Havana Fever

by Leonardo Padura

  Between two uncovered water tanks and sad clotheslines full of patched up clothes, Conde peered out over the eaves to get a prime view of the twilight hustle and bustle in the barrio. He calculated the sea was in front, behind various dark concrete blocks, past the blackened towers of the power station, so near, yet so alien to that place. Lost in geographical and philosophical musings, he snapped back to reality summoned by the sweetish smell of burning grass, and turned round to find Juan the African, leaning back on one of the tanks inhaling from a spindly joint.

  “Now I’ll see if you really are police. Go one, have a drag,” Juan threatened, holding out a roll of paper.

  “I don’t care a fuck what you think. I’m not going to smoke.”

  “And if I get in a mess, are you going to put the police on to me?”

  “They already are, and have been from the day you were born. I’m the one they’ll piss on if they see me with you . . .”

  “You never smoked?” the African asked, looking happy, waving the joint, and broadening his smile when he saw the Count shake his head. “I’ve smoked from the age of thirteen. And whenever I can I smoke here, by myself, so I really enjoy my drag . . . Look, this is my little hidey hole. I’ve hid things here ever since I was a kid,” he said, showing the Count how he put two other joints in a little nylon bag, that he lowered down an air vent protruding by the side of one of the water tanks.

  “Who you hiding them from?” enquired the Count, flopping down against the other tank.

  The African took a heavy drag.

  “I owe five thousand pesos. I’m a loser, right? I always get bad luck. I got involved in a spot of business, took out an advance and gave it my best . . .”

  “A five thou advance?” the Count thought aloud. “That was drugs or a contract killing . . . Right?”

  “Don’t get too nosy,” and the African started smoking again, almost burning his fingers.

  “Was the business with Veneno?”

  Juan smiled and shook his head.

  “No, Veneno was the middleman. The business was with other guys. Not from the barrio. Real hard guys who don’t get their hands dirty for four pesos. They handle quantities of loot that would make you shit your pants.”

  “Did you meet them?”

  “Negative. You can’t get to see them just like that. They’re people who’ve got it here,” and he tapped his temple, indicating intelligence. “They’re whites who are OK, well set up and only doing the big stuff.”

  “Sounds like mafia?”

  “Well, what do you think?” Juan took a last drag and ditched his tiny fag end.

  “Were you told to kill someone, Juan?” the Count asked again, afraid he’d say yes.

  “I told you not to ask so many questions. End of interrogation . . . Now let me enjoy the moment, man.”

  Conde got up and looked for the best angle from which to survey calle Esperanza. On a neighbouring terrace he spotted a hut probably built for pigeon-rearing, behind which some fifteen-year olds were noisily taking turns with binoculars, masturbating all the time, watching a scene the Count also wanted an eyeful of.

  When night started to fall, the African, now very high and uninhibited, suggested going for a walk, to see what was on, and the Count, not imagining what he was letting himself in for, accepted his invitation. They went up Esperanza, towards the edge of the barrio, and along one of the alleys that cut across, its name hidden under tons of historic grime, where his companion suggested they wait a minute, ostensibly, to test the temperature. Several people greeted the African, two stopped to have a chat, and walked off seemingly convinced the Count was an expert cattle slaughterer, a cousin of the African’s ex from the countryside and a friend even of Veneno and Michael Jordan. Just after eight, the African bought a pack of cigarettes from a street-seller and offered the Count one.

  “You’ll smoke one of these, won’t you? Now you see how I share my money around,” he said, smiling, and added: “and I’ll now invite you to lay some whores.”

  Taken aback, Conde was at a loss for what to reply. In an existence entirely spent between the island’s four walls, he’d joined in the most diverse moral and physical adventures, some in, others out of the police, some drunk and others horribly sober. He’d never before been invited to have sex you paid for and he was shocked to feel doubt impishly coursing through his veins and wondered whether he might not like to try that for once.

  “If you really want to be part of this scene, and nobody to suspect you, then you’ve got to go on, right to the bottom,” said Juan, as he took the first step.

  “No, forget it,” he protested feebly.

  “Hey,” the African threatened him, “I can see you’re a bit delicate. You won’t smoke pot and don’t want to shaft a little lady . . . You’re not queer by any chance, my friend?”

  The knocking-shop, as his ex-confidant described it, was half way along the block. An old married couple, owners of a threebedroom house, rented them out by the hour to couples with nowhere to make love and to local whores and their customers. The best strategy to get a lay, according to the African, was to linger in the vicinity of the knocking shop and wait to be picked up by an available woman on the job. Suffering an attack of butterflies, the Count leaned expectantly on the wall, a virgin in terms of such experience. He lit a cigarette on his previous butt and looked at both sides of the street, where several people were wandering. Two women appeared ten minutes later. One was a mulatta, dyed blonde, and the other white, very thin, with bright red hair; the Count reckoned, with some difficulty, that they must be in their twenties, although they shifted from seeming older to being almost adolescent. The African immediately chose the white woman, and, with a yellow smile, casually asked how much she charged for the works.

  “A hundred pesos,” came the reply, and Juan recoiled like a shocked punter. “You think that’s dear? Look, you big black, it’s twenty to be rubbed off, forty to be sucked off, sixty if you put it in but don’t kiss, eighty with a kiss and for a hundred you can stick it up my ass . . . And that’s not counting the fact you’re a black monkey and are getting to shaft a white woman with a pink cunt . . .”

  “Can I give your cunt a feel?”

  “Five pesos,” the girl responded, adroitly halting the advancing, simian hand.

  The Count had begun to feel the first symptoms of asphyxia as he listened to the terms of the agreement between the African and this Juanita-of-all-trades and was about to faint when the mulatta flashed a smile that showed off two gold molars at the corner of her huge mouth, and whispered: “And does, papi, want general servicing?”

  Conde did his best to smile, knowing he’d be unable to bed that woman, or even kiss her, and glanced at the African, who was relishing the situation. He then understood that all his moral openness was just a childish game in that insane world where sex acquired other values and uses, and became a source of sustenance, a way to put the miseries and tensions of life out of mind.

  “No more arguing,” said Juan. “In we go.”

  Conde felt the situation, so everyday for the African and the girls, was forcing him into his most stressful decisions ever: either he ran for it, found his way out of the barrio and salvation for his battered ethics, or followed the impulses of his morbid curiosity and participated in a purely commercial act, to the extent his stomach would allow. Refusing to think further, almost about to hurl himself into the pit of degradation, he got as far as the living room, where Juan was already caressing the small, firm buttocks of the white girl, agreeing terms with a respectable looking old man and paying the agreed amount, though hardly haggling over the hire terms: no drugs, no beating up, no shouting; only beer and rum sold by the establishment; paid for in advance; at an hourly rate . . .

  Without looking at the house-owners – their eyes now glued back on the television, as if their lives depended on the news reports – the Count, in a kind of hypnotic trance, crossed the passage and followed the mulatta into the first bedroom,
only to be rescued by an attack of nerves when he saw the African and his girl follow him in.

  “But what?. . .”

  “They’ve only got one free,” replied the African who took his first swig of rum from the bottle and began to wildly shower his companion with kisses.

  For the rest of his life, however much he tried, Mario Conde could never remember what the room was like or what was in it, apart from a bed and the washbasin attached to the wall. However, he could never forget the precise, rapid gesture with which, once inside, the mulatta for hire dropped a packet of condoms on the bed and lifted up her skimpy blouse to present him with two breasts and two black aureolas, which she pointed at his chest as if he’d been sentenced to execution by firing squad.

  An expert of sorts, the girl saw the scared look on Conde’s face and with a lascivious flourish of her tongue drew him near and bathed him in sickly-sweet breath.

  “Don’ wan’ me titties, papi? Gimme a lickle suck and gimme the hots?”

  Right then Conde realized he’d exhausted his curiosity and that if he went any further he wouldn’t live long enough to cope with his repentance. He grasped the only dignified exit on offer.

  “This isn’t my way. I can’t carry on with them in here,” and turned round to point at the African and white girl, only to find them completely naked already, not the least inhibited by the presence of others, and going at it hell for leather. And though he’d have preferred not to, he did see it: Juan the African’s knob, a huge black sausage, veins bulging, topped by a slavering, purple head, over bull’s balls entwined by curly black hair. Rationality restored, his mind fleetingly considered the spatial issue of whether the girl with scant breasts and protruding ribs could host that piece of firm meat whose back and belly she’d begun to lick with great relish, before her mouth swallowed it whole. He felt an emptiness between his own legs and concluded that his decision had been made.

  “Wat’s the madder, mi amor?” the girl yelped, afraid she’d lose the money that was in her grasp.

  “This isn’t my way,” the Count repeated, clinging to these words of salvation.

  Conde stayed under the shower, trying to clean that mindcurdling scene from his brain: the African’s cudgel-like prick, the white girl’s ribs, the mulatta’s nipples and reptilian tongue, her faked voice of passion and, above all, the sight of himself opening the door and taking a step backwards, the first in his noisy retreat into filthy streets where he finally recovered his ability to breathe.

  The Count left his bathroom, wrapping a towel round his body, shaken by an awareness that he was upset by his own nakedness. Not sure why, he looked for his record player in a corner of the room. He placed it on the useless television stand, put Violeta del Río’s record on the turntable and activated it by moving the arm. He carefully dropped the needle into the first groove and sat on the distant sofa, as if he required that space in between. Resting his elbows on his knees and his head between his hands, trapped in a feeling of vertigo, he tried to clean his mind of the fetid traces of the experiment he’d let himself be dragged into and just listened to Violeta del Río’s voice, imploring, demanding, ordering: “Be gone from me”. He soon felt the melody change his skin, his hair and his nails, and realized he was recovering his sense of urgency to find out the real fate of that woman whose ghost had apparently returned to end an artificial silence, who had spent too long in a precarious vacuum. Like a man possessed, and powerless to resist, Conde sensed the latent spirit of that woman reduced to her voice, to her voice alone, slowly becoming blood of his blood, flesh of his flesh, transforming him into a living extension of the dead, as if Violeta del Río herself was beating at his temples, unexpectedly convinced that her voice was summoning him to reveal more than a single truth.

  “But, fuck, it can’t? It can’t,” he told himself and ran to the old cupboard in his bedroom where he kept the souvenirs and flotsam from his previous lives. In the process he lost his towel and, stark naked, flung its doors wide open. On his knees, he extracted the wooden container in the bottom left-hand side, provoking an avalanche of objects he’d pushed out of his way.

  There were things belonging to his father inside the box he’d decided to keep; things that he’d not revisited since the long distant day when his dad died. A pre-historic baseball glove, two photograph albums, an envelope containing merit certificates from work, a pair of black and white winkle-pickers, a dog-eared telephone book, two packets of rusted Gillette blades, and his busdriver’s hat and identification tag emerged from the trunk, and then Conde saw what his memory had finally dredged up from the depths of his murkiest reminiscences. The original sleeve seemed washed out by damp and old age, but it was unmistakable: he took out the small record, lit up by a yellow circle, the shiny gem of the recording company. Conde stroked the vinyl and saw it was warped and unusable. He finally remembered his father, sitting in the living room in that same house, wrapped in a gloom that seemed mysterious to his childish gaze, listening, enthralled, to that record, perhaps experiencing sensations similar to those that were now disturbing his son, forty years on. Retrieving the image of that solitary man, sat listening to a woman sing on an electric appliance, finally seemed to account for his visceral empathy with a voice he’d met for the first time so long ago and that had been slumbering, had not died, at the back of his mind. How much had his father really loved that woman he listened to in darkness? Why had he kept that record that had probably been unusable long before it made its way into the Count’s junk? What had he said to his son on that night which had disappeared in a succession of yesterdays? Why had he, the man who remembered, forgotten that strange episode which should have floated quickly to the surface of his memories? Mario Conde again stroked the vinyl surface, as undulating as the night-time sea, and thought how his father had been just one more man to succumb to Violeta del Río’s seductive powers and how, like Silvano Quintero, he must have wept when he heard the news of her death and realized that the only testimony to her voice was pressed into the grooves of that little record. Or were his memory and hitherto untarnished image of his own father playing yet more tricks on him, concealing truths that might be truly horrific?

  8 January

  Dear love:

  I had decided to wait several days before writing to you again, to allow the spirit of Christmas that passed by without giving me a glance to vanish, but the events of the last few days changed my mind, because they have snatched away my few remaining hopes. What will become of our lives now? Will you ever come back? What will happen here? Although I have tried to shut my ears to the noise in the street, the decision to break off relations just announced by the United States fills me with new fears, because the doors to possible homecomings have now shut, and yours, the one you so longed for, now becomes practically impossible.

  Hence, more than ever, these letters are my only consolation, and my greatest reward would be to receive a reply. You cannot imagine what I would give to know if you thought of me if only for a second at Christmas or New Year. I would give my life to know whether you remembered the years of love and prosperity we shared together (although they sometimes seem so distant) as the chimes of the clock reached the final second of the old year and we swallowed our grapes, in time-honoured tradition. How can I tell if this end to a year of separations and resentments was better than those when we shared an expectation of happiness, in necessary silence?

  What I cannot understand in the slightest is why you’ve not even sent me a card with gleaming snow or the twinkling star of Bethlehem, pre-printed thoughts and space for a couple of personal words. Is my punishment to be eternal? I suppose it is, since I must sadly assume that your resentment is more than a passing irritation, a suspicion that may fade when other ideas and soothing thoughts . . . Your resentment is like a life-sentence, and my only salvation is to be able to persuade you of my innocence, with irrefutable proof. That’s why I have decided to go in search of that proof. I intend to overcome the terrible fear I fe
el when walking in a strange world, that is no longer mine, that I don’t understand and that becomes daily more radical and dangerous. I will overcome the echoes from voices that pursue me in the night destroying the peace of solitude, and will reach out to the greater good of your forgiveness.

  Today, when I decided to write to you and begin my search, I felt that I regained a different attitude of mind, an energy I thought lost, and I devoted almost all day to cleaning your library. It is the first time in months that I have returned to this sacred place in the family memory, because it is too painful, it recalls the happy times in our lives and the lives of the whole family. I have looked again at the books your grandfather bought in his youth, with that passion that made him never hesitate for a second when it was a choice between a book or a pair of shoes; those gathered by your father on the days he worked at the office, in the university, in the period he had political commitments; and above all those that you, driven by the family fervour, bought in every corner of the city and hoarded like treasure, books that aroused so much envy in those privileged to see them. I saw your private collection of books on legal matters and customs regulations and your business magazines and, I can’t deny I felt my heart crushed by the thought that you will perhaps never again touch their leather covers, grainy pages or read the words that meant so much to you. Consequently, when I finished cleaning I reminded your daughter that whatever happens, whoever dies, everything in this sanctuary is absolutely and eternally sacred: not a page may leave, not a single volume put in a different place, so that the day you return – because against all the odds I know it will come – you will be able to walk with your eyes shut to the bookcase of your choice and take out, as was your habit, the book you want. I have arranged for the bookcase doors to be opened once a month, for a few hours and always on a hot day, when no rain threatens, to allow the books to breath and gather strength, as you would say. Once every six months, a cloth and feather duster will pass along the spines and tops of the books, which will never be moved, to avoid the slightest disorder entering your personal order. But above all I wanted these decisions to ensure that if anything should happen to me, that no hand, not even your children’s, can penetrate the most hidden secrets of your life and mine, that from today await you between the pages of these books.