Havana Fever Page 3

  The Count swallowed Amalia’s torrent of words sitting on the edge of their threadbare sofa, smoking and using his hand as an ashtray, until Dionisio returned with a chipped, gold-edged dessert dish which he apologetically handed to the smoker. But Dionisio’s actions went unnoticed by the Count, entranced by that chronicle of irrational loyalty. His emotions hadn’t, however, entirely stifled his critical powers: the automatic alarm developed by his time in the police was alerting him to the fact that it was only part of the story, perhaps the most pleasant or dramatic part, though for the time being he had to go along with what he’d heard.

  “Well, if you’ve made your minds up . . . I’ll come back tomorrow . . .”

  “Won’t you take any books now?” Amalia almost implored.

  “I’m really not carrying enough money on me . . .”

  Amalia looked at her brother and took the initiative: “Look, we can see you are a decent, honest fellow . . .”

  “It’s years since I’ve heard that phrase,” the Count responded. “A decent, honest . . .”

  “Yes, we can tell,” the translucent woman assured him. “Can you imagine the number of bandits we’ve had to deal with to sell the vases and other adornments? And how often they offered a pittance for things that were really valuable? Look, just make us an offer, take a few books and . . . pay us what you can. How about it? You can come back, draw up whatever inventory you want and take the books you then decide to buy . . .”

  Conde noticed that while Amalia was talking, Dionisio reacted almost defensively as if he wanted to shield himself from the words he was hearing. He discreetly averted his gaze in the direction of the library, whose mirrored doors remained open, as if inviting him to walk in and help himself to the royal banquet spread out there.

  “I’ve got five hundred pesos on me . . . Four hundred and ninety, to be exact. If I’m going to take a few books with me now I’ll need ten for a minicab.”

  “That will do . . .” she replied, unable to rein in her eagerness.

  Conde preferred to walk into the library rather than return Amalia’s look, let alone Dionisio’s. Able to obliterate the remnants of pride and an old pledge, their despair was the last scrap of dignity to be destroyed by the calamities that had destroyed those lives. Yet again, he regretted the sordid side of his trade, but soon found relief from remorse in his quest for books that would easily sell on the market. Two volumes of population censuses prior to 1940 that an Italian was after, a client of his partner Yoyi Pigeon, were the first he put aside. He then picked out three first editions of works by Fernando Ortiz – that were always easy to place with readers keen on rumbling the mysteries of the world of Afro-Cubans; a first edition of The Slave-trader, by Lino Novás Calvo; and, after putting to one side several books printed in the nineteenth century whose value he needed to check out, he bagged several historical monographs published in Havana, Madrid and Barcelona in the twenties and thirties, that didn’t have tremendous bibliographical value, but were coveted by the non-Cuban buyers who flitted from one second-hand bookseller’s stall to another. He was about to shut his bag and tot up the total, when he saw before his eyes a book that practically screamed at him: it was an intact, sturdy, healthy, well-nourished copy of My Pleasure? with the secondary title of An indispensable . . . culinary guide, printed by Úcar y García in 1956, and illustrated by the great cartoonist, Conrado Massaguer. Ever since that remote afternoon when the Count had seen that book for the first time in the hands of a nouveau riche owner of several of those private restaurants that sprang up in the first days of dire shortages, as a compulsive buyer of gastronomic literature, he’d tried to track it down, thrilled by its wonderful recipes for Creole and international cuisine, compiled to satisfy the most aristocratic kitchens in an era when aristocratic kitchens still existed in Cuba. However, the Count’s persistent search wasn’t driven by bibliophilic or even commercial goals, but the grandiose, self-interested idea that he might present that wonder to old Josefina, the only person the Count knew with a magical ability to conjure up miracles – even in times of Crisis – and convert those dream dishes into edible realities.

  With his bag of books over his shoulder and his stomach gurgling in joyful anticipation, Mario Conde returned to the reception room, where the Ferreros awaited him looking grave and anxious. He only then noticed how the fingers of Amalia, who was at that moment wiping the sweat from her hands, were atrophied and sore around the cuticle edges, like frog toes, no doubt because of her compulsive need to nibble her nails and the skin surrounding them.

  “All right, I’ll take these sixteen books. There’s only one that’s special, the one on Cuban cooking, though it doesn’t have a high market value . . . I want it for myself. How about five hundred pesos for the lot?. . .”

  Dionisio looked at his sister and they stared at each other. They both slowly turned to the Count who rather uneasily anticipated possible recriminations: ‘You don’t think it’s enough?’

  “No,” Dionisio immediately replied. ‘No . . . not at all. I mean, it’s very fair.’

  Conde smiled with relief.

  “It’s not very much, but it’s fair. That price includes my earnings, and the bookseller’s, after he’s paid the space he rents and taxes . . . You get about thirty per cent of any final price tag. That’s how we work out the earnings from books that sell easily, a three-way split.”

  “So little?” Amalia couldn’t repress that complaint.

  “It’s not so little if you’re convinced I’m not going to swindle you. I’m a decent fellow and, if we don’t fall out, I will buy lots of books from you at a good price.” He smiled, assuming he’d dealt with that quibble, and, before brother and sister could do their sums differently, he handed over the agreed amount.

  When he walked out into the street, he was hit in the face by the afternoon humidity the sun had whipped up: a short-lived shower that had stood in for the anticipated storm had merely increased the mugginess of the air. The Count immediately noticed the contrast in temperature: the Ferreros’ house, once the property of the filthy-rich Montes de Ocas, could cope with a Havana summer and for a moment he felt tempted to go back and take a second look at the cool mansion, but an intuition warned him against looking back. If he had, he’d most certainly have been astonished to see a Ferrero running out of the house to the nearest market, trying to arrive before five o’clock when they closed the meat, vegetable and grocery stalls that might spare them for once the obligatory diet of rice and black beans they shared with several million compatriots. But as he walked off in search of a road where he might flag down a passing mini-cab, Mario Conde noted that, although some symptoms had slackened off, his hunch was still alive and kicking, clinging to the skin of his left nipple like a bloodthirsty leech.

  Yoyi Pigeon, who’d been civically registered and Catholically baptized with the resonant name of Jorge Reutilio Casamayor Riquelmes, was twenty-eight years old, slightly swollen-chested – hence his pigeonnish nickname – and had an irrepressible propensity for verbal wit. He was moreover a man who thought on his feet and was quick and efficient at complex calculations, as endorsed by the academic diploma in civil engineering, framed in a soberly elegant, wrought bronze frame, that hung on the wall of his living room in Víbora Park. He was patiently waiting, said the engineering laureate, for toilet paper to go into short supply so he could adapt the crackling piece of university parchment to such use, given it had brought him little success and no economic advantage. Although the Count was twenty years his senior, he recognized, with a touch of envy, that Yoyi possessed a cynicism and practical knowledge of life he had never and clearly would never possess, even though those qualities were increasingly necessary for survival in the jungle of Creole life in the third millennium.

  Ever since the Count had become one of Pigeon’s suppliers three or four years ago, his earnings from buying and selling second-hand books had rocketed most pleasingly. Out of his many business ventures – the purchase of jewels
and antiques, works of art, two cars now ready for hire and the ownership of twenty-five per cent of the shares in a small, entirely illegal building firm – Yoyi’s only official connection with the authorities was his licence to set up a stall for the sale of books in the plaza de Armas, which was in fact supervised by a maternal uncle he visited a couple of times a week in order to supply new goods and control the commercial well-being of the business that served him as a front. The Count had finally concluded that the young man’s innate ability to trade, sell at a good price and cajole potential customers – who, according to his principles, you always tried to rip off – must be the result of a genetic legacy from his general-store-owning Spanish grandfather to whom he also owed the name of Reutilio, for the boy had grown up in a country where scarcity and shortages had banished the art of making a good sale several decades ago. People sold and bought from necessity; while some sold what they could, others bought what their bottomless pockets allowed, with no stock exchange complications and, in particular, without the stress that choice entailed: take it or leave it, it’s this or nothing, hurry up or it will be gone, buy what’s there although right now you don’t need it . . . But not Yoyi Pigeon. He was a consummate artist, able to place luxury items at unbelievable prices, and the Count bet that even if he realized his dream of leaving the island – to go anywhere, Madagascar included – he’d end up a successful entrepreneur.

  When they met, Conde felt he was reluctantly rejecting the youth because of his appearance, his love of the jewels he displayed on his hands and neck and his relentless cultivation of his own body. Nevertheless, the relationship between the two, born of purely commercial motives, had successfully surmounted the iron barrier of the Count’s prejudices and started to turn into friendship, perhaps because their complementary qualities balanced out any apparent shortcomings. The young man’s pitilessly mercantile vision and the Count’s outdated romanticism, the former’s rash impetuosity and the latter’s scrupulous calm, Pigeon’s occasionally unthinking outspokenness and the Count’s guile forged by years in the police gave them a strange equilibrium.

  Their friendship had been definitively cemented one afternoon three years ago when the Count called in at his partner’s house on the pretext that he had to tell him he’d be bringing a load of books the day after, although what he really wanted was a cup of the excellent coffee the lad’s mother used to make. But that afternoon, Conde’s presence had saved him – at the very least – from a scam that was proceeding undetected by Pigeon’s beady eyes.

  Conde had arrived at Yoyi’s just as the latter, dazzled by a job-lot of jewels offered at an unbelievably reasonable price by two characters who’d come recommended by a jeweller, was about to fetch from his bedroom the 2,200 dollars they’d agreed as an overall amount. When he arrived, Conde had greeted Yoyi and the jewelsellers and discreetly made for the lobby, driven by a hunch that not everything was as it should be. He’d squeezed his memory hard and prised out an image of one of the would-be sellers, implicated years ago in a case of violent robbery. He immediately concluded the deal was fraudulent: either the jewels came from a robbery that had yet to be rumbled or, more dangerously, were simply a ploy to strip Yoyi of his money. Conde had no time to intervene and abort that operation, so he made his way along the passage down the side of the house to the backyard where he picked up a piece of iron piping which he flourished like a baseball bat. He retraced his steps and by the time he’d reached the living room, the scene had reached climax point: one of the sellers was threatening Yoyi with a huge knife, and demanding the money, while the other collected up the jewels. Almost without thinking Conde brought the pipe down on the rib cage of the armed man, who dropped his knife and fell to his knees in front of Yoyi, who kicked him in the jaw and sent him flying on his back. Seeing all this happening, the other thief grabbed the jewels as best he could and ran between Yoyi and Conde to get to the street before the ex-policeman struck again with his makeshift weapon. Feeling his body shaking after he’d acted so violently, Conde handed the iron pipe to Yoyi, kicked the knife away, and flopped down on the sofa, beseeching the young man: “Don’t hit him again. Let him be. Don’t complicate life . . .”

  But this afternoon, as on other lucky ones, Yoyi smiled contentedly when he saw his partner approaching with a bag of books. After asking his mother to prepare the indispensable cups of coffee, Yoyi followed the Count onto the terrace, where several pots of ferns and malangas fought for space, favoured as they were by the protective shade of the fruit trees growing in the next-door yard. The Count emptied his bag on the table and told Pigeon that this little consignment was only a very light hors d’oeuvre compared to the banquet of books he’d just discovered. The young lad listened to him as impatiently as ever, caressing the jutting keel of his sternum.

  “I swear, my partner’s a silly bastard,” he finally commented. “How the hell could you tell those famished creatures there are books you can’t sell? What got into you, Conde?”

  “I felt sorry for them. They’re starving to death . . . And because you know I won’t do that kind of . . .”

  “Yes, you only have to take one look at you . . . Look at your shirt, man, it’s about to fall apart. You could make money hand over fist but of course you have to bleat on about books you can’t sell . . .”

  “That’s my problem,” Conde tried to cut that conversation dead.

  “Of course,” agreed Pigeon, shaking his left hand, where two gold bracelets entwined. “What’s the game-plan?”

  “I agreed I’d call back at their place with more money and make an inventory of what they’ve got and take off another batch. So you pay me for this lot and advance me some money to buy more.”

  Asking no questions, with a business confidence he reserved solely for the Count, the lad put a hand in his pocket and took out a sheaf of notes that made the other turn pale. He used his impressively nimble fingers to count the bits of paper at a speed the Count’s addition skills couldn’t match.

  ‘Here’s a thousand, that’s yours, and three thousand more to start the negotiations. Fair dues.”

  “If I flash all this at them all, it’ll frighten them to death.” He recalled Dionisio Ferrero’s greedy eyes and his translucent sister’s worm-eaten fingers grasping the money he’d given them. “Remember the two censuses will fetch a really good price.”

  ‘When I’ve sold them to Giovanni, I’ll settle with you. That Italian bastard’s got a thing about censuses. I’ll take twenty-five greenbacks off him for each . . . And they’re as good as new. You see what things are like? Just a couple of censuses bring in thirteen hundred pesos, because I’ve got the right customer lined up. Get me? If you really bring me good books, I’ll make you rich, man, I swear . . .”

  Pigeon smiled and waved contentedly at Conde. He went into the kitchen and returned with two cups of steaming coffee and a bottle of vintage rum, along with two small cut-glass tumblers, separated by a sheet of very fine sandpaper.

  “Start cleaning the books,” he instructed the Count giving him the sandpaper.

  While savouring his coffee and watching with relish as Pigeon poured out the rum, Conde cut the sandpaper in half to make his job easier and pulled the heap of books towards him.

  “What about that one?” asked Pigeon, pointing his glass of rum at the volume half hidden under his bag.

  “It’s a present for Skinny’s mother. It’s a cookbook I’ve been after for a while.”

  The youth swigged his rum and smiled again.

  “A cookbook? To cook what? Hey, man, you and your friends are incredible: Skinny, Rabbit, black Candito who’s crazy about Jehova and all that jazz . . . Fuck, they’re like a bunch of men from Mars, I swear. I look at them and wonder what the fuck they stuffed in their heads to make them like that . . .”

  Conde took a swig and lit up. He took one of the books and started sandpapering gently along the top edge, to remove any traces of damp or specks of dust.

  “They made us belie
ve we were all equal and that the world would be a better place. That it was already better . . .”

  “They fooled you, I swear. Everywhere you go some people are less equal than others and the world is going to the dogs. Right here, if you don’t have any green’uns you’re out of the running, and there are people getting rich, and not exactly on the straight and narrow . . .”