Havana Red
( Havana Quartet - 1 )
Leonardo Padura
Havana Red
Leonardo Padura
We all wear masks.
Batman
The heat is a malign plague invading everything. The heat descends like a tight, stretchy cloak of red silk, wrapping itself round bodies, trees and things, to inject there the dark poison of despair and a slower, certain death. It is a punishment without appeal or relief that seems ready to ravage the visible universe, though its lethal vortex must fall on a heretic city, on a district condemned to hell. It tortures mangy, forlorn street dogs searching for a lake in the desert; old men dragging sticks that are more exhausted than their own legs, as they advance against the summer solstice in their daily struggle for survival; once majestic trees, now bent double by the fury of spiralling temperatures; dead dust piled against the sidewalks, longing for a rain that never comes or an indulgent wind, presences able to upset their becalmed fate and transform them into mud, abrasive clouds, storms or cataclysms. The heat crushes everything, tyrannizes the world, corrodes what could be saved and arouses only the most infernal wrath, rancours, envies, hatreds, as if it intended to provoke the end of time, history, humanity and memory. .. But how the fuck can it be so hot? he whispered as he removed his dark glasses to dry the sweat dirtying his face and spat into the street a minuscule gob of phlegm that rolled over the parched dust.
The sweat burned his eyes, and Lieutenant Mario Conde looked up at the sky to clamour for a cloud that would augur relief. And then the shouts of glee hit his brain. The cacophony hurtled towards him, a rehearsed chorale expanding as if it had erupted from the earth and careered on the afternoon heat, rising up momentarily above the din of traffic and lorries rushing along the Calzada, gripping Conde’s memory in a sullen embrace. But he saw them as soon as he reached the corner: while one lot celebrated, clapped and shouted, others argued, also at the top of their voices, and eyed each other up like real enemies, blaming each other for the same reason the others were so happy: vanquished and victors, he quickly concluded as he stopped to survey the scene. There were boys of various ages, between twelve and sixteen, of every colour and shape, and Conde thought how, if someone had stopped on that same corner, in that same district, twenty years ago on hearing a similar outcry, he’d have seen exactly what he could see now, boys of every colour and shape, except the guy celebrating or arguing most would have been him, the young Conde, grandson of Rufino Conde, or the Count as he was known to everyone. Suddenly he enjoyed the illusion that time didn’t exist there, because it was that side-street which had served ever since as an area for playing baseball, though some seasons would see a sly, treacherous football appear, or a basketball hoop nailed to an electricity post. But soon baseball – with bat, hand, four bases, three rolling-a-fly or at the wall – would impose its rule not too acrimoniously, over those passing fads: baseball infected them, like a chronic passion, and the Count and his friends suffered virulent attacks.
Despite the heat, August afternoons had always been the best for playing baseball on the street corner. Holiday time meant everybody was in the neighbourhood all the time, and had nothing better to do, and the hyper-active summer sun allowed you to play on beyond eight o’clock at night when a game really deserved to be extended. Recently, however, the Count had seen few games of baseball on the street corner. The boys seemed to prefer other less energetic, more sweet-smelling diversions than running, hitting and shouting for several hours under a scorching summer sun, and he wondered what boys nowadays could possibly do on long summer afternoons. Not like them: they always played baseball, he recalled, and then recalled how few of them were left in the neighbourhood: while some went in and out of prison for lesser or greater crimes, others had moved on to such disparate destinations as Alamar, Hialeah, Santiago de las Vegas, Union City, Cojimar or Stockholm, and one had even collected a one-way ticket to the Colon Cemetery: poor Marquitos. Consequently, even if they’d wanted to and still had enough strength left in their legs and arms, the guys from that era could never organize another game of baseball on that street corner: because life had destroyed that option, along with so many others.
When the celebrations and arguments were over, the boys decided to play another game and the two obvious group leaders prepared to pick their sides with an eye to redistributing forces and continuing the war in more balanced conditions. Then the Count had an idea: he’d ask if he could play. He felt roasted by his eight hours that day in the Information Bureau at Police Headquarters, but it was only six in the afternoon and he’d rather not yet return to the solitary heat of his house. A much better idea would be to start playing baseball. If they’d let him.
He walked over to the group, which was around the plank chosen as home-plate, and hailed Black Felicio’s son. Felicio was one of those he’d always played with and the Count reckoned he must be back inside as he’d not seen him for a long, long time. The boy was as black as his father and had also inherited that abrasive, acrid smell of sweat the Count knew by heart, for he always managed to catch it when out with Felicio.
“Ruben,” he addressed the black kid, who looked at him slightly alarmed. “Reckon I could join the game for a bit?”
The boy kept staring as if he hadn’t understood, and then looked at his friends. The Count thought an explanation was in order.
“I’ve not played for some time and suddenly felt like making a few catches…”
Then Ruben went over to the other players, so he wouldn’t be the only one to bear the weight of the decision. Best to consult on everything in this country, thought the Count, as he waited on their verdict. Opinions seemed divided and agreement took longer than expected.
“All right,” Ruben finally said, from his position as intermediary, but neither he nor the others seemed over-pleased by their concession.
As they discussed the make-up of the teams, the Count took off his shirt and rolled up his trouser bottoms twice. Luckily he hadn’t taken his pistol to work today. He put his shirt on the wall of the house where Spaniard Enrique had lived – and also died, was it ten, twenty or a thousand years ago? – and eventually they told him he was in Ruben’s team and an outfielder. But, when he found himself surrounded by boys, shirtless like them, the Count felt it all too contrived and ridiculous: his skin sensed the boys’ sarcastic looks and he thought they perhaps saw him like the first missionary to reach a remote tribe: he was a foreigner, with a different language and customs, and wouldn’t find it easy to integrate in that brotherhood which hadn’t sought him out, which didn’t want or understand him. Besides, all those boys must know he was a policeman and, in keeping with the neighbourhood’s ancestral ethics, they wouldn’t be particularly delighted if others saw them on such good terms with the Count, however close a friend he’d been of their parents or older brothers. OK, some things never changed on that street corner.
As the members of his team started to take up positions, the Count grabbed his shirt and went over to Ruben. He went to put his arm round his shoulders, but desisted when he felt his skin touch the layer of sweat covering the boy.
“Sorry, Ruben, I just remembered I’m expecting a phone call. I’ll have a game another day,” he told him.
And he went off towards the Calzada, feeling the red, merciless sun, already level with his eyes, burning body and soul. Above his head he could see the flaming sword indicating his irrevocable exit from that lost paradise that had once been his, but was no longer and would never be again. If that corner wasn’t his, what did he own the title deeds to? A lacerating sensation that he was alien, foreign, different, hit him so strongly that the Count had to restrain himself and cling to his last ounce of pride to stop himself running away. And
only then, when he realized it was too hot to be running around street corners, did he grasp the real reason they hadn’t wanted to count him in: how come I didn’t get it, those bastards were playing for money. ..
“What’s the matter, wild man?”
“I don’t know. I think I’m tired.”
“It’s hot, don’t you reckon?”
“Fucking hot.”
“Your face looks really shit awful.”
“I can imagine,” the Count agreed, as he coughed and spat out of the window in the direction of the yard. Skinny Carlos watched him from his wheelchair and shrugged his shoulders. He knew when his friend behaved that way it was best to ignore him. He’d always said the Count was a long-suffering bastard, a sucker for nostalgia, a total hypochondriac and the most difficult person to console in the world, and today he didn’t feel he had time or stamina to relieve the fierce onslaught of melancholy his friend was suffering.
“Should I put some music on?” he asked.
“You feel like it?”
“Only asking. Just to pass the time, you know?”
The Count went over to the long row of cassettes on the top of the shelves. His eyes ran over titles and singers, and this time was hardly surprised by Skinny’s eclectic taste in music.
“What do you fancy? The Beatles? Chicago? Formula V? Los Pasos? Credence?”
“Hey, Credence,” they agreed again: they liked to hear Tom Foggerty’s tight voice and the elemental guitars of Credence Clearwater Revival.
“Theirs is still the best version of Proud Mary.”
“That’s not even up for discussion.”
“He sings like a black, or rather sings as if he were fucking God.”
“Fucking right.” And were surprised as they looked each other in the eye: both felt simultaneously the painful inevitability of the morbid replay they were engaged in. They’d repeated that same dialogue, the same words, on other occasions, often, over twenty years of friendship, and always in Skinny’s room, and its periodical resurrection brought back the feeling they were entering an enchanted realm of perpetual, cyclical time, where it was possible to imagine all was pristine and eternal. But so many visible signs, so much skulking behind shame, fear, rancour and even affection, gave notice that only the remastered voice of Tom Foggerty and the Credence guitars had any permanence. The baldness threatening the Count and not-so-skinny Skinny’s sick flab, Mario’s inveterate sadness and Carlos’s intractable illness were all too conclusive proof, among a thousand others, of a wretched decline entirely in the ascendant.
“It’s some time since you saw Red Candito?” Skinny asked when the song came to an end.
“No kidding.”
“He was here the other afternoon and told me he’d given up his line in shoe-making.”
“What’s he into now?”
Skinny looked at the cassette player, as if suddenly something about the machine or song had distracted him.
“What’s up, you sly bastard?”
“Nothing’s up… He’s got a piloto and he’s selling beer…”
The Count nodded and smiled. He could smell his friend’s intentions from several miles.
“And he asked me why we didn’t go and pay him a visit one of these days…”
The Count nodded and smiled again.
“You know I can’t go to that kind of place, Skinny. It’s illegal and if something happens…”
“Mario, don’t fuck around. In this heat, with your shit-awful face
… and it’s only a couple of minutes to Candito’s place… A few beers. Come on, let’s off.”
“I can’t, you bastard. Fucking remember I’m a policeman…” his weak-willed arms feebly hoisting flags proclaiming SOS… “Don’t keep on, Skinny.”
But Skinny did. “I’m damned desperate to go and I thought you’d jump at the chance. You know I never get out, I’m more bored than a toad under a rock… A few cold beers. Just for my birthday, right? And you’re practically not a policeman any more…”
“But what kind of bastard have you turned into, Skinny? Your birthday’s not until next week.”
“All right. All right. If you don’t want to, we won’t…”
The Count brought the wheelchair to a halt outside the entrance to the building. He wiped the sweat away again, as he looked at a passageway lined with doors on both sides. His arms hung heavy after the effort of pushing his friend’s two hundred and fifty pounds more than ten blocks, and the two hills he’d gone up and down. A light flickered in the dark at the end of the passage and the glare from television screens and voices of the characters in the latest soap emerged from every open door in the place. “Tell me, Mama, who’s to blame for everything that’s happened? Please tell me, Mama,” asked someone who’d surely suffered terrible things in that life in daily episodes that craved to be the real thing. Then he put his handkerchief away and walked towards Candito’s door, the only one still shut. As he pushed the wheelchair he tried to hide his face between his arms: I’m still a policeman, he thought, as the temptation from those clandestine beers drew nearer, with the cool, delectable oblivion their consumption would deliver.
He knocked and the door opened as if they were expected. Cuqui, the mulatta who now lived with Candito, had only to stretch out her arm to turn the door handle. Like all those living in the block, she too was watching the soap, and her face seemed to reveal the astonishment of the character finally discovering the whole truth. “I’m to blame,” the Count thought of saying, but he restrained himself.
“Come in, come in,” she insisted, but her voice retained something of the hesitancy of the character in the soap: she refused to believe, and perhaps that was why she shouted into the room, and kept her eyes trained on the newcomers: “Candito, you’ve got visitors.”
Like in a puppet theatre, Red Candito’s saffroncoloured head peered out from behind the curtains hiding the kitchen and the Count got the code: having visitors was different to having customers, and Candito should show himself cautiously. But as soon as he saw them, the mulatto broke into a smile and walked over.
“Fucking hell, Carlos, you persuaded him,” he said, as he shook hands with his two old school friends.
“I told you I’d come and here I am, right?”
“You bet, come inside. I’ve still got some stuff left. Hey, Cuqui, get a nice snack for these mates of mine and forget the soap, go on. Whenever I look at it, they’re spewing out the same bullshit…”
Candito sorted the furniture so Skinny’s chair could cross the room, raised the curtain which hid the kitchen and opened the patio door: some six tables, all full, halted the Count in his tracks. Candito looked him in the eye and nodded: yes, he could go in. But for a moment from the kitchen the Count scrutinized the customers: they were almost all men, only three women, and he tried to identify the odd face. He instinctively touched his belt to check his pistol wasn’t there, but calmed down when he didn’t recognize anyone. Any of those characters could have had run-ins with him at Headquarters and the Count didn’t like the idea of bumping into them in a place like this.
The cheap marble tables were round, iron legged and piled high with bottles. A cold bright light lit the space and a cassette recorder played at top volume the mournful songs of Jose Feliciano, whose voice did its best to drown out the drinkers’ voices. By the sink, two metal tanks sweated ice against the heat. Candito walked over to a table in one corner, occupied by two awesome-looking specimens. He spoke quietly. The men agreed to give up their seats: one was huge, fair-haired, a good six feet tall with long, dangling arms, a face as cratered as the moon’s surface; the other was smaller, his skin so black it was blue, and he just had to be a direct grandson and universal heir to Cro-Magnon man himself: Darwin’s theory of evolution was reflected in the exaggerated jutting of his jaw and the narrow forehead where the eyes of a wild beast of the jungle glinted yellow. Red Candito gestured to the Count to push Carlos’s chair nearer and to the men to bring three beers.
“What did you tell that pair of troglodytes?” the Count mumbled as they sat down.
“Calm down, Conde, calm it. You’re anonymous here, right. Those guys are my business legs.”
The Count turned to look at the big blond, who was now approaching the table with their beers; he placed them on the table and then, without a word, walked over to the tanks.
“They’re your bodyguards, you mean?”
“They’re my legs, Condesito, and they have a hundred uses.”
“Hey, Candito,” Skinny butted in. “What’s a lager cost these days?”
“Depends how you get it, Carlos. Right now it’s tricky and I sell it for three pesos. But yours is on the house, and no arguing, OK?” And he smiled as Cuqui appeared with a plateful of strips of ham, and cheese with biscuits. “All right, darling, carry on relaxing with that soap.” And he stroked her backside farewell.
The ice-cold beer restored a degree of peace to the Count’s over-heated spirit, and he regretted gulping down the first bottle almost in one go. Now he was only irritated by the aggressive volume of the music and the sensation of vulnerability he felt at turning his back on the other customers, but he realized it was Candito who had to survey the remaining tables and decided to stop worrying when the blond guy replaced the empty bottle with a full one. Efficiency was returning to the island.
“What are you up to, Conde?” Candito drank in small gulps. “I’ve not seen you in ages.”
The Count tried the ham.
“I’m in the doghouse, because they suspended me after I had a row with an idiot there. They’ve put me on form-filling and won’t let me as much as look into the street… But you’ve switched tack completely.”
Candito took a long swig from his bottle.
“No choice, Conde, and you know it: you can’t let yourself get burnt in any business. The shoes thing was half down the shoot and I had to change track. You know it’s real hard in the street and, if you don’t have a peso, you’re no longer a player, you know.”
Havana Red hq-1 Page 1
