by Karla Suárez
Hypothesis one: when Euclid discovers that Ángel is the man I’m talking about, he feels embarrassed and even slightly ashamed. He opts not to tell me about Margarita and so avoid making Ángel look like a cuckold and simultaneously bringing shit down on his own head. And anyway, I knew nothing about the document at the time. There’s a clear logic in that.
Hypothesis two: Euclid tells me about the document and says that the woman has given it – or sold it – to someone else. Ángel backs up this version when he says that Margarita no longer has the document, but she’s left the country with no intention of returning, so she obviously must have sold it for the money, omitting to tell her husband, naturally. Why didn’t she sell it to Euclid? Because Euclid’s means were limited, of course. By this time, I’m aware of the existence of the document, Euclid knows about my relationship with Ángel but even so decides not to inform me that the owner of the document was Ángel’s wife. Why? Because Ángel has nothing to add to our research; he’d been tricked and Euclid knows it.
Hypothesis three: Euclid and I want the document, but Ángel, still unaware of its scientific importance, also wants to get it back in order to give it to Margarita and so close the cycle. That might be a problem, although I don’t think Ángel is really looking very hard for it; his thing is a romantic illusion and Euclid doesn’t consider him an interesting element, preferring to explore other options: for example, Leonardo.
Hypothesis four: according to Ángel, Leonardo and Margarita were old friends. Leonardo is writing a novel about Meucci that will create waves because it is based on demonstrable historical events.
You’re thinking what I’m thinking, aren’t you? Leonardo might well have learned about the document through his friend Margarita, and may even be the one who bought it. Euclid doesn’t know him personally, but I unwittingly confirmed that the author was a friend of Ángel’s ex; this makes his initial suspicion more logical.
Conclusions: everything points to Leonardo. I therefore decided that if Euclid was unwilling to talk about Margarita, I wouldn’t mention her either; maybe at a later date, but not for the moment because there was little point and I didn’t want my friend to feel obliged to explain something I wasn’t particularly interested in anyway. If Margarita had been two-timing Ángel, that was his problem and I wasn’t going to be the one to dig up the past. Best to turn a blind eye, let sleeping dogs lie. In the meanwhile, given that I now knew who had the document in their possession, I’d be able to check tactfully if Ángel could add any further data and continue squeezing the Leonardo-lemon.
That same week, I turned up unannounced at the author’s office. I told him that, as before, I was running an errand in the nearby ministry and thought I’d drop by to say hello. He didn’t seem surprised by my visit, said he was delighted to see me and that I always arrived at the perfect moment. I asked if he’d won the Nobel Prize again, but he shook his head and told me it was something else and that if I wanted to hear about it, I could accompany him later to the house of another writer, where there was going to be a short series of readings. Barbara would be there as she was gathering information for her project on Cuban literature. Although I refrained from saying it, I was much less interested in sitting through another of those interminable readings than in talking to him, but luckily he added that he had something to do before the gathering. That would give me a little time alone with him. So, will you come along? he asked. And of course I replied in the affirmative. I’d find a way of escaping from the writers.
That was the evening Leonardo told me about his trip to Luanda. I remember it well. And the reason I remember it is that, after kilometres travelling in the hot sun – him pedalling, me on the back carrier – we arrived at our first port of call, which was the home of an acquaintance of his, an Argentinean woman who wrote for a theatre magazine back home, and to whom Leo, the bookworm, was bringing an article about Havana theatres taken from a 1933 yearbook that a close friend had borrowed from the National Library. Naturally, he didn’t plan to offer the article to his acquaintance for free; he’d sell it for a modest sum in dollars. A man has to make a living one way or another. Right? Once that deal was done, we left her apartment and went to sit on the university steps, where Leo had arranged to meet Barbara. It was there he explained that the Argentinean woman’s husband was a Cuban soldier he’d met in Angola. Leonardo had been a war correspondent. He didn’t want to talk about it because the experience had been so awful, but even in the worst moments it was possible to see a glimmer of light. Then he started to describe the city, which he called Lovely-Luanda. Like I said, I adored listening to him, I thought he was a born novelist. Sometimes, when he was pedalling his Chinese bicycle and telling me some story, I’d find myself grinning behind him because it seemed so strange – sort of... the opposite of what you expect – that such a cultured, well-travelled person, a scholar with heaps of experiences, a man for whom the world was his oyster, should have no other mode of transport than a bicycle. But that’s the way it is here. One day I shared this thought with him. And guess what he said: A bicycle is good for your leg muscles, everything else I keep inside myself. Leonardo had a great deal of positivity.
That afternoon, he spoke at length about his Lovely-Luanda and, as usual, I was enthralled by his narrative, until, when he ran out of stories and we started talking about travel in general, I seized the moment to ask if he’d ever visited Italy in his globetrotting days. That was the best way I could think of to lead up to Meucci, but unfortunately Leonardo said he hadn’t. He knew a great deal about the country but had never been there. And talking of Italy: look who’s here... He stood up just as I raised my eyes and saw Barbara coming up the steps, smiling as always, and, also as always, wearing a short, tight-fitting top that scarcely left her boobs room to breathe.
I liked Barbara. She was invariably pleased with the world, as if life was marvellous and Havana smiled upon her at the break of each new day. But she’s a foreigner, of course. She lived in a city ten centimetres removed from the one we inhabited because, although we occupied the same space, her Havana was different from ours. We were different species in the same zoo. Do you get me? She was an exotic species, the sort that visitors stop in front of; we were the everyday sort that no one bothers to look at, the sort that are given the skins of the bananas the exotic species eat. None of that was Barbara’s fault, of course; she was likeable and did what she could for us. After her affectionate kisses, Leonardo said that he had some dollars from the sale of the article and wanted her help to buy one or two things in the store. Remember that it was still illegal to have dollars, so Cubans had no access to certain shops. Barbara gladly agreed, said she couldn’t do enough for him, his son and everyone else on this marvellous island.
That night, the gathering took place in the home of another writer, a friend of Leonardo’s. Now I come to think of it, it’s funny that I decided to call him after Da Vinci, forgetting that there’s a brilliant Cuban author whose name is Leonardo Padura, but that’s beside the point. OK? I don’t know Padura. Anyway, our host prepared tea from the lemongrass Leo had brought and we all sat out on the apartment’s long balcony. When the readings began I, as always, used the time for introspection. After attending a huge number of such events over the years, I’ve come to understand that writers require undivided attention; they need you to be listening to them and praising them the whole time. They’re just overgrown kids. No doubt we all require a certain amount of approval from others, but with authors the figure is multiplied, in some cases disproportionately. I’ve always noticed that writers and artists are seen as unique beings with exceptional lives, as if they spent their whole time entertaining great people and talking in capital letters about profound, elevated topics. That’s OK by me, but I’m surprised that scientists aren’t equally valued. Very few people think about scientists; yet behind everything we touch, however ordinary it might be, there are hundreds of brains who worked on its creation, because s
cience is a collective endeavour: someone discovers something, then someone else improves it and another person improves the improvement, and so on. To give an example: now that smartphones are all the rage, does anyone know who Antonio Meucci was? Of course not. And, logically, I don’t think that people should know the entire history of every inventor, but they could at least be generally recognised in the same way as artists and writers. Don’t you agree?
Leonardo and his friends were a different kettle of fish, of course; they had what you could call author-essence but lacked everything else. What’s more, in those days none of them were publishing because there was no paper, so they were completely convinced of the profundity of their texts and crying out for an audience, particularly if the participants included one of those exotic creatures who, to top it all, wanted to find authors for her research into Cuban literature.
I’ve no idea if Barbara had ever before felt so important, but that night she was queen of the ball. After the reading of each text, her every word was listened to with rapt attention, her every laugh provoked more laughter, when she crossed her legs every eye was on them, her questions received immediate responses and her thirst had the owner of the apartment going to his downstairs neighbours to buy homemade orange wine so Barbara could try local products. That was just after the readings had finished, and I was thinking of leaving, unaware that Leonardo had been waiting to announce his news. When our host returned, he poured everyone some wine, sat down and asked Leo to forget the mystery and tell us whatever it was he had to say. Leo took a piece of paper from his backpack, got to his feet, cleared his throat and began to read. ‘Diario de La Habana, December 16th 1844...’. It was a photocopy of an article about the gala event held in the Gran Teatro Tacón in honour of Meucci, whom the reporter praised and called an ‘intelligent scene-shifter’. The article ended by saying something about how Havana theatregoers knew how to appreciate and honour worthy productions. When Leo had finished speaking, someone asked where he’d found the article and he proudly replied that it had cost him a bar of soap and a peck on the cheek for his friend who worked in the National Library. That was when the night started to get interesting.
According to Leo, his friend was an absolute gem because she’d even managed to lay her hands on one or two ‘little books’, although naturally she couldn’t always help him. He’d consulted a great many newspapers in the library and had a list of all the photocopies he needed; now she just had to carry out the task and then wait for her well-earned gift. I used the pause to comment that it was brilliant that his novel would include the article and, as an apparent afterthought, asked if he’d come across any other documents about Meucci. He replied that he only had articles, but they were important because they gradually revealed the traces of Meucci in our city, and with that he stifled my attempt to find out more. Then, once he’d been assured of the others’ interest in the inventor, he took centre stage.
I owe to Leonardo almost everything I know about Antonio Meucci’s life and the fascination I felt for him: the truth is that Meucci was incredible. I imagine him as a hyperactive man, incapable of sitting still, curious and observant. If he lived in present-day Cuba, there’s no doubt that he’d make a magnificent husband, the sort who, like my stepfather, fixes everything in the home that breaks down, with the difference that Antonio also had the urge to create new things; he was a born inventor. When he worked in the Teatro Tacón, for example, in addition to his normal duties as chief engineer, he used his inventiveness to improve the acoustics and created a water mirror in the cellar by diverting a subterranean river that passed nearby. This made his job more interesting, but it wouldn’t have been enough for Antonio; he was a man who took note of absolutely everything around him. So, he developed a chemical process for mummifying corpses; it doesn’t seem to have been completely successful, but did partly solve the problem of preserving dead bodies that had to be transported to Europe. A few years later, he made forays into the field of galvanism, which involved plating metal objects with gold or silver, a technique that was employed on weaponry to prevent rusting. Meucci succeeded in closing a four-year verbal contract with the governor of the island and started working on the army’s swords and artillery; in order to do this, he set up a galvanising workshop, which was one of the first in the continent. Around the same time, the Teatro Tacón held the gala event mentioned in the article Leonardo read to us that night.
Then came the great hurricane of 1846, which left a wake of deaths, injuries and ruined buildings throughout Cuba. Many theatres were severely damaged, among them the Tacón, although it remained in a better state than the others. Once the initial repairs were underway, Meucci was put in charge of the restoration, and took advantage of that appointment to create a ventilation system in the theatre, and there’s no doubt that, given our climate, his invention was appreciated. When the Teatro Tacón reopened, the technical and decorative changes had significantly improved the venue.
After that followed a period when things apparently didn’t go so well and Pancho Marty, the owner of the theatre, decided to close it down again. Meucci had little work, his contract for the galvanisation of weapons had ended and he had to put his mind to new projects. That was when he started to experiment with electrotherapy. In those days, following theories of animal magnetism, it was fashionable to cure ailments by the administration of electric shocks. Antonio was no stranger to these studies and in his workshop in the theatre, he began to conduct experiments, first using other members of the staff and then actual patients as guinea pigs.
Then came the historic day in 1849 when, during one of those experiments, Antonio Meucci discovered that the human voice could be transmitted via an electrical signal. It seems that he was with a patient in the middle of administering the therapy; there were copper wires, batteries and electrodes, Meucci and the patient were in different rooms, the patient had a copper instrument in his mouth, Antonio was holding a similar instrument, and then, after the electrical discharge, he heard the patient cry out. But the cry hadn’t come through the windows: it was a voice that had travelled through the wiring. Eureka! That was just the beginning.
Science is fascinating: while you’re doing one thing, you discover something else. It’s like the world opens up for you in a flash and you can see something that exists but is transparent. Like a spark that has to be produced before the eyes of someone capable of viewing it in order to be seen. I’ll give you a second: click! If you can’t see me, years and years might pass until someone manages to identify me. But Meucci did see it, and then he knew that the human voice could be transmitted electrically, and after that first flash of intuition he applied logical thought and all his previous knowledge of the subject in constructing his ‘talking telegraph’.
The designs for those early experiments were recorded in the document Euclid and Ángel had seen, the document that Leonardo might be aware of, the document that had belonged to Margarita’s ancestors. One of those ancestors may even have been present during the experiments that followed the first transmitted call and, who knows, could have placed the copper instrument in his or her mouth and shouted his or her name, aware that it marked the dawn of a new historical era, even if far too many years went by before that fact was recognised.
9
After the meeting with the writers, I attempted to call Euclid several times to tell him what I’d learned about Meucci and to inform him of my conviction that Leonardo was a lead worth following up, but the tone on the telephone at the Tech maintained the same constant, unvarying, infinitely prolonged note, no matter how often I dialled numbers. Don’t laugh: it’s true. The telephone was invented here in Havana, but in 1993 most were out of order half the time.
So I decided to go straight to his apartment. Although I’d earlier come to the conclusion that it would be best not to mention Margarita, the knowledge that Leonardo had photocopies of a number of articles opened up new possibilities because, even if the au
thor denied having any other document, the following conclusions could be drawn:
First: what he said was untrue. That is, Leonardo had the document but, given its importance, was unwilling to admit that fact.
Second: what he said was true. That is, he wasn’t in possession of the document, although this didn’t exclude the possibility that he was aware of its existence.
What was absolutely clear to me was that the relationship between Leonardo and Margarita was extremely important, and when added to his interest in Meucci, he became a central, highly suspicious element. How could I ever explain these conclusions to Euclid without mentioning Margarita? The answer was, I couldn’t. Do you see? My friend was a mathematician, accustomed to theorems and demonstrations, and I’d just realised that if he was interested in Leonardo, it was because he was already aware that Leonardo knew Margarita. She was the key variable I’d lacked at the beginning. If I turned up at his place stating that something or other was true just because I said so, Euclid wouldn’t believe me, because the Holy Ghost doesn’t exist in science. I therefore concluded that it would be better to have it out. There was no need to make a big deal of his affair with Margarita, it was just a matter of making it clear that she’d owned the document, and that was all that counted in relation to our objective.
But as it happened, when I arrived only his mother and Chichí were home. The frequent power cuts were destroying electrical equipment everywhere and his mum’s fridge was on its last legs, so Euclid had had to go out in search of a necessary spare part. I waited for quite a long time. His mum talked non-stop about Blot who, having recovered from his experience in the streets, was now a beautiful white poodle and had been awarded the privilege of sleeping on the bed at her feet. Chichí, for his part, was plain comical; he decided to read his short stories to his grandmother, and she looked at me in astonishment, saying he was a genius, even if she didn’t understand a word he’d written. Euclid didn’t much like his son’s stories, and to tell the truth, neither did I. Chichí was writing about the situation in the country, the growth in prostitution, bicycle theft, the boat people, the decaying society. Things we saw every day and that, quite honestly, I’d no desire to hear about, much less in a short story that would never be published. He was a bit like Leonardo’s friends, just younger, more direct and much more practical: while dreaming of being a writer, he made a living selling contraband goods. That afternoon, I started listening to one story but the electricity cut out almost immediately and as Euclid was showing no sign of returning, I decided to go home.
