Havana Fever Read online

  That’s enough for now. I only wanted to tell you a little about myself and my feelings . . . Give the children a kiss on my behalf and keep reminding them how much I love them. Also greetings to your sister and brother-in-law, tell them to be themselves, and that they should write to me some time. As for you, please don’t forget me: write to me, ring me, or at least remember me, just a little . . . Because I shall always, always love you . . .

  Your Nena

  Mario Conde’s stomach was out of training and had to make a special effort to accommodate and then digest the astonishing nutritional challenge its inconsiderate owner now inflicted on it. While Josefina settled for a grilled fish fillet, a bright and cheerful green salad and a dish of almond ice cream for dessert, Conde and Skinny began the assault on their physical and intellectual, historical and contemporary hungers, with a cocktail of oysters and prawns, destined to subvert their palate with fishy flavours long lost in the crevices of memory. The former then prepared to disappear down a juicy path of meat and potatoes in purest Cuban style, while the latter flung himself into a spicy well of broth with chickpeas that made him sweat from every single one of his multitude of pores. Then, as their bodies warmed to the task, like long-distance runners getting into their best stride, they competed to see who could eat the most rice and chicken, served in ridiculous portions – of both rice and chicken, a friendly gesture from the management – before finishing off with a shared ham pizza that Skinny insisted on ordering and stuffing into a remaining space, which proclaimed its hatred of a vacuum. For their epilogue they chose fritters, drenched in fruit juices, with a parfum of aniseed and lime peel, and neither could refuse, being such gentlemen in the circumstances, a taste of the rice and milk infused with cinnamon that Fatman Contreras himself prepared – a recipe of his great-grandmother’s, an Andalusian whore who liked the good life and died at the ripe old age of eighty-eight, puffing on her cigar and sipping a shot of rum. They’d downed two bottles of Chilean Concha y Toro before getting to the desserts and then ordered two double shots of vintage rum to wipe their chops clean and accompany their coffees – doubles that quadrupled when the friends lit up the delicately layered cigars presented to them by the ex-policeman who’d converted to gourmet living and who flopped his voluminous mass of humanity down between them and Tinguaro at the end of the night, so they could toast one another with a glass of chilled Fra Angelico. The Count wasn’t taken aback by the bill for seven hundred and eighty pesos, and when he’d paid Tinguaro his hundred pesos, he happily brought to a close what had been one of his most profitable days ever with a net loss of three hundred and eighty pesos and the soothing feeling that he might be able to pass through the eye of a needle, because he’d never be a rich man . . .

  Tossing in his bed, unable to read, Conde only got to sleep around four, and in the meantime, as he belched and sweated uncomfortably, his retina was revisited time and again by the almost irritatingly persistent image of Violeta del Río, a recent revelation to him and news to Fatman Contreras too. Perhaps his stubborn detective instincts had also been aroused by the surfeit and had forced him to notice a few incongruities in his find. The first and most perturbing was the strange decision, apparently unmotivated, at least as far as Vanidades was concerned, which led that “beautiful and refined” woman, “at the pinnacle of her career” to abandon the stage and, by all accounts, vanish so definitively that nothing was ever heard of her again. Might she have left the island, like so many thousands of Cubans around that time? The Count reckoned it was the most likely explanation, although he didn’t discount the possibility she might still be living in Cuba, under her real name – Lucía, Lourdes, or Teresa, because nobody could, in real life, be a Violeta del Río – as a private individual, stripped of the lamé, limelight and microphones. It wasn’t a wild conclusion to draw: in years of such radical change in the lives of the country and its inhabitants, there’d been an infinite number of political, ethical, religious, professional, economic and even sporting transformations: Grandfather Rufino had suffered the banning of cockfights as if it were a prison sentence and the Count’s own father didn’t see another game of baseball to the day he died, because he couldn’t imagine or accept that the blue Almendares club had ceased to exist, a club he’d fanatically supported for every minute of the first thirty-five years of his existence . . . But no artist can stop being an artist from one day to the next, just like that – just as no policeman could totally cease to be one, however long he’d been off duty – something Mario Conde knew for a fact. Maybe that was why he was so intrigued by that press-cutting, slumbering inside a cookbook nobody had opened in years, as witnessed by its state of preservation as well as the fact, endorsed by history, that its contents were of no use in a country that had been on food rationing for almost half a century. Hare stew with sultanas? Eggs in foie gras aspic? Foyot veal cutlets? . . . You must be joking! Conde conjectured that the book must have belonged to the wife of Alcides Montes de Oca, although he thought he remembered that she’d died around 1956, the year the book of recipes was published. If, as Amalia Ferrero asserted, her brother Dionisio stopped living with them when the revolution was victorious, it was unlikely he could have left a cutting there which was published in 1960. Five people remained on his list: the deceased Alcides Montes de Oca and his two adolescent children, the aged, now blank-minded Mummy Ferrero and Amalia herself. How could one of them have been involved with a ’50s Havana cabaret singer? The Count couldn’t imagine, but some link must have existed between one of those individuals and the vanished singer of boleros, the seductress who’d been dubbed the Lady of the Night and who beat faintly in some remote cranny of the Count’s memory as a diffuse, almost extinct presence, still able to send out disruptive tremors.

  It was gone three a.m. when the Count heard a rather authoritarian scratching on his kitchen door. He knew it was useless to try to ignore it, since stubbornness was the scratcher’s most pronounced trait, so he got up to open the door.

  “Hell, Rubbish, what kind of time is this to be coming home?”

  On the brink of the advanced age of fourteen, Rubbish retained his streetwise ways intact, and would prowl the barrio every night in search of fresh air, frantic fleas and females on heat. Ever since the Count had brought him home to live with them on that stormy night in 1989, the quarrelsome Maltese had insisted on his freedom, which the Count accepted, seduced by the character of the animal who, alerted by the faint, lingering scent of the evening’s feast on his clothes, now barked twice, demanding to be fed.

  “All right, all right, grub’s up.”

  Conde fetched a metal tray from the terrace. He opened the bag of leftovers from the paladar and tipped part of the contents onto the tray.

  “But you eat it outside . . .” the Count warned, taking the tray out on the terrace. “We’ll talk tomorrow, because this has got to stop . . .”

  Rubbish barked twice again, and wagged his battered tail like a shuttlecock, urging him to get a move on.

  Back in bed, Mario Conde smoked a cigarette. With the dark eyes of Violeta del Río floating in his mind, his memory slipping over her thick wavy hair and satin skin, he was finally blessed with sleep and, quite unexpectedly, slept soundly for five hours, feeling swindled when he woke up, because he couldn’t recall a single dream about the beautiful woman sheathed in lamé.

  What the fuck am I doing here?. . . Conde stood in the church entrance and took in a far too pleasurable lungful of the damp draught blowing down the aisle of the modest slate and brick building he’d entered for the first time on the day he was baptised. Forty-seven years ago, according to his calculations – a number that never got smaller. Once again he saw in the distance the rather modest high altar and its peaceful image of the clean, pink-cheeked archangel Raphael, a heavenly being immune to the pull of world. The rows of dark pews, empty at that time in the morning, contrasted with the bustle the Count had left behind in the street, populated by its motley crew of churro and pastry sell
ers, passersby rushing or dawdling, grumpy morning drunkards propping up the bar on the corner and resigned pensioners waiting for the deferred opening of the cafeteria where they would comfort their groaning stomachs.

  Over the last ten to twelve years, Conde had begun to visit the local church suspiciously frequently. Although he’d never been to another mass and never contemplated the possibility he might kneel by the confessional, the urge to sit for a few minutes in the deserted temple, freeing up the floodgates of his mind, repaid him with a feeling of calm he argued had nothing in common with mystical or extra-terrestrial spiritual longings apart from its basic function that the Count never used – he never prayed or asked for anything, because he’d forgotten all his prayers and didn’t have anyone to include in them – the church had begun to provide a kind of shelter where time and life lost the savage rhythms of the struggle for daily survival. Nonetheless, his conscience warned that, despite his lack of belief in life after death, a diffuse feeling did exist he’d yet to pin down, that wasn’t sapping his essential atheism but was beginning to entice him into that world and its persistent, magnetic appeal. Conde had come to suspect that the blend of aging and disillusion overwhelming his heart might finally cast him back, or just return him, to the fold of those who find consolation in faith. But the mere thought of that possibility irked him: the Count was a fundamentalist in his loyalties, and converts might be contemptible renegades and traitors, but re-conversion verged on the abominable.

  That morning Conde felt full of expectation: he wasn’t entering church in search of passing solace, but to find an unlikely response, quite unrelated to mysteries of transcendence, but rather connected to those of his own past, in the most earthbound of all possible worlds. Consequently, rather than sitting anonymously on one of the pews, he crossed over the central aisle and headed for the sacristy, where he found, as he’d hoped he would, the ever-stalwart figure of octogenarian Padre Mendoza, Bible open at a page of the Apocalypse, searching no doubt for the text for his next sermon.

  “Good morning, Padre,” he said, entering the precinct.

  “Ready then?” asked the old man without looking up.

  “Not yet.”

  “Don’t leave it too long,” the priest warned.

  “What did we agree? Is or isn’t the Lord’s time infinite?”

  “The Lord’s is, your’s isn’t. Nor is mine,” he retorted smiling at the Count.

  “Why are you so keen to convert me?” asked the Count.

  “Because you’re crying out for it. You insist on not believing but you are somebody who can’t live without belief. All you need is to dare to take the final step.”

  Conde had to smile. Could that be true or was the wily old priest merely exercising his sibylline logic?

  “I’m not prepared to believe in certain words again. What’s more, you will ask me to do things I can’t and don’t want to do.”

  “For example?”

  “I’ll tell you when you give me confession,” wriggled the Count and, coming back to earth, he handed the priest a cigarette, as he put another to his own lips. He lit both with his lighter and they were soon enveloped in a cloud of smoke. “I came to see you because I need to find something out and you can perhaps help me . . . How long have you known my family?”

  “For fifty-eight years, since the day I first came to this parish. You weren’t even a twinkle in your father’s eye . . . Your Grandfather Rufino, who was even more of an atheist than you, was my first friend around here.”

  Conde nodded and again worried about what had really driven him to Padre Mendoza’s door. A skilled hand in these uncomfortable situations, the priest helped him make the next step.

  “So what is it you need to know?”

  Conde looked him in the eye and felt the trust-suffusing gaze of that old man who’d once placed in his mouth a flour wafer that, he claimed, was the very body of Christ.

  “Have you ever heard of a woman called Violeta del Río?”

  The priest looked up, perhaps surprised by that unexpected question. He took a couple of drags, then put out the cigarette in the ashtray and returned Conde’s gaze.

  “No,” came his firm reply. “Why?”

  “The name cropped up yesterday and, for some reason or other, it sounded familiar. I had the feeling that something sleeping had suddenly woken up. But I can’t think where or why . . .”

  “Who is this woman?” enquired the priest.

  The Count explained, trying to fathom why Violeta del Río seemed both mysterious yet remotely familiar in this perplexing story that made no sense at all.

  “How old were you in 1958?” asked the priest, staring at him.

  “Three,” the Count replied. “Why?”

  The old man pondered for a few seconds. He seemed to be weighing up his responses and which words he should say or keep to himself.

  “Your father fell in love with a singer around that time.”

  “My father?” rasped the Count. The parish priest’s words clashed with the strict, home-loving image he cherished of his father. “With Violeta del Río?”

  “I don’t know what her name was, I never did, so it might have been her or somebody else . . . As far as I knew, it was a platonic affair. But he did fall in love. He heard her sing and became infatuated. I don’t think it went any further. I think . . . She lived in one world and your father in another: she was beyond his grasp, which I think was something he realized from the start. Your mother never found out. What’s more, I didn’t think anyone was in the know, apart from your father and me . . .”

  “So why does the name sound familiar?”

  “Did he ever mention her to you?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m not sure. My father never spoke to me about what he did – you know what he was like.”

  Conde tried to reshape the monolithic image he had of his father, with whom he never succeeded in establishing the channels of communication he’d enjoyed with his mother or his grandfather, Rufino the Count. They’d loved each other, certainly, but neither had ever been able to express that affection verbally, and silence governed almost every aspect of their lives. Besides, the idea he might have been chasing after a beautiful singer in bars and cabarets didn’t fit with the image of his father that he clung to.

  “Well it must have been him . . . I expect he told you one day and you just forgot. Men in love do do crazy things.”

  “I know. Tell me about it. But not him.”

  “How can you be so sure? He wasn’t that different.”

  “We didn’t speak much.”

  “What about Grandfather Rufino? Might he have said something to you?”

  “No.”

  “I expect he did, he told old Rufino everything and it got through to you and . . .”

  “But what was this woman like my father fell for?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” smiled the priest, “he just told me he couldn’t get the singer, Violeta or whatever her name was, out of his head. Your father came to see me because he said he was going mad. He told me everything right here. Poor man.”

  Conde finally smiled. The image of his father infatuated with a singer of boleros seemed unreal, but it was so human he found it reassuring.

  “So my father fell in love with a singer and watered at the mouth at the mere thought of her. And nobody ever found out . . .”

  “I did,” the priest corrected him.

  “You’re different,” explained Conde.

  “Why am I different?”

  “Because you are. Otherwise, my father would never have told you.”

  “True enough.”

  “So why didn’t you ask him what her name was?”

  “It wasn’t important. For either of us. It was as if desire had struck like lightening: it came and turned his life upside down. What’s in a name? I just told him to take care, that some changes can’t be reversed,” answered the priest, standing up and grumbling, “Well, I must get ready for mass. Will you be
staying? Look, the altar boy’s not come yet . . .”

  “I’d fancy myself as an altar boy . . . Keep your hopes up, but don’t get too excited . . . Know what? If I discover my father did in fact fall in love with Violeta del Río I’ll start believing in miracles.”

  It was inevitable: as soon as he saw their faces he recalled Rubbish’s early morning jubilation at the feast of leftovers; recalled the worst nights during the Crisis, when his desolate larder forced him to toast old bread and drink glasses of sugared water; he even recalled the old man who several days ago had asked him for two pesos, one peso, anything, to buy something to eat. The now happy but still emaciated faces with which Amalia and Dionisio Ferrero welcomed him told the Count that both had got to the market the previous evening before it closed and, like himself, had feasted on an exceptional banquet that, because they were out of gastric training, had made sleep difficult. Such an irritation, though, would never mar their real satisfaction at feeling stuffed, and safe from the cruel, stabbing pain of hunger. They might well have had some milk with their breakfast that morning and restored a creamy bliss to their gruel, even luxuriated in bread and butter, and drunk proper strong coffee, like the coffee they now offered their buyers, perhaps over-sweetened, as the ex-policeman’s expert palate detected, though it was no doubt genuine, and not the ersatz powder sold in minimal amounts according to a strict ration book.

  On arrival, Conde had introduced them to his business partner: flustered by the proximity of the treasure, Yoyi Pigeon hurried through the polite chit-chat and asked to see the library, as if it were a warehouse full of hammers or a container of scissors.