Grab a Snake by the Tail

by Leonardo Padura

  Juan Chion nodded and, like a wise man, opted to fill Conde’s glass to the brim.

  “Thanks, my friend … The other big news is that a month ago they found a consignment of cocaine in Chinatown, two blocks from where Pedro Cuang lived. Cubans were caught with the drugs, but the detectives suspect what they’ve confiscated isn’t even half of what came in. And they got three kilos … One of the men in prison says they stole a parcel of coke from his home … As far as we know, that’s never been found.”

  “And did Ped’lo have cocaine?” asked Juan, suddenly perking up.

  “I don’t know, but we found nothing in his place … Although that way of killing him … Look, my friend, this is my problem: I don’t have a clue about what might have happened or what they did to the dead man, and I need your help … I don’t know if you knew him, but he was a fellow countryman.”

  “Me be policeman?” drawled the old man, smiling, of course. “Juan Chion be policeman in Ba’llio Chino. No, Conde, me can’t.” And he underlined his feelings with a sustained shake of the head that threatened to become perpetual.

  Mario Conde looked him in the eye and choked down the plea he was about to make. As Lieutenant Patricia had warned, if he couldn’t find someone able to open Chinatown’s secret doors and help him crack the business of the severed finger, the crossed circle on the dead man’s chest and the two copper tokens bearing the same sign, there would be no way he could get to grips with that devious, defiant death he had to investigate. Because if he was convinced of anything at that moment, it was that nobody, at least in Havana’s Chinatown, had bothered to mount that spectacle as a simple game of mirrors to put the police on the wrong track. Besides, he thought that Pedro Cuang’s trip to China seemed too strange, and even more so his decision to return to his filthy bolthole in Havana where he’d lived for over forty years, storing tablets of soap, tins of Russian and Bulgarian food and old newspapers … But, to tell the truth, his biggest problem was that everything seemed extraordinary in the lives of those chinos who’d been living in the heart of the city for over a century and were still remote and different, about whom people barely knew two or three clichés that were useless at that point in time: fried rice, Chinese pomade for headaches, the dance of the lion and the existence of films without subtitles, like the one Conde had seen years ago in the Golden Eagle, surrounded by an applauding, chortling, weeping audience of Chinese who were ecstatically enjoying a spectacle he found incomprehensible. The clichés you summoned to feed the images of what the hell a damned chino was, alive or dead.

  “Conde, business of chinos so’lted by chinos. Do you get me?”

  “No.”

  “You silly, Conde.”

  “You’re sillier. This isn’t chino business … You know only too well how all this works. Your daughter is police and she told me you could —”

  “My daughter is Cuban and cannot speak for me.”

  Conde counted to ten. He needed a massive dose of chino patience if he was going to penetrate that tall story. “For fuck’s sake, more clichés.” He launched a fresh attack with a mix of guile and forcefulness.

  “Juan, your daughter is Cuban and is police and you know what it means to be police. And it was your daughter who put me on this job and told me you could help me. And you have to. Because there’s a dead man, and because people are dealing with cocaine in the Barrio Chino, there are illegal gambling dens, and, I hear, a clandestine rum and beer factory … and as I am police, I at least have to find out who killed that wretch and why. Juan, nobody deserves to die like that. And I’m not going to solve this shit by myself. If you don’t help me, the dead man stays dead and the guy who killed him lives splitting his sides with laughter and eating spring rolls in The Mandarin. Besides, Patricia told me you knew Pedro Cuang —”

  “Only by sight.”

  “But I know he was a friend of friends of yours … Please. Juan … What if the murderer isn’t a chino? Why are you so sure it’s chino business?”

  The old man sighed, shook his head again in that same negative, pendular movement, until he smiled and said: “Listen this, this wisdom from my count’ly: once there was a man who made a well at the side of a path, and all the people who passed by p’laised his deed, because was ve’ly good well for eve’ly one who lived a’lound there and needed water. But one day someone d’lowned in the well, and everybody c’liticized the man who built it … Do you get me?”

  “Yes, and even I know the song about the chino who fell down the well … That’s just one more tall Chinese story, Juan, very nice and very educational, but it’s a story, and now what you must do is help me find a real-life killer … Nobody will criticize you for doing that.”

  “But, Conde —” he protested without much conviction, and the lieutenant seized the moment.

  “I’ll be here to pick you up at 8.30 tomorrow morning, Corporal Chion,” said Conde, as he washed out his wine glass and bowed to Juan. Before he left, he checked the old man was still laughing and shaking his head of hair that was standing on end. “Just think about what I told you … Particularly the business of the finger and the cross on his chest, agreed? Help, for your mother’s sake,” he begged, straightening the revolver in his belt. “And tell Patricia to call me when she can,” he added as he went out into the street, unable to imagine the hurricane of secrets and sorrows past and present that were now obsessing his model china.

  Conde enjoyed the peaceful solitude he found in the street, but when he reached Calzada de Infanta, he found he’d just missed his bus. And it had driven away with some ten empty seats. As if to say, no, Conde, luck does not shine on the righteous.

  3

  Mario Conde had always loved books – and would always love them, and even more so when an unexpected turn in history led him to make a living by buying and selling old books as an alternative means of survival in a country where for years, in the midst of the most devastating crisis, people simply struggled to get through the day and reach the next morning alive. First as a reader, then as an aspiring writer, and in recent years as a bookseller, he had enjoyed books, sought them out and even dreamed about them as much as he did about baseball. And that was quite something.

  “Do you really like reading a novel where everything’s a lie as much as watching a baseball game where everything’s for real?” his friend, Skinny Carlos, had once teased him.

  “Novels don’t just tell lies, and what you see in a baseball game isn’t necessarily true,” he’d replied, so as not to disturb the harmonious relationship between the two activities that was solidly established – in his mind, at any rate.

  Despite his battered neurones being crammed with nostalgia, flashbacks and other detritus, there was a tidy, well-lit area set aside in his mind for the long-term storage of insights from books that had captivated him over the last twenty of his thirty-five years. This process deepened especially the moment he became a regular of Lame Calixto, the devoted librarian at Víbora Pre-Uni. Calixto was a survivor (with one less leg) of what had formerly been the high school, where, when Conde was a pupil, thanks to Calixto’s advice and passion a splendid, airy library was created, conceived so a fifteen-year-old could find whatever a fifteen-year-old should. And after satisfying the curricular needs of a pupil set on digesting whole books and not the abridged versions his teachers gave him following instructions from the Ministry, Lame Calixto wisely and enigmatically fostered the boy’s sentimental education, cannily adding authors and works to those he’d already ingested: Dumas, Salgari, Verne, Twain … Calixto broadened Conde’s horizons with the revelation of myths and heroes at the root of all psychological complexes when he entered the world of Greek and Latin classics; then he tried to get him to understand the hidden meanings of the journey into hell described by Dante and the search for earthly paradises in the chronicles of the conquest of America, and subsequently guided him thorough those nineteenth-century French and Russian novelists who challenged your patience (Conde later discovered th
at the librarian hated English novels of that period, especially Dickens, heaven knows why) and finally led him, via Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos and Carson McCullers, to the edge of the river so that Conde duly graduated from pre-uni properly equipped and would now have to cross to penetrate more entangled jungles: Faulkner’s world, say. Or Camus’s. Or Kafka’s. Or Salinger’s forest of ambiguities with his crazy but so appealing characters. Or Raymond Chandler’s urban fables of death and ethical concern, Vargas Llosa’s daring narrative structures or Carpentier’s carefully tied bundles of culture and subjunctives.

  In all those long apprenticeship years that transmuted into a love of books and, finally, into an addiction capable of making him dream he would or could be a writer – that ended in the catastrophic move from this dream to a real attempt to write and be published in a school magazine that never got beyond issue zero – Conde continued to feel that same passionate love for baseball, the ball game that had always been much more than a game for Cubans: it stood for a way of life that lay deep in the marrow of the culture and consciousness of those islanders. An inalienable feature set in the bloodstream. His gallery of heroes housed a range of characters who coexisted in excellent neighbourly relationships: the Count of Monte Cristo, Seymour Glass, Fabricio del Dongo and baseball aces Pedro Chávez, Tony González and Raúl “Guagüita” López, the most mythical closer who ever graced Cuban baseball. Sequences from novels and hitting and pitching averages. The stories of characters and the chronicles of championships. Existentialists and industrialists. Tyrians, Trojans and baseball players. All mixed up.

  “So you’re a policeman who reads? How the hell did you get into that?” Major Rangel had enquired one day, soon after Conde joined Headquarters. “Or this?” he added, touching his uniform.

  “One day, when I was sixteen, a lame librarian told me reading would allow me to see the world through the eyes of others.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?” the major had asked, lighting up a cigar.

  “One day this guy told me I was ready and gave me a book. He had wrapped it in newspaper so you couldn’t see the real cover and said: read this, it’s a book about slavery, but if you read it, you’ll be freer. It was a novel that presumably nobody should read in Cuba … A dangerous book.”

  “And which book was that?”

  “Nineteen Eighty-Four. And it changed my life. I’ve read it some ten times. And it really has made me freer. Because it showed me there are many ways to be a slave.”

  While he observed the black hulk of the building that had first housed the high school and then Víbora Pre-Uni, now converted into a technological college specializing in God knows what, he noticed that the windows of the wing once occupied by the library had no shutters, while the fence that had once protected the school space now lay on the ground. Conde felt the passage of time hadn’t brought improvement; rather, it had smoothed the way for regression, and he was sure that would have woeful consequences for his country. He remembered the three years spent in that venerable place, where he had not only become a little bit freer thanks to literature, but also must have grown into a man at a dizzy speed in the periods they were dispatched to cut sugar cane, at a rate of ten hours a day or until they’d met their daily targets. The place where, fortunately, he’d joined a clan of friends, some of who remained pivotal to his life. He painfully reflected on how reality had reduced that period of grace and dreams to tatters and how the world where he now lived seemed increasingly less like the perfect world portrayed in the rhetoric and heat of the historical moment, and more like a world whose construction was still in progress, a world that brought precariousness and prohibitions and required sacrifice, rejection and even physical mutilation.

  Conde dismissed those drab reminiscences that were so present in the building that echoed with the voices he could hear across the years, and slowly walked along the street that led to Skinny Carlos’s house and also to the house where Karina lived – the last woman he had bedded, who had blown her sax and turned his life upside down, only to vanish like a dream, or like her music – (or at least she said that she lived there; who the hell could tell if she was lying or not?). Unhappily, the fate of once great pleasures seems to be to wither …

  He needed to speak to Carlos that night without any alcoholic baggage, because he’d had uneasy presentiments ever since he’d talked to Juan Chion about the violent death of his fellow countryman, Pedro Cuang. There’d been something ambiguous in their conversation and the old man’s reactions, and Conde suspected much more was at stake in Chinatown (and especially in Patricia’s father’s mind) than a corpse that had been mysteriously branded. Which was why he had also needed to speak to Lieutenant Patricia, since he needed to warn her of his premonition and remind her that some doors were better left alone, and, naturally, should never be reopened.

  Carlos was sitting in the doorway in his wheelchair, to which he’d been confined for the rest of his life. Nothing remained of his lean frame from their pre-uni days: pounds of flesh now drooped, like hanging pouches, from his arms, neck, chest and legs, as testimony to the frustration Conde also assumed was his. Why him and not me? No, Carlos didn’t deserve the fate he had been consigned by a stray bullet that had found him – because he’d been required to make that sacrifice – in the midst of a remote and alien war.

  “Hey, didn’t you say you were up to your eyebrows in a case?” Carlos raised his hand for Conde to hit with his palm.

  “Yes, they’ve messed up my vacation … but in exchange my house is the cleanest in the world and smells like —”

  “You eaten?”

  “Like a mandarin.”

  “And you drunk?”

  “Just a drop.”

  “Would you like a swig of rum?”

  Conde looked at his friend. His question was enough to undermine all his firm pledges on behalf of sobriety. How firm?

  “Where’s the bottle?” he asked, already ripe for combat.

  “Half a bottle,” Carlos explained, not wanting to raise too many hopes. “It’s in my bedroom. You go and get it. And don’t make any noise, the old girl’s gone to bed.”

  “This early?”

  “She says television is a load of shit, and she prefers to dream.”

  “A wise woman,” agreed Conde, smiling sincerely.

  In fact, Josefina’s life had been reduced to looking after her son and tolerating the presence of that wild bunch whose friendship, thirst and hunger kept the invalid afloat. The old lady deserved her respite and escapism.

  Carlos went on to confirm his friend’s remark. “Do you know what she says now? She says she dreams she’s cooking. That she prepares banquets for us and that whenever she needs an ingredient, she only has to hold out a hand to receive it …”

  “Well, she should invite us into her dreams one night.”

  With the help of two glasses of rum, and the nighttime breeze blowing though the doorway, they talked until one in the morning. Conde spoke of his fears and premonitions and his desperate masturbating, driven by the traces left on his retina of Patricia’s body and motored by that damned hypnotic, all-conquering female smell impregnating the atmosphere in his bathroom.

  It was only when they were saying goodbye that Skinny, with his ability to touch the raw nerve ends of his friend’s existence, revealed a piece of information that set off every one of Conde’s red alarms.

  “Oh, hell, you’re almost off and I forgot … Tamara called. She’s just back from Italy. And she says she’d like to see you.”

  4

  When Juan Chion first arrived in Cuba, he was eighteen with a pair of strong arms and a single idea in his head: he was going to earn lots of money and become rich in that new world where the genuine item flowed like the limpid water in his country’s mythical streams. Then he would return with his fortune to the hamlet in Canton where his parents, brothers and sisters barely survived, always freezing stiff and ravenous, sowing rice and poaching fish from muddy, vora
cious rivers that were in no way mythical and didn’t belong to them, since even the rivers in his country were owned by somebody. With the money he earned on the other side of the world he’d buy a plot of land for himself and his family and would be famous and beloved, like a god descending from the highest, snowiest peak: his single, almighty gesture would thus change all their destinies. Juan had heard about lots of chinos who had made their fortunes in the Americas, and he, at eighteen, was sure he too would join that happy band.

  But Juan Chion, whose real name was Li Chion Tai, was too honest a man and never earned enough money to become rich or return to his hamlet: when it flooded, his parents drowned in that same river that fed them, two of his brothers died in a peasant rebellion and Li Chion Tai never did find out whether the rest of his family, who scattered across that vast and alien country in search of salvation, discovered what they were looking for … From then on he lost contact with his relatives and became deeply saddened: that was why he left the job and friends he had in Havana and went to live in Cienfuegos, where he had a cousin who’d arrived on the island two years before him. Cousin Sebastián found him a job on a fellow countryman’s ice-cream stall and Juan sensed he was recovering that nice feeling of being part of a family. But one fine day his cousin informed him that he was going to the United States. Despite the many obstacles to emigrating, his cousin had contacted a Greek captain who sailed in a boat under the Panamanian flag. For two hundred pesos that captain would take him to New Orleans. Juan, who had no money, had to stay in Cienfuegos, cherishing Sebastián’s promise to send him the necessary dollars to join him in San Francisco, where everyone insisted it was easier to establish a business and get rich in a few years.