Grab a Snake by the Tail

by Leonardo Padura

  “Here’s your man,” sighed Manolo as he arrived with the guard, who now walked around the grave and sniffed it as if he were a hunting dog.

  “So what do you reckon’s in here?” asked the man, intrigued.

  Conde didn’t look at him but spoke to Manolo: “Call Headquarters and tell them to come and give us a hand. And tell them to keep some slops back for our comrade’s piglets …”

  The gravedigger’s face visibly relaxed. Feeding his pigs must be one of his most demanding daily chores, and no doubt he calculated daily the amount of meat and fat accumulating under the hides of those animals whose eventual respective sacrifice would bring him two coveted goods that were in short supply: food and money.

  “If you sort the grub for my five pigs, five, I say, don’t worry about anything else. I can open the grave and then get on my way quicker,” the guard offered.

  “But we also have to look around the shrub they put in the directions for a good reason, because I don’t think anyone would hide anything in a chino’s grave.”

  “I do that with spade. Earth soft after ’lain.” Juan Chion now offered his services and Conde thought, There’s no way out. But there always was.

  “Fine, get on with it … I’m going to buy cigarettes in the place opposite. I’ll be back in a moment.” Manolo glanced warmly at Conde before he fled the cemetery.

  He crossed the street towards the cafeteria and the first thing he discovered was that the bar next door was closed. Was that a plot at national level? It was just past 5 p.m. and it was ridiculous that the place wasn’t open at the best time to have a drink. Yet another? Well, yes, another drop would have done him nicely. What a disaster. He walked into the cafeteria and read from the huge, garish list what was on offer: POPULARES CIGARETTES, LIGHT CIGARETTES, COFFEE. And in the corner, a handwritten sign offered water, with the decisive epithet AT ROOM TEMPERATURE, and he noticed on the other side the bar’s becalmed freezer, which could have supplied the whole neighbourhood with water. “Nothing doing,” he muttered. “It’s a plot.” He asked for a packet of cigarettes and hesitated over the coffee. Do I dare? He dared, and profoundly regretted it. The would-be coffee left a sweetish taste on his tongue and a few dregs he found almost impossible to spit out.

  Conde stood in the cafeteria doorway and looked towards the cemetery. The fence didn’t let him see what the others were doing and only the trunk and drooping branches of the weeping willow helped him locate the grave of Li Mei Tang, which must contain, most likely, a few bones, a putrefied coffin, a thousand forgotten dreams and a valuable secret, enough to cost one man his life. He lit a cigarette and looked at the cars driving past. What might that secret be? he wondered, not intending to come up with an answer, though he immediately reflected that the person capable of mutilating and stringing up Pedro Cuang must have known Pedro was involved in the gambling racket and had to be the executor of the lost fortune of Amancio the banker, with whom Pedro seemed to have sustained a long friendship and a fruitful association in criminal dealings. And Conde now knew that the deceased had taken his secret to his grave. Or the morgue, where he was currently lying. Besides, the lethal Zarabanda sign had revealed that the murderer was aware of the old secrets of the mayomberos, although there was something about that which seemed increasingly fake … And why had they knocked Conde out and not taken his pistol? Perhaps they had just seen somebody come in with a key to the room and had decided to take the opportunity to conduct a fresh search. Or perhaps they had just been taking precautions: perhaps an intruder might find what the murderer hadn’t. But if only … No, no, thought Conde before he stopped. They won’t fool me, he concluded, convinced they were only trying to put him on the wrong track with all those clues, hanging a man they thought was dead when he wasn’t and who, almost definitely, hadn’t revealed the hiding place in the cemetery, for if he had they would have found signs of a search. But the killer is someone from the Barrio, and I’m going to stop him well and truly in his tracks. He threw his cigarette butt into the street and breathed deeply until he’d filled his lungs – and over half his tsin – with the carbon monoxide belched out by a juddering, packed bus. And when he felt most like getting away from there, he crossed the avenue and followed the path to the grave where the peace of the dead was being disturbed.

  When he saw him, Juan Chion shouted, “Hu’lly, hu’lly, Conde.” But he didn’t hurry. There was plenty of time to see Li Mei Tang’s coffin, where only a few bones remained that were probably of no use for a nganga (a few ribs and vertebrae; his kiyumba was gone), and time above all to be dazzled by what Juan Chion had dug out from the roots of the old weeping willow: pendants, necklaces, rings, earrings and gold coins shone brightly from the inside of a metal box that had certainly cost Pedro Cuang his life.

  8

  Rufino swam peacefully around his bowl. His fierce fighting-fish fins gently beat the water, driving a circular dance which could only end in the creature’s death … and resume with the arrival of the next Rufino, always identical to the previous one, and to the one before that, and before that, since red fish and the repeated cycles of their lives gave Conde the feeling that something in the world could be, or at least appear to be, permanent and immutable. “That’s life, Rufo,” Conde told that particular Rufino. “Forever going round in dirty water until we’re fucked up. But there’ll always be another ready to start the round: until everything fucks up again … right?”

  He sat on his bed and placed his pistol next to the goldfish bowl. “Don’t touch it. It’s loaded,” he warned the fish as he rubbed his eyes. Two days ago, while Patricia had been helping him clean the house, he had pledged to tidy the room properly, but he didn’t have the strength to embark on such a task now. He looked at the tower of books piled high on a chair, the original function of which, before he was abandoned by that last woman whose name he didn’t even try to remember, had been to provide a prop to daring scenes of lovemaking. The novels he read time and again now slept on that complicit chair. He had been returning to the same books for some time: he knew their characters better than almost all the people around him and felt a strange pleasure when he confirmed that their lives had barely changed between one reading and the next, even though on each reread he discovered different intentions or shades of emotion, because something had in fact shifted, even if it was in a circular movement. He, Mario Conde, had moved, very probably downwards, and it was his new perspective as a reader that allowed him to discover those twinkles or dark places he’d not seen on previous visits to those pages. As if he were a new Rufino in the red garb of the previous Rufino. There was always something set to change in the lives of real, living people. And it was a bastard, and generally was a change for the worse …

  Any of those well-thumbed books represented what he would like to have written in another life. He no longer spent too much time thinking about his aborted vocation, though an envelope he’d intentionally mislaid somewhere in his house was the resting place for several stories he’d drafted even against his own wishes. Because he really preferred to live as a parasite on other authors who knew how to write well. Islands in the Stream, he read on the spine of one book; Conversation in the Cathedral; Catcher in the Rye; Explosion in a Cathedral; Horse Fever; and then he stopped.

  Conde prepared the coffee pot in the kitchen and put it on the burner. He was hungry but knew he wasn’t in a state to cook anything. And what the hell would he eat anyway? Unless he went out and hunted a chino dog in the street with his bow and arrow. He realized the real danger was the nightmares hunger usually provoked. In situations like that, he usually dreamed he went to bars where, for some reason, he couldn’t get what he imagined bars should supply, just like in real life. That conspiracy was so well devised it even controlled the world of his unconscious. He drank his coffee and looked out of the window, and reluctantly recalled yet again the last woman he’d had in his bed, the damned woman past whose house he was forced to walk whenever he visited Skinny Carlos. His feeling
of abandonment was such he even mouthed her name: Karina. Karina was beautiful, red-haired and played the sax. Was she a real person or had he simply invented her to bring solace to his loneliness? At this point he couldn’t say, but he did think he could remember that he’d never made love as he had with that elusive creature, who had become lost in lies, the night and the fog. He threw his cigarette butt out of the window and cursed Karina’s mother … That woman had destroyed him in a cruel, brutal, humiliating fashion. That’s the price of falling in love, you fool, he reproached himself. But he immediately found a sure-fire way to justify himself: The fact is you always fall in love, Tamara rubbed that in your face, and that’s why she’s afraid of you, you idiot. And he thought back to the conversation he’d had the day before with Tamara, to the desire his oldest, most sustained love always aroused, and decided on the spot he needed to see her as soon as possible and, if possible, spark that riveting interaction again. And that he should kick things off without waiting for her to contact him.

  When he returned to his bedroom and laid back on his bed, he reflected how much he wanted to sleep and dream the dream of Cuang Con, that chino who had closed his eyes and dreamed he was a butterfly filled with pleasure when he flew over flowers and green fields. In his dream he hadn’t known he was Cuang Con, but when he had woken up and was the real Cuang Con again, he hadn’t known if he was a butterfly who had dreamed he was a man or a masochistic butterfly who had transmuted into a shitty policeman who increasingly didn’t want to be a policeman. As he reflected on the fable of his own erroneous vocation as a policeman without the calling or the talent, he felt the exhaustion, alcoholic excess and blows to the head of the last two days catch up with his body, and he fell asleep. Then he did really dream. But not of butterflies, or even bars. He dreamed Patricia was the naked woman with the jade earrings who came over, caressed him and let him glue his lips to her small breasts and nipples that were as firm and sweet as plums, while his fingers wandered over her infinite thighs before beginning their ascent to stroke the wiry hair of a bush she’d inherited from her mother’s black blood. Beyond the entangled mesh of hair Conde ploughed the furrow that disappeared into a deep, mossy well, which his hand, arm and whole body entered, sucked down by an implacable whirlpool. He woke up in the middle of the night, dripping in sweat, viscously damp between his legs, his heart racing. He discounted any idea of going for a shower and fell asleep again. When he woke up, with a sunbeam on his face, it was an effort to remember why his underpants were stiff and smelled of dead chino.

  Conde would anxiously scrutinize the physical process that, by the mere act of applying heat, made the water ascend, cross the dark powder he’d placed in the strainer and produce the miracle of the liquid that was ready to be drunk. That first coffee in the morning answered the desperate call from his body and every one of his slowly awakening cells. But it only needed the first few sips for his body to begin to settle down: this was catalysed when he took the first drag on his first cigarette of the day. Then, and only then, did he begin to feel he was human again.

  The accumulated hunger, alcohol and nocturnal agitation, and the fallout from a bad night’s sleep didn’t make that morning’s Mario Conde feel anything like a thirty-five-year-old man: in fact he felt like he was two hundred, although the cold shower he subjected himself to reduced that horrific figure by half, and the second coffee, with the aforementioned cigarette, restored him to an age even he believed was acceptable: he felt he was down to eighty when he heard a knock on his door and, with his towel wrapped around his waist, he turned the knob and found himself face-to-face with his midsummer night’s dream – for real.

  “Were you looking for me, by any chance?”

  Patricia was in her police uniform and was carrying a bag. Dazzled by that morning vision, Conde reacted in a way he would later deem to be foolish and quite surprising for the sixty-year-old man he always became merely by looking at that woman.

  “Where the fuck were you, my girl? You landed me with the case of the dead chino and in a flash you’d disappeared … with a young lad you call your boyfriend and —”

  “I did what I promised I would,” interrupted Patricia, pushing him gently but firmly out of the way so she could walk into his house. “I spoke to my father so he’d help you and …”

  Conde’s ravaged sense of smell detected a second, tempting, unnerving scent. The first, naturally, came from Patricia, who had just had a bath; the second from the bag she was carrying. To his surprise he discovered he was almost back to being thirty-five. A battered thirty-five, but even so, he thought nostalgically when, years later, at almost fifty, he wandered through the Barrio once again, remembering the details of that episode and evoking the energy and illusions he’d scattered on life’s path ever since. And above all, remembering that very precise morning when he had fulfilled his dreams …

  “What have you got there?” he asked, trying to peer into the bag.

  The china smiled.

  “I saw the state of your fridge the other day. I can’t imagine how you’re still alive … I’ve come to join you for breakfast.”

  “Breakfast?” Conde was even more dazzled when Patricia pushed the full ashtray away and started to take supplies from the bag and put them on the table: a loaf that smelled as if it was just out of the oven, a piece of cheese, strips of cured ham, cakes (coconut or guayaba?) and a thermos from which she poured two large cups of milky coffee. Did such things still exist? Conde wouldn’t have believed it if he’d not seen it …

  “Come on, sit down and let’s speak,” his friend ordered.

  Conde thought briefly that he should first get dressed, although he felt very comfortable with a towel wrapped around his waist, his only defence against nudity. Hunger won out, and he sat next to Patricia and started to devour those unexpected delicacies that his stomach joyfully welcomed up to the next dismal moment.

  “So what have you found out?” asked Patricia, and Conde, while he chewed breakfast and drank his coffee, tried to tell her about his escapades over the last few days, that had been crammed with setbacks, doubts, mysteries and questions rather than anything concrete. As on the previous day, when he had spoken to his boss, he omitted from his abridged version the idea that Francisco Chiú, Patricia’s godfather, might be connected to the murder, although he did add the detail that Pedro Cuang had described the way to find Amancio’s treasure in Chinese because he had a specific Chinese recipient in mind.

  “And what I most need to say to you …” Conde was nearing the end of his account. “From the very beginning I’ve felt that your father knows something he’s not telling me. Something that might be important if I’m ever going to solve this case.”

  “What do you think that might be?” asked Patricia. She was listening hard and had barely touched her (coconut!) cake or coffee.

  “Aren’t you going to eat your cake?” Conde enquired, trying to sound casual. She shook her head and pushed the plate over to him. He grabbed it as if it might run away. “You know, I don’t have a clue … but I think Juan knew Pedro Cuang better than he’s letting on, and that his friend Francisco, your godfather, also knew him, and very well at that.”

  Patricia sighed so deeply it shocked Conde.

  “Mayo, I’d like to thank you for what you’re doing … Anything that’s related to my father is too important for me …”

  Conde listened and said nothing, and decided to keep it that way for once. It was clear that Patricia wanted to talk.

  “I can’t claim he’s been the best father in the world, but he’s better than anyone you could have dreamed of having. His family always came first. He emigrated to Cuba to find a way to support the family he had as a child and worked like a mule all his life for his family here and I …”

  Patricia had touched on a spot that was too painful and no doubt too sensitive, because as she spoke her voice began to fail and her eyes moistened until two tears rolled down her chocolate cheeks. Conde was subject to many fr
ailties, including the inability to watch a woman cry: he simply collapsed before such a spectacle. Consequently he dropped his cigarette, went over to Patricia and caressed her braided curls, which were silkier than he’d imagined. Softer than the pubic hair in his recent dream.

  “It’s all right,” she said, and she tried to smile as she took Conde’s other hand. “There are so many things, my father …”

  She gave Conde’s hand a friendly tug, which was enough to cause the towel around his waist to fall to the floor like a theatre curtain. Patricia saw an erect penis hardly twenty inches from her nose, pointing at her like a water pistol ready to shoot. Conde moved to retrieve his meagre fig leaf, but Patricia squeezed his hand and stopped him. Conde gulped and looked at his stiff appendage, which was fortunately all of thirty-five and had been rejuvenated by the unexpected breakfast.

  “I swear by my mother I wanted to console you … but I couldn’t stop thinking of that something else,” said Conde, his sincerity also stripped naked for her to see. “The truth is that whenever I see you, I can’t stop thinking about that other thing … Whenever. And you know …”

  Patricia smiled.

  “Oh, I thought all that business about laying a Chinese mulatto was a game you were playing …” The woman’s irony verged on sweet talk while she squeezed Conde’s hand harder and her eyes looked up into Conde’s or down at his reddened, already dripping glans.

  “I never toy with such things, or turn down a coconut cake, or invoke the name of the Lord in vain … I bloody —” Conde started to say and almost jumped into the air when the back of Patricia’s hand brushed against his scrotum. But when the nails of that same hand ran up the smooth underside of his penis, his trembling legs exploded in a shudder that penetrated his anus, burned his nipples, dehydrated his brain and left him completely defenceless, only fit to reduce the few inches separating his aching penis from Patricia’s face.