Havana Fever

by Leonardo Padura

  “Well, we’ve asked a number of people . . .”

  “I know, hardly anyone remembers her. She only made one record and as she worked in clubs and cabarets . . . Just imagine, in Havana at the time there were more than sixty clubs and cabarets with two or three shows a night. Not counting restaurants and bars where trios, pianists and combos played . . .”

  “Incredible,” said a genuinely astonished Pigeon.

  “Can you imagine the number of artists required to sustain that rhythm? Havana was a crazy place: it was the liveliest city on the planet. You can forget fucking Paris and New York! Far too cold . . . the Nightlife was right here! True, there were whores, there were drugs and there was the mafia, but people enjoyed life and night-time started at six p.m. and went on till dawn. Can you imagine in a single night being able to drink beer, listen to the Anacaonas in the Aires Libres on Prado, eat at nine listening to the music and voice of Bola de Nieve, then in the Saint John and listening to Elena Burke, after going to a cabaret and dancing to Benny Moré, with the Aragón, Casino de la Playa, the Sonora Matancera, then taking a break to swing to the boleros of Olga Guillot, Vicentico Valdés, Ñico Membiela . . . or off to listen to the crooners, grainyvoiced José Antonio Méndez, or César Portillo and, rounding off the night, escaping to the beach to see Chori play his timbales, and sitting there cool as anything, between Marlon Brando and Cab Calloway, next to Errol Flynn and Josephine Baker. And, if you’d any breath left, down to The Grotto, here on La Rampa, to see the dawn in with a jazz session with Tata Güines, Barreto, Bebo Valdés, Negro Vivar, Frank Emilio and all those lunatics who are the best musicians Cuba has ever produced? They were here in their thousands, music was in the air, you could cut it with a knife, you had to push it aside to walk down the street . . . And Violeta del Río was one of them . . .”

  “Just one of the crowd?” hazarded the Count, apparently heading for a big disappointment.

  “She was no Elena Burke or Olguita Guillot, but she did have a real voice of her own. And a style. And a body. I never saw her, but Rogelito, the timbalero, once told me she was one of the most fantastic women in Havana. A real traffic-stopper.”

  “And what happened?”

  “One day she said she wasn’t going to sing anymore and disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “In a manner of speaking. She didn’t sing again and . . . vanished like a hundred other boleristas who had their days of glory followed by their years of oblivion . . .”

  “Any idea why?”

  “I heard things . . . That her voice failed her. She had a smallish voice, it wasn’t a torrent like Celia Cruz’s or Omara Portuondo’s, although she performed well with what she had. But I never bothered to find out where she ended up . . . Katy Barqué did talk to me about her once. She said they had a row.”

  “A row?” the Count smiled. “I can’t imagine a woman as spiritual as Katy Barqué getting into a row.”

  “Katy Barqué is a little she-devil, don’t believe all they say about her being the gentle singer of love songs . . . But their row was just words. They didn’t see eye to eye because they had similar styles. Truth be told several boleristas sang more or less the same way, with lots of feeling, lots of high drama, as if they held everything in contempt. It was a very fifties style. Did you never hear the recording they made of ‘Freddy’? In the sixties, La Lupe changed that style into some thing else rather sorrowful, contempt turned to scorn, drama to tragedy: La Lupe marks another era . . . But when Violeta started out, Katy Barqué was the best known in her style, and apparently she thought the other woman was competition . . . Hence the row.”

  “But wasn’t there room for everyone?” wondered Yoyi.

  “Down at the base of the pyramid, there was. It wasn’t the same at the top. These boleristas were very special ladies, full of character. A bolero isn’t any old song, obviously: to sing one you really make it yours, don’t just feel it. Boleros aren’t about reality but a desire for reality you reach via an appearance of reality, if you follow me? No matter . . . That’s the philosophy behind boleros, I wrote about that in my book . . . And that was its golden age, because the classic composers who’d been writing since the twenties and thirties came together with these young men with lots of feeling who read French poetry and knew what atonal music was. And that encounter created those boleros that now seem to speak of life . . . Real life. Even though it’s all lies: pure theatre, as La Lupe said.”

  “What about Violeta’s record?” asked the Count, clinging to the edge of the precipice.

  “I’ve got it in there . . . but my record player’s broken. I’m waiting for a friend to bring me one from Spain, because . . . Do you know how many LPs, 78s and 45s I’ve got in there?”

  Rafael followed his question with such an abrupt silence the Count was forced to follow his cue.

  “No, how many?”

  “12,622. What do you reckon?”

  “Fantastic,” conceded Pigeon.

  “They cost me a fortune, and now with CDs nobody’s interested. Every day someone comes with a box of records and gives them me for nothing.”

  “What do we have to do to listen to Violeta’s?” the Count implored.

  Rafael took his glasses off and rubbed them on his shirt-flap and the Count was shocked to see he hardly had any eyes. The sockets were two deep round holes, like bullet holes, darkened by the circles from the bags obscuring his mulatto skin. When he put his glasses back on, the man restored his wakeful owlish eyes and the Count felt relieved.

  “I never lend my records, books or press cuttings. As you can imagine, people have nicked things hundreds of times . . .”

  The Count’s brain began to spin in search of a solution. Come back with a record player? Bring a needle for Rafael’s system?... Or leave something in lieu?

  “How about this for a deal? We’ve got seven boxes of books in our car boot you won’t find anywhere else. I’ll swap you the book of your choice for Violeta del Río’s record . . .”

  Rafael’s unreal eyes glinted wickedly.

  “Good books?”

  “They’re something special, believe me. Take a look and chose the one you want. Come on.”

  The Count stood up and held a hand out to Pigeon, wanting the car keys. The look on the young man’s face showed his disapproval: that whim could cost them dear and, as Yoyi swore, you shouldn’t gamble your children’s food away – though he had none and didn’t intend having any. The suggestion brought Rafael to his feet and they went into the street.

  Pigeon opened the boot and pressed a button to switch on the light. Like any bibliophile stricken by the bug, the musicologist didn’t hide the desire aroused by boxes stuffed with books and, turning to the Count, he checked: “Whichever?”

  “Uh-huh . . .”

  The musicologist inspected the books one by one, slowly, lifting them up level with his face, just a few inches from his spectacles, as if he needed to smell rather than see them. He lingered over some of the tomes he greeted with sporadic cries of “How wonderful!”, “Christ, look at this!”, or a self-satisfied shout of “I’ve already got this one”. Finally, when he’d spread all the copies over the carboot, Rafael focused his desire on the original 1925 edition of The Crisis of High Culture in Cuba, by Jorge Mañach, and another first edition, from 1935, of The Universal History of Infamy. Borges or Mañach? he tried to make his mind up and, sorrowfully, stretched out a right hand and put Mañach’s essay back in one of the boxes he’d just emptied, while he patted his newly acquired copy of the Borges classic.

  “Right then,” he declared, as he caressed the book’s spine, seemingly more frustrated by his inability to have them all than satisfied at being the owner of a rarity half the world was after, “let’s get that record.”

  28 October

  My dear,

  Dawn brought rain today. It was a gentle, persistent rain, as if the sky was weeping and had no intention of stopping, so profound was its grief. God must know
I have not seen you or had any news for thirty-nine days. Did you realize that? I never thought this would happen, but I have learned over the years that we often grow in strength, and have a strange, hidden capacity to resist the hardest blows, which compels us to keep on.

  Tell me, how do you feel? I hope you have fought off the migraines that tormented you so in those last months and have new worries to occupy you, which must be both a blessing and a risk: the blessing being that time will not drag so and the risk that you might welcome the relief resignation and oblivion bring . . .

  The cyclone that appeared to be heading towards us swerved and thankfully passed us by, its gales never touched us, though it did leave this rain in its wake. I had prayed to the Virgin: you know how afraid I am of hurricanes (I must have inherited that from my father, poor man, who trembled at the mere sound of the word cyclone). And, I must say, we have quite enough to deal with, if not too much, with the other whirlwind that has hit the country. There is something new every day, a new law is passed or an old one repealed, someone talks for hours in front of a television camera while another silently departs (many of your old friends, your university colleagues have left), or somebody renounces what he once was (some of these were also friends of yours), wraps himself in the flag and swears he was always a patriot (though he had never done anything to show it), and publicly salutes the freedom and national dignity we’ve finally been given, or so they tell us. We’re living pages of history that are too turbulent: everything is collapsing and new myths are being thrown up; heads roll and things are being renamed. As in any revolution. As a distant witness, with no need to leave the house, I think I have a better view of all that’s happening outside and for the first time I fear the situation may take a really tragic turn and, above all, become irreversible. Is it the definitive end to our world?

  If you had been able to read it, you would have noted in my previous letter how I decided not to mention things that were too sad. But I think so much, all alone, that I need this confession where I can empty out my soul, and you are the only possible destination. I still think that everything that happened, before your departure, was a cruel blow from fate whose hand you were trying to force and which rebelled, like a curse, to remind you of hallowed alliances. I know: horrible thoughts have passed through your mind and most blame me for what happened. But, knowing me as well as you do, you will not find in your brain (if you are fair) and much less in reality the slightest reason to persuade you I was in any way guilty. What is more, my love: I now believe that nobody is guilty. Life simply tried to correct a deviation and return things to their original place, from where they should never have moved. I know your grief and anger will last a long time, but when oblivion begins to erase those feelings, you will understand I am right and see how unfair you have been to think I was guilty of something which you know only too well, I couldn’t even imagine: the act of causing the death of another person is an act I could never commit, whatever the humiliations and grief I have suffered, whatever the grief inflicted on me by that person’s existence and her undesired presence.

  You know that, because of you and your love, I agreed to play the saddest of roles and defer my desires and rights when you embarked on the most ridiculous affair in your whole life. To love her was to kill me. You knew that but didn’t hold back. Often the heart sends out orders when the brain should exercise common sense (something I know only too well) and nothing can resist these orders, although there are times when one has to curb feelings to reach a truth that is just.

  3 November

  My dear:

  Here I am, again.

  I left the house yesterday, for the first time since you left. That outing has given me strength to resume this letter I broke off a few days ago, numbed by grief that brought tears and made my hands shake.

  Can you imagine where I went? I hope you can, because I did it for you. It was All Saints Day and, as was our wont, I visited the graves of your parents and grandparents, and took them the flowers you liked to place in their pantheon. It was a strange experience because it was the first time I’d done this without you. It was even more difficult because your son came with me. I was afraid to go alone, to go out into a world I feel is increasingly hostile, and, once in the cemetery, the poor boy didn’t understand why his mother cried as if we were attending the burial of a loved one who had recently died. Happily, he doesn’t know and doesn’t suffer. He just thinks I am going mad because I weep over the graves of people who died so many years ago.

  This outing helped me to realize how much the country has changed in very few months. From my taxi, I could see how the streets and especially the people still seemed overwhelmed and happy at what is happening, and live normally, without fear of the dangers that increasingly darken the firmament. I found their faces and their eyes expressed a joy that had been hidden too long and, above all, I thought I saw they had hopes and were enjoying a new dignity. How long will this state of collective grace last? . . . I must confess, my love, that I envied them: they have continued with their lives or rediscovered them (your son, in his fanatical enthusiasm, says they have been re-born) and are enjoying the time they will spend on this Earth with an intensity I could only have felt with you at my side, either here or there. As I watched I was persuaded that this time something important had happened, that nothing would ever be the same again. I suddenly understood that people like you and I belong to a time that has been played out. We are the dead from that past and perhaps that is why the cemetery is the place I saw most changes. You can’t imagine how many graves where the people closest to the family used to gather on this day were quite solitary, without flowers, without the consolation of a beloved hand on the cold gravestone. It was then I had a real measure of what is occurring in a country where the living go far away, in search of happiness, or adapt as best they can and put on a smiling front, while their dead lie abandoned in the most unpleasant solitude.

  I didn’t seek to sadden you and make you feel guilty with news like this. You must have a thousand worries on your mind and, it is best for everyone if the dead are left where they are and in the peace they deserve. All the dead. And for life to go on, for those who may still possess such a thing.

  My love, lots of kisses to the children and remind them how much I love them. And please, don’t ever forget who most loved you,

  Your Nena

  He felt his hands sweat as he ever so gingerly lifted up the pick-up arm between two fingers, and moved it backwards so the turntable received its electric go-ahead and started to spin. Then he lowered it slowly, trying to find, though shaking slightly, the first groove on the small acetate. Conde rubbed his hands on his trouser legs and closed his eyes, about to embark on that voyage into the past.

  Bitten by the curiosity bug, Yoyi Pigeon had driven him to Skinny Carlos’s house, where the Count knew an old portable RCA Victor record player existed, that might still be coaxed into action. Thanks to that small machine, whose original speaker they once successfully swapped for a German democratic variety, Conde and his friends had listened hundreds of times to the plastic plaquettes on which Cuban engineers, helped by mysterious processes, pressed the music of Paul Anka, the Beatles and The Mamas and the Papas – now on the final strait to his fifties, Conde still got goose-pimply listening to “Dedicated to the One I Love”. Those distant years, when only such quaint methods enabled you to hear groups on the island that were all the rage in the decadent, capitalist remainder of the planet, where they made and broadcast their petty bourgeois music, unsuitable for the ears of a young revolutionary, according to the wise, Marxist decision taken by the state’s ideological apparatus that banned it from radio and etherized it from television. Only a few privileged children of what you’d hardly call groovy mamas and papas in government posts, who were occasionally allowed to set foot in Mexico, Canada or Spain, had access to the original records, which were so excessively used and abused that they often lost their grooves.

  Like wiz
ards before a mouth-watering brew, on unforgettable evenings and hot nights, Conde, Carlos, Andrés, Rabbit and Candito, all without the privilege of carrying a single drop of leadership blood in their plebeian veins, resigned themselves to those worn-out discs and, gathered round that same record player, dived in and soaked up the hot sounds and words outside their understanding that could leave no trace of ideology but which nevertheless touched sensitive nerve ends. Several years later, when Carlos finally got hold of a small cassette recorder, his friends ratcheted up their enjoyment of music, on copies no less tatty than the previous plaquettes, recorded on corrosive Orwo cassettes – German and democratic to boot. They entered the world of Blood, Sweat and Tears, Chicago and, above all, Credence Clearwater Revival, and turned “Proud Mary” and the gravely voice of Tom Fogerty into icons of the blood ties they had forged from those harsh times, plagued by material shortages and restrictions and slogans that had to be rigorously obeyed, socialist targets and massmeetings to bolster political commitment. It was, nonetheless, a past that they’d think of as almost perfect, perhaps because of their romantic insistence on keeping it intact, as if hibernating in the favourable mists from the best years of their lives.

  Conde and Yoyi had dropped by Carlos’s place with pizzas they’d bought en route and two bottles of rum to clear their throats and brains. While Josefina improved the so-called pizzas by adding a few slices of onion, tomato purée and slivers of green pepper requested by her son, the Count delved into the cupboard on the terrace to unearth the record player, fearing all the while it would be unable to produce a single note. After dusting it inside and out, he cleaned the needle with a handkerchief soaked in a high octane, recently purchased rum, and finally connected it to the current, to see if the turntable at least spun round.