it was as if she were no longer pockmarked and had become the most beautiful woman in the world.

  We froze there, until Carmita started crying, and Lamey looked at the tribunal standing in judgement over us when Rafael stood up, smiled, smirked and sidled over to the headmaster, comrade headmaster, he said, after this nasty incident, I think it right I should speak to the students, because they’re all excellent comrades and I think they must understand what you have just told them. Take yourself, Carmita, he said, and he put a hand on the skinny girl’s shoulder, I’m sure you never thought through the consequences of your idealist story, but we must be on our guard, you must agree. I believe the best thing you can do now is to show how you can produce a magazine that reflects the needs of the times, in which we can emphasize purity, selflessness, the spirit of sacrifice to inspire the new generations (sic), right, Carmita? And poor Carmita said yes and nodded, not knowing she was saying yes forever, that Rafael was right, and even I wondered whether he was, but I couldn’t forget Olguita our teacher and what they’d said about my story, and Lamey got up, please, he said, any complaints about him should be made to his rank-and-file committee and he walked out as well. It cost him a year’s curtailment of rights and the worst possible reputation; he’s always been an awkward, sarcastic, arrogant type, he’s got even more bigheaded after the publication of those paltry poems, pronounced the head of department as she watched him leave. I wanted to die on the spot as I’ve never wanted to since, I was afraid, I was speechless, I didn’t understand what I’d done wrong, I’d only written about what I felt and what had happened to me when I was a kid, that I preferred playing baseball on the street corner to going to Mass, and luckily I kept back five copies of La Viboreña, which never made it to issue number one, that was going to be about democracy, because Olguita our teacher, who was so nice and so beautiful, thought we should create that issue by taking a vote on the best we could reap from our rich literary harvest.