Grab a Snake by the Tail

by Leonardo Padura

  “You’ve gone really pale, you idiot,” Candito warned him.

  “Let me get some fresh air, it’ll pass,” Conde answered. He took a painkiller from his shirt pocket and chomped on it, absorbing all its bitterness. Then he lit a cigarette and gazed at the sea. He felt the bilious juices settling down, and spat on the ground. “I swear I’ll never ever drink another drop of rotgut.”

  Candito laughed and forced Conde to laugh with him.

  “You must be kidding, Mario Conde, you’ve been saying that ever since I’ve known you.”

  The parish priest walked by dressed for a service, or perhaps on his way back from administering the last rites.

  “Know what? I swear by that priest’s mother.”

  *

  “Zarabanda,” declared Marcial, putting his cigar back in his mouth.

  That black could be one, two hundred years old, or whatever. Covered by a white woollen cloth, his head contrasted starkly with his jet-black skin, marked by every possible wrinkle and concertinaed into stiff folds. But it was the old man’s eyes that caught Conde’s attention: his eyeballs were almost as black as his skin and bore an expression that in the past, when Marcial was young and strong, must have been terrifying. According to Candito, Marcial was the grandson of African slaves and had lived his whole life in Regla, where he had been initiated into the religious secrets of the palo sect and become a mayombero. If that wasn’t enough, he also acted as a babalao in the Regla de Ocha and many people judged him to be the person who knew most about Yoruba santeria. And if that still wasn’t enough, Marcial was also a member of the ancient abakuá cult of the Makaró-Efots, one of the oldest cells of that secret society that had come from Calabar in slave ships, and, for many years, had occupied the highest position among the luminaries of that fraternity. But when Conde spotted a certificate from the Great Consistory of Grade 33 of the Cuban Masons granted to brother Marcial Varona on a wall next to a Catholic altar watched over by a crucifix and the Virgen de Regla, a black-faced Cuban saint, he realized he had found the man he needed: a bottomless source of knowledge and a living example of what it meant to be Cuban. Candito had forewarned him that talking to the old man was like consulting an old tribal guru, the man able to mentally hoard all the tribe’s stories and traditions, something Conde would very soon confirm.

  The effects of the sea breeze that blew underneath the ceiba tree Marcial had planted in his courtyard seventy years ago gradually re-energized Conde’s whole being, and he felt the excellent coffee served by one of the old man’s great-great-great-granddaughters awakening his intoxicated neurons one by one.

  “Zarabanda is nganga from Congo worship, but also belong to Lucumi Oggún, or Yoruba santeria, as they say nowadays. Oggún is the master of the forest and metals, and is also St Peter, the one who hold the keys to heaven, you see? That’s why Zarabanda isn’t a genuine palo but a Creole mix, you understand me?”

  “No,” Conde admitted with all the sincerity he could muster, feeling unable to appeal to his sense of irony, and asked his macerated brain to make a manly effort to absorb all that totally cryptic, academic information for an individual who, of his own volition, had ended his relationship with all religions on the same day when, compelled by his mother, he had taken his first and last communion.

  “You see, my son … Palo monte is the religion of the blacks from the Congo and nganga is the seat of the mystery of that religion. The Ark of the Jews, the chalice … Nganga mean spirit from the other world. A dead man is trapped in the nganga, physically gathered in the iron cauldron, where various attributes are placed so he can be the slave of a living man and do whatever that living man order. Nganga is power and is almost always wielded to do evil, to put an end to enemies, because nganga fuse all supernatural forces from the cemetery, where the deceased reside, and the powers from the monte – forest – where the sacred palos – sticks – from the trees reside, which is where the spirits live … And that’s why the religion is called palo monte …”

  “So what’s all this got to do with ngangas?” Conde asked, showing him the doodles again, since he’d given up trying to understand and was now simply trying to shift the conversation from the abstractions of an intangible world to the material squiggles on a dead chino’s chest.

  “That is a Zarabanda signature, the sign that’s always written at the bottom of the iron cauldron that receive the nganga. That sign is the seat of the strength, as the power is called, and is the basis of everything else the cauldron contains. Take a good look at the drawing: the round part is the earth and the two crossed arrows are the winds. The other crosses mark the axes of the world, always four in number … No need to search any more, what you see there means Zarabanda … But the odd thing about that signature is it’s a form rarely used today … Those who believe they know add more arrows and little flourishes, as if they mattered. What you see is the old signature, from the days when Cuba was a colony, the way my grandparents did it, genuine Congolese who’d come from there.”

  Marcial pointed to a precise spot, beyond the frontiers of the small town of Regla, over the sea. The beginning of everything.

  “And is it true they put human bones in the nganga?”

  “Of course. If not, how are you going to possess the dead? The nganga carries a thousand things, whether pure Congo or Creole mix with Yoruba santeria, like Zarabanda. But it must always have a man’s bones, and best of all the head, the kiyumba, which is where bad thoughts, madness, hatred and ambition reside. Then it has sticks from the mountain, but not any old palos: sacred sticks, with the power; also thunderstones that have already tasted blood, animal bones, best from the fiercest animals, a little earth from a cemetery and quicksilver as it is never, never still. Oh, and holy water if you want it to do good. If not, it’s not baptized and stay Jewish, that mean un-Christian – nothing to do with the religion of the Jews … But if it is Zarabanda’s nganga, as he own all iron metals, there is a chain around the cauldron, and you must place inside a key, a horseshoe, a magnet, a hammer and over all that Oggún’s machete … All those attributes are given rooster and goat blood to drink, and then it’s decorated with feathers of many colours.”

  Conde felt he was losing himself in a world that went back along a path to beyond Mount Sinai, to the origins of human understanding. He had been brought before a mixture of cultures – and Marcial Varona was its living, exemplary representative – that he had always coexisted with, and even formed part of, though he was infinitely removed from its arcane practices. Those religions that had first been stigmatized by Catholic and Christian slave owners who believed them to be heretic and barbarous, then by the bourgeois who deemed them to be things done by dirty, black savages, and in more recent times sidelined by dialectical materialists who described them according to scientific and political criteria as remnants of a past that atheism has to overcome, embodied, in Mario Conde’s view, the charm of the human spirit’s resistance and its will in defying the dictates of fate. The mysteries of that universe brought from Africa by hundreds of thousands of slaves had taken root on the island, had survived every social, economic and political onslaught and entered the flesh of day-to-day life: paleros, santeros, abakuás and babalaos (who were Catholics and Masons as well as practising those rites, were everything all at once) walked the same streets as him, under the same sun, drank the same kinds of rum, but were protected by a useful, pragmatic faith the policeman didn’t have, the essence of which – its greatest benefits, secrets and substances – he felt were beyond his understanding. Is the Congo Zarabanda the same as the Yoruba Oggún, master of the hills and the trees, and the same as Christian St Peter, apostle on earth, rock of Christ’s church and owner of the keys to heaven? If it didn’t have water from a Catholic church, blessed by a priest in a surplice, was it a Jewish nganga? The revelation of the existence of that mixture of complementary and hostile religions, the multiple after-effects of the previous night’s horrific binge, and the image of a chino strung up in a
Havana tenement, his chest marked with an almost forgotten Zarabanda signature, combined in his aching head to suddenly produce an idea capable of giving him the shakes, like a small snake suddenly poking out its head (or might it be its tail?).

  “So, Marcial … must the nganga’s owner know the dead man he puts in the cauldron?”

  The old man sucked on his cigar twice and smiled.

  “That rarely happen nowadays, because people use any dead man … They go to the cemetery and open the grave that’s easiest to open or buy the bones straight from gravediggers … But it is much better if you know the deceased, because you can choose the most suitable corpse. Back in Africa, when there was a war, they carried off the most courageous or nastiest enemy’s kiyumba … You know, if you want to make a Jewish nganga, to do evil, you must search for a deceased person who was really evil … because the spirit is still as evil as when it was alive on earth. And is sometimes worse … That’s why the best bones come from the mad, and even better than the bones of the mad are the bones of chinos, the most rabid, vengeful folk on the planet … I inherited mine from my father and it contains a chino’s kiyumba, one who was in such a rage he committed suicide because he didn’t want to be a slave … and you don’t want to know the things I’ve done with that nganga … and may God forgive me.”

  A chino’s kiyumba, thought Conde’s kiyumba, is difficult to get your hands on. But a chino’s finger is easier. The grisly yellow, emaciated image of Francisco Chiú flashed through his mind when he shook Cuang Con’s wild cane of fortune and the way he spoke about chinos who practise black voodoo.

  “Marcial, can a palo monte cauldron help revive its owner’s health?”

  “It can do anything, my son. Anything.”

  Mario Conde would always remember that in all his years as a police detective, he had managed to learn several things. He had learned, for example, that the most difficult cases usually had the most commonplace solutions and also that slow, routine police work is usually more efficient than hunches or prejudices, although he detested routines and scientific work and preferred to be guided by flashes of insight that were usually reflected in a pain in his chest. He had also learned that being a policeman was a dirty business that had fallout: dealing with murderers and thieves, fraudsters and rapists on a daily basis ended up giving you a distorted vision of life, and the smell of shit stuck to your hands and was immune to the best detergents: that was why he was almost never shocked when a policeman was corrupted and accepted backhanders, practised bribery or protected criminals ready to pay whatever the asking price was. And he learned, by dint of practice, that walking alone tends to be the best way to think, especially if you are a policeman addicted to premonitions and prejudices (Conde’s were always prejudices), and not to routine.

  The bitter taste of the last painkiller was still lingering but he now relished the feeling of his neurons settling down, even believing he was in a fit state to think. He said goodbye to Candito on the ferryboat quay and took the road that led from the port area to Barrio Chino, which he entered via the Calle Zanja shortcut. The large dark clouds filling the May sky and the steam opening Conde’s pores were all signs that a torrential downpour was about to hit the city. But now he felt he was starting to move along clear paths, with something tangible to cling to, and that was why he’d called Headquarters and asked Manolo to computer search the history of that betting bank which had been broken up the previous year, while he assigned himself the no less arduous task of walking, thinking, learning, and even knowing, if that were possible.

  From the moment old Marcial Varona had confirmed the Congolese origins and Cuban transmutation of the strange sign etched on Pedro Cuang’s chest, and the possibility that the severed finger had been destined for a Jewish nganga (because it was a chino’s bone), Conde had felt he’d been heading into a cul-de-sac, and now he was sure that the ostentatious wrapping hid a much less sophisticated product. Killing an informer, if that’s what Pedro had been, didn’t require such an elaborate scenario, nor did it seem necessary to have enacted such a macabre performance if the aim had been to steal money that the whole district was talking about but nobody had seen. All that staging had begun to seem much less meaningful even if it had been related to some peculiar religious rite: there were chino bones in the cemetery, and you could get those without having to string up a hapless old man and his mongrel and create obscure paraphernalia that, as it turned out, wasn’t so obscure if you asked the right person. In other words, the motives for Pedro Cuang’s murder had been much more banal and material, and Conde was increasingly certain that the stuff about Zarabanda and his nganga was only a smokescreen, or useful diversion from what had actually happened. Could it be connected to the drugs that were hidden somewhere in the district? Or had the old man perhaps possessed a secret that related to the banker he worked for as a bet collector? Or had it just been about money? Nonetheless, he couldn’t get the idea out of his head that the bone of an acquaintance had somehow ended up at the bottom of a nganga intended to cure a terminally ill man. But would Francisco Chiú have had the muscle to fabricate all those theatrics, including hoisting the corpse into place? Or, if he was involved in the crime, might he have relied on help from someone else? And how would Juan react if he discovered his friend was behind the murder? Better not even think about that … The policeman just had to think, think and think, for Christ’s sake!

  Conde discovered that at that time, around midday, the baking-hot streets of the Barrio were emptying out. The surviving elderly chinos fled the muggy heat, and in their absence the doorways where they sat in the morning or at twilight didn’t seem the same. Once again he was shocked by how little he knew about those men who had grown old among sordid, stinking streets where one of the most populated Chinatowns in the whole of Western society had once been sparkling and vibrant, and he felt sorry for the brutal uprooting those wretched people had suffered. They had crossed the seas escaping poverty and hunger, authoritarian governments and compulsory military conscription, and in the end had encountered things as horrendous as those which had led them to flee in the first place: contempt, lack of understanding, neglect and even agonizing forms of death, like the fate which had met Sebastián, Juan’s cousin, frozen in a ship’s hold. But most painful of all was the merciless uprooting that the economic success of a few had been unable to mitigate. The only salvation for those Chinese had been to create a ghetto and respond to contempt with silence, to scorn with smiles, to shouting with closed doors, and to surround themselves with a philosophy that seemed peaceful and at the very least helped them to tolerate life. And were they as vengeful and frenzied as Marcial Varona had claimed? Perhaps, he told himself, recalling Tamara’s qualms and understanding why she had felt the need to return to the fold to find herself …

  Conde wondered how often the police had failed to solve those mysterious mysteries (he decided to let that repetition stand) that chinos could provoke with the hermetic habits they had developed as a form of self-defence. He was just starting to justify his own probable failure when he saw a boy selling mangos on the corner of Calle Salud and felt the need to eat one. Not out of hunger or desire: just pure necessity. He chose a mango that looked tempting. He gave it a rub to clean it a little and, leaning forward, sunk his teeth in, feeling his life melt into the taste and texture of the fruit. With his hands dripping juice and his lips sweetened by the yellow flesh that stirred up nostalgia for his happy mango-stealing childhood, he returned to the visible, aggressive reality of the tenement on Salud and Manrique. He walked back down the passageway and scrutinized the anodyne entrance to the nasty little room where Pedro Cuang had lived and died. Without a doubt, Francisco could have visited the chino without anyone thinking it strange or even registering his presence. Conde opened the door with the key he’d decided to keep. He didn’t switch on the light, but slumped onto one of the chairs with a smashed seat, part of the murdered man’s meagre inheritance, and felt gripped by a biting, familiar sens
ation: in the end, loneliness wasn’t an Asian invention. He too had gone to bed many a night with a premonition that he wouldn’t see another dawn, and his lonely, neglected body had spent many hours in that bed that was too broad for his melancholy. The loneliness of Pedro Cuang, killed together with his dog, seemed a special metaphor for his own abandonment: everything he saw in that room betrayed the slovenly mess solitude engenders. The sad inheritance bequeathed by a poverty-stricken life … And that was when he spotted it: on the table by the stove, well corked, still shiny and pristine, barely hidden by a bundle of old magazines. His hunch was too strong to have got it wrong, and he wondered why he’d not noticed it on his previous visit. He got up, used a chipped knife to lever out the cork and then took a whiff: it was rum, of course. At the end of the day there are things a man with enough experience will never get wrong.

  Conde took less than a second to calculate the possible consequences of his action, and immediately persuaded himself that what he was about to do was the best antidote for a hangover, which was why he was doing it. He remembered that drunkard’s saying – “hair of the dog” – and took a long swig from the mouth of the bottle, enough to clean out the mango taste, warm his throat, relax his stomach and even risk polishing a piece of his stained tsin. “Thanks, o deceased,” came his toast and, before swigging any more, he spilt a drop on the floor. “For San Fan Con,” he whispered, though he must also have invoked Changó, Zarabanda, Oggún and St Peter the apostle, all mixed up in the same pot that was … Jewish.

  Bottle in hand, he returned to the chair and lit a cigarette. His third gulp was steadier and consigned any sense of guilt to the abyss. What the fuck, who the hell knows where this litre willed to nobody would have ended up otherwise? … Thanks to the rum, the Chinese smell began to be an aroma you could live with … He thought of his friend – if Candito could see me now – and smiled, then suddenly felt even up to joining the Long March. Why were you killed, you old chino? Was that your tao? Is that why you came back from China? So you could die in this stinking den and provide a finger for a high priest’s nganga? he wondered, contemplating the beam from which the old fellow had been hung, and suddenly felt something in his head explode and the bottle of rum slide from his hands. He wasn’t even conscious enough to feel his own body following the bottle on to that filthy floor.