Havana Black

by Leonardo Padura

  “Me? No. And you?”

  “Well, as today’s a special day I didn’t start on any great innovations and decided to follow a traditional recipe of steak with bacon and gruyère cheese, which goes like this: buy fresh fillets in the market, on the long and thin side, and cut to the same size. Spread the steaks out and lightly salt them; put a strip of bacon down the middle and the gruyère on the bacon. Then dust everything in herbs: personally I add thyme, basil, oregano and rosemary . . . Then fold over each fillet, as if it were a pasty, and join the ends with a couple of toothpicks, which I only managed to get today, to stop the stuffing leaking out. With me so far?”

  “Uh-huh,” replied the Count, all his gastric juices rising up in a proletarian rebellion. “Uh-huh, uh-huh, with toothpicks, go on . . .”

  “Well, then let them sit, so the smells of the cheese, the meat and the bacon infiltrate each other and are then impregnated with the smells from the herbs. After that, heat equal measures of oil and butter in the frying pan, fry the steaks on a full flame for a couple of minutes on each side, so they go brown, and then leave them for another eight minutes on a low flame . . . Then put the fillets in a dish and place them in the oven, but on the lowest heat possible, so they don’t go cold or cook too much. Meanwhile, remove the fat left in the pan and put in butter, mixed with the juice of a Seville orange, which is better than the lemon in the traditional recipe. Remove the orange and butter sauce from the burner when it’s hot and add two spoonfuls of cream. Next you take the steaks from the oven, sprinkle on a good amount of parsley and pour the sauce over them, and now it’s ready to serve or you can put it back in the oven for a short time, but on very, very low, until the guest of honour arrives, who may even go by the name of Mario Conde.”

  “And who has now arrived, Jose. Tell us what else you’ve done?”

  “What, you want more . . .? Right, well, there is more, because the fillets are served with potato puree, made with the oil and butter fat we separated out after frying the fillets, you remember . . .? But, as I know the scene, I took the necessary precautions: it’s only one fillet per head, so be warned: though you can have as much as you want of rice, mushy black beans, stewed yucca, flash-fried green bananas, onions in breadcrumbs, tomato, watercress, lettuce and avocado salad, guava shells with cream cheese and coconut jelly in fruit juice with savoury cheese.”

  “I do not believe it, I do not believe it: gentlemen, the age of abundance is upon us!” quipped Rabbit.

  “And don’t we have any coffee?” asked Andrés.

  “Café from Oriente roasted and ground by yours truly,” the woman confirmed, looking into the feverish eyes of the Count, whose stomach, used to thirty years of strict food rationing, refused to believe what his ears had heard.

  “Hey, Jose, now I’m no longer a policeman, you can damn well tell me: where the fuck do you find all these things?”

  Carlos’s mother looked at the Count, then at her son and glanced at all the other friends, before turning to the Count, who was now in no doubt at all: Josefina was like the circus magician who conjured from nowhere an elephant dressed as a sailor.

  “You really want to know, Condesito? Well, I get it out of here,” she said after a pause, and touched her temple: “out of this imagination of mine.”

  From the first swig the Count’s experience of drinking had warned him that this mixture of rum, friends and old Beatles songs might be explosive. The special dinner served up by Josefina had prepared their stomachs to accept a larger intake of alcohol and bottles were emptying at a dangerous rate. After the meal Skinny had insisted on moving on to the presentation of the gifts that each guest had had to bring, including the two compulsory bottles of rum – a tax only Candito the Red had been spared because of his new religious affiliations. Seated at the head of the table, the Count received the presents in turn from his friends, and they catered for each and every one of his physical, material and spiritual cravings and desires. The first was Carlos, who gave him a small goldfish bowl with a fighting fish, for he’d heard of the death of his most recent Rufino.

  “Great, now I’ve got a dog and a fish,” commented the Count, as he watched the fish’s slow, purplish flight.

  Candito the Red presented him with a Bible with black, bound covers that, according to him, had more commentaries and maps than any other published in Spanish. Ever subtle and material, Tamara gave the Count the checked shirt he had always wanted: seemingly straight out of a Wild West film, and made of soft wool, just the job for the approaching winter, and in the pocket, behind the Levi’s label, a Schaeffer pen, ideal for the aspiring writer. Perhaps paying all his nicotine debts at once, Baby-Face Miki handed over a pack of twenty boxes of Popular cigarettes, and along with it, or so he said, the monthly allowance of one of the several children he’d scattered over the face of the earth. Gentle Niuris, in the full freshness of her sixteen years and obviously guided by Rabbit, gave him two cassettes of Chicago’s Greatest Hits, which the Count read from the top down: from “Make me Smile” to “Beginnings”, from “Saturday in the Park” to “Colour My World”, the titles sounded like cries of alarm at the huge number of years that had passed between the days when they’d listened to those songs together and that hurricane-force birthday-party night. With his loving eye for detail, Rabbit unfolded before the Count’s eyes a poster of Marilyn, asleep on a red sheet that emphasized the glow from her yellow (dyed, to be sure) hair, the precise undulations of her black woman’s buttocks and the magnetic pink of a single visible nipple. Andrés, who had patiently waited his turn, faithful to his profession as a medic, placed in the Count’s hands two jars of Chinese pomade – one from the tiger, the other the lion – and an envelope with a hundred analgesics, a combination of pills and ointment that would save the Count from death by migraine during his next hangovers. Last in the queue, Josefina walked over to the thirty-six-year-old she’d known for twenty, when her son was skinny and walked on two legs and shut himself in with the Count to listen to music at full volume and dream of a future in which war did not figure; and, without uttering a word, she gripped his cheeks, made him feel the roughness of hands ravaged by washing up, cooking and laundering, and then kissed him on his forehead.

  “Thanks, Jose,” the Count stammered, moved by the burden of tenderness that kiss carried.

  Rabbit rescued him this time, insisting on a full account of the Count’s last case. Mario tried to refuse, but the screams from his audience won the day. Before starting, he looked at Tamara, at the opposite corner of the table, and tried to imagine how much of the story he was about to relate would remind her of the episode in which they had both been embroiled as a result of the death and disappearance of Rafael Morín, a man immaculate only in appearance, who married the twin and shattered Mario Conde’s heart into a thousand pieces.

  “Once upon a time in China, at least fifteen or twenty centuries ago . . .” began the Count, preparing to begin at the beginning, and spoke for an hour to the best audience he’d ever known.

  “Conde, Conde, how amazing,” exclaimed Rabbit when he heard the end of Adrian Riverón’s murderous confession. “Can you imagine, if the Hindu monks hadn’t gone to China, Miguel Forcade would have died differently.”

  “Why don’t you write this down?” queried Baby-Face Miki, the only published writer among the Count’s friends.

  “I might do one day,” replied the ex-policeman, thinking that yes, maybe he did have a story here that was at least moving, if not squalid.

  But now, right now, for fuck’s sake, he wanted to write about a wounded man and the other scars left by less solid, but equally lethal bullets.

  “More rum, more rum,” Skinny shouted from his wheelchair, and after helping himself, he asked: “And what the fuck are we going to do now?”

  “Carry on drinking,” posited the Count.

  “No, better that I tell you a story, another story,” interjected Andrés from his chair, with such conviction in his voice that the others fell s
ilent for a moment, and the doctor jumped in to fulfil his promise. “It’s a story that began long ago, but I can only tell you now . . . because I told the people at work today I wanted to leave Cuba . . .”

  He suddenly threw down the dice, and glasses clattered on to the table, alcohol-scented mouths gawped, corks returned to the necks of their bottles and, beyond the walls, gusts of wind whistled no more, as if on orders from a higher command.

  “Twenty-six years ago, when my father left and my mother refused to follow, something was broken for ever in our family. You remember, Rabbit, how my little sister Katia had died two years before and if there could have been any solution to that unjust death, my Dad’s departure took it with him: we’d never again be the family we’d once been and the best we could do was to start sharing out the blame for what had happened and what now would never happen . . . Dad was the most to blame, because he abandoned us just when we needed most to be together, and left his country and turned into a contemptible gusano, living in Miami . . . Life fucked me up and I was full of fears and reproaches, and if anything saved me it was finding a group of friends like you, who became as important to me as my family and never criticized me for my father’s decision. Then things began to go down a path that seemed for the best: my mother took it into her head that I should study medicine and I thought I should please her and was really happy that I could choose my career and become a doctor and I think I’ve been a good doctor, haven’t I? On my way I made a good marriage with a woman I still like, I had two children, I became a specialist and everything seemed so ideal that you even started to envy me: you said everything had turned out right for me, that I had a good family, a good job and even a good future . . . But there were things that weren’t as I wanted them and I don’t know if I am right or have a right to ask for those other things. I wanted my life to be more than getting up in the morning, helping to dress the children, going off to the hospital, working all day, coming back in the evening and sitting down to see how my children do their homework while my wife cooks, and then having a bath, eating, watching television for a while and going to bed in order to get up the following day and do the same as I’d done the day before, and so on and so forth . . . Perhaps one of you thinks that is what life is about, but if that’s true, then life is shit. Because it’s a routine that’s got nothing to do with what I want . . . The worst thing is, when you start to think you discover that this routine began much earlier, when other people, other necessities, other turning points decided your life should follow one pattern and not another, without your really having the right to choose and write the story you wanted to write, don’t you agree, Rabbit . . .? What would have happened if I hadn’t let Cristina go, if I’d gone after her, carried on with her, even though she was ten years older than me, and even you lot thought she was a whore because she’d had several husbands? Or if I hadn’t given up baseball to devote more time to my schooling and become a good student of medicine, as I had to? Who would I be now if I’d done what I wanted to do and not what you were supposed to do and what everyone forced me to do . . .? Because some ten years ago something happened that stirred me up and I started asking myself some of these questions: my father wrote me a letter, after I had heard nothing from him for a long time, and he said he was sorry for abandoning me and explained why he had left: he told me that there had come a moment after my sister’s death when he needed to change his life and that he would have preferred to take us with him, but dear Consuelo was opposed and insisted on staying where she was rather than follow him wherever he was bound. As far as I was concerned that explanation didn’t in any way justify his selfishness, although I saw my father differently for the first time, not as the guilty man I, my mother and the world around us had created . . . Now he seemed a man, with his own needs, anguish and hopes, a man like any other who’d sacrificed part of his life to have another, the one he thought he needed and had decided to choose, you know? Perhaps it’s all stupid, but that’s how I felt, and I told him so, and he replied by saying that if he could help me in any way, I could count on him, that despite what he’d done, he was still my father. That made me feel better towards him, but that was all, because my life continued to be perfect, almost impossible to improve on, until one morning I got up not wanting to go to work, or dress the children, or do any of what I was supposed to do and I felt as though my life was all a big mistake. Does this ring any bells, Conde? The knowledge that something diverted the route you should have taken, that something pushed you along a path that was not yours. The dreadful feeling when you discover you don’t know how you’ve got where you are, but that you are somewhere you don’t want to be. It was all shit. Why did it have to be like this? And my first thought was to run out of the house, as I did when I fell in love with Cristina and ended up drunk on wasteland in Old Havana: but now I’d have to run much further, to throw off myself and that feeling of claustrophobia and routine I couldn’t stand a minute longer. But one thing held me back: the sight of my two children dressing themselves to go to school. If I left, I’d be leaving them just as my father left me and I didn’t want them to suffer that. But if I didn’t break out of my own routine I was condemning them to live like me, teaching them to obey and be people who’d receive orders for the rest of their lives, to become a second round of the hidden generation. Miki, do you remember the hidden generation? In the end they’d be as fucked as I was, faceless no-hopers with nothing to tell their own children. There and then I took the decision to leave, to go anywhere, but with them, and when I returned from the hospital that evening I told my wife, and she said I was mad, understood fuck all, and what the hell were we going to do and I said: ‘I don’t know, but I’ve made up my mind,’ and I asked her: ‘Will you come?’ And she said she would. She said yes straight away . . . Then I wrote to my old man and explained how I now needed the help he had promised . . . That was the only way I could get far away, try to change my life, and if I was making a mistake I might as well be mistaken big-time, right? And for once in my life make my own mistakes. That was a year and a half ago, and all this time I’ve been doing the necessary paperwork to leave, without anyone finding out till something was for sure. I couldn’t even tell you lot, who are my brothers and will understand me, and if you don’t understand me you won’t condemn me, will you, Carlos? Red? And you, Miki, would you dare write this story in one of your books . . .? Today, when I went to see the director of the hospital, a man who was a comrade in the faculty, he couldn’t believe what I was saying and he even tried to dissuade me, but when I told him it was a decision I wouldn’t go back on and even had the letters asking for permission to leave, he put his hands to his head and said: ‘Andrés, you know I’ll have to take this upstairs,’ and he even looked up, when he should really have been looking down, because I now know I’ve got to work in a Policlinic in a barrio till they give me my letter of liberation, yes that’s what it’s called, a letter of liberation, and they let me leave, and it will take one or two years, maybe more, but I’m not worried: it is my decision, my madness, my mistake, and for the first time I feel as if I own my decisions, my acts of madness and my mistakes, even the fact that I’ve acted like shit with you and not told you before what I wanted to do, but you know I couldn’t tell you, more for your good than mine, because you’re staying and, if Jehovah wishes, as Candito says, in two years I might be right off the map . . . But right now, though I feel calm I’m also afraid I’m shooting myself in the foot, because I’m probably doing to my own children what my father did to me, except in reverse. And I’m going to miss you people, because I love you from my heart and balls . . .” he said this, then started to cry, as was right, as he needed and wanted to do, and he moved Tamara and Niuris to weep, provoked a tear in Skinny Carlos’s eyes, a blasphemy in the mouth of Candito, who shat on Jehovah, and a sigh from the Count, who stood up, hugged Andrés’s head, and told him: “And we love you too, you pansy,” and pressed him hard against his chest, which seethed with a bunch of
shared stories, mixed up with political prejudices, fear of the future, reproaches against the past and tot after tot of rum: the horrific sum of their flawed lives.

  Andrés’s confession killed off the impact of alcohol on the Count’s brain. An unhealthy lucidity spread through his mind, placing a question mark over his own life, now reflected in the mirror of Carlos’s life, which he intended to write up, and Andrés’s, which Andrés himself had just outlined: his own frustrations took on a sharper relief in the light of his friend’s words, and the Count totally understood why he had left the police: he needed to escape, even though he was incapable of changing location. Too many nostalgic memories tied him to the house where he was born and lived, to the neighbourhood where he grew up and where his father and Grandad Rufino grew up, to the friends he had left, whom he could never abandon, to certain smells and plagues, to many fears and epiphanies: his anchor was fixed in such a way he almost didn’t need to know how it was secured: he simply possessed irrevocably a physiological need to feel that he belonged in one place.

  The bitter burden of Andrés’s words had decreed an end to the fiesta, and the break-up began, sadly and with everyone feeling they’d experienced something final and beyond appeal. Today it could be Andrés’s departure, tomorrow it might be the death of Carlos, sentenced to his infamous wheelchair; another day would bring Miki’s betrayal, another Rabbit’s lunacy till they reached the apocalypse, he thought, as Tamara’s car advanced along Santa Catalina on the way to her house. The Count, who had so wanted her to ask him to provide the company he longed to give, was hardly surprised when she said: “Will you come home with me?”

  “Of course,” he’d answered, convinced Andrés was provoking all this, and not entertaining the possibility that Tamara might have wanted it long ago, perhaps even as much as he had.