Havana Black

by Leonardo Padura

  “Eighteen. And Miguel was forty. Anything else?”

  The Count smiled again. “Miriam, why do you take everything as an insult?”

  She was the one who then attempted a smile, but the smile never reached her lips: the grimace, brought on by tears, pulled her lips down. Down and down, like a waterfall that seemed unstoppable. But the large, shiny tears welling in her eyes seemed unreal: as if they came from another face, or another person, or other feelings, which were very far from that place, perhaps on the other side of the sea. Hollow pearls, concluded the Count.

  “But don’t you understand anything? Don’t you realize I don’t know what the hell I’ll do with myself when I get back to Miami?”

  “Calle 8 was what I wanted to see first. Before getting to his house, before going to bed with him. I’d created Calle 8 in my head, and it was like a fiesta and a museum. I couldn’t imagine it any other way: a place of entertainment, full of bright lights and bustle, where the music played at full volume and people walked along the pavements, happy and carefree, enjoying that Little Havana where the good and the bad survived that had died out in this other Havana. That’s why it also had to be a place that had stayed still in time, where I would find a country I didn’t know and had always wanted to discover: like this country was before 1959, a café on every street corner, a jukebox playing boleros in every bar, a game of dominoes in every arcade, a street where you could get anything without queuing or finding out whether it was your turn or not according to the ration book. Like everybody else I’d heard the stories here in Havana and turned that blissful Calle 8 into a myth, and transformed it mentally into something like the heart of Cuban Miami . . . I remember how it was already dark when we left the airport and after three years without seeing each other I told Miguel my first wish and he asked me what it was I wanted to see on Calle 8 that was so pressing, and I told him: ‘That’s it, Calle 8, Little Havana . . .’ And to do something as simple and straightforward as eating a steak sandwich on a street corner.

  “But that is all Calle 8 is: a street manufactured by the nostalgia of those who live in Miami and the dreams of those of us who want to go there. It is like the fake ruins of a country that doesn’t exist and never existed, and what remains is sick from an overdose of agonizing and prosperity, of hatred and oblivion. And consequently what I found, in the Calle 8 I’d been fabricating while waiting for my exit visa, was an ugly, lifeless, spiritless avenue, where almost nobody walked on pavements, where I heard no music I wanted to hear, found no carefree entertainment, or fry-up stalls selling the steak sandwich I wanted. Not even arcades with lots of columns, because there are no arcades in Miami . . . Three drunks cursed cars driving by. ‘They came out from Mariel,’ said Miguel almost contemptuously, and two old people like my grandparents drinking coffee by a restaurant . . . The rest was silence. The silence of death.

  “ ‘Miami is a strange place; not at all like you imagine it, is it?’ commented Miguel as we turned at the end of Little Havana and went off towards Flager and his house. ‘Take a good look: Miami is nothing. Because it’s got everything but lacks the vital element: it has no heart.”

  “He had a bad time of it in those early years. In Madrid he’d depended on the charity of nuns and when he finally made it to the United States and to Miami, he’d worked as a hotel porter, a toll-collector on the freeway, on a supermarket till, until he got a job in a firm that imported and exported produce from Santo Domingo, and then things improved. But he never got involved in politics, though he had several visits from people who tried to involve him. You know, with the position he held in Cuba, it might have smoothed his way if he’d made a few declarations and ingratiated himself with some of the local political grandees, but he’d already written to me in a letter how he was afraid someone would find out he’d been in charge of expropriating properties owned by many people who now lived in Miami. And people in Miami are not the kind to forgive and forget, I can tell you, although they like to turn a blind eye to the renegades who jump ship: it’s mathematics really, a simple matter of addition, you know?

  “That night, in his house, Miguel and I could at last talk about why he’d stayed in Spain without telling me anything beforehand and without any proper preparations. I’d never wanted to reproach him for his decision, for I knew there must be an important reason behind such an unexpected exit, living as we did in Cuba, with almost everything that one could wish for. Finally he told me his situation at work wasn’t what it had been, and that any day it might have all collapsed, as it did not long after, and he also told me my brother Fermín was getting money together to buy a boat and would leave with me for Miami while he’d defect in Spain because he didn’t want to leave by sea. You remember, his trauma about the sea? Well, not long after, they found Fermín had been embezzling, put him in jail and the whole plan collapsed . . . though I never knew anything about it.

  “And so there we were, in Miami, a city Miguel couldn’t stand, living on a wage and trying to relaunch his life, and I can tell you it wasn’t easy. Calle 8 was like a premonition of everything I was and wasn’t going to find in Miami and immediately I understood why Miguel said it wasn’t how you thought it should be. Although it’s full of Cubans, people don’t live like they lived in Cuba anymore or behave as they behaved in Cuba. Those who don’t work here can only think about working over there and possessing things: every day a new purchase, even though they are working themselves to death. Those who were atheist over here become religious and never miss a mass. Those who were militant communists become even more militant anti-communists, and when they can’t hide what they were, they shout it from the rooftops, parade their renunciation like a trophy, fully aware of the consequences, you know? There are even people who left here cursing the place, and who are even more fucked in Miami and so they decide it’s their business to say dialogue would be best and that it should all be sorted through talk. Besides, something similar is happening there to what happened here with the image of Miami: the people there are beginning to turn Cuba into a myth, to imagine it as a desire, rather than remembering it as it was, and they live in a halfway house, going nowhere: they can’t decide whether to forget Cuba or be new people in a new country, and finally they’re neither one thing nor the other, like me, because after living there for eight years I don’t know where I want to be or what I want to be . . . It’s a national tragedy. Miami is nothing and Cuba is a dream that never existed . . . The truth is I don’t know why I’m telling you about my life, about Miguel and Fermín. Perhaps because I think I can trust you. Or probably because I’m afraid and know that the worst of all this is that I must go back and Miguel won’t be there to help me to live that peculiar life he forced on me. Do you still think it’s strange that I curse the day we decided to return to this blessed isle for ten days?”

  After seven failed attempts, the dialling tone offered by the eighth public telephone he tried was like heavenly music to the Count’s ears. At his wits’ end he put his last coin in the slot and dialled Manolo’s number and the ringing reaching him from infinity seemed a just reward for his labours.

  “It’s me, Manolo. Listen carefully, let’s hope the line doesn’t go dead.”

  “Sing on, Conde.”

  “Something very strange happened . . .”

  “You’ve seen a ghost?”

  “Shut up and listen, I’ve used my last coin: I spoke to Miriam and she told me half her life-story. I need you to get weaving as early as possible tomorrow and sort two things as quickly as possible: get the Immigration people to act so she can’t leave for three or four days for whatever reason, but not let on that we’re keeping her here. Get the people on the airline she travelled with to say there are no seats, no flights, that there’s no petrol for the planes, whatever, but give her no inkling we’re the ones forcing her to stay, get it? Because I need her to keep talking . . . The other thing you should do is look out information on her brother, Fermín Bodes Alvarez. From what Miriam told me,
I reckon the man may know what Miguel Forcade was after in Cuba, because I’m now sure he was after something he couldn’t take with him in ’78 and that’s why they killed him. Got all that?”

  “Fuck, Conde, I’m not some retard. What should I do then?”

  “Pick me up at the Boss’s. I’m off to talk to him. I’ll wait there.”

  And Mario Conde hung up, with a sigh of relief, as the cannon fire signalling it was nine p.m. reached him from far off. Time to close the gates to protect the city from pirates, and the policeman looked at his watch, which was slow, as if he were one to worry about precision, and his eyes returned to the figure of Miriam retreating up the Rampa, for the first time freely contemplating her from the rear, buttocks so perfect from the new perspective, compelling, firm, abundant flesh, like a magnet trailing in its wake the premonitions and desires of the Count, abandoned on the shore, a declaration full of doubt ringing in his ears: “I don’t know what I’ll do with my life,” she’d said before taking off and now he thought he should have said: “Walk up the Rampa to heaven, and I’ll go with you,” but he hadn’t and what he now saw at his feet was the dirty Calzada de Infanta, along which his bus was approaching, like a dark, rabid animal, impregnated with all the smells, anger and desires stirring in the city. “All aboard,” he shouted at himself, as he ran to hang off a door.

  “Just as well you got here.”

  “Why? You in need of a policeman?”

  “Are you in a bloody mood?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Skinny Carlos smiled from his wheelchair and lit the cigarette between his lips.

  “And how should I take that, wild man?”

  “With all the shit, like I do . . . I feel fucked, hungry, sleepy, I’ve got to go on being a policeman and I have no luck with women. I mean, I don’t have anything I should have, what more do you want?”

  “For you to stop acting tragic and remember that the day after tomorrow is your birthday and that we must organize something.”

  “You sure, Skinny?”

  “About what, Conde?”

  “That we have to do something.”

  “You don’t want to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I do . . . You only hit thirty-six once in your life, you know.”

  “And eighteen, forty-nine and sixty-two. But hardly ever eighty-two.”

  “That’s what I say. That’s why I spoke to the gang and everybody’ll be here on Wednesday. Andrés, Rabbit, even Miki . . . and I just have to let Red Candito know, though he’ll probably not come.”

  “How come?”

  “What do you mean, wild man? Didn’t you know Candito’s turned Adventist, Baptist or some such balls?”

  Mario Conde was shocked beyond belief.

  “You’re kidding. Since when?”

  “That was what I was told. That he’s left the clandestine beer shop, that he’s no longer doing the business and spends his days proclaiming Jehovah as his saviour.”

  “I don’t believe it,” retorted the Count. “He was always half a mystic, but to go Adventist, or Pentecostal . . .? Hey, but I’ve got to see this and anyway I need to talk to him. Ring Andrés and see whether he’ll take us to Red’s place and I’ll eat what Jose kept for me.”

  When the Count entered the kitchen, the last strains of the final theme tune of the nine o’clock soap reached him from the living room. He found the meal Josefina had left for him just in case, under a plate on top of the cooker. She’d poured black beans on a mound of white rice and tucked a fried chicken leg away in one corner.

  “The salad’s in the refrigerator,” he heard behind him, and the Count took a moment to turn round.

  The loyalty shown by Skinny and his mother always disarmed him; it was so simple, elemental yet rocksolid. He had a place in that house he’d never had anywhere else, not even in his own home when his parents were alive, and the experience of belonging there softened him to the point that, on nights like tonight, when he felt heartily exhausted, disillusioned, rancorous, worried, destitute and full of angst, he was on the verge of tears, so when he turned round he opted to say: “So that animal in there scoffed all the chips as usual?”

  “I told him to keep some for you, but he said he was sure you wouldn’t come . . .”

  “If you weren’t here, I’d say he was a son of a . . . but better not, I suppose.”

  “That’s up to you two,” said Josefina, smiling her usual smile.

  The Count put his plates on the table and looked at her.

  “Sit down for a minute, Jose.”

  She obeyed and sighed plaintively.

  “What’s the matter? You tired?”

  “Yes, I get more tired by the day.”

  “Hey, Jose, let me tell you something: your son’s had the idea of celebrating my birthday here.”

  Josefina smiled again, now really enjoying herself.

  “Is that what he told you? I’ll soon start thinking he’s that son of an individual you were about to mention. Because the idea was mine.”

  “But are you crazy, sweetheart? Don’t you know what it will be like with all your son’s drunken friends here?”

  “Yours as well . . . It will be all right. I’ve already got the things I need for the meal.”

  “And where did you find the money?”

  “Don’t worry about that, it’s all sorted.”

  “And what are you going to cook?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  “You’re just like your son,” nodded the Count, abandoning a chicken bone stripped of meat on the edge of his plate.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “When isn’t he?” asked Skinny as he came into the kitchen.

  “You ate my chips, you animal.”

  “Forget the chips and wash your hands, because Andrés is on his way.”

  “And where are you off to? If one might be so bold,” asked Josefina, clearing the dishes from the table.

  “To Red’s place,” said Mario, lighting up. “Your son says he’s turned Baptist. Or Mormon? But I swear on my life I don’t believe a word of it.”

  On the slippery slope to his fortieth year Red Candito was sure he was destined to die in the same place he’d been born: a rundown, promiscuous rooming house in Santos Suárez, walls falling apart, electric cables dangling from the eaves like poisonous tentacles. Being born and growing up there had moulded his way of life with an irremediable domestic fatalism: from early on he’d learned that you have to defend even your minimal playing space, with fists if necessary, and when he grew up he also learned how fists opened up other doors in life: respect between men, for example. That is perhaps why he befriended the Count and had remained a friend even when Mario entered the prickly clan of the police: he’d once seen him defend with his fists a dignity that had been hurt by the theft of a tin of milk, when they had gone together to a school in the countryside, and Candito had come to his defence then and ever since. Because loyalty also formed part of the code of his turf, and he practised it, whenever it was called for.

  When they met, Candito had already twice repeated the first year of high school and was one of the first to let his hair grow long, to create from red, rebellious ringlets a saffron afro that earned him the nickname he still bore: he was Red and would always be so, even when he was active in a Protestant, Lutheran or Calvinist sect. At the time they got to know each other, Candito expressed himself with a peculiar level of violence that also had its own morality: nobody ever saw him abuse anyone smaller or weaker than himself and the respect his friends felt for him grew till it became a harmonious friendship. Then, when the Count and his other friends went to university, fate or destiny placed Red at the edges of a marginal existence bordering on illegality where he earned his living in the chinks left by state shortages and inefficiency: and the Count, as a policeman, had taken advantage of that situation. In exchange for the street wisdom Red brought him and for information useful in solving some of his cas
es, the lieutenant offered him, alongside friendship, the pledge of unconditional protection if it were ever necessary in his conflicts with the law. It was an agreement between gentlemen, backed by a single guarantee, the sense of honour and friendship they’d learned in the barrios and meeting-places of Havana, when such words still rang true.

  Recently, however, Candito must have experienced a kind of mystical revelation. Contrary to what happened in his usual circles, where African religions ruled firm, promising pragmatically and comprehensively all kinds of protection and help in the material world (as well as in questions of love and justice, hatred and revenge), Red had begun to gravitate towards the Catholic Church, where, so he claimed, he was searching for a peace denied to him by the hostile, aggressive outside world. So, from time to time, he would go to mass or spend time in church, never taking confession, but praying his way, which meant asking God to grant peace and good health to him and his loved ones, including the three men who invaded his home well after ten o’clock at night.

  Cuqui, the sinewy, obedient little mulatta now living with Red, opened the door and smiled when she recognized the new arrivals, who greeted her with a kiss.

  “And where’s your husband?” Carlos asked, looking into the small room where someone was monologuing on television about the excellent forecasts for the next sugar cane harvest.

  “He’s in church.”

  “At this time of night?”

  “Yes, he sometimes gets back at eleven . . .”

  “He’s got a bad case,” interrupted the Count, and Cuqui nodded.

  She knew Candito’s friends had a right to certain confidences that were denied her.

  “If you want to go and look for him, it’s just around the corner.”

  “What do you reckon, Conde?” hesitated Carlos. “He might not like that.”

  “I spend my life dragging Candito out of churches. Come on . . . Cuqui, get the coffee on, we’ll have him here in no time,” the policeman assured her, as he started pushing Carlos’s chair again.