by Karla Suárez
Euclid was very pleased when I told him that I’d finally tasted the flesh of angels. The truth is that I still couldn’t say for sure if we were a couple; Ángel was a complicated guy. I suspected that we were still in the first chapter of a long novel, but the main thing was that I was happy. Euclid made a joke about the glint in my eyes and, with a hilarious expression on his face, said that you had to admit the guy had good taste. Then he laughed before adding that he and Ángel now had a common denominator. That phrase seemed ingenious, which is why I haven’t forgotten it. And I couldn’t help but laugh with him, because he was right: he’d just made me the common denominator between the bodies of two men.
That conversation took place as we walked to his apartment one day. A short time later, after we’d carried buckets of water to top up the drums, Euclid told me Meucci’s story and I learned that someone in Havana had the original document related to the true inventor of the telephone. It should be no surprise to you then that when I left, the world felt like a different place. As I said, nothing much had been going on in my life but, without warning, everything had changed. Absolutely everything. Get it?
3
Can I ask you something? Do you mind if we use first names? It’s just that I’m telling you very personal things and surnames create a distance. So it’s first names then. OK? Then I’ll continue.
As I said, Euclid had recovered from his depression by then, although he never put all that weight back on. The only problem was that he was bored. It can’t be easy to get used to hanging around the apartment with nothing to do after years of intense activity, which is why he decided to reread his science books and research new areas. According to him, his job at the university had taken up a lot of his time. He’d always maintained that scientific knowledge feeds the soul, and with a well-nourished soul the brain functions better and the body ages less quickly. Of course, he had to modify this theory in 1993, and then he asserted that scientific knowledge feeds the soul but the body also needs food. A well-nourished body and soul provides the necessary conditions for good brain function, which then has positive consequences for everything else. In order to nourish his body, he set himself the task of finding students in need of private maths classes to top up his retirement pay and his mother’s pension, which, even taken together, weren’t enough to live on. As for the soul, he had the idea of starting a study group composed of him, me and two other colleagues, who would meet in one of their homes to discuss scientific issues. We started with fractal geometry, the implications of chaos theory, Mandelbrot, the Julia set. Yes, that’s the Gaston Julia who provided me with my pseudonym. In short, maths stuff. We didn’t expect to get very far, but at least we meant to avoid brain death during that terrible year. Euclid made me laugh. He used to claim that alcohol, crosswords and park benches for sitting and chatting with the elderly had no place in his life. He’d only admit words that began with M (for example, mathematics and mating).
Meucci begins with M.
A few days after hearing his story, I returned to Euclid’s. On my previous visit he’d been downright in his refusal to lend me the notes in his folder, had said that there was no way they were leaving the apartment. So my only option was to examine them there. And I was anxious to do that.
In his bedroom, after I’d finished reading, Euclid tuned the radio to CMBF and said: The other day you mentioned an author. What else do you know about him? He thought that Leonardo might be an interesting lead to follow; if he was working on Meucci, he’d probably already gathered quite a bit of information, and some of it might even be useful to his own search. But this isn’t your search, Euclid. It’s ours. It’s our duty as scientists to find that document, I insisted. He looked me straight in the eyes and asked if I really wanted come aboard. Of course I did. I loved the idea that he was the captain of the ship and that we could return to our former roles as tutor and pupil. My friend smiled his satisfaction. We must act like real scientists, he said, taking into account even the smallest details, because everything was important, even things that might seem trivial at first. The author’s an interesting lead, he reiterated, but we need facts.
All at once his bedroom had become our old maths seminar room. I stood up, stating that we’d have to start from scratch, and as I paced I began to recall everything I knew about Leonardo: his physique, the way he dressed, the few things Ángel had told me about him. But the most important fact of all was that I knew where to find him. At the party, when Ángel and Barbara were having a heated discussion about the development of Italian cinema, Leonardo had come over to chat. He told me that he worked in the human resources department of a company in Old Havana, near the cathedral. It wasn’t a great job, he’d said, mostly just tedious paper pushing, but it meant he could write. That was when he told me I could drop by his office if I was ever in the neighbourhood. Nothing would be more natural than to take him up on the offer. What do you think? I asked Euclid and he smiled, saying that I’d always been his best student. He wanted to meet Leonardo too, but for the moment there was no justification for that. Luckily, I’d been presented with an opportunity on a plate.
That said, Euclid also began to pace the room as he spoke. I’d have to visit Leonardo and somehow bring up the subject of Meucci. Getting a writer to talk about his work shouldn’t be too difficult, he added with a smile. Then I’d have to gradually strike up a friendship with him, not hurrying things, so that later it would be natural for Euclid to meet him too, as a friend of mine. If he knows anything about the document, he won’t tell you straight out, Julia. We have to be patient.
Euclid had me in his spell. Seeing him there, designing our strategy, it was as if he were solving one of those differential equations that used to be such a headache at the university. We had to be very cautious and shouldn’t just take everything Leonardo said at face value since he might be hiding something. But I can take care of that later, Julia; for now, just try to attract him, win his confidence. That shouldn’t be hard for you. Euclid gave me a little grin that instantly took me back years: to the maths seminar room where a slightly younger version of him smiled in exactly the same way as he unbuttoned my top. That won’t be too hard, I said. And we both laughed.
So, Euclid and I had a pact. Leonardo was now our number-one objective, the lemon we had to squeeze every last drop of juice from. It’s weird, but sometimes when you think things are totally fucked, some tiny detail changes everything. It must have to do with a lack of objectives. Having no objectives in life can be soul destroying, and if the soul is destroyed, the body hasn’t got a chance. You just die, you fall to pieces, vanish. I’ve always feared having no objectives, but at that moment I had two: one Ángel and the other Meucci. Do you see?
When you have concrete objectives, all other problems shrink to next to nothing, become infinitesimal. My classes at the Tech still lacked any interest, but that no longer worried me so much. The situation in the country was still a disaster, but that didn’t bother me either. Or the shortage of food, or the power cuts, because I had concrete objectives. Blaise Pascal said that the last thing one knows is what to put first, yet the only thing Euclid and I had clear was where to begin. Pythagoras said that the beginning is half the whole. If that’s true, we’d already covered a lot of ground. The beginning was Leonardo.
I went to visit him that same week, on an afternoon when I finished early and hadn’t arranged to meet Ángel. Leonardo was surprised to see me standing in the lobby of the building where he worked. I told him that I was in the area doing some errands at the Ministry of Education, needed to make a few phone calls, and remembered that he worked nearby. No problem, come on. He led me to his office, where I did in fact make some phone calls, but to non-existent numbers, and then complained about wasting my time. It was almost five, and there was no way I was going to find anyone at their desk. I’d had a lousy day, nothing had gone right, and I was dead on my feet. Did he know where I could get a coffee? Leonardo said
there was a small stand not far away; the coffee wasn’t great but if I wasn’t in a hurry and could wait for him, we could go together. I’m finished for the day, I told him, and sat by his desk to wait. That was when he asked how Ángel was.
It was a perfectly normal question, given that we’d met through him, but it honestly took me by surprise, because none of the questions I’d imagined had included references to my lover. That’s why I hesitated for a moment before replying: He’s fine, I haven’t seen him for a couple of days. Leonardo said he hadn’t seen him since the night at the paladar, but wanted to call him. He liked Ángel. And how’s Barbara? I asked to change the subject. Fine, I haven’t seen her for a few days either, he replied. We left the building just after five. Leonardo collected his bicycle, which was chained in the parking lot, and we walked together to the stand. He bought me a coffee and as I still wasn’t in any hurry, suggested that we sit in the Plaza de Armas for a while to get some fresh air and chat.
Leonardo was one of those people who need no encouragement to talk; in fact his words seemed to be permanently stationed just outside the door, waiting for a moment of carelessness to barge in. That evening he told me many things. I discovered that he was divorced and had a son he couldn’t see as often as he wanted because he lived with his mother in Santa Fe, which was a long journey; Leonardo had returned to live with his parents in Cerro, where he’d converted the garage into a small studio apartment. Cycling all the way to Santa Fe was no easy feat, so he had the child once a fortnight and visited him occasionally in between. I learned that he’d published a few books of poetry and short stories; but the Special Period had entailed a crisis in the publishing world, with the shortage of paper and the corresponding reduction in the number of new publications, so he hadn’t seen his name on a front cover in quite a while. I told him I loved poetry and he promised to lend me his books. They’re good, he assured me. Or at least that was what the critics had said. I learned that he’d had a few other jobs before his present one. A writer, he insisted, is a complex being who is capable of perceiving things that are invisible to others, can find beauty where others see filth, and that’s why writers need to mix with the world without allowing it to swallow them whole. Do you see what I’m getting at? he asked. And without waiting for a response, he explained that the only reason he worked in the company was because he needed frequent contact with other humans but couldn’t handle a job that would take up too much of his time. That was my window of opportunity to ask about his new literary project. Leonardo smiled; he took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, offered me one, and I told him I didn’t smoke. Then he leaned back on the bench, lit a Popular, inhaled deeply, turned to me and said: My new project is a bombshell. I smiled and, of course, wanted to know more.
It was his first novel and a highly complex, ambitious project. A novel that could be called historical, in inverted commas. Umberto Eco had had the audacity to incorporate Latin into The Name of the Rose and that work was a bestseller. Leonardo wanted to incorporate science, but in a different way. He was thinking of a work where there was hardly room for what we understand as fiction because the whole thing was based on real events. Naturally, he assured me, everything that’s written, absolutely everything, even history books, because it’s all rooted in the writer’s interpretation. Do you see what I’m getting at, Julia? I nodded and he went on: For example, if someone were to ask us separately what we’d talked about in the square that afternoon, we’d both tell a different story because we were different people and had different points of view. We wouldn’t recount what had actually been said but the fiction our minds created. Interesting, I said. But Leonardo was too fired up to listen. In fact I don’t even think he was actually seeing me; he was observing something far off. The difficulty, he said, and this was what made the project so ambitious, was to make real life read like fiction; for readers to settle into their sofas, convinced that they were once again dealing with literary deceit, and then wham, in a flash the reality would suddenly come crashing down on them, because each and every tiny detail in the book was justified by demonstrable historical data, and then the fictional space they were so comfortably inhabiting would become unstable and readers would unexpectedly discover that they were in History with a capital H. Don’t you think it’s amazing? he asked, actually looking at me this time. I thought for a moment before blurting out that whatever the case, the story would also be fiction because, as he’d said, it depended on who was telling it. I don’t think Leonardo liked that comment because he twisted his mouth in a strange way and finally replied: No, not if the things you narrate are fully demonstrable.
I laughed, saying that instead of writing he could have taken up mathematics, an area where demonstrating the truth was a fundamental activity. But even in maths, what is shown to be true today may be revised tomorrow, because demonstrations depend on the state of our knowledge at any given moment. For example, I added, Euclidian geometry (I was, logically, referring to the original Euclid and not my friend) could never have solved the problems posed by fractal geometry because they correspond to different periods of our knowledge of the natural world. Leonardo opened his eyes wide and I, fortunately, paused, because the minute I mentioned the word fractal, my friend came to mind and I realised that, in my enthusiasm, I’d forgotten that my mission that afternoon was to extract information from Leonardo; I’d forgotten all about the lemon and the objective and was getting tangled up in Leo’s arguments. He smiled, saying that maths wasn’t his strong point, that it had been the bane of his schooldays, what he knew about was words, and... I’d have to forgive him because he tended to rattle on. There’s nothing to forgive, quite the contrary, I replied and insisted that I was loving everything he said, it was really interesting. And what was that Italian man’s name? The one with the telephone. He’s a character in the novel, right? Leonardo lit another cigarette and continued: Antonio Meucci, prof, get that into your head and forget about Bell... Then he added: Are you hungry? I know someone nearby who sells pizza. Are you up for it?
Pizza. Pizza is from Meucci’s native land, and with that Leonardo concluded his disquisition on the novel for the afternoon. I know, it was my fault; instead of channelling the conversation towards the things that interested me, I’d allowed myself to be swept away by him and everything he was saying, which did in fact seem interesting. That’s always happening to me. I don’t know why, but when I start talking to a man, I lose myself. And anyway, my objective was to strike up a friendship, and exhausting the topic at the first meeting would limit future possibilities.
Leonardo led me to a place where, at the end of a long passage, we found a window framing a head, and he bought two pizzas. He commented that I was in luck as I’d turned up on a day when he had cash; he’d just won the Nobel prize, he said with a laugh, then explained that one of his short stories was going to be included in an anthology in Spain, and he’d been paid twenty-five dollars; he was rich. But I’d better not get my hopes up because he had a son to bring up and that money had to last a long time. Twenty-five dollars wasn’t much, but they were dollars and could be used to buy goods only sold in that currency, basics like oil and shampoo. And since Leonardo’s salary was in local currency, he was feeling wealthy. I bit into my pizza, then leaned back to stop the grease from staining my dress and, before I could reply, he said he was kidding, he loved treating people, it was just that he hardly ever could. That’s why he was happy that I’d visited on that particular day. I smiled: Thanks, next time it’s on me.
That debt was a guarantee of a next time. After finishing our pizza, we set out towards the Malecón, where I could hitch a lift home. At one point Leonardo asked me to stop so that he could look at me for a moment. I did as he requested, a puzzled expression on my face. He began walking again and explained that I reminded him of someone. He said that the evening when I’d opened the door of Ángel’s apartment, he’d thought I was a girl he’d known years ago in Barcelona: her face wa
s very similar to mine, and there was even something in the way I moved that made him think of her. You’ve been to Barcelona? I asked in amazement. Yes, Leonardo had visited the city a few years ago and said it was beautiful, a place where anyone would want to stay forever.
Leonardo had a way of speaking that, with your eyes still open, transported you to wherever he was describing. It was something I discovered that day. Each of his words was like a fragment building up a picture of the city so that, little by little, I found myself in Barcelona. I haven’t been lucky enough to travel, I’ve never left the island, but I swear that the city Leonardo constructed for me as we walked the dirty streets of Havana – he pushing his Chinese bicycle – is indelibly imprinted on my mind.
