Havana Fever

by Leonardo Padura

  After he left the building he took almost a minute to locate the whereabouts of calle Factoría, which he concluded must be several blocks to his left. As in his days as a policeman, he began to prepare for what might be a trying interview. He walked along the pavement, his mind in ferment, hardly hearing the music that switched and changed from house to house, or noticing the hectic activity in the barrio.

  Stripped of his capacity to react, Mario Conde only realized something was amiss when they’d pushed him violently through the open door of a tenement. Propelled by a violent shove, his feet twisted like slack ropes and, in a free, seemingly endless fall downwards, Conde’s retina registered electric cables dangling next to a staircase, plastic sacks full of rubbish, a bicycle’s deflated tyre, and even a dirty, bare concrete floor inexorably approaching his face, as his nose was hit by the horrifically acidic stench of stale urine, and he felt them pull his head back and put out the light.

  His throat felt on fire, as if he’d swallowed a cup of boiling sand . . . He would die for a drop of water, would give his kingdom for a mouthful of water . . . A remote instinct made him put his hand in his pocket and dig around, until his fingers touched a small metal pot and he thought: an oasis, I’m saved. Trying to keep his movements to a minimum to avoid setting off more pain, he forced open the tiny container and dabbed Chinese pomade on his forehead. It was a shock to find his head in its usual place, not entirely centred maybe, although it was clear the afflicted mass was not the same head he’d had that afternoon: it felt as if it had grown, overflowed its bone structure and that its swollen version was about to explode. With the edge of his nail he placed a dab of pomade on the tip of his tongue: the heat from the Asiatic ointment was soothing and reminded him vaguely but unmistakably, that in some murky, not too distant place and time, he’d talked to a pale, slow-moving man, who’d emerged from the deepest shadows in an absurd orange tunic that had almost made him roar with laughter. Why did the images from that hallucination seem so real? Could it be the memory of a real experience? He remembered how the man who was perhaps too tall to be true, had walked over to him, his silhouette swathed by a thick luminous halo – could he be God himself ? he’d wondered at the time – and immediately, without even introducing himself, he’d begun to talk, in a deliberate, guttural tone, of noble truths and suffering. Although he still couldn’t decide where he’d met him before, when he saw him close-up and heard him hold forth, he was quite sure he already knew who he was, even felt he was very familiar and struggled to follow his argument on pain as an intrinsic element of the human condition, from birth to death, because life is only a cycle that’s renewed with each reincarnation. Reincarnation? So I’m dead, am I? wondered the Count, thinking that state would better explain the presence of the Enlightened One – I know this bastard – but the man shook his head and he told him: “You’re wrong on every front, you are always wrong, you are wrong too often . . . And you’re stubborn: you want to find an explanation for everything, that’s your problem, and you refuse to understand that nature cannot be explained by any single or fixed system of definition,” he embarked on a protracted pause. “The world, Conde, is as it is, independent of any specific thought one may have about it. And you’re full of terribly specific thoughts, you even want your thoughts to change the world, and forget that all your mind can change is yourself. Get rid of your prejudices and meditate . . .” “Where do I know you from, how come you know me and are able to speak of my thoughts and prejudices” the Count remembered asking, and felt those words were sounding increasingly familiar when uttered by this spectre hovering between this world and another. “Suffering comes from the desire for possession. Our mind and feelings malfunction when they cling to the prejudices of experience. Don’t prevaricate any more: meditate and ascend, meditate and set yourself free. You will then understand that nothing is random: everything that has happened wanted to happen . . .” These words suddenly assumed their full meaning in the Count’s mind and unleashed tremors in his brain: “wanted to happen”. “No, that’s impossible,” he told the Enlightened One, “is it really you? I don’t believe it . . .” “Do you understand what I was saying?” his pale interlocutor reproached him: “You only dare believe in what you think you should believe in and never open your mind . . .” “Don’t tell me it’s you?” the Count persisted, overjoyed, ignoring his interlocutor’s reproaches: of course, wanted to happen, and for many years the Count had wanted it, even when he knew it was impossible. The slow, pale man was one of his unmovable gods, right, an Enlightened Being, almost a mukta, a man who knows God – or at least someone who’d got very, very close to him, along the way to perfection – and to have him there, at his side, and hear him, was a priceless privilege. “I’ve always wanted to speak to you,” he finally whispered, his voice overcome by emotion, “though not to speak of death and suffering, or even of reincarnation, which, if truth be told, I couldn’t give a fig for. This shit life is hard enough to cope with, and I don’t hanker after another. I want to talk to you about something much trickier, more intangible, as you say . . . Tell me please, what do you do to write stories that are really squalid and moving? What’s the secret? Why does Seymour commit suicide on his honeymoon night? And what about Buddy, what happened to Buddy Glass after he moved to that cabin outside New York? And did Esmé ever find happiness? Did she get the story the soldier wrote for her? Tell me that and also tell me: is it true you wrote nothing in all these years?. . .” Reeling from this flood of questions, the Enlightened One looked uncomfortable in his orangey tunic, frowned severely, and shook his head refusing to spill forth, but was unable to repress a brief smile, when the Count renewed his onslaught: “I can’t believe it’s true you’ve not written again. You do know that’s a crime? It’s all very well meditating, enlightening yourself – you must see really well with all that light you radiate, to be sure – and distancing yourself from the world, hell, but you can’t stop writing, you can’t. I can’t accept you’ve given up writing in order to meditate, you of all people. That’s more than criminal . . . What’s your name?” “Call me J.D.,” conceded the man. “Uh-huh, J.D., J.D.,’ the Count repeated, happy to have done the necessary reading and meditation to merit that trust that enabled him to call him J.D., and went on: “Yes, it’s a crime, J.D., because you had lots more to write and we had lots more to read.” “How do you know?” the Enlightened One interjected, and Conde began to feel several hidden sorrows surface again, as the light emanating from J.D. faded into the darkness, his pallor deepened, and his tunic melted away. But Conde shouted: “I know because when I read you I want to go on reading you. I love reading you . . . Do you know what else? Yes, you do: what I most cherish, when I’m feeling totally exhausted after I’ve read a book, is my wish to be the author’s friend and be able to ring him at any time. I would have rung you lots of times. It’s that simple, you see?” J.D. nodded and his blurred face reflected invincible pride in the fact someone could quote a character of his from memory. But he shook off the hint of earthly vanity and looked pitifully at his interrogator: “Never meet a writer if you like his book, dixit Chandler. And he was right: writers are a strange breed. Better read than meet them, that’s for sure,” and he straightened his orange tunic before fading into the Havana night, although the Count thought he heard, or at least thought he recalled hearing the increasingly ethereal voice of the Enlightened One telling him, before he vanished completely: I must leave myself things to do in my other lives . . . and besides, too many books have already been written. Remember what the Buddha taught: there is only one essential time to wake up; and that time is now. So wake up now, you bastard . . . Darkness returned, as if obeying an order, and, now totally conscious, Conde became painfully aware of his body and the thirst burning his throat. He quickly tasted a little more Chinese pomade, wondering if that was the magic formula to bring J.D. back, but J.D. didn’t return and he felt sorrow rather than pain, because J.D. hadn’t given him a little telephone number so he cou
ld ring him after he’d read one of his squalid and moving stories for the hundredth time.

  Lying on the grass, wracked by the pain issuing from his battered anatomy, Mario Conde realized he couldn’t pinpoint how long he’d needed before finally daring to open his eyes, because in spite of his wishes, only one eye raised its lid, the bare minimum necessary to see that night had fallen and he was alone. He closed his working eye and felt the other, only to find a moist, latent swelling extending from his eyebrow to his cheek. Had they knocked an eye out? he wondered, momentarily forgetting his conversation with the Enlightened One, because thirst and pain were pummelling him, and he felt a desperate desire to cry from his surviving eye. He fought off the pains shooting up his back, knee, stomach, face, the nape of his neck and, especially, from inside his head, pulled himself up and, hands against the ground, rode out a dizzy spell that was regrettably non-alcoholic. From the heart of darkness he saw he was on empty wasteland and a few minutes later glimpsed, 200 metres away, a poorly lit street along which the odd car sped. He wondered if it would be best to crawl to the street, but was afraid he might cut his hands on the broken glass that was no doubt scattered among the grass. He summoned all his energy, pulled himself up on his knees and, holding his battered head, made the supreme effort necessary to totter to his feet as if in one of his most drunken moments. He then realized that he was barefoot and, when he touched his chest, that he was bare-chested too. And what about that eye? Had they really knocked it out?

  Twelve falls later, burnt by the thirst searing his throat, with a new sharp pain in the sole of his left foot, the remnants of Mario Conde finally made it to the road, and he saw he was near the silent, rusting power station that cast its gloomy, geometrical shadows over the wasteland. He thought his best option would be to cross the street to the service station and try to locate Yoyi or Manolo from there, but doubted he had the strength to make it that far. Before attempting such a risky crossing he’d have to recoup energy; he flopped to his knees in the grass, and was unable to stop his body from collapsing in the direction of the pavement. He probably lost consciousness as he fell because he felt no pain when his face hit the concrete.

  The hand swabbing his sore eyebrow and cheek brought him back into the land of the suffering. The stabbing pains were so severe that the Count struck out.

  “Hey, easy does it, Bobby,” said a voice. “They gave you enough to eat and take away . . . Let me clean you up a bit, then they’ll X-ray you up to your ears.”

  Conde realized the voice wasn’t his enlightened friend’s and, imagining he must be in a place as mundane and nasty as a hospital he asked: “Did they knock one of my eyes out?”

  “No, it’s still there but in a mess.”

  “Who are you?”

  “A nurse. The doctor gave you a painkiller and we’re going to stitch you up now.”

  “With a needle?” asked the Count, appalled.

  “Yes, of course, though you’ve got so many holes we could use a sewing machine . . . Up you get . . . now faint again, I’ll start on the eyebrow . . .”

  “Wait a minute . . . Let me weep a few tears first . . .”

  “All right, but make it quick.”

  “Hey, by the way, you ever seen a big guy around here in an orange tunic?”

  “Yes, he was round and about, but went off to the carnival. Come on, faint, then I can get on with it.”

  Five minutes or hours later the Count moved his eyelids and suspected he really was dead – definitively, unequivocally dead, as if someone had ignored all his sins and he was ascending to heaven, where an angelical voice said: “It’s him, it’s him.”

  When he opened his working eye, he could see, from his supine position, Tamara, Candito, Rabbit and Yoyi’s faces: his blurred brain worked out that the voice he’d heard belonged to none of those archangels. He dropped his head to one side and found himself level with the face of Skinny Carlos, leaning forward in his wheel chair.

  “Hey, brother, you got one hell of a pasting.”

  “You’re kidding, Skinny, they didn’t even take an eye out.”

  Mario Conde refused to report the incident. He thought it would be absurd, a sign of softness in the head, to start telling a policeman that some bad guys had kicked him to pulp because he’d poked his nose somewhere he wasn’t invited. Besides, who could he blame for his drubbing apart from himself, his own naivety and stupidity? The unlikely names of Veneno and Michael Jordan were the ones that came to mind as possibly being behind the attack, but lack of proof and his conviction that both would have set up good alibis were grounds enough to see that making a statement would be futile. To cap it all, in the depths of his battered self he felt grateful: they were only telling him he was unwelcome in the barrio and bidding him farewell in their time-honoured manner.

  The doctor insisted on keeping him under observation in hospital for a day, but when he discovered nothing was broken, that he’d only severe bruising, soreness and a couple of wounds they’d already stitched on his left eyebrow and behind his right ear, Conde asked to leave and swore an oath – which he conveniently faked by raising his fingers – that he’d inject himself with the prescribed antibiotics. Taking full advantage of his situation, he pretended to turn down Tamara’s suggestion that she could put him up for a few days: why should she bother, he said, if it’s nothing serious, but yielded tamely the first time she insisted.

  When he finally saw himself in the mirror, Conde confronted a budding monster he only vaguely recognized. Although the swellings on his eyebrow and cheek had gone down thanks to an intake of anti-inflammatory pills and bags of ice, and he could half-open the eyelid, his eyeball was completely bloodshot and its vision mediated by an opaque film bent on changing his view of the world by painting it pink.

  After he’d swallowed a couple of pills, suffered a sharp jab in the buttock and begun to reconcile himself with the world after drinking fresh coffee made by Tamara, Conde slipped into a warm bath and soaked there until it went cold. The peace and elegance, the feeling he was safe and the centre of attention of the woman he’d loved the most and longest, restored his sense of well-being, and he wondered if the whole of his life shouldn’t be like that. However, some difficulty was always lurking ready to divert him from the peace he so desired, as if he were fated to hover between the edge and centre of a whirlpool of doubt.

  Keen to make the most of a bad situation, his friends converted his convalescence into a party, rolling up at Tamara’s at ten a.m. Candito and Rabbit had taken turns to push Skinny’s wheelchair fifteen blocks, and when Yoyi arrived he lambasted them for not giving him a call: he’d have driven them all the way in his Chevrolet, listening to his birthday gift from the Count, that selection of hits by Credence Clearwater Revival.

  Sheltering under the foliage of the flowering ceiba that dominated Tamara’s patio, they drank cold lemonade out of militant solidarity with their battered friend, Conde, who reeled off possible reasons why he’d been chased so forcefully out of the old barrio of Atarés. Skirting round his flirtation with drugs and his encounter with the pale J.D., he announced he was going back the following day to find the elusive woman whose address he’d finally tracked down.

  “You think they beat you up to stop you talking to her?” asked Candito, who, after more than ten years of Christian clean living, still maintained his streetwise knowledge from his time as an urban warrior in the most diverse fields of battle.

  “No, I don’t,” the Count replied thoughtfully. “They can’t know the African left me that lead. They drove me out so I wouldn’t fuck up their trade. They’re cooking up big deals with guys from abroad who move lots of cash and I bet they thought I was police.”

  “You reckon they’d dare take on the police?” wondered Carlos.

  “Down there, man,” interjected Yoyi, waving a finger at hidden depths under the soil, “they don’t believe in anything or anybody. And the guys not from the barrio work like the mafia. But they didn’t do you over for
being police, that’s too dangerous. It was because you were being a nosey parker.”