Havana Black Read online

  The Count took a deep breath to relieve the tension. He felt a desire to twist the neck of that expert in cynicism who had enjoyed the socio-historico-politicomaterial privilege of giving, granting, conceding, deciding, administering, distributing favours from his position as a trusted leader, and in the name of the whole country. He felt his arrogant confession of the way he wielded power to be an insult: he created networks of compromise and debt, corrupted all the byways where he left his slimy tracks. It was no doubt because of people like Gómez de la Peña that he’d been in the police for more than ten years, deferring his own life, to try to dent their overbearing complacency and, if possible, make them pay for some of the crimes that could never be paid for. But this bastard’s slipping from my grasp, he thought, as he observed the pyjamas that represented the comfortable sentence he was seeing out: a remoteness from power that, nevertheless, didn’t deprive him of a house in the best part of Havana, of the Soviet car he kept in the garage nor even a Matisse worth three and a half million dollars, which he’d legally acquired – and no one would ever know if that was true – for five hundred Cuban pesos, for personal enjoyment and the morbid game he could play with his visitors. If only I could catch you out some way, you son of a bitch, he told himself, trying to smile as he spoke: “If you can bear to be frank yet again, please answer a further question: don’t you think it’s really shameful that you’ve got a painting worth millions hanging on your wall, one you bought using your position, when down in the city there are people who spend their week eating rice and beans after working an eight- or ten-hour day and sometimes without even a wall on which to hang a calendar?”

  Yet again Gerardo Gómez de la Peña smoothed the pathetic camouflage over his embarrassing bald pate and looked the detective lieutenant straight in the eye: “Why should I personally feel ashamed, a retired old man who likes to look at that painting? From what I gather, Lieutenant, you don’t know this neighbourhood very well; there are houses just as comfortable as mine, with other equally beautiful paintings and heaps of beautiful African wood and ivory sculptures, acquired by more or less similar means, where Nicaraguan furniture is all the rage, where they call their servants ‘comrade’ and breed exotic dogs that enjoy a better diet than sixty per cent of the world’s population and eighty-five per cent of the nation’s . . . No, of course I’m not ashamed. Because life is as the old conga ditty says: if you hit the jackpot, go for it . . . And too bad for the fellow who doesn’t, but that fellow got well and truly fucked, didn’t he?”

  Night cloaked the city in two minutes, but the dark sky was still empty, completely indifferent to the flurry of clouds on its predestined path towards the island. His mouth lined by the sour aftertaste left by interviews with characters of that ilk, the Count asked Manolo to drive back to Headquarters so he could fulfil one of the agreements he made: to give the first of his daily reports to Colonel Molina.

  “What are you going to say, Conde?”

  “That I’m beginning to be grateful to him for giving me this case. Because I’m sure I’ll break one of these bastards’ legs.”

  “I hope it’s this fellow’s. Calling me naïve . . .”

  “But he really got under your skin.”

  Manolo forced a smile and asked his boss for a cigarette. He sustained his habit of smoking a little without ever making prior investments.

  “And do you think he’s connected to Forcade’s death?”

  “I don’t know, I’m not convinced. What do you think?”

  “I’d rather not say as yet, because if Forcade did come to reclaim the painting or anything else of value he might have given Gómez de la Peña, this guy would be capable of anything, wouldn’t he? But what we really need to find out is who the relative was Forcade had to see in order to resolve important business. I mean, if it’s true what de la Peña says and that relative exists . . .”

  Mario Conde lit his own cigarette as the sergeant turned into the parking lot at Headquarters.

  “Perhaps Miriam knows . . .” he said.

  Manolo’s violent braking spoke for itself. “Conde, Conde, you want to burn in that fire?”

  “What fire are you on about, Manolo? I need to speak to her, right now . . .”

  “I know you only too well,” he muttered, parking the car in its space. “You couldn’t keep your eyes off that blonde.”

  “Well, she was worth some attention, wasn’t she?”

  Mario Conde wasn’t surprised by the news that Colonel Molina had left at five p.m. The new boss was too much of a novice to know there were no fixed hours and that Major Rangel would be at Headquarters every day, including Sundays and the First of May. But perhaps if they’d have given him the chance, he might have been a good spy . . .

  Back in his cubicle, the Count wrote his report, in which he told the Colonel he’d started the investigation, that he’d called in at Headquarters at half past six and that he’d try to carry out another interview that night. He took a breath, picked up the telephone and dialled the number of Miguel Forcade’s old house.

  “Is that you, Miriam?”

  To go up or go down: that had always been the question. Because going down and up, going up and down the Rampa was the Count and his friends’ first experience beyond their barrio. Catching the bus in the barrio and going on the long journey to Vedado, with the single purpose of going up and down, or down and up that luminous slope that was born – or died – in the sea, signalled the end of childhood and the onset of adolescence just as their older brothers’ had been marked by the Literacy Campaign and that of their parents’ generation by sexual initiation in the Pajarito or Colón neighbourhoods: it was tantamount to signing a Declaration of Independence, to feeling your own wings had grown, to knowing yourself physically and spiritually adult, although it really was not the case: now or ever. But they came to believe that all frontiers to adulthood were marked by that alluring avenue, which belonged to the sinful side in their adolescent lore, a slope they were to go up and down – or down and up – in droves, always aiming for an ice-cream at the top and the prize of the sea – always the sea, accursed and inevitable – at the bottom, though their only real obsession was to walk up and down the Rampa, unaccompanied by parents, hoping to find love on one of its street corners. It was almost a second baptism to ascend and descend that street that was like life itself, the only avenue in the city with pavements carpeted in polished granite, where you trod, aesthetically unaware, on unique mosaics fashioned by Wifredo Lam, Amelia Peláez, René Portocarrero, Mariano Rodríguez and Martínez Pedro, because your eyes were glued to the captivating neon signs of night clubs that were banned till the hurdle of a sixteenth birthday was cleared – The Vixen and the Crow, Club 23, The Grotto Cocktail Club – to the mysteries of the Cuba Pavilion and May Salon, exhibiting the last cry of the avant-garde, flanked by the two best cinemas in Havana, showing strange films with titles like Pierrot le Fou, Citizen Kane, Stolen Kisses or Ashes and Diamonds, which you struggled to see though they were impossible to enjoy. And you also practised urban mountaineering to catch a fleeting glimpse of a few underfed tropical hippies, fake and already damned, or else take a mocking glance at those pansies who insisted on showing what they were, and conduct a drooling survey of the mini-skirts that had only just hit the island, first worn on that incline where all the rivers of the new times seemed to flow: including the first rapids of intolerance, whose rigours they had to flee, though they were still such young, correct and dewy-eyed students, when the politically and ideologically correct hordes started to persecute youths, armed with scissors ready to snip any hair that fell beneath the ear or widen trousers whose thighs couldn’t encompass a small lemon: sad recollections of scissors and armoured cars exorcising pernicious cultural penetration, led by four long-haired English lads who repeated such reactionary, pernicious slogans as All You Need Is Love . . . Politics and hair, consciousness and fashion, ideology and arse, the Beatles and bourgeois decadence, and at the end of the road the Militar
y Units to Aid Production with their prison-like rigours as a corrective to shape the New Man.

  The Count was surprised by the exaggerated innocence of his own youthful initiation as he made that unexpected autumnal ascent, on the cusp of thirty-six, more than twenty years after he’d made his first ascent – or was it descent? – with Rabbit, Dwarf, Andrés, perhaps Pello as well, each armed with a cigarette, chewing a rubber band as if it were enemy chewing gum, with a dream in their hearts – or perhaps a bit lower down. (All you need is love, right?) The Count rediscovered on that very same Rampa, which Heraclitus of Ephesus would have dialectically described as different, his hunting ground from the old days, now all in darkness, closed clubs, a dingy Pavilion, the boarded-up pizzeria and the absence of that long-gone girlfriend he would wait for on the corner by the Indo-China shop, where they now sold what must be the last watches sent from a Moscow that was every day more distant and impervious to tears. It was all far too pathetic, but at once moving and squalid, as he replayed that innocent snapshot of his awakening to life, and the policeman on active service thought he could see some remote causes of later disappointments and frustrations: reality had turned out not to be a question of capricious, wilful ascents and descents, unconsciously alternated, with the sea or an ice-cream as a goal, but a struggle to go up and not down, to keep on up, to go up and stay up, for ever and ever, pursuing a philosophy of finding a room at the top from which they had been excluded and definitively locked out – Andrés was right again – and sentenced – almost to a man – to the eternal labour of Sisyphus: to go up only to go down, to go down only to go back up, knowing you’d never stay at the top, getting older and more exhausted, as when he climbed up that night, after walking down, looking for the blonde now waving at him from the corner of Coppelia and who enquired of the Count as he walked up to her: “What’s up, Lieutenant? Anyone would think you’re about to burst into tears.”

  “I am, but I won’t . . . The fact is I’ve just found out that some nice kids I knew have just died. But nothing to worry about . . . Anyway, where shall we go and talk?”

  The woman stroked her hair and looked to the heavens for an answer. “The Coppelia is impossible, though I do fancy an ice-cream. Shall we go down to the Malecón?”

  “Well, back we go down again,” said the Count, as he set off in search of the sea.

  “I think I made a bad choice, don’t you? They only fished the corpse of my dead husband out of this very same sea two days ago and we still haven’t been able to bury him. They say tomorrow . . . It’s complete madness . . . Do you know something? The worst aspect of Miguel’s death was that they threw him into the sea: he had some complex or other and didn’t like bathing on the beach. But I like the sea, any sea . . .”

  The Count also looked towards the coast, on the other side of the wall, and saw the waves gently lapping against the rocks.

  “The hurricane’s heading this way,” he said, looking at the woman.

  “You think it will get this far?”

  “Sure it will.”

  “Well I’m off as soon as he’s buried. I mean, if you’ll let me.”

  “I have no objections,” acknowledged the Count almost without thinking what he was saying.

  In fact he’d have preferred for Miriam to stay: something about her strength – and thighs, and face, and hair and those eyes protected by eyelashes like twisted bars, which made him wonder, poetical as the Count was, whether she would ever go deaf, and that was why God gave her those eyes – attracted him as if it were fated: the blonde, presumably fake, reeked of bed, like roses smell of roses. It was something that seemed natural and endemic and it made him imagine he might breathe that scent in fact in a bed, with its four legs weakening, when she commented: “After all, there’s nothing for me here,” and she looked at her feet, prey to a persistent pendulum.

  Rising from the floor where he’d been lying on the now-shattered dream bed, the policeman searched for an exit: “What about your family?”

  Miriam’s sigh was long, possibly theatrical.

  “My brother Fermin’s the only member of my family I care about. The rest got upset when I started with Miguel, and later, when I went to Miami, they practically excommunicated me . . . The assholes,” she said, almost unable to contain her rage. “But now I’ve come with dollars, they don’t know which altar to put me on . . . All for a few jeans, designer T-shirts and a couple of Chinese fans.”

  “And why do you care about your brother?”

  “It was through him I met Miguel . . . they worked together. And always got on well. He was the only one who didn’t condemn me . . . He’s also been the unluckiest in the family. He was in jail for ten years.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Money problems in the firm he worked for.”

  “Fraud?”

  “Are we talking about Miguel or Fermín?”

  “Miguel, of course . . . But I need to know more. Who is Adrian, for example?”

  “What’s he got to do with any of this?”

  The Count effortlessly allowed patience to come to his aid. He had to wave his cape at the bull in each confrontation and, without goading, try to guide it to the right pen.

  “Nothing as far as I can see. But as he was with you today . . .”

  “Adrian used to be my boyfriend, thousands of years ago. My first boyfriend,” and something seemed to loosen the moorings of millennial woman.

  “You’ve carried on being friends?”

  She almost smiled as she said: “Friends . . .? We haven’t seen each other for ten years. I have nothing here, and nothing there either. But I like talking to him: Adrian is a calm man who reminds me of what I once was and makes me think of what I might have been. That’s all.”

  “I understand the car your husband was driving belonged to your brother, Fermín?”

  “Yes,” she replied, looking at the Count. “A ’56 Chevrolet Fermín inherited from an uncle of mine, one of my mother’s brothers. They confiscated the one the government gave him when he was jailed, in order to set an example . . . Is that the kind of thing you wanted to know?”

  He lit a cigarette. It was pleasant being there, your back to the sea, opposite the Rampa, the night still young, in the company of that edible blonde. But a dead man floated on that still-becalmed ocean, like a dark, infinite mantle.

  “That and much more . . . For example, do you think your husband’s death was prompted by another husband’s jealousy or something of the sort?”

  “Are you mad? That was no jealous husband, more like a savage who – ”

  “It is a possibility though, isn’t it?”

  “No, of course not. That wasn’t Miguel’s style. He was more the romantic sort and besides . . . Well, recently he couldn’t . . . if you get me?”

  “Perhaps it was something that happened a long time ago and that he resurrected . . .” the Count continued, warming to Miriam’s confiding tone.

  “I’ve already told you it wasn’t, but you can think whatever you want. That’s why you’re a policeman, even why they pay you to be one.”

  “True, but not enough,” confessed the Count trying to relieve the tension before heading off in another direction. “And what other reason did Miguel have, apart from his sick father, to risk returning to Cuba after leaving the way he did?”

  She looked him in the eye and the policeman saw such a profound gaze he could have lost himself in its pursuit.

  “I don’t understand you.”

  He was now the one to sigh, looking for the least stony path. “I mean did he return to resolve something he’d left hanging when he defected . . . Or perhaps to salvage something very important that he’d left behind . . .”

  “I see where you’re coming from. What sign are you?”

  The Count breathed out before replying: “Libra . . . Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  “Almost. You seem more a Sagittarian.”

  “But I’m a classic Libra, I swear to you .
. . Was he after something?”

  “Like what?”

  “A very peculiar Matisse, for example. Or perhaps even a Goya. I don’t know, something worth much more than a few Tiffany lamps . . .”

  She turned her head to look at the sea for a moment. The sea was still there, she seemed to be confirming, before saying: “If that was why he came, he’d have told me . . . And do you think I’d tell you?”

  “I’ve no idea, it all depends . . . Let’s say it depends what’s more valuable: what he was after, or seeing justice done.”

  “Forgive me, but you’re talking rubbish . . . I still think they killed Miguel, I mean, the people who intended killing him . . . So, anything else?”

  “Yes, there’s something you perhaps know . . . I spoke to Gómez de la Peña today and he says Miguel left his house claiming he had to see a relative of his about very important business. Can you throw any light on that?”

  Down came her eyelids and her carnivorous eyelashes almost swallowed Mario Conde.

  “No, he never mentioned that to me. I can’t think which relative it was, even less what important business he might – ”

  “And why did Miguel go to see Gómez de la Peña?”

  “They’d known each other for years, hadn’t they? But I don’t think they were friends. I don’t know why he insisted on seeing him. Didn’t Gómez tell you?”

  “He told me but I wasn’t convinced and I think he’s a great liar. And if that’s so, the truth might be somewhere there.”

  “So you want to find out the truth . . .”

  The Count threw his cigarette butt into the sea and expelled all the smoke from his lungs: “I’d also like to know how old you were when you married Miguel.”