Havana Black

by Leonardo Padura

  As he breathed in the putrid stench of the bay, the Count realized why he had fled the Archive where the legal memory of his country rested: he really couldn’t care less whether he found anything. An unhealthy apathy had invaded him at the revelation of so much dead past, so much existence reduced to certificates, declarations, forms, extracts, protocols, registers, in duplicate and even triplicate, emptied of passion and blood: the whole devalued detritus of history without which it wasn’t possible to live but with which it was impossible to co-exist. The violent revelation that all was reduced to a piece of paper, numbered and filed according to entries of birth, marriage, divorce and death had been far too apocalyptic an illumination for his spirit on the eve of a birthday and liberation from work: the arid wake of nothingness left by being thirty-six less one day exposed to him the alarming futility of his efforts, as man, as human being, as supposedly intelligent animal. What could he do to hold off that pathetic, dismal destiny, as someone who considered his memory and memory itself to be a most precious gift? Perhaps art, as the unashamedly queer dramatist Alberto Marqués had reminded him recently, might be the remedy most within his grasp in order to escape oblivion. But his art, he knew already, would never enjoy the transcendence able to save him (art and myself, as Martí had cried on a day of despair; either we save each other or go down together). Or perhaps it would? he wondered, remembering that other genius who had committed suicide sure he’d failed artistically and whose novel then won prizes and recognition that were well and truly deserved. No. He’d never write anything like that, he shouldn’t delude himself, he concluded, and depressed himself a little bit more before standing up and walking along the old Alameda de Paula, Havana’s elegant eighteenth-century promenade, equally devalued by age and neglect, with its leonine fountain distressingly dry, before heading to the still distant mouth of the bay. It was inevitable his steps would take him past that mythical bar in the port, The Two Brothers, where Andrés had once lived his most memorable bout of drinking, and had learned – then communicated the experience to his friends – that having a whore as a mother doesn’t turn the offspring (necessarily) into the son of a whore, despite being born (as he had been) while his progenitor was still on the job . . . There were then more than temporal or labour issues that determined whether you were to be (or not to be) a son of a whore. The Count, on the other hand, had downed so much alcohol on binges others would find unforgettable and that he’d forgotten and blurred in terms of quantity and incident, cause and effect. And something similar happened with the sons of whores: he knew such a quantity that to classify them according to maternal trade and time of birth would have required a real investment in cybernetics. But the bar’s façade managed to activate the magnet: Lieutenant Mario Conde looked at the swing doors and found the bar semiabandoned at high noon, occupied by a few drinkers beyond salvation. Yes, he did like that place. But it was the deep, rancid smell of a place dedicated for over fifty years to the sale of alcohol that propelled him remorselessly into the cool, welcoming inner reaches – or at least so he thought – of that dirty, irresistible bar.

  “What rum you got?” he asked the mulatto bartender as if it were important or as if it were at all likely he would be able to choose brands and quality in a down-at-heel bar where the only matter of true significance was the availability (or not) of any distilled liquid to drink.

  “White Legendario, Padre,” the mulatto replied, flashing a golden gleam of his teeth his way.

  “And what’s the damage?”

  “A peso a tot, Padre . . .”

  The Count sunk a hand deep into his pockets and extracted all the notes and coins he could find. Placed them on the shiny wood of the bar and managed to assemble three pesos ten cents. Put away the useless surfeit and looked at the mulatto.

  “I’ll have a triple and don’t call me Padre again, I never even made it to altar boy.”

  The mulatto looked him in the eye. Took the bottle of rum and poured four tots into his glass.

  “I asked for a triple . . .”

  “But the fourth is on the house. Padre . . . Reckon you’re in need, don’t you?”

  The Count looked at the liquid filling his glass to the brim, its fake pearl colour and scent of perdition, and told himself that that mulatto, expert in handling alcoholics and melancholics, both depressed and desperate, was quite right: more right than lots of people in this world, and duly acquiesced: “Yes, you’re right, Padre . . . I think that’s what I need,” and downed a first gulp before he heard a voice approach from behind, and from an evil corner of his memory.

  “Give me the same as this guy.”

  Leaning on the bar, the Count felt a nasty shudder as the sound of the voice turned into a mental image. And thought: It can’t be, before turning round and concluding that yes, it could be and was.

  “Don’t I get a salute, Lieutenant Mario Conde?”

  Ex-Lieutenant Fabricio’s ruddy face tried to conjure up its usual sardonic laugh but the Count refused to give him the pleasure of the sight of his teeth. The last conversation they’d had, six months ago, had led to mutual recall of their respective mothers, before giving way to the liberation of violence: they’d set to punching each other in the middle of the street and even now the Count could feel the lacerating pain from the leathering Fabricio had dealt to his face.

  “What’s up? You still sore?” Fabricio asked, leaning back on the bar and almost touching Mario Conde’s shoulder.

  “Ask yourself the same question. You look as if you’ve got the mange.”

  Fabricio reeked of cheap liquors that had fermented each other. He smiled drowsily and the Count, who knew a thing about such things, surmised he was drunk.

  “You don’t change, do you, Mario Conde?”

  “Nor do you apparently,” retorted the latter, making it clear he didn’t like that conversation, which could sour the pleasure of his beverage.

  “I’m well and truly fucked, Mario Conde, I’m done for . . . I don’t even have a pistol, like you,” and, saying that, he pointed to the Count’s belt, where a weapon’s presence made itself felt.

  Clearly he was well and truly fucked: the ex-policeman looked as if he was in the phase prior to delirium tremens. The Count could imagine the rest. Lieutenant Fabricio, one of the detectives at Headquarters, had always been one of those guys who liked to be a policeman because of the social distinction and everyday power the job conferred. He usually wore his uniform and stripes, and had more than once used the pistol that was now a requisitioned subject for nostalgia. In the end he’d discovered his police status brought him other advantages: more money than his monthly wage packet contained, among other things.

  “It was of your own making . . .” the Count finally said, trying to concentrate on his rum.

  “I was stitched up. I didn’t do anything. They’re sons of bitches.”

  “So why did they kick you out?”

  “I don’t know, you know what they’re like. Those guys are like hunting dogs: once they bite, they won’t let go, until they pull your guts out.”

  “But did you or didn’t you?”

  “That’s neither here nor there. Once you fall into their clutches, watch out.”

  “Thanks for the advice,” said the Count, and he tried to down his last swig.

  Something in his throat prevented him. The sacred ritual of swigging rum, at the knowing, grimy bar of a dive like The Two Brothers, while listening to a toothless, alcoholic black man, with the face of a boxer defeated in a thousand fights, who had begun to sing in crystalline tones a beautiful bolero written at least a hundred years ago, bore no relation to the bad vibrations and worse memories triggered by Fabricio.

  “I heard they did for your buddy Rangel . . .”

  The Count put his glass on the bar, and in the same slow, subdued key he’d used thus far addressed the other fellow, staring him in the eyes: “Hey, I don’t want to hear Rangel’s name in your filthy mouth . . . He got fucked because he trusted
shitty types like you . . .”

  And he tensed his muscles, ready to enter the fray. It was only his basic ethics as a drinker of alcohol that stopped him going on the offensive: the Count would never have begun a fight with a drunk and, if it weren’t filthy petulant Fabricio, with whom he had accounts to settle, he’d even have taken a first blow without reacting. But Fabricio smiled, with that sour distinctive twitch of his.

  “So you’re still buddies . . .”

  “Don’t push me any further, Fabricio.”

  “No, I won’t mention your mate again . . . After all, he’s as fucked as I am. Did they take his pistol away too?”

  He couldn’t stop himself now: the Count smiled. Fabricio felt mutilated by the absence of a weapon that fulfilled him as a man and his drunkenness was truly pathetic. He realized the guy was as dead and castrated as Miguel Forcade. Relieved by this thought, his throat opened up again and he downed the last swig of warming rum.

  “You know, Fabricio, at the end of the day it has been a real pleasure talking to you. I am delighted you’re so fucked and I couldn’t care a fuck and I can’t and won’t forgive you. I’m glad to see how you bastard police end up . . . So stew in your own juice and don’t raise a fist, because I’ll do you in . . .” he concluded, letting go of his glass, moving away from the bar, and shouting from the swing door: “Hey, Padre, thanks for the liquor and keep an eye on that fellow, he’s a nark and an evil bastard, and when he was police he liked to blackmail people like you,” then went into the street, feeling he’d swept the soot from a hidden corner of his consciousness.

  He watched him come in, clutching a plastic cup and spoon of calamine in his left hand and nervous indecision in his right. It was as if he didn’t know what to do with that second arm, which should be doing something and, in its enforced leisure, felt ill at ease and superfluous, as if it was in fact a third, unexpected extremity. Conversely, his face revealed a degree of satisfaction the Count attributed to the lunch he’d just downed in the canteen of the nearby factory. Adrian Riverón was finally back in his office in the Municipal Offi-Record, the hub for organizing the system of ration cards and lists of consumers that lots of people, perhaps possessed by sharp poetic imaginations, used to call Offi-Queue, packing into a desperate neologism everything engendered there: that office being the mother-begetter of all queues, a national institution forged by a demand that always overwhelmed the strict offers ruled by a ration book that had become eternal, and through which everything was distributed from cigarettes to shoes, from sugar and salt to underpants (one or two pairs a year? wondered the Count. Or none at all?).

  When Adrian spotted him, all the contentment in his belly visible on his face began to evaporate, and his right arm searched for something in his shirt pocket that it didn’t find despite a thorough check.

  “Something wrong, Lieutenant?”

  Mario Conde muttered good afternoon, as he placed a cigarette between his lips and returned the packet to its place. He lit up, displayed deep pleasure, dragging and exhaling smoke, and said: “No, don’t worry, Adrian, nothing’s wrong,” adding, as if regretting his lack of forethought, “Sorry, I didn’t offer you one,” and taking the packet out again.

  “No, thanks all the same, I don’t smoke,” said the other, with a hollow cough.

  “Well, I’d like to talk to you. Can we do so in your office?”

  “Of course.”

  As a result of his post as the municipal director of Offi-Record, Adrian Riverón enjoyed the privilege of a small private corner in that place that once must have been a shop, bar or liquor store. It was just one of so many businesses shut down by the Revolutionary Offensive in the Sixties and then transformed into houses, offices or warehouses. Consequently, even with the fluorescent light switched on, the spot exuded a sense of claustrophobia and misery. Adrian offered him a seat opposite his desk and the Count contemplated on the wall the map of the municipality, divided into commercial districts, with little stickers registering the number of the region and quantity of consumers.

  “I suppose you’re very busy?”

  “We always have work: every day someone dies or is born or is divorced or has their seventh or sixty-fifth birthday and that all means we have to introduce changes on the register and add or subtract names. As you can see, very creative work.”

  The Count nodded understandingly, and put out his cigarette in an earthenware ashtray.

  “Adrian, I came to see you on two counts. Miriam told me you were her boyfriend thousands of years ago, as she puts it,” and he noticed how, in spite of his skin’s reddish hue, Adrian turned even more blood red. “And, from what I’ve seen, you are still good friends.”

  “Yes, we are friends. Have been for thousands of years . . .” and he coughed.

  “Then perhaps you can help me, because I expect you are only too aware that Miriam and her brother, Fermín Bodes, are two difficult characters. I at least am sure they know things that can shed light on Miguel’s death and for some reason they’re keeping quiet. Get my drift?”

  Adrian Riverón had recovered his usual colour and, filling his lungs with air, leaned back on his swivel-chair.

  “I’m not sure what exactly I can tell you, but you’re right in one thing: Miriam and Fermin are two very complicated people. Miriam’s marriage to Miguel would make a good subject for a bad novel . . . She was practically forced to marry him and I was removed from circulation. Miriam’s father is one of those people who make you want to throw up. He must have twelve or thirteen children, with seven or eight wives and whenever he divorces he leaves his house to his previous wife, because he knows they’ll give him another house for the next in line. He is one of those men they like to call a historic leader, and he really is that because he’s been leading whatever for thirty years, always badly, but never gets the chop.”

  “I’m acquainted with such men of history.”

  “Well, this fellow, who’d never done a thing for Miriam, turned up one day in that house with Miguel Forcade and apparently Miguel fancied the girl: she was seventeen and if everybody’s mad about her now, imagine her then.”

  “Yes, I am,” and the Count really was imagining her.

  “And old Panchín Bodes, as his friends call him, decided there and then it would be a good marriage and practically forced his daughter to marry Miguel.”

  “Family agreements.”

  “More like disagreements,” Adrian corrected him, coughing. “But they married Miriam off to the old man and got a good position for Fermín, who had miraculously managed to finish his degree in architecture. You know what happened after that.”

  “More or less. How did you get to know them?”

  “Through Fermín. He’s two years older than me, but we were in the same scholarship year and we rowed in the same team. One day I went home with him and I met Miriam there.”

  “So you were a rower?”

  “And still am, though I don’t compete anymore. I love being in the water.”

  “So I see from the colour of your skin.”

  “That’s right.”

  “There’s another important aspect to Miguel’s death . . . he was castrated. What do you make of something like that?”

  Adrian Riverón coughed again, a more prolonged salvo this time. The blood red hue of his skin deepened again and a smile came to his lips.

  “What do I know about such things, Lieutenant? I reckon they have to do with abakúa blacks and santería priests? Religious business, I expect.”

  “No, I don’t think so, that’s not their way, because abakúas and santeros don’t do that kind of thing . . . And what was Miguel Forcade after in Cuba? Did Miriam tell you?”

  The municipal director of Offi-Record smiled even more expansively.

  “Lieutenant, rather than investigating Miriam, who’s been a plaything of others, and Fermín, who’s a wretched son of his father, I think you should get to know Miguel Forcade a bit better. Because if he did come back for something
, not even his mother would be in on the secret. You can’t imagine what kind of person Miguel Forcade was.”

  “I do have some kind of an idea . . .”

  “A rather distant one. As the youth of today say: that guy was a tricky shit. Miguel Forcade was never straight with anyone . . . He always deceived half of humanity and I can tell you there’s a lot of rubbish you still have to dig up about his past.”

  “From what I see, you didn’t like him very much, true?”

  Adrian Riverón’s cheeks turned bright red again, while his right hand, definitively at a loss, landed on the earthenware ashtray, which it placed in the middle of the table.

  “No, I didn’t like him at all, but that’s not saying much, lots of people had accounts to settle with him. Lieutenant . . .”

  “Mario Conde.”

  “Of course, Mario Conde. Miguel Forcade was one of the biggest bastards on the planet and, though I don’t like to say it, the way he was killed he got his just desserts.”