Havana Black

by Leonardo Padura

  “Vintage, but only a drop,” demurred Manolo.

  “I too prefer vintage, but I don’t place any restrictions like that young man. After all . . .” said Friguens, who receded into the house repeating: “After all, after all.”

  Seeing him walk was also a spectacle: he had kept an erect posture into his eighties, perhaps helped by the scant flesh covering him, and splayed out his feet as he walked, at a rate of knots as vital as the light-coloured guayaberas he wore in summer and the dark suits he sported in winter: Friguens was the last representative of the species of the elegant gentleman and had even welcomed them into his home wearing that grey long-sleeved guayabera, suited to the autumn.

  Now an almost dessicated old man, he’d been art critic for the Diario de la Marina for thirty years, a role that had given him real power in Cuban art circles: Friguens functioned at that time as a kind of guru and an unfavourable opinion from him, trumpeted from the pages of that age-old, Catholic, conservative newspaper, could be the ruination of a joint exhibition, even of Picasso and El Greco. However, his prestige went beyond the platform from which he launched his eulogies or anathemas: it was well known that Friguens behaved like a true incorruptible: spurning the usual practice of his colleagues, he never accepted cash handouts or goods in kind from any of the painters, gallery-owners or dealers he came into contact with and the walls of his house were evidence of his true asceticism: the only drawings visible were those idyllically commercial copies of The Last Supper and The Sacred Heart of Jesus that could be found in the living rooms of any Catholic Cuban of the old school.

  When the newspaper was definitively shut down soon after the victory of the Revolution, almost all of Friguens’s colleagues took the road of political exile. He, on the contrary, decided to stay on, wedded to the island’s cultural offerings: life in Cuba (at least while rum is manufactured and there are still such good painters, he once told the Count) was the only possible cornerstone to his existence, even when he’d been delivered an emasculating “loss of by-line” and buried alive on a radio programme where his name disappeared in a farrago of words flung into the ethereal ether. His Christian resignation must have helped him in that calvary, thought the Count, for, after enjoying years as a real influence in the land, to see oneself suddenly thrust into the mediocre world of news bulletins could have been one punishment too many for someone used to seeing his signature printed daily in a large-circulation newspaper of real substance. But Juan Emilio had accepted the challenge, also without being corrupted: he wasn’t a hostage to bitterness or hatred and retained his pride in being the encyclopedia freely consulted on anything anybody wanted to know about artistic and commercial movements in the Cuban fine arts between 1930 and 1960.

  “Here’s your rum,” he announced, returning to the living room, and giving each of them a glass. His and the Count’s were at the upper limit.

  “Maestro, do your doctors know you’re still taking this medicine?”

  Friguens smiled, hiding his mouth as usual, and said: “My dear boy, I haven’t been to the doctor for twenty years. The last time I went was when my bunions started playing up . . .”

  “Here’s to my health and his, you’re already far too healthy,” said the Count, raising his glass, and the three sipped their rums.

  Juan Emilio took a second sip before speaking.

  “My dear boy, I’m so glad you came to see me. Because that Matisse has been intriguing me for more than thirty years. Well, not just me . . . You realize that right now it’s easily worth four or five million dollars? Yes, because it’s a rare work, one of the last from Matisse’s post-impressionist period, before he became one of the fauves when he had that exhibition in the Paris Autumn Salon in 1905 with Derain, Rouault and Vlaminck. I don’t know if you realize it was there that the fauvist movement was invented? That’s when they started to make paintings in which the drawing and composition were the most important ingredients and pure colours were rediscovered, and quite aggressively at times. Though the fact is Matisse always paid tribute to working with that light he had learned from his master Cézanne . . . You know, according to the information I have, that painting must have been created in 1903, at a time when the poor fellow was always up to his eyeballs, grabbing help from wherever, one hand behind him and the other God knows where, and he sold very, very cheaply. Just imagine, he was working as a decorator’s assistant and was one of the painters of the friezes in the Grand Palais. And Marianito Sánchez Menocal, a nephew of General García Menocal who was strutting his dandy stuff in Paris, took full advantage of that bad patch, and, bought the picture for a rock-bottom price. Marianito then brought it to Cuba when his uncle was President and the 1914 war was starting in Europe, and the family kept it here till the 1929 crash, when they also sank in it up to their eyeballs and decided to sell it to the Acostas de Arriba, owners of sugar refineries in Matanzas who didn’t know too much about art, but had too much money by half and a son who was half, well, half pansy, a gay, as they say nowadays,” and he emphasized the nowadays, as an evil thought went through his head. “In short, the little queer decided he wanted to buy the picture, because Matisse was now famous and he imagined the work must be rather important. When the Acostas de Arriba left the country, lots of people said the painting had already been lost, because they didn’t take it with them, but nobody knew where it had gone. I remember it being said the family no longer had it because one of Batista’s ministers had bought it around 1954, but the truth was nobody knew where the Matisse had ended up. You follow me? What we do know is that when the little queer who bought it from the Sánchez Menocals arrived in Miami, he can’t have had the picture, because a few months later one of his lovers shot and killed him with two bullets to the chest and nobody mentioned finding a Matisse in that shakeout . . . The fact is a haze descended over the painting and whoever bought it didn’t want people to see it or talk about it again. They must have had good reason. So, what’s the verdict, my Count of Transylvania?”

  The policeman took a long draught and two drags on his cigarette. “Devious.”

  “A synonym for trickery, as well as for cunning,” the old man riposted, performing his entire smiling routine.

  “Now one would need to know how it reached that house where it was expropriated as property reclaimed by the State that never reached the hands of State.”

  “Oh, my dear boy, if I start telling you those tales . . .”

  “So I’ll have to find out who owned the house and see if we can conclude the story of that painting . . . Because there were other impressionist paintings in the place and even, I was told, a Goya and other things as well.”

  “Did they tell you what the Goya was like?” jumped in the old man, goaded by professional curiosity and deep pride.

  “No, they didn’t.”

  “Because there were three Goyas in Cuba, and if that one was in Miramar it must have been the one the García Abreus owned . . . So were they the ones who bought the Matisse?”

  The Count attacked his glass of rum once more.

  “And, Juan Emilio, are you sure the Matisse had a yellow patch like a dog in the middle of the street?”

  “Yes, in the background. You almost can’t see it, but it is there, as God is in Heaven. Most definitely.”

  “Did or didn’t you see it?”

  “I didn’t see God, and don’t need to. Or the dog.”

  “So how do you know the damned dog was there?”

  “Because I was told about the painting and committed it to memory,” he responded, smiling, dental occlusion included. “Remember it was my livelihood . . .”

  “And how come I never saw the damned dog, if I see every stray dog going? Tell me something else, Juan Emilio, are there more of these famous paintings, worth millions, that went missing around that time?”

  “You know, my dear boy, as far as I am aware there are three that could submerge in pesos whoever owns them. But I don’t think they exist any longer, because some people w
ho left, rather than abandon their possessions, preferred to hide or set fire to them. That was what Serafín Alderete did, the man who owned half Varadero, when he set fire to guess what: to a Titian . . . You know, just the thought gives me the shakes,” and to exorcize his trembles he downed his rum in one gulp. “Poor imbecile. Well, as I was saying, apart from that Matisse I still have to see to believe, there are three other works on which silence descended and that must now be worth several millions, with the added bonus of the mystery of their disappearance thirty years ago. These eyes of mine saw one when it was still a sketch, a table by Lam. You’re familiar with The Chair, I expect? Well, Lam was working on a diptych, which was that chair and a table, on which he was going to paint a kind of ‘active’ still life, as he put it to me. But as Chinese Lam was always hungrier than a church mouse, when he finished The Chair he sold it to the Escarpentiers, I think for three hundred pesos. We never knew the exact sum, because the Escarpentiers never let on and Lam forgot within the week, after eating away half the money and drinking the other half with his friends, and owing another half to several individuals . . . And that was when he began to work on the sketch of the table, which was going to be better than the famous chair. I know he finished it, but Lam never said where that painting went. Nobody saw it in a finished state, but I can assure you it exists, although Lou Lam, his widow, told me the last time she was in Cuba that he never finished it. But, believe me, for I know more than that French girl: The Table exists . . . The other is a Cézanne owned by the family of the marquesses of Jaruco. I never saw it, but María Zambrano did when she once went to their house and she told me about it: Mariita said it was a Normandy landscape, with a lake reflecting the surrounding trees. In ’51 they announced the theft of the painting and no more was ever heard of it, and the fact is it’s not in any known museum or private collection anywhere in the world. Can you imagine, my dear boy, a Cézanne gone missing? And the third is a blue-period Picasso owned by a family in Cerro because Alfonso Hernández Catá gave it to them. The gossip is that when Picasso still gave drawings away as presents, he gave it to Hernández Catá in Paris and that Alfonso, on one of his trips to Cuba, had an old man’s affair with the daughter of the household and to show them he was a true gentleman, he gave her the Picasso. Then, when those people left, a fake Picasso was found in their house, a dreadful copy of the supposed original: the strange thing is that those people, who still live in Miami, never sold the picture and have never exhibited it. My brother, the one who lives over there, knows them, and he’s asked after their Picasso and they always say it was a fake, which is why they left it in Havana, but I don’t believe a word. Hernández Catá wasn’t a poor fool who’d go giving bad fake Picassos as presents to a woman who had sent him crazy, now was he?”

  “No, that doesn’t sound right, though you can expect lecherous old men to get up to all manner of tricks, can’t you? One final thing: what size were those canvases?”

  Juan Emilio shut his eyes and the Count thought he was looking at a dead man. But he knew the brain of the apparently deceased man was working overtime. “I’m no lecherous old man, you know . . . Well, the Lam must be about two and a half yards by two. Yes, more or less. And the Cézanne, from what Mariita Zambrano told me, must be around a yard square. And the Picasso was smaller: forty-five by thirty inches . . .”

  The Count calculated the sizes as Friguens gave out the measurements and concluded: “The Picasso and Cézanne can be carried pretty easily. But the Lam is too big.”

  “Yes, my dear boy, it’s large even when rolled up,” the old journalist agreed and he asked: “Another little tot?”

  The Count stood up and looked at his bereft glass. He felt like filling the void, but opted to fly the white flag of alcoholic truce.

  “No, Juan Emilio, thanks. I’ve got to keep a clear head because the plot’s still thickening . . . but you’re the one who can help me clear a way through . . . But we must go now,” he said, though his last wish was a lament that Friguens hadn’t repeated his alcoholic invitation.

  Ever since he’d been promoted to detective, Mario Conde had always avoided that kind of labour: reviewing legal documents, probing archives, checking though papers. Although he often had recourse to investigative routine, his approach was more and more based on hunches, prejudices and intuitions rather than assembling statistics or proceeding to logical conclusions, and that was why he preferred to leave the scientific side of the investigation to his aides. But the rush imposed by the day and a half deadline meant he had to shut himself up with Sergeant Manuel Palacios in that oppressive study in the National Archive and dive in to locate two remote facts: the address of the García Abreus in Miramar and the existence of the inventory of objects made in that house by the functionaries working for Expropriated Property, who must have included Miguel Forcade. The Cuban itinerary of that Matisse brought by Sánchez Menocal, later purchased by the Acostas de Arriba, and supposedly sold to a Batista minister in 1954, could perhaps be plotted further if it could be proved the work had been in that house in Miramar that Friguens assured him had belonged to the García Abreus, who must have had a good reason not to make their million-dollar acquisition public. Moreover, the Count’s inability to visualize the yellow patch the old critic identified as a dog had started to gnaw at him as irritatingly as a nagging suspicion.

  “Did you take a good look at the painting, Manolo?”

  The Sergeant marked the file he was examining and looked at his boss.

  “Fuck, Conde, I looked at it. And I really don’t think I like it very much. You can hardly see anything, man.”

  “You’re an ignorant savage, and insensitive to boot. It’s post-impressionist . . . But did you see the dog?”

  “The yellow dog?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Manolo closed his eyes for a moment, like old Friguens. The Count supposed he must be reviewing the picture mentally, and when he raised his eyelids he said: “No, to be honest, I can’t remember.”

  The Count sighed and accepted defeat.

  “All right, get on, keep looking.”

  And they turned to the bundles of documents. It was only at moments like that that the Count longed for the efficiency of computers, which could digest a name – “García Abreu” perhaps – and tell the whole story with photos included. Otherwise, his cybernetic inadequacies made him think of those machines as an aberration of human intelligence, which had perhaps created in them one of the monsters of its own selfdestruction. The infinite trust placed by people in the electronic reasoning of those insensate gadgets scared him in the end: it was inevitable that if man transferred all his wisdom and analytical ability to those soulless creations such an unnatural act would wreak devastation. Luckily for the Count, the island’s chronic underdevelopment and pre-post-modern intellectual stance had vaccinated it against that unstoppable world pandemic. Although, at the end of the day, he thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea if the archive did possess a little engine of salvation, which could tell the whole story (canvases included) in response to a single name: Henri Matisse, for example.

  “We’ve got three days’ work here,” he declared desperately and lit a cigarette as he stood up. A physical need to flee had hit his stomach, and threatened to drill through.

  “You’ve given up so soon?” Manolo asked with a smile. “You almost lasted an hour . . .”

  “The fact is I can’t stand it.”

  “But I have to . . .?”

  The Count took a drag, looked at the bundles, and said: “You shouldn’t have to. Nobody should have to . . . but if somebody has to do this shit, I think it’s your turn today . . .”

  “It always is . . .”

  “Don’t start, Manolo, I let you off when I can,” he replied, searching his repertory for an excuse that rang with elegant conviction. “Look, while you try and find something, I’ll go and see somebody who can help us. I’m not sure how but I think they can. It’s ten past eleven? Well, let’s meet back at Head
quarters at two. If you don’t find anything, I’ll tell Colonel Molina to send some people . . . Because I can’t get into this, even if they turn me back into an ordinary policeman . . . I just can’t: look, I’ve already got a rash . . .”

  The old avenue down to the port, between the area around the National Archive and the church in Paula, must be the eyesore of Havana, thought the Count, as he always had: it’s not even ugly, dirty, disgusting or disagreeable, he listed some adjectives, discarding others: it’s alien, he concluded, contemplating it beneath the harsh light of a midday that was summery rather than autumnal, as he walked up the street lined by anti-aesthetic stores on the sea side and unfriendly blocks on the city side: brick and concrete blocks built to the single criterion of utility with no concession to beauty, forming an impenetrable, ochre wall on both sides of the street, covered in rubbish that had fallen from the overflowing bins where a few dogs sniffed, hoping against any real hope. What was terrible was that people, probably too many, inhabited those buildings without balconies, arches or visible columns: their tiny flats designed in function of the rapid pleasures bestowed by prostitutes on passing sailors, port-workers and city dwellers who dared to descend to the last frontier of the old district of San Isidro, in the heart of Apache territory: the “quays”, that place permeated with the whole history of modern pirating, vice and perdition, those dark annals through which the Count felt a longing for the unknown, inherited by way of stories he’d heard from old men who’d swum in those lagoons of bottomless evil. Later, many of those practitioners of sex, morally redeemed and socially recycled, had stayed on to live in rooming-houses, thus transformed into family residencies by ex-whores who now had children that couldn’t always be dubbed sons of whores for reasons of timing: because, in fact, the correct classification depended on the moment they were born: before or after maternal rehabilitation . . . The Count had occasionally visited those sad apartments, marked by a sordid past, which, after one fine morning, thirty years ago, were no longer reached by running water, and now he thought of the additional daily sadness of those people, trapped by the cruel fatalism of town-planners, people who went into the street only to see that same dark, desolate panorama, so far removed from a possible landscape by Matisse or Cézanne, or by chairs and tables tropicalized by Chinese mulatto Wifredo Lam. No, it couldn’t be pleasant to spend your life in that area, a bucket of water in each hand and congenital ugliness behind you, he told himself as he walked by the old church of Paula, now marooned in the middle of the street by utilitarian modernity, and turned his prow towards the Alameda in search of a tree able to give shade and a bench from which he could contemplate the sea. Nor was that really the sea he was looking for, since he judged that corner of the bay to be equally sordid, its waters polluted by oil and gases spilled there, a sea without life or waves, but he reaped the reward of a patch of freedom he so desperately needed: an open space to pitch against archival claustrophobia and streets bordered by peeling walls and whorish anecdote.