Havana Fever

by Leonardo Padura

  Conde felt that space was like a sanctuary lost in time, and for the first time wondered whether he wasn’t committing an act of profanation. He gingerly returned each book to its respective place and inhaled the lovely scent emanating from the open bookcase. He took several deep breaths until he’d filled his lungs, and shut the doors only when he felt inebriated. He tried to hide his discomfort as he turned to the Ferreros, whose faces now burned with a flame of hope, that was determined to triumph over the only too conspicuous disasters life brings.

  “Why do you want to sell these books?” he asked, against all his principles, already seeking out a path to the history of that exceptional library. Nobody consciously, so abruptly, got rid of treasure like that, (and he’d only glimpsed the first promising jewels), unless there was some other reason, apart from hunger, and the Count felt an urgent need to know what that might be.

  “It’s a long story and . . .” Dionisio hesitated for the first time since he’d encountered the Count, but immediately recovered an almost martial aplomb. “We still aren’t sure we want to sell. That will depend on the offer you make. There are lots of bandits in the antiques trade as you well know . . . The other day two paid us a visit. They wanted to buy our stained-glass windows and the cheeky bastards offered three hundred dollars for each . . . They think one is either mad or starving to death . . .”

  “Of course, lots of people are on the make. But I’d like to know why you’ve decided to sell the books now . . .”

  Dionisio looked at his sister, as if he didn’t understand: how could the fellow be stupid enough to ask such a question? The Count cottoned on and, smiling, tried to refocus his curiosity for a third time.

  “Why did you wait until now to decide to sell them?”

  The transparent woman, perhaps stirred by the urgency of her hunger, was the one who rushed to reply.

  “It’s Mummy. Our Mother,” she explained. “She agreed to look after these books years ago . . .”

  The Count felt he was treading on typically swampy ground, but with no choice but to press on.

  “And your Mother?. . .”

  “She’s still alive. She’ll be ninety-one this year. And the poor thing is . . .”

  Conde didn’t dare keep on: the first part of the confession was on its way and he waited in silence. The rest would come of its own accord.

  “The old girl’s past it . . . she’s been a bundle of nerves for a long time. And the fact is we need some money,” spat Dionisio waving at the books. “You know what things are like these days, the pension goes nowhere . . .”

  Conde nodded: yes, he did know about that. His eyes followed the man’s hand towards the shelves crammed with books and he felt the hunch that he was on the verge of something big, still there, rudely pricking him under the nipple, making his hands sweat. He wondered why it hadn’t gone away. He knew he was surrounded by valuable books, so why should the alarm-call still sound so loudly? Could it be there was a book that was too much to hope for? That must be it, he told himself, and if that were true it would only stop when he’d inspected every shelf from top to bottom.

  “I’ve no wish to pry, but . . . But when was the last time anyone touched this library?” he asked.

  “Forty . . . Forty-three years ago,” the woman answered and the Count shook his head incredulously.

  “Hasn’t a single book left here in all that time?”

  “Not one,” interjected Dionisio, confident he was upping the value of the library’s contents by making such a statement. “Mummy asked us to air it once a month and clean it with a feather duster, just along the tops . . .”

  “Look, I’ll be frank with you,” Mario Conde decided to issue a warning, aware he was about to betray the most hallowed rules of his profession: “I have a hunch, in a manner of speaking. I’m quite sure there are books here worth lots of money, and others so valuable that they can’t or shouldn’t be sold . . . If I might explain myself: there could be books, particularly Cuban books, that shouldn’t leave Cuba and almost nobody in Cuba has the money to pay out what they’re really worth. The National Library, for a start. And what I’m telling you now goes against my own business interests, but I believe it would be a crime to sell them to a foreigner who’d only take them out of the country . . . and I say a crime because it would be more than unforgivable, it would be a felony, and that’s the least of it. If we can agree terms, we can do business with the saleable books, and if you then decide to sell the more valuable books, I’ll get out of your way and . . .”

  Dionisio stared at the Count with unexpected intensity.

  “What did you say your name was?. . .”

  “Mario Conde.”

  “Mario Conde,” he chewed on the name slowly, as if extracting from the letters an injection of dignity his blood sorely needed. “Standing where you can see us now, my sister and I have really run ourselves into the ground over this country, in a big way. I risked my life here and even in Africa. And although I’m starving to death I won’t do anything like that . . . Not for a thousand or ten thousand pesos,” and he turned to look at his sister, as if seeking out a last refuge for his pride. “Will we, Amalia?”

  “Of course we won’t, Dionisio,” she assured him.

  “I’m glad that we understand each other,” nodded the Count, moved by the naivety of the heroic Dionisio, who thought in pesos, whilst he calculated similar figures, but in dollars. “Let’s do it this way. I’ll choose twenty to thirty books that will sell well, although they’re not particularly valuable. I’ll separate them out now and come for them tomorrow with the money. After that I’d like to check the whole library, so I can tell you what I’d be interested in taking, what books would interest no buyer, and which books can’t, or rather shouldn’t, be sold, right? But first I’d like to hear the whole story, if you don’t mind, that is . . . I’m sorry to insist, but a library that has books like those I’ve just fished out and that’s been untouched for forty-three years . . .”

  Dionisio Ferrero looked at his sister, and the colourless woman stared back at him, nibbling the skin on her fingers. Then she swung her head round towards the Count: “Which one? The story behind the library or the one explaining why we’re selling now?”

  “Isn’t it the same one, with a beginning and an end?”

  “When the Montes de Ocas left Cuba, Mummy and I stayed on in this house, one of the most elegant in El Vedado . . . as you can still see, after all this time. Mr Alcides Montes de Oca, who had initially supported the Revolution, realized that things were going to change more than he’d bargained for and in September 1969, when they started taking over US companies, he headed north with just his two children, as his wife had died four or five years earlier, in 1956, and he hadn’t remarried. Although business hadn’t gone well under Batista, Mr Alcides still had lots and lots of money; his own, and what he’d inherited from his deceased wife, Alba Margarita, who was a Méndez-Figueredo, the family that owned two sugar mills in Las Villas among countless other things . . . And it was then he suggested to Mummy and me that we could go with him, if we wished. Just imagine, Mummy was his right arm in all his business affairs and on top of that had been like a sister to him as well. She’d even been born in this household; that is, in the house the Montes de Ocas owned in El Cerro before they built this one, because Mummy was born in 1912 and this house was finished in 1922, after the war, which was when the Montes de Ocas were at their wealthiest. That was why they could afford to ship marble from Italy and Belgium, tiles from Coimbra, wood from Honduras, steel from Chicago, curtains from England, glass from Venice and interior designers from Paris . . . At the time my grandparents were gardener and laundry woman to the Montes de Oca family, and as Mummy had been born in the house she was brought up almost as a member of the family, as I said, like a sister to Mr Alcides, and that’s how Mummy was able to study and even get her finishing certificate. But when she was about to enter Teacher Training College she made up her mind to stop studying and aske
d Mrs Ana, the wife of Don Tomás and Mr Alcides’ mother, if they’d let her work in the house as housekeeper or administrator, because she fancied being here, surrounded by beautiful, pristine, expensive things rather than life as a school teacher in a state school struggling with snotty-nosed children for a hundred pesos a month. That was when Mummy was nineteen or twenty, and by that time the Montes de Ocas weren’t as rich, because they lost a lot of money in the 1929 Depression and because Don Serafín, who’d fought in the War of Independence, and his son Don Tomás, a renowned lawyer, refused to play along with Machado, who was a dictator by then. Machado and his people made their lives impossible, and ruined lots of their business operations, just as Batista did with Mr Alcides, although before Batista’s coup d’état Mr Alcides had made a fortune in deals he made during the Great War, so it didn’t matter so much if he didn’t get a share in that degenerate’s big handouts . . . Ah, but I’m losing my thread as usual . . . Well, the truth is that Mummy helped Mr Alcides an awful lot. She dealt with all his papers, accounts, income tax declarations, was his private secretary, and when his wife, Mrs Alba Margarita, died, Mummy also took responsibility for their children. Consequently, when Mr Alcides decided to leave, he suggested to Mummy that we should go with him, but she wanted time to think it over. She wasn’t immediately sure if we should go or stay, because Dionisio, who’d joined the clandestine movement to overthrow Batista when very young, and was a hundred per cent behind the Revolution, had gone to educate the illiterate in the hills of Oriente, and Mummy didn’t want to abandon him. How old were you, Dionisio? Twenty-four? But by the same token Mummy didn’t want to be separated from Jorgito and Anita, Mr Alcides’ children; she’d practically brought them up and she knew that Mr Alcides would really need her when he started up other businesses in the US. It was a tremendous dilemma. Mr Alcides told her to take her time and that when she’d made her mind up, the doors to his house, whatever it was like and wherever it was, would always be open to us, and we could join him whenever we wanted. If we stayed in Cuba, we could live here and he only asked one favour: to look after the house, particularly the library and the two Sèvres porcelain vases his grandmother, Doña Marina Azcárate, had bought in Paris, as he couldn’t take them, although he was always one who thought the Revolution would be short-lived and when it collapsed he’d be able to return to his possessions and business here. And if it didn’t and we didn’t leave, he asked the same favours of us, until he, his son Jorgito or daughter Anita could fetch the books and vases and they would be reunited with the family. Naturally, Mummy promised that if he stayed in Miami, Mr Alcides could be sure that when he returned everything would be in place, that was her pledge, and it was a sacred commitment as far as she was concerned...

  “I’ve never been able to find out what Mummy’s real intentions were, if she’d already decided to stay or was only marking time to see what happened to Dionisio here or to Mr Alcides when he established himself over there. I asked her two or three times and she always gave me the same answer: her mind was a fog, she wanted more time, and it was a very big decision . . . But a woman like her must have known, however thick the fog in her head. The crunch came seven months later, in March 1961, when Mr Alcides, driving while utterly drunk, had an accident and killed himself. The news reached us a week later. When Mummy – who was already quite depressed – put the phone down, she locked herself in her room for a week, didn’t come out or let anyone go in, and when she did finally open the door to me, I found a different woman: she wasn’t the Mummy we knew, and we saw how her grief and feelings of guilt at not leaving with Mr Alcides had unbalanced her mind.

  “I think it was then that I understood exactly what the Montes de Ocas meant to her, apart from her working for Don Alcides and feeling so important at the side of that powerful man who no longer existed. After all those years she couldn’t imagine Don Alcides wasn’t on this island to give her orders and ask her advice . . . Poor Mummy had organized her whole life around that man and had lost out totally. She shut herself up in her room and turned into a fossil, because if she’d once thought of leaving with Mr Alcides, and of helping him with his children and business, that now made no sense, because Jorgito and Anita were living with their Aunt Eva, who’d also left Cuba, and Mr Alcides had taken his promise that we would be welcome in his house to the grave . . . While she closeted herself in her room, and brooded over her sorrow and confusion, Dionisio and I tried to start out in life. Just imagine, I was twenty-one and had begun working in a bank. I became a member of the Women’s Federation, then a militia woman. Dionisio joined the army when he returned from the literacy campaign, was soon promoted to sergeant, and we both began to live, well, differently, on our own account, for ourselves, not thinking about the Montes de Ocas or depending on them, as our family had for almost a century, as my mother had ever since she could remember . . . Although Dionisio may not agree, this was self-delusion, because the ghosts of the Montes de Ocas were still alive in this house: my mother’s sickening isolation finally turned into madness; the china, library, Sèvres vases, furniture, lots of decorations and two or three of the paintings Mr Alcides decided not to take, stayed in place here, waiting for a Mr Alcides, who’d now never return, and then for his children, who never came or took the slightest interest in what they’d abandoned. I entered into correspondence for several years with Miss Eva, who’d gone to live in New Jersey, if I remember rightly, to a town or city called Rutherford, and kept in contact, though it was only one or two letters a year. But Miss Eva moved house around 1968, a couple of my letters were returned to sender stamped ‘addressee unknown’, and we had no news of them for years. I began to fear the worst. I wrote to other people who lived over there, hoping they might perhaps know where the Montes de Ocas were, but we had no news of them for ten years, until a friend of the family visited Cuba and we finally found out that they’d gone to live in San Francisco and that Miss Eva had died of cancer three or four years earlier. But the children were still alive and, out of respect for Mummy’s pledge, I waited and waited in case they expressed an interest in the vases and books, and decided to keep them just so. The oldest books almost all belonged to Don Serafín, Mr Tomás’s father, who also bought a lot, because he was a very educated man, a solicitor and law professor at the. Like his father, he used to buy every book that appealed to him, never worrying about the price, and he’d only ever give his friends and grandchildren books as birthday presents. The Sèvres vases had belonged to the family since the nineteenth century, when the Azcárates and Montes de Ocas of old had been exiled in France, whilst they waited for the war against Spain to resume. Those books and vases, like the house itself, were the real history of the family, and as Mummy felt she was a Montes de Oca, because they’d always treated her as such, it all had a sentimental value for her and we had to respect her pledge . . . although the fact is nothing remained of the Montes de Ocas, nobody remembered them, and that library and those vases were their only connection with the past and this country . . . But the years went by and the books and vases lingered on. As I earned a good wage and Dionisio always gave me money for Mummy, we were comfortably off and I never thought of selling anything, because we never went short. But things took a real turn for the worse in 1990 and 1991. To cap it all Dionisio had a heart attack, was demobbed from the army and then separated from his wife. Although the year he was demobbed Dionisio started to work on the same wage for a company that supplied the army, what we both earned soon went nowhere, because there was no food and you had to be as wealthy as the Montes de Ocas to buy any food that did appear. To make matters worse, Dionisio left that company and started eating lunch and dinner at home. I’m not ashamed to say this, because you must certainly have experienced something similar: it got so bad that some nights my brother and I went to bed on a glass of sugared water, and an infusion of orange or mint leaves, because we gave the little real food we had to Mummy, and sometimes there wasn’t even enough for her . . . It was then I decided to
do something with the decorations, paintings, vases and books – the only things of any value we had. I swear it was a matter of life or death. Even so I stalled for months until I decided that we were going to starve to death from lack of food if we carried on like that; you only had to see how skinny Dionisio was, who, after being a major and leading men in the war in Angola, was now forced to plant bananas and yuccas in our patio and get himself a job as a night watchman to earn a few extra pesos . . . One day we stopped debating and started to sell what was left of the dinner services, then the decorations and paintings, which were nothing special, although we practically had to give them away, because we couldn’t find anybody who’d pay us what they were supposedly worth. Then we sold a few pieces of furniture, some lamps, and got a decent amount for them, believe me, but it ran through our fingers like water and four years ago we finally decided to sell the Sèvres vases to an upstanding Frenchman living in Cuba who does business with the government. He paid us well for the vases, just imagine, they were this high and hand-painted, and that saw us through up to now. Those vases saved our lives . . . But after so many years, and at present prices . . . Dionisio and I have been thinking for some time that we should sell the books. I mean, Dionisio started thinking that way, because I’d made my mind up long ago. Whenever I went to dust the library I’d always ask myself what did it matter if nobody read them and nobody was ever going to reclaim them . . . Besides, I’d always felt resentful towards those books, not the books themselves, but what they represent and represented: they are the living spirit of the Montes de Ocas, a reminder of what they and others of their type were like, the people who thought they owned the country, I find it upsetting just to go into the library, it’s a place I feel rejecting me, and one in turn rejects it . . . So, that’s the story. I know there are people who aren’t having such a bad time as they did five or ten years ago, that there are even people who live very well, but you just add it up: on two pensions and with no one to send us dollars, we’re still in the same plight, if not worse. In the end, life itself made it easier for us: we don’t have any alternative now and my brother understands . . . we either sell the books or gradually starve to death, poor Mummy included, who luckily is completely detached from reality, because I expect she’d forgive us for selling everything else, but if she ever realized what we intend to do with the Montes de Ocas’ library, I think she’d have it in her to kill us both and then starve to death . . .”