Havana Black

by Leonardo Padura

  Why had that particular bullet chosen to hit him of all people and change his whole life in less than a second? He knew that was one of the risks of war but it seemed to him too cruel for everything to come to an end like that. He, who’d never thought of wars, who’d detested the cold weight of guns, and who’d said yes ever since he had use of his reason, thinking obedience would take him to a very different place from the bed where he now lay, an invalid for the rest of his days: a bullet with no return to sender had hit him of all people, aimed by a faceless being and shot with a hatred he had never felt or shared.

  And the Count wondered: is this the moving story I want to write? No, it was but the prologue to an episode summing up the cruel experience of a generation and the burning reflection of another’s guilt assumed as his own, for he always thought his back should have been the one to get “a bullet with no return to sender” and not Skinny Carlos’s, the finest man he’d ever known. He struggled with the dilemma of continuing in that vein or tearing up the sheet of paper, when he grasped the real extent of his doubts: was he able to say all, without hiding anything, about what he felt, thought, believed, wanted to write? Could he be honest enough with himself to commit to paper his fears, dissatisfactions and incurable pain. Could he say what others silenced and that someone, some time, should say? The Count lit another cigarette, closed his eyes and accepted that he too was afraid.

  He boldly opened his eyes, in the certain knowledge that he had reached the horrendous age of thirty-six and that it would indeed be his last day as a policeman, and what he saw no longer shocked him: an empty goldfish bowl, a bed only slept in in its most sunken half, a few books burdened by dust, deferred longings and envy, a bottle of Caney rum squeezed as dry as a rag, a murky, threatening future and, framed by the narrow angle the window now offered, a scrap of sky, once again that goddamned persistent blue. But he hardly thought about hurricane Felix, which was probably just round the corner, at an obedient halt, waiting to be invoked by the Count before it took to its preferred route of the Calzada and carried through its general clear-out, but rather he scrutinized his watch, which warned there were still six hours to go to the change of age: as if that were at all important. His mother had told him he was born at one forty-five p.m. on 9 October and each year when they were together she patiently waited for that moment before she went over, hugged him and gave him the third of the four kisses they exchanged in the whole year. The three others corresponded to her birthday, 15 April, Mother’s Day, always the second Sunday in May, and the last kiss came on 31 December, just as the bells rang out the final seconds of the year and they swallowed grapes, if there were any: as many as twelve, if they could. When the Count grew up and decided to see the New Year in with his friends, at street parties or at Skinny’s house, the annual kisses were reduced to three, and Mario Conde now regretted that irreversible dearth of affection and love he and his mother established in a deep yet timid relationship where they were unable to express physically what they felt within themselves. Because many other events might have deserved the natural congratulation of a kiss: his graduation from high school, perhaps; the publication of his short story ‘Sundays’ in the bulletin of the school literary workshop; his first communion, when he was so pure and ready to receive Christ’s flesh and spirit and she was all in white in that crackling starchy lace dress the Count remembered better than the moment he was unsure whether she had or hadn’t kissed him. Nevertheless, his mother showed him other forms of affection he treasured in the holiest sanctuary of his memory: for example, the day he went into the bathroom without knocking and saw her naked. Mario must have been around nine and already thought he knew something of the secrets of female nakedness, and his mother’s wet, shiny body, those luscious breasts, crowned by large, brown nipples and her jet-black abundant bush, froze momentarily before he half turned to flee that feminine vision he knew was prohibited, and she called to him and said: “Come, Mario,” and he turned round slowly, looking his mother in the face so he didn’t see her breasts and dark sex again, and she repeated, “Come, I am your mother,” and she took his arm and placed his hand on her wet belly and said to him: “Take a good look at that scar,” and he saw an ancient red weal on her skin, which started under the navel and disappeared into her pubic hair, and she said: “You came into the world through that gash,” and he engraved on his mind for ever that eternal sign of an unrepeatable oneness that used to bind him to a woman he did not wish to see naked again until the day she died, when, contrary to all he could have predicted, he decided he’d be the one to clean the still body with her favourite cologne, and stroked again the gash from which he originated and gave her the first and only kiss for that year, since she died on 16 January, three months before his birthday. The number of kisses still pending was so great the Count always wondered why the kiss was the highest sign of love: totally Eurocentric and Judaeo-Christian, sexual, labial nonsense, he’d tell himself then, and told himself now, remembering how on his eighth birthday there was an additional kiss, granted after the inevitable one forty-five p.m. kiss, an evening kiss specially permitted for the last birthday photo with cakes and cold drinks, an occasion on which, for the last time, he’d be snapped with so many cousins later lost to remote paths of exile, and with Grandad Rufino, who died a few years after. He preferred not to look at those photos, consigned like stigmas to a box of festering nostalgia, in order to conceal the truth that he’d once been so happy and loved, an active member of that vanished concept of the family, garnering his mother’s kiss and a hug from the old patriarch of the Conde clan, on whose vanquished legs he’d already sat, in order to smile at Oliverio’s camera, as his arm fell round the neck of the old man who’d given him his first notions of the real world: for example, the one about not playing if you aren’t sure you can win. Old Count Rufino, eternal bard of his youthful feats, was still a strong presence on that piece of card, a far cry from the final image of a man corroded by an illness about to waste him entirely, after softening his legs of stone, legs that accepted defeat and decreed the end of his rule as a cock-fighter when mid-flight they told him they were no longer up to helping him escape a police raid on clandestine organizers of cock-fights. In the last memorable photo of that memorable birthday, the Count remembered one by one the relatives gathered there, all smiles behind an eight-candle cake, as if they knew that conjunction of the third, fourth and fifth generations of the family of Teodoro Conde, the Canary Islands escapee who’d reached Cuba a century and a half ago, was to become an alarmingly final image: diaspora, death, distance and memory-loss haunted that family photographed on 9 October 1961 and already predestined never to meet up again, not even at the wake of Grandad Rufino, who saw his greatest desire perish as he lived: to embark on death surrounded by all his children and grandchildren. Destiny’s a bastard, thought the Count, and violently repelled that image now captured in his brain in order to recall, with the tiniest grin he could manage, his private celebration of his eleventh birthday, held in the solitude of the bathroom at home. It was an irrefutable axiom for him and his friends at the time that only at the age of eleven, at the exact moment your eleventh year began, did your penis start to be of use for more than shedding urine several times a day: now the peter, knob, thingy, willy was transformed, via the workings and grace of the age attained, into a weapon of struggle called cock – or dong, or tool, or prick, or wick, or meat, anything but the polite member it wasn’t – and could shoot out white drops full of new potential, including a harvest of pleasure. And, following wise advice, Mario Conde shut himself in the bathroom with uncle Maximiliano’s old magazine, which his cousin José Antonio had requisitioned, in which several women had allowed themselves to be photographed showing their tits, arses and even hairy twats (one shaved). José Antonio, jerker extraordinaire if ever there was, skilled practitioner of the phantom jerk, the Capuchin, the two-hander, the soap-sudder, the mongrel and seven other varieties (including the suicidal jerk of the bat, the one you could
only achieve by hanging by one arm from the eaves of a house, as you looked through a bathroom window and rubbed away with the other), had advised him that the best way to do it (especially if it was the first time) was by moistening yourself with saliva: saliva’s hot and slippery as if you’d put it up a woman or a sow . . . But the Count was worried by the absence of other complementary signs of his sexual debut: not a single wisp of hair had sprouted in his armpits or pubis, his voice was still childish and reedy, and – no doubt worst of all – he preferred baseball to women. But he was eleven years old, eleven on the dot and his time had come: contemplating the steamy photos of naked women, he felt a flicker of current in his genitals and a degree of hardening of his small member, on which he spat a couple of gobs of saliva before beginning a rhythmic rub, back, forward, back, forward, that hardened his ex-peter, now transformed into an adult, masculine cock, which got harder and harder, and grew like a snake charmed by magic pipes, back, forward, more saliva, until something stirred in a spot on his body that he couldn’t locate and a few drops of white amber ran along his hand, which reeked of sweat and saliva, leaving him empty and wondering: is this the shit that’s supposed to be so wonderful? which he wasn’t convinced of on his eleventh birthday, only understanding his extremely serious lack of appreciation when, nigh on a year later, he glimpsed the breasts of his neighbour Caridad, popping out of an indiscreet neckline, which stirred his scrotum and forced him to run home, shut himself up in the bathroom again, where, seized by an urgency he’d never before experienced, and forgetting all about the saliva, began to rub himself with Caridad’s breasts in his mind’s eye – two hard protuberances, he knew, inflamed at their tips by earth-coloured nipples – and taken almost unawares felt a brutal shudder, heat coming from all his pores, a burning sensation coming from his testicles and shooting up his back, and the white, gleaming spillage, which propelled itself from his penis and splattered the tiles on the wall, and he knew why his cousin José Antonio had earned himself a diploma for jerking-off: that was the life . . . he concluded and, after smoking a cigarette that made him cough, he returned to his saliva and enjoyed a second adult masturbation. From then on he practised two or three times a week, until he discovered, almost on the day of his twentieth birthday, that there was an even better life to be lived: provoking the same spillage on a much better place than bathroom tiles: a woman’s vagina.

  “A woman’s vagina,” he called out loud, returning to consciousness as a policeman presumably on his last day of duty: perhaps Miguel Forcade’s death had nothing to do with sublime works of art whose fakery he was aware of, but with something much closer, more mundane and sometimes more important, like a woman’s vagina. Or, at least, perhaps the truth could be reached along that risky, moist, desired and lethal path. It was an unexpected revelation that came with fatally grey eyes (or were they green? or blue?) half hidden by lashes as wavy as the sea when a cyclone is approaching.

  Colonel Molina’s order erupted from the intercom and the petty subaltern who was acting as the new office boss and had been critically examining the detective lieutenant’s visage stood up to open the door for him. The Count, who’d enjoyed the woman’s displeasure at his deplorable mien and get-up, grunted to his feet, and, unbeknown to her, tugged at his old blue jeans so the pistol in his belt clattered to the floor. Nevertheless, the Count continued to walk towards the office door, as if oblivious to his loss, and the woman, whose astonishment had spread geometrically, shouted: “Hey, Lieutenant, you’ve dropped your pistol.”

  The Count turned round in front of the Colonel’s office door, smiling at her as beatifically as he knew how.

  “What pistol?”

  “Yours,” and she pointed to the abandoned weapon.

  “You know, I keep leaving it all over the place,” commented the Count and yawned before he picked his gun up and slotted it back into the waistband of his trousers.

  And now he walked unsmiling towards his boss’s door and whispered, “Thank you,” as he sidled past the petty officer, who was undoubtedly thinking of starting on the report she’d file on his negligent attitude towards his regulation firearm.

  “Come in, Lieutenant,” said the Colonel, sitting behind his desk, a cigarette between his fingers.

  “Good day, Colonel. I’ve come because I need to hear you repeat what you said two days ago.”

  “What did I say then?”

  “That you gave me carte blanche in this case.”

  “But I also told you to be careful and cautious, and not to go too far. Remember we have to avoid a scandal in the international media . . .”

  “That’s all very well, but tell me what I asked you . . .”

  Colonel Molina stood up and walked round his desk till he was face to face with Mario Conde.

  “What is it you want, Lieutenant?”

  “To solve the case.”

  “But what are you going to do that means you need to hear my authorization again?”

  “I just want to rough up some people who are lying to me . . .”

  The Colonel raised his eyebrows, as if not believing what he’d heard, and turned round a moment to stub out his cigarette.

  “Lieutenant, what do you old-school police mean by ‘roughing up’?”

  The Count steadied himself. He’d alarmed this novice, too, and without having to set up the spectacle of an abandoned pistol.

  “I don’t know, it depends on . . .” and he halted on the edge of the precipice.

  He was perhaps risking too much if he joked, even his retirement letter, and preferred not to: though he was sorry. He would like to have seen Molina’s face as he listed medieval instruments of torture used as synonyms for roughing up.

  “What does it depend on, Lieutenant?”

  “On whatever one wants to find out, Colonel. And in this case I want to find two things out: first, what Miguel Forcade came to Cuba for, something he couldn’t take out ten years ago, something that could make him rich in two days . . . and then to know who killed him, and if it was to grab whatever could make a man rich.”

  “And who do you want to rough up?”

  “A blonde who’s probably not blonde, a North American citizen who has a Cuban passport, a hitter who can slam hard and a man who stole the shoes from my dreams . . . Will you just repeat the bit about my having carte blanche?”

  The Colonel seemed to hesitate. He looked at the Count, studied his hands, thought about what he should do as the lieutenant added: “Colonel, you can’t always be orthodox and patient in order to reach the truth: sometimes you have to strike back and dig out the truth from wherever it is hidden. And this blonde, despite all my efforts to keep her here, will return to the States in two days. And if she goes, the fucking truth goes with her. Do you understand? Besides, I only have nine hours left to present you this case giftwrapped. Now I want to hear you repeat yourself, please.”

  Molina smiled briefly and lit another cigarette, after offering the Count one.

  “Lieutenant, either you are mad or I’m the one who’s mad for telling you this: go for it, you’ve got carte blanche . . . And may God look favourably upon me.”

  If time had been on his side, the Count would have preferred a different scenario: for example, to keep Miriam in his hot cubicle for a couple of hours, as if he’d forgotten all about her and under the apparent supervision of two uniformed men who wouldn’t respond if she asked a question. That would have made things easier, he thought, as he watched Miriam smile calmly, after she’d asked: “So, you’re going to put me inside?”

  Sergeant Manuel Palacios, who had brought her into Headquarters, looked over the woman to the Count and waved a hand, warning him to prepare himself: he’d certainly already taken more than his fair share when he’d asked Forcade’s widow to accompany him there.

  “Nobody is going to put you inside,” the Count said finally, “unless you’ve done something that merits your being there, of course.”

  “And what might I have done?” She
returned to the attack, with that sour persistence the Count had met before.

  The woman had guts, he told himself, and almost rejoiced he hadn’t been pronged on the bars of her eyelashes. Or was that ripe fruit from Paradise still worth tasting? He had time perhaps, he consoled himself, ever a greedy sod.

  “The fact is I don’t know, Miriam, but I am sure of one thing: you know much more than you’ve let on.”

  “And what do you reckon I know?”

  “I told you: what your husband was looking for in Cuba . . .”

  “And I’ve told you more than once: he came to see his father. Or did they make a mistake when they allowed him in?”

  The Count again regretted he didn’t have time to soften her up, although he also thought such gentle techniques wouldn’t have produced the goods with this hard-bitten woman. Worst thing of all was that if Miriam blocked all routes in, he’d have no paths along which to progress the case: Fermín still hadn’t said anything to incriminate himself and Gómez de la Peña had been sent home blubbering at dawn, after he’d sworn a hundred times he didn’t know his extraordinary Matisse was a fake and didn’t know where Miguel Forcade went on that fatal night after he’d visited him. To cap it all, the ultra-efficient Candito had called him that morning to confirm what the Count suspected: the Havana underworld was not involved in the death and castration. “So why did they cut his tail off, Red?”

  “You find out, Count, that’s why you’re the policeman on this job, isn’t it?”

  As a false trail, to hint at revenge, jealousy, or was it another queer affair? Who can tell . . .? Now what did he have left? Perhaps he should try his luck with a loose cannon, like Adrian Riverón, suspected of the heinous crime of being a closet smoker, Miriam’s friend and ex-fiancé and now perhaps her confidant; or go back to talk to the dead man’s mother, who didn’t seem to have the slightest idea of what world she was living in. And old Forcade? he wondered, as his consciousness felt certain all paths had been blocked. After all, everybody insisted Miguel had returned to Cuba to see his father and that apparent lie might be the one and only truth.