Grab a Snake by the Tail

by Leonardo Padura

  Half an hour later, while preparing to have a shower before leaving to find ways to fulfil his side of the deal with Patricia Chion, Conde spotted a thick, black hair in the tub; it was curled in on itself, like a spring, a hair that could only be one of the china’s pubic hairs. With her bush in his eyes and dizzy from the clean-woman smell still floating in the bathroom, he made his mind up and sat on the edge of the tub. He didn’t put up much of a fight; after all, he had only a single source of relief for his longings within reach.

  2

  It was that same night, on a packed and noisy bus en route to Juan Chion’s house across a dark, torrid and increasingly aggressive city, that Mario Conde started to pull together his threadbare ideas about the make-up of a chino. But after fine-tuning his model with all the experiences he could channel, it was obvious he had only managed a pathetic, rather pitiful schema. “If Mao Tse-tung hears me or Confucius grabs me …” the then lieutenant muttered, thinking that the Long March, the Cultural Revolution, even the Great Wall of China, the enormous mythological dragons and other phenomena from that larger-than-life country could never have been generated by that modest chino endowed with a culinary gift for inventing dishes. In the end, though, he wasn’t as appalled by his transformation of a man as upstanding as Juan Chion into his stereotype. The old man deserved as much and, besides, Conde had discovered that the exercise of trying to discover what constitutes a chino in a clammy, stinking, overcrowded bus had notable pluses: you stopped worrying about being brushed by undesirable appendages and even about somebody taking the seat yours truly had a right to when the black built like a bricklayer got up to get off and a busty mulatta thrust a tit into the space and shattered the just aspirations of Conde, ever a man who loved to sit on a bus, face the window and, from a decent height, look out for fronton courts, towering arches and tall shrubs in places that, at ground level, remained out of sight.

  The only irresistible feelings at that hour, even for someone travelling in a packed, sweaty bus, were hunger pangs: Juan Chion and food had become so intertwined that the mere thought he was heading to the old man’s house started a rumble in his belly that was always ready to welcome concoctions that, miraculously, always tasted delicious. Aubergines stuffed with duck boiled in a bamboo and purslane sauce, sprinkled with crunchy mashed peanut …

  Mario Conde alighted from the bus at the stop on Infanta and Estrella, and to get his feet on the sidewalk he almost had to hurl himself against the hordes trying to get on at the same time.

  “Out of the way, saggy bum, a bus ain’t no bed,” said the woman, elbowing him as she pushed past, and Conde didn’t even feel the need to answer back. I’m a saggy bum, am I? he wondered, and stood and watched the vehicle judder off, bellowing menacingly, shrouded in a cloud of black smoke as if its inevitable destination was hell itself. Then he patted his sweat-stained shirt, eased his pistol against his belt and started to walk the three gloomy blocks to the home of Juan Chion and Lieutenant Patricia Chion in old Calle Maloja.

  He soon forgot the busty mulatta and her insult, because the din in the street was a thousand times worse than the bus’s hostile, crammed promiscuity. What the hell was all that, a carnival or a demonstration? he asked himself, venting his anger at the absurdity of such an impossible notion: there were no longer carnivals or spontaneous demonstrations in Havana (no matter what the ever-euphemistic newspapers kept saying), though there certainly were endless daily blackouts and high temperatures for May. Conde would have preferred to walk aimlessly, without rushing, along an empty street, thinking whatever his brain was in the mood to think, since, basically, he was only a melancholy memory man, as his friend Skinny Carlos liked to say. But in the heat of the night, aggravated by an irritating blackout, every denizen of that central district seemed to need the air in the street to survive, and a bustling throng had overflowed from sidewalks onto the asphalt, lugging kerosene lamps as well as stools, benches, beds and domino tables, and even the odd bottle of rum in order to await the return of their electricity in the best manner possible.

  “Who the hell do those bastards think they are? How fucking long are we going to be without light?” shouted someone peering over a balcony, and a murmur of approval spread along Calle Maloja, ending the resigned spirit of that obligatory collective vigil.

  Accustomed to waiting eternally, those people remembered now and then that you could make demands, although they didn’t know how or where. Then Conde hurried along and blessed his habit of never wearing a police uniform. Over the last few months the blackouts, caused by the sporadic delivery of Soviet oil, had led to bottle-throwing in the streets, the breaking of shop windows and other spontaneous acts of vandalism, which was why he was so relieved to hear the contented mutterings when light finally came back as the power was restored.

  Like animals trained to respond to orders, people shouted: “About time too!”, “Just as well!”, “Hey, today’s episode is about to start!” and vacated the street in under a minute, switching on fans, lights and televisions to reveal, in the flickering illuminations from a couple of bulbs on each street corner, the intrinsic ugliness of that modest, proletarian district on its road to ruin, a district which didn’t even enjoy the benefit of the occasional tree to enliven the panorama.

  Juan Chion’s house had a door and two large windows overlooking the street, and when visiting, Conde always felt it was being crushed by the two adjacent houses. All the buildings in the block were high and dated from 1910 to 1930, and for years they’d been crying out for refurbishment and licks of paint to postpone the threatening apocalypse. It was in that quintessential Havana street, where in colonial times they had sold the maize that gave the street its name, that Alejo Carpentier said he was born, and a few years later, when Conde discovered that the writer’s birth in the city was more fictional than real, he granted that the creator of those fictions had been clever to choose, from the many possibilities, a street sufficiently anonymous and at the same time so genuinely Havanan to transform an F-1 with a French father and Russian mother into the purest Havanan.

  The bronze knocker clattered against the black wooden door and Juan Chion’s smile made up for the handshake that a chino never gave.

  “Conde, Conde, so good to see you,” said the old man, greeting him with a quick bow and ushering him into the house.

  “By any chance did you ever build the Great Wall of China, Juan?” he asked, and smiled at his host’s bemused expression at that bizarre question. “But don’t worry about that, tell me, how are you?”

  “All ’light,” responded the old man, offering him a seat while he sat in a shabby armchair that despite Patricia’s beseeching he had not turned into rags and lumber to put in the garbage can. The chino adored that armchair, which had a special value for him: his wife had bought it for two pesos in a second-hand store on Calle Muralla run by Polish Jews and, after reupholstering it with brocaded material, she had given him it as a birthday present in 1946, several years before Patricia was born. “Me feel fine, Conde, exercises good for you, you know. T’ai chi …”

  Conde lit a cigarette and nodded. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had any repeated exercise apart from the one he’d just practised at midday sitting on the rim of his bathtub.

  “Where’s your daughter? Isn’t she back yet? … She said we’d probably see each other here tonight.”

  That was when Juan Chion stopped smiling, but only for a second. He could say the most terrible things in between smiles.

  “Is c’lazy, Conde, talk to her. Has got this ve’ly young man and she’s c’lazy. Gets back ve’ly late eve’ly night.”

  Mario Conde decided he was an unlucky man and Patricia was evidently a frenzied nymphomaniac and bitch. It now transpired a young nobody was enjoying Patricia’s multiple bodily charms. The worst of it was that Conde had joked to Lieutenant Patricia for years, making it plain he might be totally serious, that his lifelong dream was to lay a Chinese mulatta with a really big ass. Then,
in the manner of his Grandfather Rufino’s roosters, he would strut around her as if still needing to prove that Patricia might be a good candidate. The china, like the bitch she was, always laughed and said that one day he’d probably get what he wanted, and Conde implored her: “The sooner, the better …” But now, after putting on one of Conde’s jumpers, after cleaning Conde’s house barefoot and showering stark naked in his house, she was out gallivanting with a young lad. What a bitch, he thought, and tried to find immediate relief for his genuine angst.

  “Juan, you got any rice wine left?”

  “Hang on, Conde, hang on,” the old man repeated, waving to him to be patient. “Me made you tea. G’leen tea, from Canton. If you d’link it ve’ly hot, it cool you down …”

  “But don’t you have any wine? What about some sake?”

  Juan Chion didn’t reply; instead he got up and levitated into the kitchen like a cosmonaut. Lieutenant Mario Conde thought that a drop of strong rice wine or a cup of sake (it didn’t matter if it wasn’t Chinese, the important thing was the degree of alcohol) would have been better than a cup of tea to get Patricia Chion and her envied young man out of his head and remind Juan Chion that he wasn’t there simply to slurp egg and pigeon soup seasoned with the countless herbs Juan Chion had recited down the telephone, but also because a fellow countryman of his, the friend of another countryman of his, had died in the strangest circumstances and, as Patricia had forewarned him and he had experienced in practice, he needed the old man’s help to get into the underbelly of Chinatown. And then, if he could, he’d find out why they had killed that old chino.

  “The forensics have finished working on the body. We were waiting for you before removing it because I wanted you to see how they found him. I’ll tell you now, this is a very peculiar business,” Manolo had said when he saw him arrive in the afternoon, and Mario Conde couldn’t understand why the sergeant’s patter was making him so cheerful. Perhaps because it was good to have something different on your hands now and then? It made a change from the same thieves, the same fraudsters, the same bastards getting rich from their positions of power; the same double-crossing can get boring, and a dose of something extraordinary – or exotic – works wonders for a policeman’s routine.

  “So what’s so peculiar, Manolo?”

  “Just take a look,” Sergeant Manuel Palacios had replied with a characteristic dramatic flourish, pointing out the route from the street to the room in the tenement where the crime had taken place. Conde had prepared himself: he’d been in the police for ten years, but a case involving chinos had never come his way.

  “Juan, you don’t mind if we call you chinos chinos now, do you?” Conde began, holding a cup of boiling, highly scented tea and becoming far too garrulous because he was feeling out of sorts sexually. “It’s not offensive, is it? Because chinos are chinos, though you mustn’t call negros negros, even if they’re blacker than the backside of a turkey buzzard. Well-brought-up children are taught to say ‘a person of colour’, but that’s because they’re black, right? My grandad, Rufino, used to tell me to call them ‘darkies’. I’m part black, you know? On the side of my father, my mother, or the Holy Ghost … Well, to get to the point, they’ve never killed a chino on my turf and ever since I saw him this afternoon, I’ve been thinking in chino …”

  Sergeant Manuel Palacios hadn’t exaggerated at all: the man had lived on Calle Salud, almost on the corner with Manrique, in the very heart of the Barrio Chino, and the first thing that shocked Conde was the huge number of chinos gathered in the passage in the rooming house. They had been crouching silently, like sparrows perched on a wire, and all had stared at the policeman when he walked in. Their way of looking had been oblique, ponderous and grief-stricken and had stirred the feelings of the lieutenant detective, who would always remember thinking: “It’s like a wake without flowers, and so dismally sad.” But he had still refused to accept that there was anything unusual. “One dies and others take his place; don’t they say chinos are like ants?” he had reflected that afternoon, but had later regretted saying as much to old Juan Chion.

  “Besides, there’s a peculiar smell in those places where lots of Chinese live. Don’t you think, Juan? I don’t know what it can be, it’s a sweetish pong, like steam from a laundry. It seeps up your nose and you automatically think: that smells of lots of chinos. Isn’t that right? The tenement has a long passage, with one door after another and a communal bath at the end, past a few sinks and metal water tanks. If it hadn’t been for the chinos and their smell, it wouldn’t have seemed like a chinos’ house, but it’s been that for over seventy years.”

  “What do we know about the guy?” Conde had asked Manolo, still feeling the eyes of those chinos silently drilling into his back.

  “Pedro Cuang, seventy-three, born in Canton, emigrated to Cuba in 1928 at the age of thirteen. He only returned to China once, last year, but came back after a month. He was a dry-cleaner and received a monthly pension of ninety-two pesos. He lived alone, had never married and had no family. Just your average chino,” the sergeant informed him, putting his notebook in his back trouser pocket in a gesture Conde knew was his and which his subordinate was shamelessly plagiarizing.

  “And why the fuck would anyone want to kill an old man like him?” Conde had asked Manolo before entering the scene of the crime, as he greeted the policeman posted by the door.

  “I swear to you, Juan, the smell of chinos multiplied by five and grabbed me by the face like the hand of fate intent on strangling me. But I went in. They told me nobody had touched anything … And I almost felt like crying, you know? You’re lucky: you’re married, you live with your daughter and own this house, but anyone who wanted to depict loneliness would be truly inspired by Pedro Cuang’s room. A narrow bed, a dirty mattress and a sheet full of mends, and a piece of wood against the headboard, doubling as a pillow, I imagine. A piece of string in a corner where two or three shirts and some trousers were hanging. Two chairs with broken seats. A small kerosene stove and on the floor, by the bed, a tin full of water containing five very long pipes like the one you sometimes use. The dog was next to the bed. A mongrel with long white hair, it must have been half poodle, or half Maltese. The dog still had the rope around its neck that had been used to hang it … On the table by the stove were two plates, two small dishes, a few bottles and a box containing a set of dominoes. And the rest of the room was full of cardboard boxes: boxes of old magazines and newspapers, with cleaning cloths and tins and battered pans, boxes of soap, toilet paper and tins of food he must have kept for years. There was even a box of china plates. Like thirty boxes, mostly open, their contents emerging as if their entrails had been ripped out … The first thing I asked myself was, why did that man go home to China and then return to live in that stinking slum? Why, Juan? So many things littered the floor that nobody could tell whether anything was missing. I later asked and apparently nobody does know whether anything is missing. But your countrymen are the pits: you never know when they don’t know or when they prefer not to know …”

  Pedro Cuang had still been hanging from a ceiling beam; the end of his pale tongue, bitten by his teeth, stuck out. He was stark naked and there was a pool of shit, urine and blood on the floor. Conde had studied the corpse for a moment and thought He’s the skinniest chino I’ve ever seen.

  “And now comes something you’re probably familiar with, Juan: they’d cut off Pedro’s left index finger, and on his chest, using a razor blade or sharp knife, etched a circle with two arrows that made a cross, and in each square they’d cut smaller crosses, like multiplication signs … you get me?”

  “Look at this,” Sergeant Manuel Palacios had added, showing him a nylon bag he’d picked up from the table by the stove. When the next-door neighbour, the one who had found him, had touched it, it had fallen from his right hand. There were two copper tokens, the size of a cent coin, that carried the same marks they’d cut on Pedro Cuang’s chest. A circle with two crossed arrows and four s
maller crosses.

  “It st’lange, mighty st’lange,” Juan Chion finally agreed, downing the last drop from the glass of rice wine he’d only brought out to accompany the meal.

  “Hey, Juan, you’ve been living in Cuba for over fifty years, tell me just one thing: why don’t you speak Spanish properly?”

  Juan broadened his smile.

  “Because I don’t feel like speaking like yourr people, Mario Conde,” he said, making an effort to round out his syllables and mark the r as if it was an exercise he found exhausting. He smiled and reached for the lieutenant’s glass.

  “Now you’re being a sly old chino, right?”

  “Somet’in of the sort … Don’t be stupid, Conde, the r doesn’t exist in chino.”

  “Well, well … So how do you say roller coaster? Or trigger? Or generator …? Won’t you pour me another drrrop of rrrice wine? Well, the fact is I spoke to the neighbour who found him and it was like speaking to a wall. He grinned or looked serious but could only manage ‘Chino not know, policeman, chino not know.’ And all the others say ‘not know’ even more, but somebody must know something, must have heard something … And your daughter is police and you certainly know I can’t get to work without a fucking clue as to why they killed Pedro Cuang, cut that finger off and made that mark on his chest. Manolo says – I mean, the sergeant who works with me – that he’s sure the man had money, but I doubt that: look how he lived. Although we didn’t find a single cent in his room, and that’s very strange too. But perhaps all the mess was just to put us on the wrong track or whatever … Or do you think it was a case of revenge and that all the things they did to him make some kind of sense?”