Havana Fever

by Leonardo Padura

  But the previous night could be etched in letters of gold among his memorable experiences, because not even Manolo’s news that there was no trace in the police files of a person called or nicknamed Violeta del Río could dampen the Count’s joy as he surveyed the turkey’s bare rib cage, the bottles of rum, beer, wine and champagne that had been cheerfully emptied of their contents, and witnessed the obvious delight he’d given his friends, in particular Skinny Carlos.

  With two painkillers in his stomach, a cigarette on his lip and a double espresso in his fist, he went out on his terrace and remembered that, when he’d arrived in the early hours, Rubbish had been waiting for him, as if he too had been expecting to partake in a banquet.

  “Rubbish, don’t get too used to this. When the party’s over, we’ll be back to the usual . . .”

  As he watched the animal yawn, while a back leg tried to shake off a particularly annoying flea, Conde vaguely envied this dog that, despite its age, seemed ready to resume life every morning. For a moment he reflected that he should stop postponing the decision to take exercise and reduce his daily quota of cigarettes to a single packet, but shelved this thought immediately, as he realized that if he made the effort he might still have time to meet Katy Barqué before going to the rendezvous agreed with Silvano Quintero the journalist. Right then he was forced to recognize that the basic impulse fuelling this super human sacrifice was an unhealthy curiosity demanding to know – in a quite disproportionately violent fashion – more about Violeta del Río.

  “I’ve always said this: you need two things if you want to sing boleros: a heart this size for all that feeling, and steel-plated, blockbuster ovaries. Your voice is the least of your worries . . . And it’s a fact that, apart from this voice that God gave me and preserves for me as if I were a young fifteen year old, I’ve always had more heart and ovaries than all the other singers put together, starting with Violeta del Río.”

  Conde scrutinized the singer’s mummified face. Katy Barqué was bordering on eighty though perhaps you could agree she was well preserved for her age. But her efforts to look twenty years younger, including surgery to give her face an artificial tautness, were rounded off with several layers of cream, swathes of re-energizing blusher, eyelashes like fans, lips stuffed with silicone and a foulard anchored in the middle of her forehead to pull back towards her skull the most rebellious folds of drooping skin.

  “The bolero is feeling, pure feeling with lots of drama. It speaks about tragedies of the soul and in language that goes from poetry to reality. That’s why you can sing just as well about a cloudy sky, say yours is a strange way to love, or shout ‘be gone, the heat’s gone from between your legs’ . . . The important thing is for it all to come from your soul, making it seem credible, you know?... That’s what I do, and I’m a big star; I’ve done films, musical theatre, operetta, lots of shows . . . Does your film producer know all this?”

  She accompanied her harangue with florid gestures, would-be intense looks and melodic support from snatches of old boleros, as if she were facing the most critical of audiences.

  “Europeans and Americans are very cold, that’s why they don’t understand what a good bolero is, and lately they’ve been going for records full of versions sung by pretty boys, versions that make you want to shit your pants. But really shit them. The bolero is from the Caribbean, that’s why it was born in Cuba, and took root in Mexico, Puerto Rico and Colombia. It’s the love poetry of the tropics, always telling the truth, rather thickly laid on at times, but then we are thickly laid on, nothing we can do about that. Listen to Arsenio Rodríguez’s lyrics and tell me what you think:After you’ve lived

  twenty disappointments

  what does one more matter,

  after you’ve seen

  life in action

  you shouldn’t cry.

  Just accept

  everything is a lie,

  nothing is true.

  Just live for the moment,

  learn to enjoy what’s there,

  (She shakes her head, endorsing Arsenio’s deep truths. Her intense gaze devours Yoyi’s exultant youthfulness.)because all considered

  life is a dream

  and nothing sticks.

  Only birth and death

  are for real

  (A second, more categorical affirmation. She gazes at Yoyi again, more suggestively.)why get so anxious,

  to live is to suffer eternally,

  the world’s a place . . . without joy.

  “Hell, look at my hair standing on end . . . Do you know when poor Arsenio wrote that? When New York’s best doctors said there was no cure for his blindness and he realized he was going to be blind forever . . .”

  Conde looked at Yoyi and, as if by prior agreement, they both nodded. The old diva had more malice than voice, but there was something pathetic about how she sang Arsenio’s memorable bolero, from behind that face mask, wrapped in a kimono covered in Chinese or Japanese characters.

  “As I was saying . . . There was terrific rivalry at the time, you had to be really good to get a slice of the action. You couldn’t imitate anybody, you had to find the best composers, get the arrangers to work to your style, and be lucky enough to put on a good show and then shift to television, which was already in colour here when in Spain they had one television set for Madrid and another for Barcelona . . . I got it all, purely on the strength of my lungs and talent, because I was the best and everybody knew I was the best. By the way, did you read the last interview I gave to Bohemia?”

  Right then Conde had a flash of insight as to why he’d always spontaneously rejected Katy Barqué: it wasn’t, as he’d previously thought, down to the almost masculine timbre of her voice, the ridiculously aggressive, at times filthy lyrics she often wrote herself in her self-appointed role as self-sufficient-woman-able-to-scorn men, or even the opportunist versions of revolutionary anthems and political eulogies she’d slotted into her repertoire at different stages, or the facile poses she adopted on stage – and not only on stage, as he now saw. In fact, his rejection was altogether more visceral, down to the singer’s patent disregard for any sense of historical boundaries and her attempt to cling, against the wind, tide, logic, time and fear of the grotesque, to a pre-eminence that was no longer hers and that for the last twenty years or more had turned her into a singing caricature of herself, a kind of circus act. Unlike others Conde knew, Katy Barqué would never get off her high horse: you’d have to unsaddle her or be resigned to watching her die, disastrously, holding the reins, leaving no heirs and playing the worst of roles in the theatre of life: that of the buffoon.

  “Then Violeta appeared from nowhere all ready to snatch what was mine by right. She was young, with a good body and heart on her, I think, but lacked ovaries . . . and a maestro to teach her how to sing. Poor woman, at times she sounded like she was about to choke . . . But she was a cunning bitch! She landed herself a lover who was mad about her and gave her a push up to get her name in lights. Just imagine an upstart like her as the star on the second bill at the Parisién, when that cabaret was the place to meet those who decided who was or wasn’t any good in Havana, in Cuba . . .”

  From the moment they reached the well-lit penthouse in that big house on Línea, Conde and Pigeon felt that they’d visually entered a kind of museum of bolero kitsch. An evidently amateur portrait in oils, of Katy Barqué at the height of her physical splendour, occupied the premier spot on the wall in a reception room crammed with china and glassware – the height of bad taste was a metal flower, now rusting, on a plinth that declared: Prize for the Most Popular – awarded in recognition of her fifty plus years in the business.

  “Besides that she had a nerve. Really quite shameless. One day I found out she was saying things behind my back and I just had to put her straight: I grabbed hold of her and even told her to go to hell. Because it’s one thing to defend yourself as best you can, quite another to clamber over the heads of others to get some of the limelight. I wasn’t ha
ving any of that. We had some good singers here, Celia Cruz, Olguita Guillot, Elena Burke, a good number, but each trod her own path and nobody ever trespassed on somebody else’s terrain. It was like an unwritten law. But that girl didn’t understand a thing and was messing us all about. Do you know what singing all night in a club for no pay means? Excuse my honesty, but they were bad tactics and it was bad for business . . . Don’t you think?”

  Yoyi Pigeon nodded: his trading ethics appreciated Barqué’s logic. But Conde pondered over the star’s thoughts, and remembered how in her interviews he’d never heard her mention any of the great boleristas, the really great ones, the ones who might make it obvious that Barqué’s rise had most to do with self-promotion and opportunism of every stripe, including the sexual and political varieties.

  “I never found out who the man was behind her. There was a lot of gossip in Havana, but he never showed his face. He must have been a wealthy fellow and full of prejudices and he didn’t want to be seen with a cabaret singer, who, what’s more, certainly had a peculiar look about her: lovely hair and all that, but don’t anyone try to fool me, she looked like a nigger.”

  The absence of a clinching name, however, confirmed the Count in his idea that the mysterious lover was none other than Alcides Montes de Oca. And that was reinforced by his suspicion that for some unknown reason Katy Barqué was avoiding identifying a person he was sure she knew, so intent was she on waging her individual war against Violeta del Río.

  “After that row I never saw her again, fortunately . . . Five or six months later, she announced she was giving up singing and promptly disappeared from the scene. I was as happy as Larry: one less, another with no stamina for the fight, sleepless nights, and the struggle to get good performing and recording contracts. If she was going to marry that wealthy individual, she could put all that behind her and enjoy her good luck, because she wasn’t like me, an artist devoted night and day to my art. She was a just a bed-hopper who’d struck lucky . . . Later on, when I barely remembered she’d ever existed, I found out she’d committed suicide. That’s right: she killed herself . . . By the way, how the fuck did you come across her?”

  The news of her suicide, right out of the blue, provoked a primitive response from Yoyi and sent the Count’s mind and body into a whirl. The certainty that Violeta del Río was now just a press cutting and a voice heard dimly on an old crackling 45 killed at a stroke Mario Conde’s high hopes, nourished over the two days he’d been dreaming, that he might find the mysterious, seductive woman alive: she whose image and way of singing had begun to obsess him as if were an infatuated adolescent. A wave of frustration hit him. He suddenly felt lost in the tragic final lines of a bolero: lines written to shatter expectations raised by a sultry love song.

  “Where the fuck does that old man live?” enquired Yoyi when a bewildered, disappointed Count pointed him out of calle Zanja and into Rayo, in search of Silvano Quintero’s residence.

  Despite a few recent cosmetic touches, Havana’s old Chinatown was still the same sordid, oppressive place. Over decades the Asians who’d come to the island had huddled together there, vainly hoping they’d find a better life, even dreaming they’d get rich, a dream that had been quickly flattened. These ancient, increasingly obsolete Chinese businesses had postponed their inevitable and natural demises, by changing into restaurants – their greasy offerings got pricier by the day – and had brought life and atmosphere to the area. But the district was still gripped by its rapid, apparently unstoppable, degeneration. It emerged from potholes in the streets brimming with stinking water, climbed over metal bins packed with detritus and scaled walls gnawing at them, and occasionally causing them to collapse. Those old buildings from the beginning of the twentieth century, many now turned into tenements where several families crammed in, had long ago shed any charm they might have once had, and unremitting decline now offered up vistas of horrific poverty. Blacks, whites, Chinese and mestizos of all bloods and beliefs lived in a poverty that didn’t discriminate between skin tone or geographical origins, putting everyone on an equal footing in a struggle to survive that made everyone aggressive and cynical, like the hopeless beings they’d become.

  “Go another two blocks in that direction,” the Count instructed him, imagining Pigeon couldn’t be well-pleased at having to navigate his shiny, white-stripe-tyred Bel Air between the puddles in the street and razor-sharp eyes giving them the once over.

  “The other day the television said the worst of the crisis was over . . .” Yoyi talked as he steered round the potholes in the street. “The guy who said that hadn’t been round here. It gets worse and worse . . .”

  “It always was a barrio in a bad state,” the Count recalled.

  “Never like this. With all this restaurant mess and tourist riffraff this place is about to explode. And to cap all that now they’re pushing drugs . . . And we’re not talking opium . . . What should do I do?”

  “Go on, it’s the next corner . . . You ever tried drugs, Yoyi?”

  “Where you going with that, man?” he replied jumpily.

  ‘I’m not a policeman anymore. I was just interested to know . . .”

  “The odd spiked rum, a party spliff, but nothing harder, I swear. Look at this body on me: it takes some looking after . . .”

  “How’d you react if I told you I’d never done any drugs at all?”

  “I’d not react any different, man: you and your friends are Martians. They put you lot into a test tube . . . And how did you come out? The New Man you mentioned the other day? No, they filled the tube with alcohol and you lot got off on that fix . . .”

  “Why do you reckon so many people get hooked? Is it that easy to get drugs?”

  “You have to be kidding. There’s zero money here and zero money equals zero trade. Ten, twenty, say a hundred tourists, prepared to buy the odd drug? A hundred kids with enough dollars for a line? That’s not enough to start trading . . .”

  “So where do they get it? Because there are drugs out there . . .”

  “Consignments float in from the sea and someone fishes them out. The cycle kicks off: the guy who gets it out of the ocean invests nothing and sells it cheap to the man who sells it in Havana. It’s pure profit from day one, no big investments, that’s how the trade started. But after the police cleanup it’s got more difficult, though some lunatic will always take a risk and sell whatever washes up. The worst of it is that it’s more expensive now and more diluted, so dealers earn more and junkies get into bigger messes trying to get money . . .”

  “When we were fifteen or twenty, we’d not even seen a joint. I had to join the police to find out what one smelled like . . . And look at me now.”

  The lad smiled.

  “I believe you . . .”

  “Stop, it’s here.”

  “Conde, you know that woman committed suicide years ago . . . so what are you after exactly?”

  “I don’t know,” he confessed again. “Whatever I’ve yet to find out, I suppose.”

  Yoyi parked his car in front of the building. It was typical of the area, and in a state of decline the Count had anticipated. In the adjacent half ruin, a swarm of people busy cleaning century-old bricks, salvaging rusted metal bars and prehistoric tiles, ready to recycle rather than to patch up their houses, while others sniffed among the debris looking for the unexpected something they’d almost certainly never find. Several people were dragging fifty-five gallon tanks of water along the street, on trolleys cobbled together with old bearings, as if sentenced to hard labour, and the only two real Chinamen the Count could see – so old they might be millenarian – were sitting on a doorjamb selling small tins of the Chinese ointment the Count got through so quickly as balsam for his headaches. From windows open onto the street, small counters hawked pizzas made from dubious cheeses, pastries made from stolen flour, coffee blended with cat paw, and dubiously filled croquettes. Men chatted on each street corner, as if they owned time itself. The Count calculated that on that
hundred-yard stretch of street more than sixty people were inventing ways to sort their lives or at least endure them with the least trauma possible. The feeling of decline in the air alarmed the ex-policeman, and his skin trembled with fear: it was a situation at explosion point, and nothing like the pleasant city he’d known for so many years. Too many people without hopes or dreams. Too much heat and pressure under the lid of a pot that, sooner or later, would have to burst.

  While Pigeon agreed a price for protecting his car with two black guys who looked like ex-convicts, the Count crossed the street, sidestepping a swollen rat floating in a puddle, and bought four tins of pomade at ten pesos apiece from the Chinamen. He surveyed the scene and was reminded of images of African cities he’d seen on television. A return to our origins, he thought, as he geared himself up for the bigger shocks in store.

  Conde and Yoyi went into the building and up the stairs. A smell of rank damp and fermenting urine hit them, and despite feeling queasy, Conde didn’t dare touch the grimy banister, and kept his distance from the wall and its hanging garden of dozens of frayed electric cables, constantly threatening to short circuit. On the first floor the stairs led to a narrow passage dotted with mostly open doors. Conde peered over the metal parapet and down at an inside yard, where several people sat around a domino table, seemingly immune to the fetid atmosphere, exacerbated by the contribution from a pen where two pigs slept and a cage where several spindly hens pecked. On each corner of the table, Conde registered bottles of beer and plates with leftover food.