Havana Black Page 8

  You could never have identified the Christian temple from its architectural appearance; it looked more like a warehouse, with a high tiled roof and double door, which when open hid the cross set there to indicate its function. Nevertheless, religious ecstasy spilled out of the place: the shouting and clapping of the faithful, intoning a rhythmic hymn of love to Jehovah, came down the street, impelled irrepressibly by a faith too vehement by half, and strong enough to halt the three friends in their tracks.

  “That has to be it,” commented Skinny Carlos.

  “You really think we should go in, Conde?” asked Andrés, always on the reticent side, as Carlos and Mario exchanged glances. The chorus now sounded a couple of decibels louder, and the clapping quickened, as if the Jehovah they invoked was nigh.

  “No, better not go in. I’ll just take a peek to see if Red can see me.”

  Without thinking why he did so, the policeman pulled down his shirt, as if trying to tidy his unkempt appearance, and crossed the small doorway to put his head inside the sacred precinct. And he was moved by what he saw: that church had nothing in common with the concepts of church stored in the Count’s Catholically trained brain. To begin with, there was no altar, always dominated by the image of the church’s patron saint; all there was on the clean, whitewashed wall was a simple wooden cross that bore no crucified Christ. The walls, also unadorned by saints and decorations, had large windows open to the night. Nonetheless, there wasn’t enough ventilation, and the Count’s face hit a hot, sweaty atmosphere exuded by the heaving mass of faithful gathered there, clapping like the possessed, while they sang in chorus with the short, thin black man who, without dog-collar or soutane, acted as the leader of that communion with the divinity, shouting periodically: “Yeah, you are, Jehovah!” enthusing the flock, which bellowed “Yeah, hallelujah!” The Count finally spotted Candito’s red head in the front rows and took a first step inside the church, when he was struck by a shocking disparity: he realized he was surrounded by people who knew of God’s existence and praised Him with an apparently inextinguishable physical and spiritual vehemence, and he was forced back to the door, driven by his evident inability to belong to that crowd of redeemed believers. Tidying his shirt yet again, beneath which he carried a gun, the Count returned to the street, racked by doubt: who was mistaken: he or all those people gathered in that church without altars or Christ? Those people who believed in something that could save them or he, a man who could hardly think of a couple of things worth saving?

  “Fucking hell,” he said to himself, as he reached his friends, and Carlos looked at him in alarm.

  “What happened, Conde, did they throw you out?”

  “No . . . Yes . . . Listen, I think we’d better wait outside.”

  “Hey, Candito, what the fuck are you doing as an Adventist, you, a half-Catholic who take your problems to an African high priest?” asked the Count, when they were finally able to rearrange the furniture in the small room to make space for Skinny Carlos’s wheelchair.

  The smell of the coffee Cuqui was preparing wafted their way from the kitchen, and, still marked by the evidence of faith he’d just observed, the Count’s mind was now filled with the image of a rampant Candito clad in white castigating the evil one before a legion of the faithful.

  “Don’t fuck around, Conde, don’t start interfering in people’s lives,” interrupted Carlos, and turned to Candito: “Hey, Red, so now you can’t have a little drink, smoke or swear, or . . .” and lowering his voice to a whisper, “or have a fling with a bit of skirt that offers itself?”

  Candito shook his head: there was no hope for these guys.

  “It’s not like you think. I’ve not been baptized yet. I don’t think I’m ready. I just go to the church every now and then and sit there.”

  “Singing and clapping?” asked the Count incredulously.

  “Yes, and listening to people speak of love, peace, goodness, cleanliness of spirit, hopes of salvation, quiet and forgiveness . . . Hearing things people don’t say elsewhere, spoken by people who believe in what they say. It’s better than selling beer or buying stolen leather to make shoes, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it’s true. You’re doing right,” affirmed Andrés.

  “What? And will you take the same righteous path?” the Count demanded, and immediately regretted his sarcastic tone.

  “What the fuck is eating you, Conde? I said Red was doing right. That’s all. Isn’t it, Candito?”

  Their host smiled. The Count searched him for visible physical changes and thought Red’s smile seemed different: perhaps more peaceful, more accepting: strengthened and able to withstand jibes. A smile expressing a hope in belief.

  “It makes sense for the Count to get like this, Andrés. Well, you know him better than I do . . . I once told him to watch out, because he was turning cynical, you remember, Conde?”

  “Sorry, Red, it isn’t what Andrés is thinking, but the fact is even after I’ve seen you in action I can’t imagine you’re really into that,” replied the Count, trying to salvage something.

  “And why can’t you imagine me into that? Isn’t it better than being a petty criminal for the rest of my life worrying every day in case the policeman knocking on my door isn’t you? Or downing a bottle of rum morning and night to forget how fucked I am, which is what you do? Isn’t it better to pray and sing a bit, Conde, and think someone somewhere only wants you to have faith and be good? You know, Mario, I’m sick of all the shit out there . . .”

  “You said ‘shit’, Candito,” quipped Skinny, and Candito smiled. His inner peace is already becoming evident, thought the Count.

  “Yes, of the shit everywhere. You know what my life’s been like. But I think you can change if you make it in time, although I’ve got to forget a lot of the things I’ve been for a long time. And besides, I don’t feel empty anymore, like I used to, and I’m learning you can’t live a life of emptiness. You get me?”

  “I get you, Candito,” replied Andrés. “I know what it’s like to feel empty . . .”

  As if he’d not heard the doctor, the Count looked Candito in the eye and took out a cigarette. He made a gesture to ascertain whether he could light up and the other nodded. The Count thought his friend had said something that could convince him and he now envied that possibility of change and fulfilment Red had glimpsed by way of his religious faith. Were all those in the church better than he was? The certainty that that might be so alarmed Mario Conde’s incredulous spirit even more.

  “And how do you feel the change, Red?”

  “You don’t feel it, Conde. You search it out. The first step is to want it. For example, to want to change, or love one’s neighbour, or want to live free of anger and bitterness.”

  “And forgive everyone?” asked the Count, out of interest.

  “Yes, forgive. Nobody must stand in judgement . . .”

  “Well, I am fucked. Well and truly. Do you want people to forget everything? No, my brother, there are things one can’t forgive, and you know that’s so . . .”

  “You can, Conde, you can.”

  “In which case I’m happy for your sake. If only I could change and want to believe and even love all my neighbours, including the two million bastards I know only too well. The truth is sometimes I don’t even believe in myself. I’m not in the running. I don’t want to forgive: not fucking likely. The fact is I don’t want – ”

  “I’m not going to say you should go to the church, because I respect you as a friend and I don’t like to tell anyone what he must or must not do in this kind of thing. Not even my wife . . . But if only you could.”

  “Forget it, there’s no cure for my state, but if you feel good then I’m pleased, because I’m not the cynic you sometimes think, and I love you more than you can imagine . . . But tell me just one thing: can people of your religion go to a friend’s birthday party?”

  Candito nodded again and smiled on. If the grace of God has really touched him, it seems to have done so at n
erve points that generate laughter, thought the heretical, anatomical Count.

  “Of course they can. And if he’s a real close friend, I can even have a couple of drinks. You know I’ll never be a fanatic. What I want to change are other things that are in here,” and he touched his head, now a greyflecked red, “because I can’t change some things that are out there . . .”

  “Great, the day after tomorrow, at Skinny’s place. It’s my birthday and this guy says you only get to be thirty-six once.”

  “Of course I’ll be there. And don’t worry. I know what I have to bring, right, Conde?”

  “May God keep you this wise, Red . . . But I also came because I wanted to ask you something, to sound you out, because you might be able to help me in the bit of bother I’m investigating now. Listen, a fellow comes from Miami to see his family. He comes with his wife, who is twenty years younger than he is. The fellow was a high rider in the seventies and then defected in Spain, but they let him back in, to see if he’d come looking for something, even though he appeared to be clean. But one day the fellow throws his tail and disappears, immediately after he’d seen a horrible individual who had once been his boss . . . And he turns up two days later on Goat Beach, half eaten by fish. A blow with a bat to the head killed him, but as well as that, and here’s what I want you to mull over, they cut off his cock and balls with a knife . . . Does it sound to you like jealousy or something else? Do you think it could be the abakúas, or something similar?”

  Red Candito shifted in his armchair, trying to protect the area of his genitals with his legs. His smile had gone and he seemed like the Candito of old, the owner of that feline mistrust with which he now looked at his friends and replied: “It wasn’t jealousy, and you know the abakúas don’t do that, Conde . . . It’s something else, something really fucked . . .”

  “I quite agree.”

  “It reeks of revenge.”

  “But a bastard form of revenge . . .”

  “There you are, Conde, and still you reckon you shouldn’t forgive . . . It’s terrible what they did to that fellow.”

  “Well, I need you to find out what it might mean without making too much fuss. Just see whether there’s any gossip going the rounds.”

  Candito looked at his hands with great concentration.

  “I’ve totally left that scene, Conde, but I’ll see what I can turn up. What we really need to know is what the fellow was after . . .”

  The Count glanced at Red and thought that, despite the respect and envy he now felt towards him, he couldn’t let such an opportunity go by.

  “The only ones in the know are the dead man, his killer and Jehovah. Hey, Red, why not have a word with your man who knows all and see if he can’t help me get to the bottom of this mess.”

  From now on everything should become much clearer: obviously, a tropical cyclone is not a rebellion of all nature’s forces against man, nor a curse from on high, nor even an act of vengeance wrought by the atmosphere against its predators. “At this time of year it is simply a common meteorological phenomenon in the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean, created by a system of low pressure, near the centre of which the wind gyrates at great speed, in an anti-clockwise direction when it develops in the northern hemisphere,” stated the commentator on Radio Reloj before adding: “Six minutes past eight the correct time.” The Count noted that his watch was slow as usual, perhaps it was going backwards like a northern cyclone, but he left it to its own devices and turned up the volume on the radio: “The central area, called the eye of the hurricane, reaches a diameter of between six and thirty-five miles, and at the perimeter the sky is clear, with no currents of air, only a kind of ring forming around the eye where the strongest winds blow . . . Tropical cyclones are almost always formed out to sea, from clusters of clouds associated with different meteorological systems, such as tropical waves, sudden drops in temperatures and, in the southern section, cold fronts.” And added: “Radio Reloj, seven minutes past eight the correct time,” and didn’t say anything about fear. Because, like the Count, the announcer must have recalled as he spoke that in the island’s historical memory, even before it had any notion of history, the hurricane was the god most feared by the first men to live there, who considered it to be the Father of All Winds and bestowed upon it strength of intellect and will, power and perversity. Its possible image, perpetuated in small mud and stone figures by the imagination of these peaceful, nudist barbarians, smokers of tobacco and other more cheerful herbs, splayed unmistakable arms that grew from its belly, and a face stricken with terror: it was engendered by fear of what had been experienced and suffered in the past, that most tangible of fears, later inherited and assumed by other men who came in other centuries and stayed on those coasts that dazzled them with their beauty, despite the terrible autumnal scourge that, in diffuse reminiscences, was said to have provoked downpours of blood, fire, sand, fish, trees, fruit and even of strange anthropomorphic beings, unlike any other of this Earth’s inhabitants, transported from unknown climes by the hurricane’s fury. And fear followed its course, because the new islanders also became familiar with the hurricane’s treacherous ability to deceive, which Mario Conde himself now recognized, as he observed the patch of sky, visible from his kitchen window, that was still blue, an intense blue, as if it were in the eye of the hurricane, even as the man on the radio was declaring that Felix, with winds of a maximum speed of 130 miles an hour and a minimum pressure of 910 hectopascals – and what the fuck were hectopascals? – could be seen, according to the six a.m. report on that day, 8 October 1989, between 81.6 degrees latitude north and 18.1 degrees latitude west, some seventy-five miles south of Georgetown, Grand Cayman, and two hundred and eighty miles south of Cienfuegos, in central Cuba, and that its estimated route over the next twelve to twenty-four hours would take it north-north-west, at a rate of speed that had reduced to some seven miles an hour, perhaps so the phenomenon could recharge its zone of intensity, like a cunning long-distance runner conserving his greatest burst of energy for the final strait. That is why they said it might gather speed in the evening, and the island’s western provinces should be alert to this shifting meteorological organism, particularly the province of Havana, Radio Reloj added yet again, and the Count didn’t hear the time announced because he proclaimed loudly: “I knew it. The bastard’s heading here.”

  And he calculated, with an arithmetical effort worthy of Hector Pascal: at a rate of seven an hour, that’s seventy in ten hours, one hundred and forty in twenty hours and a hundred and fifty-four in a day. No, that’s one hundred and sixty-eight a day and three hundred and thirty-six in two, so that possibly on the 10th the Count would be watching cyclone Felix walking round his house, crossing the road through the barrio and finishing off everything and everybody, as if the destructive forces of nature were rebelling against man, like a curse from on high, like an act of righteous revenge wrought by the atmosphere against its predators, despite all the wretched newscaster might say, who read what had been written by an equally wretched weatherman, who must know nothing of curses, punishments, or the debts and sins that could only be atoned for in that terrible, awesome way: by hurricane, for example. An earthquake was another such. Armageddon or the Apocalypse as prologue to a Final Judgement?

  The Count lit his cigarette after he’d finished his huge cup of coffee, the only magical potion able to take him out of his beetle-like state and turn him back into a person after he woke each morning, and he remembered that, officially, this might be his penultimate day as a policeman and, certainly, his final day as an inhabitant of his thirty-fifth year, and what he saw around and within him didn’t seem particularly pleasant.

  “My wife wants me to clean up the garden today, what do you reckon?”

  “That you’d be mad to buckle down . . . It’s the beginning of the end: she’ll want you painting the house, cleaning the cess-pit and even washing that ugly dog of yours. Then you’ll be fucked for good, because she’ll hand you a bag and the ration bo
ok and I’ll be seeing you in the queue at the grocers, collecting the bread every day and finding out whether they’ve got chicken or fish at the butchers. And there’s no salvation: you’ll be what is universally known as a crusty old man.”

  “You’re right,” agreed Major Rangel, after he’d finished listening unusually attentively to the oh-sopredictable array of concrete dangers outlined by the Count. “Do you know what I’ve found out now I’m always at home? That Ana Luisa always keeps a plate of cooked yucca for a week. You know, she puts it on a plate in the fridge and you’ve got to move the bastard plate and its four hard yuccas to get at the jug of water . . . And yesterday I’d had enough of the wretched yuccas and asked her why she was keeping them and she said she wanted to fry the yuccas but the store hadn’t got any oil yet. They’ll stay put till some oil turns up . . . Don’t you think that’s taking it too far?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you: you’ve got to fight back,” the lieutenant continued, sinking his hand, if not his arm, into the sore where he’d just stuck a finger. “Tell her you’re not a crusty old man and that if you aren’t a policeman anymore you’re going to be, let’s say, a cigar taster.”

  “Now you are talking nonsense, Mario Conde.”

  “Well, I might be talking nonsense, but can you imagine what a good job it would be. You know, you’ll be in an office in a Montecristos, H. Upmanns or Cohibas factory, or whichever turns you on most, and they’ll bring you cigars made that day, all lying in their boxes. And you’ll pick them up one at a time, light them, take two or three puffs, not too many, so you don’t die within the week, and if the cigar’s good, you put it out and give your approval, and place it back in its box. And you go on like that with the ones they’ve been twisting that day. The boxes will get a bit smelly from all the cigars you put out, but any buyer has a guarantee, unique in the world, that an expert smoker has tested his cigars.”