Havana Fever

by Leonardo Padura

  Dionisio Ferrero turned pale.

  “That’s impossible,” he retorted, convinced Conde was hallucinating. “I’d never touched them before.”

  The Count had forgotten Dionisio and, keeping them close to his chest, caressed the books’ leather. “If only Cristóbal could see them . . .”

  ‘Cristóbal?’ Dionisio seemed more and more in a dither, unable to understand what was unravelling so unexpectedly in front of his very eyes. “Who might Cristóbal be?”

  “But how the fuck did that black guy, who limped out of his mother’s fucking cunt, ever walk straight to these books?” an angry Yoyi almost shouted, in a state of shock increasingly fanned by bad vibes about the future.

  “Far too great a coincidence,” allowed the Count, finally taking the books to the bookcase they’d chosen for the editions they were putting in the not-for-sale category. “Far too great,” he repeated, caressing the awesome spines of the two volumes yet again, as if amorously bidding them farewell, and he tried to shake off the sensations gripping him. “Down to work, Yoyi, unless we want that man to beat us in a little fraternal socialist rivalry, right?”

  Until he’d turned into a professional predator of books, intent on feeding from his profits, Mario Conde had enjoyed a respectful, almost mystical relationship with libraries. Although the overheated, quarrelsome barrio where he’d been born wasn’t home to a single library of more than twenty books, luck would have it that there were a dozen books in his own house – all belonging to his mother, for his father, like his Grandfather Rufino the Count, never opened a book in his life – that had got there along the most diverse paths, and were now arrayed proudly and prominently, and as if someone suspected those objects might be valuable, at one end of the sideboard top, next to his parents’ wedding photo, a Viennese porcelain clock and a small art nouveau vase. Throughout his adolescence, Conde read those books in his odd moments – two volumes of Reader’s Digest Selections, the tearful, as far as he was concerned abominable Heart, by Edmundo de Amicis, one of Sandokán’s adventures and, above all, Huckleberry Finn, in a cheap edition that was falling to pieces – and felt timidly enthused at being attracted by an activity that was so uncommon in members of his family and inhabitants of his barrio, who were generally not very fond of such passive hobbies. Even when the Count preferred to spend his time playing ball-games, idling around the streets and stealing mangos, his innate curiosity led him to take his first step to becoming a bibliophile when, after reading The Count of Montecristo in a state of emotional ecstasy, he decided to find out about Edmund and Mercedes’ final destinies. He’d hunted out the second act of that fabulous adventure, only to encounter a disappointing, almost cruel Dumas, who in The Dead Man’s Hand destroyed the happiness over which generous-hearted Dantès and his beloved Mercedes had expended so much effort. A couple of years later, now enrolled at Pre-Uni, curiosity again came to his aid, this time conclusively, after reading a ridiculously abridged version of The Iliad, as an exercise in class. Conde visited the wellstocked library in the old La Víbora grammar school in search of a complete version of Homer’s poem and, intrigued by the fates of its warriors, looked for answers in The Odyssey and naturally, without any effort on his part, fell into a trap with no way out as he tried to discover the fates of the remaining Greek heroes. It was Cristóbal, the old one-legged librarian, who first encouraged him to read the Aeneid and later other sagas of Achean heroes.

  His relationship with Lame Cristóbal, as they all called him at the Pre-Uni, was an encounter that decisively shaped the life of Mario Conde, who soon became a voracious, compliant reader, able to finish any book he started – he got the better of Les Misérables and even The Magic Mountain – and began to love books and libraries the way believers worship their shrines: as sacred places only to be profaned at the risk of eternal perdition.

  Apart from supplying him with books and guiding him in his reading, Cristóbal was the first to detect that the boy had latent sensitivities and to urge him to try his hand at writing. Mario Conde, who always possessed an acute sense of his many limitations, was terrified of looking like a fool and so discounted the idea, but the seed lodged in a hidden corner of his consciousness, ready to germinate. In the meantime, he deepened his relationship with books and, thanks to the old librarian, familiarized himself with the important books published in Cuba in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth, and began to value books not only for their content, but often for their frequently ignored continent, age and origin.

  One of Cristóbal’s most persistent challenges was to bring the young man closer to a part of Cuban literature that was being concealed by new political and aesthetic tendencies. Consequently, he made him read the innumerable writers damned and slandered in the arid decade of the seventies, writers who Conde wouldn’t hear about in public until many years later. To open the door to that past world, Cristóbal selected Lino Novás Calvo and Carlos Montenegro, with whom he intuited – quite rightly – the young man would soon easily connect, thanks to their tales of slavetraders, thugs and convicts. Then followed Labrador Ruiz, Lydia Cabrera and Enrique Serpa, and he was later thrust into the caustic worlds of Virgilio Piñera, who at the time was sentenced to the most crushing silence, where he met his death. As a result of all those writers he read at the age of sixteen and seventeen, Conde shaped a complex view of his past, of the past of all the island’s inhabitants, and gleaned that the world could enjoy a variety of colours and truths infinitely more complex than those officially on offer.

  In his wild youth Mario Conde committed various excesses – he stole food on sugar-cane encampments where they were sent off harvesting for several months, cheated in examinations when the questions were leaked by the management of the Pre-Uni to guarantee high rankings, was deceitful when it came to paying in the ice-cream shop next to the school, and filched books from The Woodworm bookshop – but he never dared take a single school library book for personal gain, even though Cristóbal made him an unthinkable exception and let him go into the store-cupboard to sniff around and choose books to read. The conviction that the world was a battlefield whereas a library could be an inviolably neutral, collective terrain, took root in his spirit as one of the most pleasant insights in life, a notion he’d have to revisit, when the Crisis came, in order to survive, as so many others had to with their memories and even dignity intact.

  In spite of the years he’d invested in book buying and selling, Conde always felt quite uneasy when he worked as a library predator and, as a matter of principle, decided never to buy any book that was stamped as public property. However, in all the time he’d devoted to such commercial dealing, he’d never sensed he was so acutely engaged in an act of profanation as with the library of the Montes de Ocas. Perhaps the fact he knew the treasure had remained untouched during more than forty years of revolutionary hurricanes – until the moment he had entered the sanctuary – as a consequence of an unbending pledge, contributed to his feeling of unease. Knowing that three generations of a Cuban family had devoted money and effort to that wondrous array of close to 5,000 volumes, that had travelled half the globe in order to find a place in these bookcases which were immune to damp and dust, seemed like an act of love he was now mercilessly destroying. Most painful of all was the certainty that profanation would lead to chaos and that chaos often sparked off the collapse of the most solid of systems. Wasn’t his presence helping to verify that equation? His hands and economic interests were violating something sacred, and the Count anticipated his deed would provoke a chain reaction he still couldn’t imagine, but which was imminent.

  It was on one of those lethargic afternoons when young Conde had taken shelter with a book in the coolest, most out-of-theway corner of La Víbora Pre-Uni library, that Lame Cristóbal, leaning on his crutches, interrupted him on the pretext that he wanted to share a cigarette with his pupil. For the rest of his life, Mario Conde would never forget how that initially nondescript conversation suddenly changed t
one when Cristóbal began to speak about the library’s uncertain future. His retirement date was long past and, at some fast-approaching date, he’d have to take his crutches and love for books elsewhere, perhaps to the grave. The old man most fretted about what was going to happen to the books he’d preserved and defended for almost thirty years, books he was sure nobody would love and look after as he had.

  “Each of the books back there,” he pointed to the stacks, “has a soul, has a life of its own, and retains part of the lives and souls of boys, like you, who’ve passed through this library and read them over these thirty years . . . I’ve classified every one, put them in place, cleaned, refurbished and glued them whenever necessary . . . Condecito, I’ve seen so much lunacy in my lifetime. What on earth is going to happen to them? You’re graduating this year and will leave. I’ll retire or die, but will have to go as well. The books will be abandoned to their fate. I hope the next librarian will be like me. It will be a calamity if he or she isn’t. Each book here is irreplaceable, each has a word, a sentence, an idea that’s waiting for its reader.” Cristóbal put his cigarette out, pulled himself up on the table, and stuck a crutch under an arm. “I’m going to have a bite to eat. Look after the library . . . Before I get back, go in and choose the books you need or like. Take them, save them, and above all, look after them.”

  Astonished by the very suggestion, the Count watched Cristóbal leave, swaying on his wooden supports. Half an hour later, when the old man returned, Conde was still in the same place, reading the same book.

  “Why didn’t you do what I told you to do?” enquired the librarian.

  “I don’t know, Cristóbal, I can’t . . .”

  “You’ll be sorry . . .”

  Fifteen years later, when Detective Lieutenant Mario Conde went back to the old Pre-Uni in La Víbora, to investigate the murder of a young chemistry teacher, one of the first places he visited was the once neat and tidy library, where Cristóbal had urged him to read Virgil, Sophocles, and Euripides, Novás Calvo, Piñera and Carpentier. To his eternal grief, the ex-student had had to acknowledge that Lame Cristóbal’s fears had been surpassed. A few battered, moribund books were dozing among the empty spaces on the once packed shelves, whence Greek and Latin classics, tragic Englishmen and Italian poets, chroniclers of the Indies and Cuban novelists and historians had flown their nest. The plundering had been merciless and systematic, and apparently nobody had been held responsible for the vandalism. Conde thought how, in his grave, Lame Cristóbal must have felt that wilful profanation whiplashing his bones, destroying his poor life’s finest work as a handicapped librarian who loved his precious books.

  That afternoon’s crop was worth the sacrifice that Yoyi and the Count made by missing out on their lunch break and stifling the cries of anguish from bellies that wanted more corn to grind. Spurred on by fear of other undesirable intrusions, they managed to inspect a third of the library and took 263 highly coveted books from the house of the Ferreros who, apart from receiving the $436 and 1,300 pesos the buyers owed them, shook all over when they heard they were now owed a total of 28,400 pesos, of which they received the 6,000 Yoyi was carrying on him. In the meantime, Conde and his business partner decided to create a third reserve from the books they’d originally discounted, volumes that were certainly sellable but at a modest price, forming a bulky emergency holding of almost 500 books, set aside for a second phase of buying and selling. At the same time, they put several tomes in the section of those “not for sale”, including the two illustrated books that so aroused the Count’s sensibility, plus an extraordinary 1716 Mexican edition of the poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; the highly prized, much sought after Island of Cuba, illustrated by thirty luminous engravings by Federico Mialhe Grenier, printed in Havana in 1848; a copy of the Birds of the Island of Cuba, by Juan Lembelle, dated Havana 1850, the always much coveted 1891 New York first edition of Martí’s Simple Verse, endorsed by the apostle’s signature in a dedication to “the compatriot and brother Serafín Montes de Oca, the good man”, and the two tomes – which the Count walked away from particularly sorrowfully – of the very rare, much sought after edition of the Poetry of Citizen José María Heredia, published in Toluca in 1832, which was presented as the corrected, extended second edition, though valued by connoisseurs as a first edition of the Cuban classic, because it removed inaccuracies and added important poems excluded from the 1825 New York original.

  Their great pleasure at the incredible deal they’d just clinched couldn’t, however, dispel Yoyi’s distress at the alarming presence in that mine of books of a buyer equipped with dangerous radar able to lead him to the most coveted treasures of Cuban publishing. Nor could it silence the malevolent echoes of Silvano Quintero’s story, still ringing in Mario Conde’s ears, who, immediately after agreeing the financial deal with Pigeon – a deal loading him up with many thousands of pesos the like of which he’d never seen – preferred to take refuge in the solitude of his own home as he needed time and space to think things over.

  After taking a shower, he swallowed the two pork sandwiches he’d bought in one of the barrio’s pokey shops – although he only handed his money over after critically inspecting the protein content, for he wouldn’t have been the first to eat roast dog or stewed cat at porky prices – and decided against hunting for rum or ringing Skinny to talk over recent events, or Tamara, to suggest a visit so he could tell her of the discovery of the Heredia poems she liked so much. The previous day’s excesses, his exhaustion after an excitement-packed day on the streets and a desperate need to sort his own ideas out, all disposed him to enjoy an exemplary peaceful night. Armed with his cigarettes and half a cup of coffee, he went up to his house’s terrace roof, followed by Rubbish, and settled down on a block of concrete, his feet on the edge of the eaves. Despite the daytime heat, night brought a pleasant breeze, heralding October, and the Count felt happy in himself at being able to occupy a vantage-point overlooking the old barrio of the Conde family, the territory of his nostalgia and ancestors. He looked at the hill with the quarries and, through the foliage of poplars, gum-bearing ocuje and weeping figs, he intuited, rather than saw, the castle with its English tiled roof, where his grandfather Rufino el Conde had laboured almost a hundred years ago. It was always a relief to know the haughty, larger-than-life castle was still there, as it made him feel there were things that never changed in this world, that could navigate unharmed the turbulence of time and history.

  Rubbish nuzzled and nibbled in between his legs wanting a spot of affection, and the Count scratched him behind the ears, where his pet most appreciated it. Ignoring the swollen tick Rubbish must have picked up on one of his sallies into the street, Conde let his mind float freely and was visited by the grotesque image of Silvano Quintero’s hooked hand. Something far too grim must have occurred in the vicinity of the late Violeta del Río for her so-called friends to give such a drastic warning to a nosy journalist. The presence in the apartment block on Third and Twenty-Sixth of a character like mafia capo Meyer Lansky might have simply been fortuitous, but what Silvano Quintero had suffered indicated the unfolding presence of a darker intrigue, a mystery the Count, with his usual fondness for prejudice, refused to admit might directly implicate Violeta, whatever the dark, hidden motivation was. The most visible factors pointed to a connection between Lansky and Alcides Montes de Oca, who, according to Amalia Ferrero, had amassed a fortune in that period, even though he didn’t belong to the circle of those favoured by the bloodthirsty Fulgencio Batista. Had Don Alcides done profitable business thanks to his criminal connections? Possibly, since apart from the drug-trafficking which Lansky personally avoided, the Jewish mafioso had succeeded in laundering all his operations in Cuba thanks to the fact that gambling was legal on the island and to Batista’s self-interested support of all his banking and real-estate speculation. Those deals fulfilled the former hoodlum’s golden dream, transforming him into a respectable businessman at the epicentre of a great Cuban tourist pro
ject, conceived as a Gold Coast between Mariel and Varadero, stretching along more than one hundred and twenty-five miles of warm idyllic coastline, barely ninety miles from Florida and forty minute’s flight from Miami, a blue strip on the edge of warm currents from the Gulf of Mexico, endowed with the best beaches in the world and especially suited to the construction of hotels, casinos, luxury residential estates, marinas, restaurants and countless other attractions, able to generate almost inconceivable millions of dollars in a very few years. If all that took off on a secure legal base backed by government support, Conde couldn’t see any reason to risk a scandal by mutilating a lovesick showbiz reporter who’d banged on a door behind which a woman was singing. But why use a flat under the name of one Luis Mallet who’d still not put in an appearance? The fact that Alcides Montes de Oca belonged to the Creole aristocracy, and was the widower of a Méndez-Figueredo, might explain why he was so wary about his relationship with Violeta del Río and even more so about any he might have with Madame Lotus Flower. Nonetheless, the precautions surrounding those connections were excessive if it was just a matter of clandestine affairs, as Silvano Quintero had remarked. All the paths from the Count’s logic led to a dark abyss, at the bottom of which must lie the convoluted reasoning that might be the real cause of all that secrecy and violence and, perhaps, the bolerista’s cyanide suicide.

  But, come on, you tell me: what the fuck has this half-century old story got to do with you? What does it matter to you if she killed herself or was killed, if you’re never going to find out the truth? Are you obsessing like this in homage to your father? Smoking a second cigarette and intent on crushing Rubbish’s impertinent tick on the layers of adobe covering the roof, the Count decided the time had come to dampen his curiosity, forget his hunches and close the book on that story which belonged to someone else. He should be more than content to settle for his pleasing discovery of the recorded voice of Violeta del Río, the revelation of the impossible love that had tormented his father and, above all, to enjoy his dip in the most astounding private library any Cuban of his time had ever stepped into, thanks to which he could now enjoy an economic breathing space in the company of Tamara and his old friends. Insistence on exhuming that past, on searching for a female suicide’s increasingly complicated ghost, brought a bitter taste like attempting to make love to a beautiful corpse, when what he needed right now was a living, breathing woman. The truth was beyond reach, he thought, and would have to remain locked in the stronghold where it had been locked away, for there were only two possible leads he could play with: mad Mummy Ferrero and Lotus Flower the singer, presuming that the latter was still alive, within reach and prepared, moreover, to tell what she knew.