Grab a Snake by the Tail

by Leonardo Padura

  “Me don’t believe that, captain, but there people who do. It’s my count’lymen making black witchc’laft and blacks making magic with chino things. You get it? Ped’lo Cuang owed and someone collected, and that’s why he got sign of San Fan Con.”

  “So he was killed by another chino? In revenge? And did they cut his finger off because he had informed on someone?”

  “Oh, captain, me not know,” said Francisco, still shaking the bamboo cane. “Now you want to know your path?”

  Conde didn’t have time to think of a way to put pressure on Francisco before seeing a rod emerge from inside the cane Francisco was still shaking, just one, that seemed to float over its companions as if a hidden magnet had separated it from the rest and brought it to the policeman. The top of the rod, like all the rest, carried symbols and a few letters. Might his destiny be contained there?

  “No, thanks, I’d rather not know …” said Conde, driven by the power of his superstition as he pushed the rod back into the glass. “But I’d like to look at the one with the cross.”

  Francisco stopped shaking the container and moved over to the light from the window. He looked at the rods and selected one, which he handed to the lieutenant. Followed by Manolo, Conde also stood in the light.

  “It’s similar, but not the same,” noted the sergeant, while he sketched the incomprehensible symbol in his notebook.

  “Francisco, what Pedro had on his chest also had little crosses here, in those four squares … Isn’t there another rod?”

  “No, captain, not one with four c’losses … It’s st’lange, ’light, Juan?”

  “Francisco …” Conde hesitated to say it, but did so. “Would it be too much to ask you to lend me that rod? I promise I’ll return it. I need to take a photograph of that sign and —”

  “No, that belongs to San Fan Con and —”

  “A man has died, Francisco,” said Conde, trying to make his voice sound as solemn as possible.

  Francisco seemed to think as much as his brain was capable of, and then took a decision.

  “All ’light, all ’light,” the old man conceded. “But you must b’ling it back or you’ll suffer curse of San Fan Con …”

  “I swear by my mother I’ll return it,” Conde declared, already imagining the impact of a possible Chinese curse.

  “I don’t see any chinos, but I can smell them,” Conde muttered, and felt pleased with himself. His sense of smell had deteriorated years ago when he started smoking, which was why he wanted to know what pungent qualities that peculiar smell contained for him to be able to distinguish it from among all the smells of a city rich in scents and, above all, in stench. The long passageway in the tenement on Salud and Manrique had fallen silent. On the clothes line two T-shirts as full of holes as soldiers fallen in the cruellest war were battling against the wind and, by the jamb of the third door, an old man was reading a cutting from a Chinese newspaper.

  “Look, there he is,” Manolo said when he saw Pedro Cuang’s next-door neighbour.

  “What his name?” asked Juan Chion.

  “Armando Li,” the sergeant remembered, greeting the old fellow by that name. “How are you?”

  Armando read for a few seconds more, then looked up. He considered smiling but decided against it. He stared at the newcomers, and his eyes lingered on Juan Chion’s face.

  “Good day,” he said finally, and got up with a nimbleness that belied his apparent age.

  “So, Armando, this is Juan Chion. He’s a relative of mine. He came to explain to me, you know …”

  Armando nodded, said, “Me know nothing,” and then produced a smile.

  Conde gazed at the old man’s greenish teeth and thought how he despaired before a smile that could encompass four thousand years of culture. He raised an arm, about to threaten the old man, but Juan Chion seemed to guess his intentions and jumped in first. He said something in Cantonese and Armando, after concealing his smile again, replied and the two old men disappeared into a room.

  “Well, that’s us sorted, isn’t it?”

  “Didn’t you want Juan to help you? That’s just what he’s doing. The chinos who don’t want to sort things in our presence.”

  “Know what, Manolo? We’re only beginning and I’ve already had a bellyful of chinos and San Fan Con …”

  “Well, watch that stomach, because this is turning ugly … Because if that sign isn’t San Fan Con’s, then what the fuck is it?”

  “It’s smelling Chinese again, but tasty Chinese this time, right?” Conde asked, though Manolo knew that that final inflection was simply a rhetorical move. He merely wanted agreement, not a reply, and the sergeant half-heartedly went along with him.

  “Yes, but what’s he putting in?”

  “Don’t you worry, whatever it is it will taste great. That’s my experience.”

  “And this wine isn’t half good, right? On the sour side, but it slips down a treat.”

  “Too true,” said Conde, taking a sip of the ginger wine Juan Chion had offered them.

  In the kitchen the old man was now singing a mournful Cantonese ballad that seemingly complemented his culinary inspiration and helped him process his ideas. When he’d finished his conversation with Armando Li and they’d gone out into the street, he’d asked them for time to think, and Conde’s questions had only prompted invitations to lunch. It was obvious that something had happened that morning that had improved Juan Chion’s state of mind.

  “Hey, Juan!” – Conde projected his voice from the sitting room – “so did Pedro Cuang belong to the San Fan Con Society?”

  “Of course, of course,” the old man replied before resuming the lyrics of his Cantonese song.

  “And what do you think that sign they drew on his chest means?”

  “Something bad, ’light?”

  “Doesn’t the severed finger sound to you like the chino mafia?”

  “You see too much films, Conde. No chino mafia in Ba’llio. Only heap of old chinos and shitty Cuban c’liminals …”

  “So why did they kill the dog? Don’t you usually say they bury dogs alive with their masters so they can guide them through the other world?”

  “Sometimes do, stuff of legends,” said Juan Chion only after sustaining a falsetto on a long line.

  “Hey, are you chinos always so complicated?”

  The reply didn’t come immediately. It came when Juan Chion peered out of the kitchen.

  “Chinos chinos, Conde … Food’s ’leady.” He smiled and beckoned to them.

  Conde and Manolo walked over to the table which the old man had already set. Although they weren’t slow to ask what was in the dish he was offering them, the chino, holding a beautiful soup tureen decorated with blue and feathered serpents, asked them to be patient and said he hoped they enjoyed a good meal.

  Juan Chion placed the tureen in the centre of the table and sat down. Not waiting a second, Conde stood up and peered into the mysterious concoction: yellow and dark green strips floating in a thick, whitish broth that had the consistency of jelly.

  “Hey, it smells good,” allowed the lieutenant, though he hesitated before tucking in. “Now please tell me what it’s got in it.”

  “Chino dog soup,” said Juan Chion, unsmiling, and Conde and Manolo’s faces immediately expressed their inevitable disgust.

  “Chino dog? What —” began Conde, when the old man recovered his smile.

  “Naw, Conde, me playing … Teasing, as you say. Look, it’s soup made from ’lice and white fish, with eggs and st’lips of cabbage. T’ly it, t’ly it.”

  “And what else did you put in?” persisted Conde while the chino served them.

  “Basil and mint, that why it smell so good, ’light?”

  Conde inspected his plate and glanced at Manolo’s ever disconcerted expression. “I’m going for it,” he thought, and made the leap: he put his spoon in the steaming jelly, blew on it a couple of times and finally tried it before Manolo’s expectant gaze and Juan Chion’s s
teady smile.

  “Hey, guys, it tastes really good,” he said, sticking his spoon back into the viscous ancestral dish.

  Juan Chion watched them eat contentedly, and suddenly came out with: “I thought something.”

  “Right you are,” gulped Conde and prepared to listen to the result of the old man’s long ruminations.

  Juan Chion thought lots. When he went to Canton, Pedro Cuang had commented that if things went well, he would stay in China, but he returned after a month and never said why, although he did tell people in the Barrio that the China he found wasn’t the China he’d imagined. However, many people thought the dead man had returned because he must have had money in Cuba: for years he’d worked as a bet collector for a clandestine bank that dealt in illegal gambling in the Barrio, and as the Chinese loved to lay bets, the collectors must have earned a tidy sum. Although not only chinos bet: apparently, all the Barrio was at it, including little boys and girls, as they say.

  The police had dismantled the bank precisely when Pedro was in China and he had emerged unscathed because it suited nobody to say that an old man who was absent at the time was the guy who collected the loot and lists from all the other bet collectors. Chinos weren’t informers, and that business could only become public knowledge now the old man was beyond the reach of human justice … As far as people knew, Pedro Cuang wasn’t involved in drug trafficking or in other murky waters, and certainly had never betrayed or informed on anyone. But Juan Chion believed that there is always somebody ready to kill a chino who might have money, perhaps a lot of money, and that’s why it wasn’t at all odd that not a single cent was found in the dead man’s room. Pedro must have had money. And he also thought that there was a code that is inviolable in the eyes of his fellow countrymen: deception and betrayal are paid for with death, and though nobody could be sure, perhaps Pedro Cuang, despite being Chinese, had betrayed or informed on somebody.

  “Make your life easy now, Conde?” concluded Juan Chion, and it was Conde’s turn to smile.

  “You’ve given it to me on a plate, haven’t you? Now all I need to know is what the hell I’ve got on that plate: deception, betrayal, an illegal gambling bank that no longer exists and a chino who we don’t know if he was involved in the drug trafficking everybody’s talking about or if he really had money, or just ought to have had … A chino who was strung up with a cross on his chest that now turns out not even to be the sign of San Fan Con, a saint who at the same time is and isn’t a saint, a mafia that no longer exists, but if it did, it wouldn’t forgive a betrayal, a chino who doesn’t betray but probably does … Piece of cake.”

  “Oh, Conde, Conde,” the old man lamented. “The snake got tail and got head. ’Leach tail from head and head from tail. G’lab snake. You always ’leach the other end. But take care … if you g’lab head, snake bite.”

  “A snake?”

  Luang-me Wu had lost the last of his children, but showed no sign of grief. He organized a fine funeral, received condolences, and friends even saw him smile. Time passed, and Wu tilled his land again, looked after his animals and drank a few drops of liquor after he finished: he continued to behave as he always had, and didn’t even respect the usual mourning period. When he noticed this, a neighbour who had thought Wu to be a wise and honest man reproached him for his lack of feeling. Then Luang-me Wu told him: “There was a time when I lived without children and I wasn’t depressed. When my last child died, I returned to my previous state. Why must I be sad?”

  Juan Chion inhaled smoke from his pipe and stayed silent for a long time so Conde and Manolo could consider the tale, before telling them that this story was one of the most famous in the Taoist tradition. And although he knew that things functioned differently in the real world, and that dead loved ones should be mourned, the story attributed to Luang-me Wu really did impart truths Conde and his colleague should learn: for example that everything, animal and human, enters the world with its own path, its own tao, but at the same time perhaps nothing exists that can be eternally unchangeable. Everything becomes its opposite, the quest for happiness can lead to misfortune and even death, and the wise man must find the essential nature of things and always observe the natural laws of life, the tao marking out each individual’s path in order to possess knowledge and come to know the truth. Because man’s soul comprises the smallest particles of matter, called tsin tsi, that come into being and depend on the clean or filthy state of the organ for thought, the tsin.

  The pipe returned to the table and Juan Chion smiled: “Clean tsin, Conde, clean it well.”

  5

  As usual, he went into a state of ecstasy contemplating the house. Because of what he saw on the outside and what was on the inside, it was always the perfect house, the one that awakened most of his dreams and desires and would continue to do so throughout his life: even the momentary dream of remarrying, despite two previous experiences of matrimony that weren’t exactly pleasant to recall.

  The line of concrete sculptures opposite the picture windows on the ground floor seemed closely related to Picasso and Wifredo Lam, and were a distinctive feature of the building. But the huge panes of glass, the long windows with wooden shutters, the breaks in the straight lines of the structures and that patio with its beautifully kept English garden rounded off the place’s visible delights. Hidden treasures included the library Dr Valdemira had curated over a long diplomatic career, with a select bibliography assembled from more than half the world, a room whose walls were graced with originals by some of the great names of the Cuban avant-garde, friends of the lawyer. But the greatest delight of the house was the one that, after Conde had come out of his trance of architectural ecstasy and bibliographic reminiscences, came and opened the door.

  “Mario, how great to see you!” she said, stepping forward to kiss him on the cheek as the policeman put the brakes on all his impulses.

  “Skinny said you were back. How did it go?”

  Five months ago, at the beginning of that same year, 1989, Mario Conde had returned to that house and the life of Tamara, the girl he’d first fallen in love with, painfully so, when they had met almost two decades previously at Víbora Pre-University. But those visits, so satisfying in some respects, were tainted from the start by trauma: the trauma of the disappearance and later revelations about the death and shady dealings of Rafael Morín, the man who with his irresistible charms had stolen Tamara’s love from Conde, even going on to marry her and father her child. The macabre circumstances which had put Conde in charge of the hunt for Morín, and the things he had begun to find out about that apparently straight-as-a-die eternal leader’s manipulation, scheming, deceptions, corruption and multiple back-stabbings, had led, wonderfully and strangely, to Conde and Tamara making love in that very house and Conde reaching the highest possible level of ecstasy: the fulfilling of a desire he had harboured for almost twenty years.

  The avalanche of dreams the policeman cherished at the time, which was so dramatic he even imagined taking the solemn step and promising “till death do us part”, was suddenly halted by Tamara’s decision to spend a while in Milan, where Aymara, her twin sister, lived, married to an Italian who, according to all the gossip, was filthy rich and a normal, nice individual. “So the guy can’t be Italian, right?” Rabbit, the friend of Conde most addicted to logic, had quipped.

  Tamara’s departure had left Conde disarmed, even disillusioned, and it had been in that state of psychological, hormonal defencelessness that he had fallen into the orbit of Karina, a perverse, red-headed nymph with the gift of disappearing when Conde most needed her. In all that time and the subsequent weeks he had hoped Tamara would return, fearing she never would, as had been the case with so many friends over the years. But she had returned, had summoned him, and a jubilant Conde was now observing the earth-shifting movement of her buttocks (that magnificent ass, the size of which had frustrated the young girl’s aspirations to become a ballet dancer) as she walked in front of him on the way to the patio. />
  Tamara left to percolate coffee while Conde analysed her reactions. After crossing the frontier they had violated several months ago, they’d reached deadlock, Conde reckoned, and it was up to her to end it: one way or another. The fact that she’d welcomed him with only a friendly peck on the cheek didn’t augur particularly well. So why did she want to see him? Just to make him suffer at the sight of those hazel eyes that were always moist, and the crushing sugar-cane movements of her wondrous backside that drove, was driving and would drive Conde crazy?

  They drank coffee and brought themselves up to speed on the generalities that courtesy required: the family’s well, Italy, what can I say, fantastic … Venice, Florence, Naples, Rome, Siena, Bologna …

  “I thought you probably wouldn’t come back … With so many sights to see and after everything that happened …”

  “Aymara wanted me to stay,” she replied, almost glancing away from Conde. “I’ve left my son there, at least until the summer. I want him to forget everything it’s possible to forget …”

  “So why did you come back now?”

  This time Tamara did look him in the eye.

  “I need to put some order into my life, and I can only do that here.”

  “Is there such a thing as an orderly life? I thought —”

  “Don’t start, Mario. You know I don’t like that irony of yours.”

  “Sorry. But you’re planning something I can’t imagine ever happening. I’m that stupid …”

  She rewarded him with a smile and Conde didn’t think twice: he hurled himself over the precipice.