Havana Black

by Leonardo Padura

  I don’t know if love enjoys eternity

  But here or there your mouth will carry

  A taste of me . . .

  The feeling of febrile possession expressed by that song communicated, more than any other poem, more than many other words he sought and feverishly rehearsed, his longing for permanence: he always wanted his women to carry the trace of his love eternally, like a pleasurable taste on the lips. Unfortunately, it was usually soon forgotten, while the Count suffered and abandoned his boleros until another bacterial process of chronic, fatal infatuation began.

  That afternoon, treacherously, the policeman felt a desire to sing a bolero, even though he knew any possibility of falling in love was remote. Miriam could never have been the woman to provoke the sensation of helplessness that love inspired in him, though he wouldn’t have hesitated a second before bedding her anywhere the blonde showed the slightest sign of letting him or wanting it. He liked her thighs, liked her guile and latent fears, but above all he liked her eyes, the eyes of a predatory animal conjured up by another old bolero – “. . . that’s why on beaches/they say there are sirens/with grey eyes/deep as the ocean” – in a situation where, if he remembered it clearly, line by line, note by note, he, the Count, could never have sung it: because he was not and would not be in love with Miguel Forcade’s widow, fluttering her eyelashes as she spoke, in apparent disenchantment: “I never imagined Miguel could have done such things. Did he really sell a fake picture?” she asked, fanning herself with her hand, as if the intense heat had caught her by surprise.

  Two Tiffany lamps lit the room, making Miriam’s grey eyes glint even more. At her side, on the sofa, her inseparable companion Adrian Riverón also listened to the litany of falsehoods listed by the Count, because Miriam insisted he should stay there: Adrian was like a brother to her and she trusted him entirely.

  “So you knew nothing of the fake picture either?”

  “No, I told you. Nor did I know Miguel wanted to come back to Cuba to get something.”

  “This is wonderful: nobody knows anything, but somebody must have had a reason to kill Miguel, don’t you think?”

  She nodded and Adrian Riverón started to speak, after coughing twice to clear his throat.

  “If you’ll allow me, Lieutenant . . . As I think I said to you this afternoon: why don’t you take your investigations elsewhere and let Miriam be? You’ve already seen what Miguel was capable of, haven’t you? She had to bury Miguel today, who was her husband, after all. Don’t you think she’s already told you as much as she can?”

  The Count smiled. Miriam’s eternal suitor had ridden forth, shield aloft, to save his maiden’s honour. Another naïve soul?

  “No, I don’t think she’s told me everything she could and I don’t believe the half of what she has said . . . But I’d like you to realize I’m not harassing her: I only want her to help me find out who killed the man she buried today, and who was her husband, after all. Does that reassure you?”

  “Must I sit here listening to myself being called a liar?” protested Miriam, her eyes and lashes begging her friend to come and rescue her.

  Adrian shook his head and coughed, as if accepting the inevitable.

  “Look, for her sake, would you like me to tell you some things that might help?”

  The Count thought for a moment. He’d have preferred a better focused image of Adrian Riverón in order to anticipate his likely hunting ground but resigned himself to listening to him.

  “Of course,” he acquiesced, looked for a cigarette for himself, and offering Adrian another.

  “Thanks, but I don’t smoke, remember?” he said with an exaggerated gesture of refusal the Count could not fathom: how come he had such a tar and nicotine cough then? Without more ado he lit his cigarette and concentrated on what Adrian Riverón had to say for himself.

  “Look, I know – or rather knew – Miguel Forcade, even before he married Miriam, because I had the misfortune to work with him. And I told her once: only once, but I did tell her: he was not a good man. He was an unscrupulous social climber and when he saw the ladder was rocking he stayed in Spain, for a reason I can’t explain, though it can’t have been an honest one. You’ve seen a fellow who sold fake paintings that weren’t even his . . . Miguel Forcade left lots of accounts pending in Cuba apart from that one, and that was why he was afraid to go into the street, now he was powerless here. You follow me?”

  “I follow you and I’m grateful for your help, because you’re telling me I’m right: I must look everywhere, because any of the people he harmed could be the murderer. And if Miriam wanted to, as she said she did yesterday, it would be best for her to help me a bit more now.”

  She hadn’t taken her eyes off Adrian while he stripped Miguel Forcade in public, exposing what seemed to be his real flesh, and now she looked at the policeman, who saw a new glint in her eye. Was she going to cry again? But she didn’t, she only let rip her full fury: “You two are as bad as each other. Feeding on a dead man. All of this disgusts me . . . When can I leave Cuba, Lieutenant?”

  The Count transferred his gaze from Miriam’s eyes to the floor.

  “Give me just two days more.”

  “But only two. I’ve finished here. I want out and I don’t think I’ll ever tread this soil again . . . Poor Miguel.”

  “One night, some six or seven years ago, Miguel confessed that leaving Cuba was the biggest mistake he ever made. I remember it was the end of December and unbearably cold in Miami, especially for a man who always started to wear an overcoat at the first sign of a north wind. On such a night he’d never have gone out, but the owner of the firm he worked for had organized a party in his new house in Coral Gables, and he’d invited a group of his employees, including Miguel. It was like a New Year’s Eve party the owner gave his closest workers because business had gone so well and, according to Miguel, so we would all die of envy at the sight of the house he’d bought a few months earlier, about which he boasted endlessly.

  “You know, dying of envy was a very real possibility: the house was in the most exclusive part of the neighbourhood, in a spot you could only reach along a street where there was a sentry-box and private security guard you had to show the printed, embossed invitation to in order to be let in. Then the side road went through a wood, where there were several houses, including Mr Montiel’s, which was one of those mansions that, if you haven’t seen one, you can’t imagine even in your dreams: according to Miguel the house had cost going on for two million dollars and the decorator had been paid more than a hundred thousand for following the new owner’s every whim. When I went inside and saw that wonder, full of mirrors, lights, marble and carpets, I thought it was the best spent money in the whole world, especially if you have several million to spend and can permit yourself the luxury of a life-size Saint Barbara, complete with sword, crown and horse surrounded by baskets of dark red roses and ruddy apples . . . The party was in the patio, by the swimming-pool, and although Miguel downed several whiskies and we sat under an awning, as near as we could to the barbecues where the meat was roasting, he kept shivering and I said to him: ‘You know, we can go if you like,’ but he told me no way, we should last at least until midnight, so as not to insult that Cuban magnate who was his boss and who’d made his millions by stamping on whatever heads tried to push in front of him. That was why he smiled at Montiel and congratulated him when the guy came over to ask us what we thought of his hovel, and, beaming, Miguel told him his house was fabulous and Montiel replied: ‘Well, you know, Miguel, not half as pretty as your wife,’ and he burst out laughing and slapped Miguel on the back. Still smiling, Miguel watched as Montiel walked off to joke with other employees and there and then he began to shake more violently and after drinking another glass of whisky he told me: ‘The biggest mistake I ever made was to leave Cuba,’ and I thought he meant because he was cold, but later I realized it was envy.

  “We lived in a rented house in South West district that would have satisfie
d the wildest aspirations of anyone here: it was fine for us, we had a patio with a lawn and barbecue, air-conditioning and a Florida-room, a sun-room that looked over a garden with flowers and trees. We both had a car and at the weekends we’d go to Tampa, Naples, Sarasota, St Petersburg or Key West and could afford the luxury of a Friday night dinner in a restaurant on Calle Ocho or in Coconut Grove or Bayside. But all that was only the first step up a slope that could rise much higher to where Mr Montiel had climbed, with his house in Coral Gables worth more than two million. Besides, Miguel knew time was against such an ascent: he was pushing fifty and, as he said, he had yet to meet a person who’d made it through honest toil . . . Consequently, Montiel’s house was like the epitome of everything we would never have, unless a miracle occurred. But what most upset Miguel was his employee status: here in Cuba he’d always operated at a high level and could feel the real power his hands wielded. Now, though he had a house and a car and money in the bank, Miguel had no power and that was the most difficult part for a man like him to accept. You understand?

  “Consequently, when we stayed at home at night or went for a drive round Florida, he would often tell me what he’d do if he had eight or ten million dollars. I can remember that first on the list, whenever he broached the subject, was starting his own business and having his own office, where sometimes I’d be his secretary or it would be a woman dressed in proper English style, according to his mood on the day . . . Then he’d be Mister Forcade and would demand his employees address him as such, because those imaginary millions put a distance between him and the rest of us mortals. Poor Miguel.

  “In recent years, though we moved to a better house in Coral Gables, which we’ve only half paid for, and Miguel was promoted within Montiel’s enterprise and had his own office and a secretary he shared with another head of department, he’d always talk of the possibility of changing everything and living as he deserved to live. He’d tell me about a big business deal he might conclude at any moment and when I asked him what that might be, he’d always reply: ‘You’ll find out when you swim in the pool in the house I’m going to buy, Mistress Forcade,’ and he’d laugh to himself. I felt his spirits rising and over recent months, when he decided we’d come to Cuba despite what he had done, Miguel was almost the confident, self-assured man I knew here and that I’d fallen in love with when I was a young girl. He investigated and found out that the best way to return to Havana was via negotiations with the Red Cross, by showing his father’s medical certificates, and he started to phone Fermín, who was out of prison by then, to get him to do the necessary paperwork here. That’s why, two or three days before our trip, I asked him if he didn’t now regret leaving Cuba, and he replied: ‘What I regret is putting off my return for so long,’ and he laughed, just like Cuban magnate Montiel might have laughed at one of his own jokes.”

  “Do you like fallen flowers, Lieutenant?”

  The voice came from behind a shrub and caught the Count in the act of plucking a tiny white flower, asleep on the path to the street.

  “Yes, you may smell it: it’s from the white weepingwillow to your right. Its real name is Sambucus Canadensis and it belongs to the family of Caprifoliaceae. If you look around you’ll see it’s very common in gardens, because it has strong medicinal properties . . . Did you realize that? Go on, smell it. It’s very distinctive, isn’t it?”

  The Count took a few steps and then glimpsed the shrivelled, desiccated figure of the old man, resting on a wrought-iron bench, by the side of which two wooden crutches were resting. In the midst of that solitude, surrounded by so many trees, flowers and silence, he was like a prophet tarnished by memory and time.

  “Are you Señor Forcade?”

  “Doctor Alfonso Forcade, at your service,” he replied and initiated the deferred gesture of presenting a hand to shake, declaring, “And you, beyond any shadow of doubt, are Lieutenant Mario Conde.”

  “And how come there are no doubts?” the Count decided to ask, as he felt an unexpected pressure issue from the old man’s hand.

  “Because Caruca, my wife, is the best physiognomist I have ever known and she told me what you were like.”

  “Your garden is very pretty. That’s what I told your wife as well.”

  “Yes, it is pretty, that’s why I try to come every day, to look at my plants and watch them grow . . . It’s one of the few pleasures left to me in life. But there are days I cannot even do this. I don’t know what will come of them after my death, an event concerning which there are also few doubts but that it will be very soon . . . Look, except for the laurel tree, the silk-cotton tree, the mamey and the picuala, which is on the back fence, I sowed all the other trees in this garden with my own hands or watched them grow, after they’d been sown by the hand of God. Do you know what the tree is over there, the one like a paunchy silk-cotton tree? I expect you don’t. Well it is a baobab, or, rather, one of three baobabs that exist in Cuba, and I sowed it . . . When I entered this house this whole terrain was a bare lawn, which I took up myself in order to plant the wonders of nature you now see.”

  “For business or pleasure?”

  Old Forcade’s face started to move in a strange way. His wonderfully false teeth gleamed in a onedimensional, gloomy smile that pursued only a vertical path. His face muscles, worn by the years or by a wasting illness, sagged as if in need of instant lubrication, then lingered before regaining their position of repose. That facial play seemed beyond the grasp of the man’s physical possibilities, as he remained static, waiting for the grimace to disappear.

  “Both,” he said finally, “both. Beauty and business can go hand in hand in some walks of life, and botany has this advantage. Policemen aren’t so fortunate, if I am not mistaken. I’ve got a real catalogue of Cuban plants here and each has a double function: the ability to be beautiful and useful to the people who know its secrets.”

  The Count lit his cigarette and looked at the hanging flowers.

  “And have you written about those secrets?”

  “I’ve published some things, and upstairs I have several unfinished catalogues that the university will inherit when what has to come comes . . . It’s terrible how life never gives us enough time, although sometimes one has it in excess, as is my case. But that’s not the problem worrying me: it is that the plants will be all alone and abandoned. Though you probably won’t believe me, each of these trees knows I am its creator, or at least its guardian, and that my hands have nourished, cleaned, looked after and watered them for thirty years. That my voice has talked to them and my presence has accompanied them from the instant they sprouted their first shoots. My absence will create a void for them and you can be sure many of these plants will get sick when I die and several will die soon after, for they will be the first to discover I am dead . . .”

  “I’d never heard about such things happening to trees. To dogs but . . .” and to some people, he was about to say, but he bit his tongue.

  “Well, I can assure you, each plant has a life of its own and consequently a spirit where the centre of its consciousness resides: soul and matter, you see? Don’t look at me like that: they are living beings, Lieutenant, and life begets spirituality, you know. It is not a sensibility like ours, but it would be cruel and stupid not to admit it or respect it from a simple perspective of blinkered anthropocentrism . . . Do you have the time for me to tell you some things about plants? If so, listen to this: it has been demonstrated scientifically that when plants are on the same wavelength as a particular individual, they can establish a permanent relationship with them, wherever that person goes and even though they are surrounded by millions of people. But that isn’t what is most surprising: plants can also feel fear or happiness and are equipped to perceive the thoughts and wishes of men, even to detect their lies . . . But we also know they can have intentions, because they possess the ability to perceive and react to what is happening around them. I’ll give you an example you might find interesting: the Indian liquorice tree, of whic
h regrettably I’ve not managed to rear a single specimen, is so sensitive to all forms of electric and magnetic pressures that it’s used as an indicator of the weather, because it has mechanisms that can forecast hurricanes, electric storms, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. That is something only very sensitive spirits and intellects can achieve, surely?”

  The Count nodded at that panoply of scientific animism proposed by old Forcade. There was something about the old man that recalled the final days of grandfather Rufino, when Mario would sit next to his bed and ask him to tell him those few stories he knew so well, which grandfather used to retell to grandson like the only recordings saved from the fires of time: the one about the day he’d managed the feat of stealing the home run in a game of baseball, which they won thanks to that act of desperation; the one about the night when he had to flee a jealous husband, leaving three strips of his flesh on the spikes of a fence; the one about the death of that many-coloured rooster with which he won the incredible tally of thirty-two fights and about whom he spoke as of a beloved son he should have given a better chance in life, but no doubt Grandad Rufino also thought his rooster was particularly intelligent.

  “Do you know anything about spirits?”

  “Depends what you mean by spirits, Lieutenant. If what you mean by spirit is a manifestation of matter organized by an inscrutable higher power or force, then I do believe. Because it’s not only what is visible and obvious that exists, as you know . . .”

  “Marxist manuals would have slotted you into the category of a materialist idealist . . . But, do you know why I ask?”