After drinking coffee, smoking a couple of cigarettes, and talking about life, Yoyi emitted a yawn that could have shaken the whole building and told Conde that the time had arrived for a siesta, the only decent activity that any Havana man who was proud of being so could engage in at that hour and in that heat.
“Don’t worry, I’m leaving…”
“You’re not going anywhere, man,” he said, emphasizing this pet word of his in particular. “Grab the cot that’s in the garage and take it to the bedroom. I had the air conditioner turned on a while ago … Naps are sacred … I have to go out later, I’ll take you home.”
Conde, who had nothing better to do, obeyed the Pigeon. Although he was about twenty years older than the young man, he tended to trust Yoyi’s wisdom on life. It was true that after that cod and the Pesquera he had drunk, a nap imposed itself like a command dictated by the tropical geographic fatalism and its best Iberian legacy.
Three hours later, in the shining Chevy convertible that Yoyi proudly drove down Havana’s potholed streets, the two men were headed to Conde’s neighborhood. Shortly before arriving at the former policeman’s house, Conde asked Yoyi to stop.
“Drop me off at the corner, there’s something I need to deal with there…”
Yoyi the Pigeon smiled and started to pull the car over to the curb.
“In front of Bar of the Hopeless?” Yoyi asked, knowing the needs and weaknesses of Conde and his soul.
“Around there.”
“Do you still have money?”
“More or less. The funds for book purchasing.” Conde repeated the formula and, to take his leave, held out his hand to the young man, who firmly shook it. “Thanks for lunch, the nap, and the boost.”
“Look, man, take this anyway, so you can get a leg up.” From behind the Chevy’s wheel, the young man counted several bills from the stack he had taken out of his pocket and handed some to Conde. “A little advance on the good business deal I’m sensing.”
Conde looked at Yoyi and, without too much thought, took the money. It wasn’t the first time that something similar had happened, and ever since the young man had started to talk about sensing a good business opportunity, Conde had known that would mark their goodbye. And he also knew that, even though the relationship between them had been born from a commercial connection to which each brought his own skills, Yoyi truly valued him. Because of this, his pride didn’t feel any more damaged than it already was by accepting some bills that would give him some breathing room.
“You know something, Yoyi? You are the nicest son of a bitch in Cuba.”
Yoyi smiled as he stroked the enormous gold medal on his breastbone.
“Don’t go around saying that, man … If they find out I’m also a nice guy, it will ruin my reputation. See you!” And he drove off in the silent Bel Air. The car moved forward as if it were king of the road. Or the world.
Mario Conde looked at the heartbreaking scene before him and noticed sharply how what he saw painfully brought down his pitiful mood. That corner had been part of the heart of his neighborhood and now it looked like an oozing pimple. Overcome by perverse nostalgia, he remembered when he was a boy and his grandfather Rufino taught him the art of training fighting cocks and tried to impart a sentimental education adequate for surviving in a world that looked very much like a cockfighting arena. He found himself this afternoon at that exact spot where his education had taken place, and from there he could see the constant to-and-fro of the neighborhood’s well-known bus terminal where his father had worked for years. But, with the bus lines now out of service, the building was rotting like a battered parking lot in its death throes. Meanwhile, Conchita’s food joint, Porfirio’s sugarcane-juice counter, Pancho Mentira and the Albino’s frita stands, Nenita’s hardware store, Wildo and Chilo’s barbershops, the bus stop cafeteria, Miguel’s chicken place, Nardo and Manolo’s bodega, Lefty’s cafeteria, the Chinese shop, the furniture store, the shoe store, the two auto body shops with their tires and car-washing areas, the billiards hall, La Ceiba bakery with the way it smelled like life itself … all of that had also disappeared, as if swallowed whole by a tsunami or something even worse, and the image of it all survived by only a small margin in the stubborn minds of guys like Conde. Now, flanked by streets full of holes and broken sidewalks, one of the service station buildings had started operating as a cafeteria where junk was sold in CUCs, the dodgy Cuban national currency. There was nothing at the other service station, and in the place that used to be Nardo and Manolo’s bodega—made over so many times that the original had been both diminished and given a new life—protected from possible robbery by pirates and corsairs by a fence of corrugated steel screws, there was a tiny bar facing Calzada that served as the local alcohol and nicotine dispensing center, baptized by Conde as the Bar of the Hopeless. It was there, and not at the CUC-charging cafeteria, where the neighborhood’s drunks drank their cheap rum any time of day or night, without so much as an ice cube, while standing or sitting on the sticky floor, fighting with stray dogs for their spots.
Conde edged his way around some dark puddles and crossed Calzada. He approached the prison fence erected over the new bar. His thirst for alcohol that afternoon wasn’t the worst he’d felt, but he needed to quench it. And Gandinga the bartender, “Gandi” to the regulars, was there to receive him.
Two stiff drinks and two long hours later, after showering and even applying German cologne that had been a gift from Aymara, Tamara’s twin sister, Conde went back out. In a small bowl next to the kitchen’s open trapdoor, he had left food for Garbage II, who, despite having turned ten already, persisted in his inherited predilection for living like a stray dog, one never renounced by his father, the noble and deceased Garbage I. For himself, however, he hadn’t prepared a thing: like almost every night, Josefina, his friend Carlos’s mother, had invited him over for dinner and, in that case, it was best to have the maximum amount of space available in his stomach. With the two bottles of rum that, thanks to Yoyi’s generosity, he had been able to buy at the Bar of the Hopeless, he boarded the bus and, despite the heat, the promiscuous behavior, the auditory and moral violence of reggaeton, and the reigning feeling of suffocation, the prospect of a better night led him to realize that he was again feeling acceptably calm, almost outside the world in which he found so much dissatisfaction and received so many blows.
Spending the night with his old friends at the house of Skinny Carlos, who had long since ceased to be skinny, was, for Mario Conde, the best way to end the day. The second best way was when, by mutual agreement, he and Tamara decided to spend the night together, watching some of Conde’s favorite movies—something like Chinatown, Cinema Paradiso, or The Maltese Falcon, or Ettore Scola’s ever squalid and moving We All Loved Each Other So Much, with that Stefania Sandrelli, who could awaken your cannibal instincts—and then ending the day with a roll in the hay that was slower and less feverish each time, but always deeply satisfying. Those small revelations amounted to the best he had to show for a life that, with all the years and blows accumulated, had lost all ambitions except those related to mere survival in its basest form. Because he had given up, he had even shed the dream of one day writing a novel in which he told a story—squalid and moving, naturally—like the ones written by Salinger, that son of a bitch who had to be about to die already, surely without publishing even one more miserable little story.
It was only in the realm of those worlds stubbornly maintained at the margins of real time, and around the borders of which Conde and his friends had raised the highest walls to keep out invading barbarians, where friendly and permanent universes existed that none of them, despite how much they changed physically or mentally, wanted to or attempted to renounce: the worlds with which they identified and where they felt like wax statues, nearly immune to the disasters and ills of their environment.
Skinny Carlos, Rabbit, and Candito the Red were already talking on the porch. For a few months already, Carlos had had a new el
ectric wheelchair that was battery-operated. The device had been brought from the Great Beyond by the ever faithful and attentive Dulcita, Skinny’s most loyal ex-girlfriend, exceedingly loyal since she became a widow a year earlier and started doubling the frequency of her trips from Miami and lengthening her stays on the island for an obvious reason, although she wouldn’t publicly say so.
“Have you seen what time it is, you animal?” was Skinny’s greeting as he set his automatic chair in motion to approach Conde and grab the bag where, he well knew, was the necessary fuel to get the evening going.
“Don’t fuck with me, you brute, it’s eight thirty … What’s up, Rabbit? How’s it going, Red?” he said, shaking his other friends’ hands.
“Fucked-up, but happy,” Rabbit replied.
“Same as this guy,” Candito said, using his chin to point at Rabbit, “but no complaints. Because when I think of complaining, I pray a little.”
Conde smiled. Ever since Candito had abandoned the frenetic activities to which he devoted himself for years—head of a clandestine bar, maker of shoes with stolen materials, administrator of an illegal gas depot—and had converted to Protestantism (Conde never really knew which denomination), that mulato of once saffron-colored hair now turned white with the snows of time, as the saying goes, tended to solve his problems by handing them over to God.
“One of these days, I’m going to ask you to baptize me, Red,” Conde said. “The problem is that I’m so fucked that I’m going to have to spend all day praying after.”
Carlos returned to the porch with his automatic chair and a tray on his inert legs where three glasses full of rum and one of lemonade clinked. As he distributed the drinks—the lemonade, of course, was Candito’s—he explained, “My old lady is finishing up with the food.”
“So what’s Josefina going to hit us with today?” Rabbit wanted to know.
“She says things are bad and that she was lacking inspiration.”
“Get ready!” Conde warned, imagining what was coming.
“Since it’s so hot,” Carlos began, “she’s going to start with a chickpea soup, with chorizo, blood sausage, some chunks of pork and potatoes … The main dish she’s making is baked snapper, but it’s not that big, about ten pounds. And, of course, rice, but with vegetables, for easy digestion, she says. She already prepared the avocado salad, beans, turnips, and tomatoes.”
“So what’s for dessert?” Rabbit was drooling like a rabid dog.
“The same as usual: guava peels with white cheese. You see how she lacked inspiration?”
“Dammit, Skinny, is that woman a magician?” asked Candito, whose great capacity for belief, even in the intangible, appeared to have been exceeded.
“Didn’t you know?” Conde cried out and lowered his glass of rum. “Don’t play dumb, Candito, don’t play dumb!”
* * *
“Mario Conde?”
As soon as the question came from the behemoth with a ponytail, Conde started to do the count in his head: it had been years since he had cheated on anyone, his book business had always been as clean as business could be, he only owed Yoyi money … and it had been too long since he’d stopped being a policeman for someone to come after him now in revenge. When he added the hopeful as opposed to aggressive tone of the question to his calculations, along with the man’s facial expression, he was a little more confident that the stranger, at least, didn’t seem to have come with the intention to kill him or beat him up.
“Yes…”
The man had risen from one of the old and poorly painted chairs that Conde had on the porch of his house and that, despite their sorry state, the former policeman had chained together and to a column in order to make difficult any attempt to move them from their place. In the shadows, only broken by a streetlight—the last lightbulb Conde placed on his porch had been switched to some other lamp one night when, too drunk to think about lightbulbs, he had forgotten to change it back—he was able to form his first impression of the stranger’s appearance. He was a tall man, maybe six foot two, over forty years old, and of a weight that was proportional to his height. His hair, thinning in the front, was pulled back at the nape of his neck in an overcompensating ponytail that also balanced out his large nose. When Conde was closer to him and managed to notice the pink paleness of his skin and the quality of his clothing, business casual, he was able to assume this was someone who had come from an ocean away. Any of the seven seas.
“Pleased to meet you. Elias Kaminsky,” the foreigner said. He tried to smile and held out his right hand to Conde.
Convinced by the heat and softness of that huge hand wrapped around his that this was not a possible aggressor, the former policeman set his rusty mental computer going to try to imagine the reason that, at almost midnight, the foreigner was waiting for him on the dark porch of his house. Was Yoyi right and now here he was in front of him, a rare-book seeker? He looked like it, he concluded, and made his best not-interested-in-business face, as the Pigeon’s commercial wisdom advised.
“You said your name was…?” Conde tried to clear his mind; fortunately for him it was not too clouded by alcohol, thanks to the culinary shock old Josefina delivered.
“Elias, Elias Kaminsky … Listen, I’m sorry I was waiting for you here … and at this late hour … Look…” The man, who spoke a very neutral Spanish, tried to smile, apparently embarrassed by the situation, and decided the smartest thing was to throw his best card on the table. “I’m a friend of your friend Andrés, the doctor, the one who lives in Miami…”
With those words, any of Conde’s remaining tension disappeared as if by magic. He had to be an old-book seeker sent by his friend. Did Yoyi know something and that was why he was saying he had a feeling?
“Yes, of course, he said something…” Conde lied, as he hadn’t heard anything from Andrés in two or three months.
“Oh good. Well, your friend sends his best and”—he searched in the pocket of his also business casual shirt (by Guess, Conde managed to see)—“and he wrote you this letter.”
Conde took the envelope. It had been years since he’d received a letter from Andrés and he was impatient to read it. Some extraordinary reason must have pushed his friend to sit down and write, since, as a prophylactic against the artful creeping of nostalgia, once established in Miami, the doctor had decided to maintain a careful relationship with a past that was too stirring and thus a danger to his present health. Only twice per year did he break his silence and indulge in homesickness: on the night of Carlos’s birthday and on December 31, when he called Skinny’s house, knowing that his friends would be gathered there, drinking rum and counting losses, including his own, which had happened twenty years before when, as the bolero warns, Andrés left to never return. Although he did say goodbye.
“Your friend Andrés worked in the geriatric home where my parents spent many years, until they died,” the man spoke again when he saw how Conde was bending the envelope and putting it away in his small pocket. “He had a special relationship with them. My mother, who died a few months ago…”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you … My mother was Cuban and my father was Polish, but he lived in Cuba for twenty years, until they left in 1958.” Something in Elias Kaminsky’s emotional memory made him smile vaguely. “Although he only lived in Cuba for those twenty years, he said he was Jewish in origin, Polish-German by birth, and because of his parents, legally an American citizen, and that the rest of him was Cuban. Because in truth he was more Cuban than anything else. On the black-bean-and-yucca-with-mojo-eating team, he always said…”
“Then, he was my kind of guy … Shall we sit?” Conde pointed at the chairs and, with one of his keys, unlocked the chains that united the seats like a marriage that forced them to live together, and then tried to arrange the chairs in a way that was more conducive to a conversation. His curiosity to know the reason for which the man sought him out had erased another part of the slump that had been dogging him for
weeks.
“Thank you,” Elias Kaminsky said as he got comfortable. “But I’m not going to bother you much. Look at the time…”
“So why did you come to see me?”
Kaminsky took out a packet of Camels and offered one to Conde, who politely turned it down. Only in the event of a nuclear catastrophe or under threat of death would he smoke one of those perfumed, sweetish pieces of shit. Conde, besides being a member of the Black Bean Eating Party, was also a nicotine patriot and he demonstrated this by lighting up one of his catastrophic, black-tobacco, filterless Criollos.
“I suppose Andrés explains in his letter … I’m a painter, I was born in Miami, and now I live in New York. My parents couldn’t stand the cold so I had to leave them in Florida. They had an apartment in the nursing home where they met Andrés. Despite their origins, this is the first time I’ve been to Cuba and … Look, the story is a little long. Would you let me invite you to breakfast at my hotel tomorrow so we can discuss things? Andrés told me that you were the best possible person to help me learn something about a story that has to do with my parents … Of course, I would pay you for your work, as if I wouldn’t…”
As Elias Kaminsky talked, Conde felt his internal alarms, dimmed until recently, start to light up one by one. If Andrés had dared to send him that man, who didn’t seem to be seeking rare books, there must be a serious reason. But before having coffee with that stranger, and well before telling him he didn’t have the time or energy to get involved in his story, there were things he had to know. But … the guy had said he would pay him, right? How much? The financial penury hounding him the last few months made him take in the information gluttonously. In any case, the best thing, as always, was to start from the beginning.
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