Havana Black

by Leonardo Padura

  “The item finally crossed the Pacific Ocean, with more careful handling than usual, and was unloaded in Acapulco, crossed Mexico, reached Veracruz and was shipped again, now to Havana, whence it should have gone straight to Seville and then to Madrid, a royal offering to a Philip IV beginning to witness the decline of his empire and like all Spanish kings quite short of funds. That sculpture had great value in its weight in gold alone and its curators took special care, set in train special security measures, convinced his Majesty would appreciate such a piece at a time when great art from the Orient was beginning to be rediscovered and valued in Europe. The only risk the work ran was in what it stood for: in the period of the Counter-Reformation and Inquisition, an image of the Buddha might perhaps be ill-fated, and the king or one of his economic or spiritual advisers could recommend its destruction by fire and transformation into a still valuable pile of gold . . .

  “Here history ends and speculation begins: because the last trustworthy news we have of the journey of the gold Buddha from Manila to Europe is of its arrival in Havana on 3 December 1631, at the height of the war between France and Spain, and it was moved to the Captain General’s coffers on the island, where it would be stored with other treasures from Mexico, Peru, Bolivia and Guatemala until its definitive departure for Spain . . . which never happened. The mystery of the Buddha’s disappearance provides scope for endless speculation and several characters can be suspected of the theft: from Juan Bitrián de Viamonte, who was Governor of the Island to the Admiral of the Fleet, including the Royal Keeper himself and the General Overseer, who accounted for all riches sent to Spain. The head of the Governor’s official guard was also suspected, and several functionaries of the imperial bureaucracy who were privy to the information about that fabulous item’s existence, and knew moreover how much it was worth and where it was kept. The investigation of the theft was carried out by a lieutenant from the Royal Guard, one Fernando de Alba, who two years later wrote a memorandum to the king detailing the story, and apologizing for his failure. What we do know is that the gold statue disappeared from where it had been located, and even from people’s memories. And when it reappeared, it only brought misfortune, deceit, disappointment and death, as if wreaking revenge on behalf of an Oriental deity . . .”

  Dr Alfonso Forcade’s stiff smile imposed a long pause, which none of those listening dared break. The old man struggled to breathe, as he waited for his facial muscles to relax. On the edge of his seat, the Count realized he’d forgotten to light up, despite the anxiety that gnawed him. He waved a cigarette and waited for the old man’s nod of approval. Only when he lifted his lighter did the policeman feel his hands shake: where would that strange, forgotten story, graced by old Forcade’s astonishing erudition, lead? To his son’s death, obviously; and the certainty that Miguel Forcade had returned to Cuba solely for the object that could make him a wealthy man showed the Count his suspicions were well founded and revealed to him an immediate danger.

  “Doctor, forgive my interrupting you . . . Are you sure nobody else knew this story?”

  Finally released from his paralysing smile, old Forcade looked at his wife.

  “Please bring me some water.”

  “Wouldn’t you like one of your pills? Or a lime infusion?”

  “No, water,” he repeated, and as his wife left, the old man at last looked the Count in the eye. “Don’t despair, Lieutenant, we will to get to my son Miguel, but there’s still some way to go.”

  “I’m not despairing, I even think I’m enjoying the story, but I don’t like the conclusion I’m already imagining.”

  “The end is indeed quite predictable by this stage . . . But what is surprising are the paths along which everything flows from now on. But don’t worry, the end isn’t exactly how you imagine it. Some surprising things still await you.”

  “And do you know where this Buddha is now?” interjected Manolo, leaning forward. Curiosity had him well and truly hooked.

  “I think so, though I’m not sure. But we’ll get there soon . . . And as for you, Lieutenant, smoke as much as you want. I love the smell of tobacco. I smoked for forty years, haven’t smoked for twenty-five and I still feel the desire to do what you are doing.”

  The Count nodded sympathetically at that confession from a repentant smoker and looked around for an ashtray. In the corner of the room he spotted a beautiful bureau he’d almost not noticed before, so enthralled had he been by the story of the missing Buddha.

  “A beautiful piece of furniture, Doctor,” he commented, pointing to the table, ideal for someone devoted to writing.

  “Yes, it is beautiful. Does it suggest anything to you?”

  The Count deposited the ash in the palm of his hand.

  “What should it suggest?” he asked and, almost without thinking, he added: “Is it connected to the Buddha?”

  The old man smiled again, cadaverously, and when he’d recovered his speech he held out a hand to Mario Conde.

  “Lieutenant, why waste your time on this job? With your intuitions . . .”

  The policeman looked back at the magnificent bureau, from which a strange call of destiny seemed to emanate, and swayed his head before saying: “If only I knew, Don Alfonso. And if only I knew how this story really ended . . . one you should have told me by now.”

  “No, it wasn’t the right moment. First I had to know who you were and what you thought and if you really wanted to find out who killed my son and why . . .”

  “And do you know who killed him?”

  “I don’t unfortunately. But I’m breaking a promise by telling you the story of the Buddha. Because I hope that then you will be able to find out . . . Thanks, Caruca,” he said and drank the water his wife had handed him. “Now where were we?”

  “Nothing more was heard of that gold Buddha until two and a half centuries later, in the midst of the War of Independence, when it came back to life to drive more people crazy . . . It all started when one of the richest men on the island, the owner of land and sugar refineries in Matanzas, by the name of Antonio Riva de la Nuez, tried to take the statue to New Orleans, perhaps afraid his properties would be confiscated or ransacked by revolutionaries fighting for independence, their ranks thronged by former black slaves: the Haiti syndrome still haunted the minds of many Cuban landowners and several took out part of their wealth in order to be spared the total ruination meted out to the French settlers in Santo Domingo. It’s the same old story repeating itself, isn’t it, Lieutenant? The eternal fear of predatory barbarians . . . But, unluckily for Don Antonio Riva de la Nuez, it was the time when, prompted by the war, a decree went out that all goods entering or leaving Cuban ports should be registered, and when that statue of the Buddha was found, the Royal Customs officer informed the Captain General of the existence and possible departure of a most valuable item to Mexico, and when the latter researched the origins of this singular treasure someone must have discovered it was the same Buddha that had been stolen from the King of Spain in 1631 . . . And the statue was impounded, on behalf of the Spanish Crown, which was still its lawful owner, as you must agree? It is a real pity, but nobody ever really discovered how the statue that had been lost for more than two centuries came into the hands of Don Antonio Riva, and how it was extracted from the Captain General’s treasure room. Because he always stated in the court cases he initiated against the Crown that he’d inherited it from his father, who in turn had bought it in Santiago de Cuba from a Franco-Haitian landowner, ruined by the war in the former French colony. Did that purchase really happen? Probably not, but nothing was certain in relation to that item . . .

  “And thus the gold Buddha returned to the Treasury in the Captain General’s new building, while it awaited a favourable opportunity to resume its interrupted journey to Spain. And in August 1870 it was put on board the sailing ship Las Mercedes, and surrendered to the tender care of the boat’s trustworthy captain, one Nathaniel Chavarría, a Basque what’s more, and a retired officer of the Royal
Navy, where he’d enjoyed an excellent service record and was valued as one with an expert knowledge of transatlantic shipping.

  “On 23 August, in the teeth of several weather forecasts warning of the approach of a hurricane like the one on its way now, Captain Chavarría raised anchor after deciding that if a storm threatened he should seek shelter in the bay of Matanzas, where he would anyway have to put in for two days. Las Mercedes set sail in the morning and that same night, when it reached Matanzas, the storm seemed to be lying in wait for her in the mouth of the bay, and despite the Basque’s acknowledged seafaring experience, the sailing ship foundered on one of the rocks in the entry to the port. Three new mysteries were then added to the history of the gold Buddha: firstly, why did Chavarría decide not to wait for two or three days, until the cyclone passed, before sailing to Matanzas?; secondly, the divers employed to search the ship’s sunken remains in the very shallow area close to the coast never found the famous Buddha that weighed thirty-one pounds; and thirdly, in the shipwreck disaster only two of those travelling in Las Mercedes disappeared: an Andalusian sailor called Alberto Guarino, a man with a long criminal record, and Captain Chavarría himself, and their bodies were never given up by the sea.

  “And the Buddha disappeared once more, as if that were its cyclical destiny. Nobody heard anything about it for a long time, though in the course of the investigations I carried out over the years into the history of that Buddha I formed a very poor opinion of Captain Nathaniel Chavarría . . . Because it just happened that one day, when conversing about Basque genealogy with a Uruguayan botanist called Basterrechea, who came to Cuba some fifteen years ago, he told me of the existence of a town in Uruguay by the name of San José de Mayo, of rich cattle ranches where he had done soil analyses at the request of the owners, the Chavarría family, of Basque descent, naturally. On hearing that, I asked him to find out the origins of the family and he wrote to me soon after, relating how the present owner’s great-grandfather had come to Uruguay around 1880 with a substantial amount of money he quickly invested in land, to avoid losing it all on the night-time binges in which he used to indulge in the brothels of Montevideo and Buenos Aires, despite the fact that he was sixty. I suggested he find out if the family was aware of the existence of a gold Buddha from the T’ang dynasty and whether they knew where their great-grandfather’s fortune came from and what his line of work was before he emigrated to Uruguay. And the response was surprising and most revealing: they knew nothing of any Buddha or the source of Nathaniel Chavarría’s wealth, although they suspected he’d got it from an inheritance or his own commercial genius, because the old man was a poor second son who had been a military and then merchant sailor, only a few years before reaching that god-forsaken corner of South America, his pockets stuffed with gold and in the company of an Andalusian colleague who went by two names: Alberto Guarino, or Federico del Barrio.

  “Chavarría’s ruse was thus exposed and anyone not possessing the information I managed to put together could imagine two alternatives: either the Basque had sold the Buddha somewhere in Europe or America, or he’d melted it down, a much safer option for him, and had sold the thirty-one pounds of pure gold and disappeared to a remote town in Uruguay . . . But the second possibility never made any sense, because thirty years after the Matanzas shipwreck the Buddha was known still to exist, as smiling and healthy as ever, and had even returned to the hands of Don Antonio Riva de la Nuez . . .

  “Because after Cuban independence, in 1902, when Spanish law ceased to be in effect on the island, a man called Manuel Riva Fernández, son of the Don Antonio who had lost and clearly recovered the gold Buddha, which he must surely have bought for a very goodly sum from Basque Captain Chavarría or his sidekick by the name of Guarino, showed the family relic to some friends and even allowed the press to photograph it. At the time there was talk of the statue costing more than two million dollars, because of its undoubted artistic value, since it was authenticated as a T’ang sculpture that had survived the disastrous banning of Buddhism in the ninth century, and was obviously one of the most extraordinary treasures from that time about which any information existed. And if any doubts remained as to its real origins, they could be forgotten after Manuel Riva was invited to an exhibition in Paris to exhibit his piece by the side of other treasures of ancient Chinese art. And Paris swooned at the feet of that magnificent Buddha, which was remarkable in so many ways.

  “Manuel’s daughter, Zenaida Riva y Ponce de León, inherited the Buddha upon the death of her father, in 1936. Zenaida, who had married the Cuban banker Alcides Guevara, one of the richest men in Cuba, took the Buddha to their Miramar home, and placed it in a security-locked, unbreakable glass cabinet, specially built in London for the Guevaras. I know of several people who saw the sculpture there and it was undoubtedly the family’s pride and joy, which they could indulge the luxury of exhibiting and not selling, for if there was something the Guevara-Riva y Ponce de Leóns had to excess it was money . . . but that was of no use when in 1951 thieves deactivated the alarms, broke the security lock and removed the item from the house in Miramar. It is very easy to trawl this part of the story, because the press at the time printed reams on the case, photos of the Buddha were circulated, and a famous detective was even commissioned to investigate the theft, apparently a semi-specialist in such chinoiserie, one Júglar Ares. Neither the police nor the detective could track down the Buddha or its thieves, and people began to forget the case, particularly after the events that started to unfold from 1952: Batista’s coup d’état, Fidel and his group’s assault on the Moncada barracks, the arrival of Granma in Oriente province, the uprising in Santiago de Cuba, the failed regicide of 13 March, the war in the Sierra Maestra and the victory of the Revolution, which by the way did not take Alcides Guevara and Zenaida Riva by surprise, for in September 1958 they had had the foresight to go to live in Zurich with their whole family, which must still be thereabouts, probably in the banking business.

  “But not a word about the Buddha. The theft couldn’t have been a put-up job like Chavarría’s, because after Cuban independence the Rivas had become the legal owners of the treasure and had no need to hide it, indeed, it was their misfortune that they did quite the opposite.

  “Yes, the Revolution triumphed and from January 1959 the Cuban bourgeoisie began to emigrate to the United States, Spain, Mexico, Puerto Rico, taking with them anything they could. Some dallied a little longer and their lingering cost them dear: they could leave Cuba, but the government confiscated everything it considered part of the nation’s cultural patrimony and passed it into the hands of the State. Consequently, many people must have left real fortunes behind them: they didn’t always surrender them, though, but sought out every possible means to hide them so they could later take them out via an alternative route or recover them, if as they anticipated, the Revolution didn’t hold out for very long . . . But what you are imagining, Lieutenant, didn’t happen: Miguel didn’t steal in that way . . . be patient, the best is yet to come . . . or the worst, you will have to tell me.

  “One of those Cuban bourgeois families was the Mena y Carbó family, who by chance lived only three blocks from the former residence of Alcides Guevara and Zenaida Riva . . . They fled Cuba in October 1960, leaving Señor Patricio Mena’s spinster aunt in the house. But that aunt, who was only fifty and lived comfortably on the income assigned her as a result of the Urban Reform requisitions, died suddenly in January 1962 leaving no heirs on the island, and consequently the house was also inventoried by the government and the objects of value it contained were expropriated as goods of the State, and my son Miguel was in charge . . . In reality, there weren’t many objects in the house of any importance: the mahogany furniture, a few Chinese porcelain vases of little merit, and that beautiful desk that caught your attention, which does have a special worth, though little appreciated by non-connoisseurs: it is the work of a pupil of Boulle, the famous French cabinet-maker who created a whole school for building cupboard
s and desks, which were particularly noteworthy because they had hidden compartments that could be barely detected if you compared the exterior and interior dimensions of the piece of furniture.

  “It was just another bureau as it was for everybody else and Miguel knew I needed one for my papers and decided to buy it and give it to me as a present; we brought it here and found a suitable spot in that corner . . . As you already know I am a scientist, and I told you that I believe in God and the Virgin, didn’t I? Well, it was that combination that led me to look for references to the style of my strange bureau and hence I came across Boulle and his practice of constructing quasi-invisible secret compartments. And I thought if this piece of furniture belonged to that school, it might also have such a compartment and I decided to find it. Do you know what? I had to search for three days, groping, measuring, tapping the bottom, and when I was almost sure no such hiding-place existed, I decided to push back a flange at the back of the drawer on the left, and when I tapped it I heard a slight whirr in the wood: almost unawares I had found the spring to lift up the two boards forming the drawer bottom, where someone had built a small cavity in which I found two pieces of paper: a handwritten love poem, with no title or author’s name, and most certainly deficient in literary terms, and something that was clearly a map, with references to a house, a fountain, a grille and an avocado bush, and the distance in feet from each of those places to a spot marked with a cross, by the side of which a word had been written that at the time I found both enigmatic and devoid of meaning. Can you guess what it was? Of course, it’s easy now: the word written there was ‘Buddha’.