Havana Fever Read online

  The first bottle uncorked was already on its third round when Conde started to lower the arm and put the needle in place, to allow the gravel-throated speaker to emit a few preliminary crackles. Then, like big drops of rain heralding the heavy downpours of summer, the almost violent chords of a piano, and only a piano, reached their ears, with no excessive flourishes or trills, quickly joined by the beat of a bongo, the deep sound of the double bass and, finally, a voice that spoke rather than sang, imbued with an almost male heaviness, first pleading, and then with an aggrieved, demanding resentment, making you feel you didn’t need to see the woman to know there was something different about her rich, husky voice, intent on speaking to the inner ear rather than singing:You who fill everything with joy and youth

  and see ghosts in the night’s half light

  and hear the perfumed song from the blue.

  Be gone from me . . .

  Don’t stop and look at

  the dead leaves on the rose

  that fade and never flower,

  look at the landscape of love

  that is the reason to

  dream . . . and love . . .

  I’ve fought against all evil,

  my hands, broken by clinging tight,

  no longer cling to you.

  Be gone from me . . .

  In your life I’ll be the best

  from the mists of yesterday

  when you’ve forgotten me,

  like the best poem’s always

  the one we can’t remember . . .

  So now . . . be gone from me.

  When the Count opened his eyes and silently lifted the needle from the virgin area of the acetate, he was absolutely confident that two days ago, when he’d been surprised by a hunch as he crossed the threshold of the library of the mighty Montes de Ocas, that it wasn’t impelling him to discover a fabulous book, as he’d believed, but was marking out a path so he could confront that voice sleeping in his past, a voice that waited only for him. Could that be right? Not thinking or looking at the equally silent and moved Skinny or Pigeon, the Count put the arm back over the first groove on the record and let himself be transported by the melody and voice, like a lover overcoming the delights from a first touch, and embarking on a quest for the more recondite essences behind that punchy vocal. He tried to grasp the drama suggested by a voice directed at a you who might be anyone: him, or possibly his own father, perhaps bewitched by the same woman, voicing a feeling that was too much like true suffering and that, at the end of the first stanza, adopted a pleading tone when it asked: “Be gone from me”. But then the voice ordered: “Don’t stop and look”, recalling distant echoes of the Bible, that made their full impact in the third stanza where the voice became slower, wearier, even more whispering, telling of its refusal to go on with that struggle to the death. The final act erupted with a fresh refrain where the voice anticipated a possible, if undesired, future, when its owner would vanish into the dense mists of yesterday. And concluded on an order that brooked no appeal, a last, heartbreaking “Be gone from me”, intent on silencing the music that only returned, as the voice’s last vibrations faded, hot and heavy, into a predicable total silence . . . but, a brief interlude opened before it reiterated its final wish beyond all appeal: “so, now . . . be gone from me”, a visceral demand that convinced the Count her way of singing was involved in much more than a game of mirrors with reality: wasn’t it in fact pure, genuine reality?

  “What the fuck is all this about?” he asked, now out loud, and placed the pick-up arm on its stand, while the silent acetate continued to spin hypnotically. He raised his half empty glass and gulped down the rum trying to restore his composure. He slowly felt reunited with his anatomy and the place that had been blurred by emotions aroused by the music.

  “You reckon that woman disappeared?” asked Skinny Carlos, his arms and hands exhausted by so much clinging, and now trying as best he could to sit comfortably in his wheel chair.

  “Apparently . . . She never sang again,” the Count confirmed. “I don’t even know whether she’s alive or dead . . .”

  “I tell you, her voice is . . .” Yoyi sought in vain for an elusive adjective to capture that strange miracle.

  “No one else sings like her, that’s for sure,” Skinny concluded, pouring round what was left in the bottle. “Put the other side on, savage.”

  “No,” the Count rasped unthinkingly as he tapped the acetate. “No. Let me digest this first.”

  Conde reread the credits on the record, spotlighted by the glinting gem that was the recording company’s logo, and finally put it back in the home-made grey-paper envelope Rafael Giró had made for it. He wondered whether now might be the moment to tell his friends he was sure his father had been in love with that singer, though he’d probably never spoken to her. But he decided it wasn’t up to him to make such a confession and blurted out, almost unthinkingly, a desire that was burning inside him:

  “Fuck me. I’ve got to find out who she was and what happened to her.”

  Mario Conde was now able to recall the twelve years he’d worked as a policeman without being attacked by an abrasive mixture of nostalgia and remorse. Reaping the benefits of the distancing process had been gradual, sometimes painful, like being cured of an addiction. The passage of time had exorcized the spell and removed the ballast his inevitably sordid police duties had lodged in the crevices of his soul. Relentlessly nostalgic or, as Skinny Carlos defined him, a bastard who was always remembering, he took a double pleasure from this distancing that finally allowed him to view his time spent as a police investigator as blurred and lethargic. Consequently, when circumstances forced him to recall his days as the representative of the forces of order he’d been for twelve years, he felt alienated from himself, like a stranger who’d lived too long among the supposedly strong and powerful, when he was naturally inclined to membership of the club for non-conformists.

  Nonetheless, knowing he was too attached to his memory, Mario Conde was forced to recognize that the destruction of that fragment of his existence had simply been a survival strategy he’d clung to when deciding to give a new – or was it old? – meaning to his life. Perhaps what most helped exorcize the past, in that process of denial, was his belief that he’d never been unfair and, above all, the certainty he’d never acted arrogantly, unlike so many past and future colleagues. His allergic reaction to violence or the use of force, his rejection of the police’s propensity to assault conscience and dignity, always spared him the usual excesses of his trade and, at the same time, other harmful secondary effects such as the corruption that blotted the copybooks of several colleagues, and destroyed many of the Count’s illusions, enabling him to grasp more clearly than ever the all-conquering frailties of the human soul – even of souls who claimed they had the power and responsibility of justice on their side.

  As he’d never found out for certain why he’d become a policeman – he was too young, needed work, was still being channelled through life by a gauche innocence – for a long time he’d put his decision to become a police investigator down to the simple fact that his youthful spirit couldn’t stand the sight of the bastards doing things and not paying for them. Perhaps that was why he enjoyed so much exposing their supposedly whiter-than-white characters, knocking them off their pedestals and making them pay for their crimes and presumption, for the way they abused the power they’d abrogated to themselves, and thanks to which they screwed up the fates of others. In the course of such demolition jobs, Conde had felt immune and almost invigorated by the many looks of hatred he’d received from those once powerful individuals he’d defeated.

  Luckily for the Count, this kind of reflection, conveniently hidden in his conscience, only dared surface in quite specific circumstances, such as that morning’s, when, his hand gripping an early morning shot of rum, he felt an elemental need to seek out the truth stirring in him, and his brain tried to galvanize into action rusty old mechanisms that might still work.

&
nbsp; “Hey, what the hell’s getting at you now?”

  The voice, from behind his back, came as no surprise. He’d summoned it himself, like a phantom floating in the mists from his own yesterdays, and felt how those familiar tones aroused deeprooted joy. So he didn’t turn round, but pushed his glass over the varnished wood of the bar, until it was opposite the next stool, then asked: “Now, tell me the truth, my friend, can one be a pansy for a while, and then opt out?”

  “You must be joking. Once a pansy, always a pansy. Once you’ve swallowed the pill, there’s no salvation . . . And the guy who was a policeman will always be one even though he burnt his bridges.”

  “Just as I’d thought,” he answered, finally turning round to contemplate the eternally skeletal features, the irremediably squinting eyes and incredibly childish face of one Captain Manuel Palacios, his former detective colleague. “So even if I burnt all my bridges?. . .”

  Manolo waited for the Count to get off his stool before giving him a hug. Then he raised his half-filled glass and gulped the whole lot down.

  “Aghh . . . To your health.”

  “How’s life treating you then, Manolo?”

  When the Count left the police force, the youthful Manuel Palacios was barely a novice sergeant who’d worked as a plainclothes detective only at the Count’s insistence. Now a fully fledged captain, Manolo wouldn’t allow himself to be separated from that uniform he so liked to show off, a uniform to which he’d certainly dedicate every possible year of his life.

  “Lots of work, it’s fucking madness. You can’t imagine what things are like. Before it was child’s play, now it’s the hard men and no holds barred. Armed robbery’s routine, drugs are booming, assault is a plague, corruption grows like wildfire, never dies however much you douse it . . . Not to mention pimping and pornography.”

  “I love pornography . . .”

  “Child porn, Conde!”

  “Hey, there are some fourteen-year old girls I’ve seen . . .”

  “Fuck off, you never change.”

  “So, do you?”

  Manolo smiled and put one of his hands on top of the hand Conde had placed on the bar.

  “I’m trying to avoid it . . . How about a ciggy?”

  “Another shot of rum?” asked the Count pushing the packet and lighter his way.

  “No, what I just sank will do me for the moment . . .”

  “Christ!” the Count called to the barman. “I’ll have another . . . What’s up then, Manolo? Is it true the end of the world is nigh? Why are people more buggered by the day?”

  Manolo sighed and exhaled smoke.

  “I keep asking myself that question. I don’t know, too many people who don’t want hard toil any more and take the easy way out. There are a lot, too many, who’ve grown up watching half the world steal, counterfeit and embezzle, and now it seems so normal they do it as if they weren’t doing anything wrong. But the violence is the worst of all: they’ve no respect for anything and when they want something they’ll do whatever it takes . . .”

  The Count sipped his refill.

  “I’ve got a partner in the book business. His theory is that people no longer believe in anything and that’s why things are like this. Do you remember when we turned Havana upside down because three lads in Pre-Uni in La Víbora smoked the odd joint?”

  “Happy days, Conde, I can tell you. Now they’re on crack, coke, parkisonil with rum and amphetamines, when they can get them. If not, any anti-depressant with alcohol and even the stuff for anaesthetizing animals, will do . . . They used to inhale petrol, paint, varnish, industrial rubber . . . You know what the latest is? They set light to CDs and sniff them. And go to heaven but shed a load of neurones on the way . . . And don’t think it’s just a handful . . . If you drop by the Psychiatric Clinic, you’ll see how many are tied to the stake like Hatuey the Indian. You know, whenever there’s a public dance or dog fight, or they’re bored, they get off on whatever they can find and start wanting to kill each other: really kill each other . . . And get money from all ends and sides, almost always by thieving, pimping or selling drugs to other people. Or by deciding to burgle, steal stuff, and kill two or three people while they’re about it. In Cold Blood? Wasn’t that the title of a book you gave me once? Well, I saw a case like that last week. Five murdered in one house, tortured, mutilated . . . and all for two thousand pesos and a television set.”

  “The newspapers never report these things . . . Doesn’t anyone ask why it’s all happening?” enquired the Count, alarmed by the panorama sketched by his former colleague and congratulating himself for being so far removed from that gloomy, ever expanding reality.

  “I don’t know, but someone, somewhere, should be. I’m a policeman, Conde, an ordinary cop: I pick up the shit, I don’t dish out the grub . . .”

  “So, we’re done for, Manolo. I’d like to know when the test tube broke, as Yoyi says, and it all started to mess up.”

  “Yeah, it would, but enough philosophizing. I’m in a hell of a rush. Tell me what you’re after.”

  “My request is less horrific but probably more difficult . . . I need to track down a person who was lost sight of forty-three years ago.”

  “Lost, disappeared, what’s the story?”

  “She vanished and nobody remembers her. I don’t know if she’s dead or alive, although she’d be sixty or so now, I really don’t know . . .”

  “Tell me her name and I’ll look in the files.”

  “That’s the first bloody problem: she was a singer and I only have her name as an artiste. No one was ever really called Violeta del Rio.”

  “Violeta del Río?”

  “You heard of her?”

  “No, no, and no again . . .”

  Manolo stretched his arm out, grabbed the Count’s glass and took a sip.

  “Do you or don’t you want another shot?”

  Manolo shook his head and added: “Let me have a look anyway, she may come up under her alias . . . Why are you after her?”

  “I don’t know,” the Count admitted. “At least I don’t think I’ll really know until I’ve found her. That’s why it’s so important.”

  Rogelito might well be the last of the dinosaurs, a kind of fossil who’d survived the natural extinction of his contemporaries and made it to the twenty-first century from a geological era only recorded in the old books shifted by the Count. His mythical beginnings belong to the year 1921, just after the end of an increasingly historic First World War, when as a mere seventeen-year old he joined the great Tata Alfonso’s danzón orchestra and started to weave his very own legend as a brilliant timbalero, playing in all the remarkable orchestras and jazz bands that drifted through the crowded Cuban musical scene for over sixty years, the ones who pursued him for what he’d always been: the best.

  It was said of Rogelito that back in 1920 he’d been lucky enough to be a pupil of Manengue the fantastic, eccentric, alcoholic timbalero who’d wanted novel resonances from his primitive instrument and had enriched it by incorporating a cowbell’s metallic percussion and the rhythmic beat from the snare and a little Japanese wooden box, that with its sharp, torrid sounds became the basic percussive instrument for the danzón.

  Despite this epic story, Conde wasn’t shocked to find the eternal Rogelito living in one of those narrow, crammed “passageways” in the barrio of Buenavista, in a tiny flat with flaking, damp-oozing walls, with no view of the street, squeezed between two other tiny flats equally sentenced to stare at the wall separating them from next door’s similarly dark, damp passage. As with all the musicians in his era, enough money must have passed through Rogelito’s hands to have bought, rented or even built a luminous, airy house. Like most, however, Rogelito had dressed swankily, and drank, smoked and fucked every peso away – not a bad option, come to think of it, Conde told himself – while finally taking shelter, with a clear conscience, in one of those asthmatic flats where old age and oblivion had caught up with him. Might the once high-living Violeta
del Río be holed up in one of those dismal rooms?

  After asking the Count to wait for a few minutes, the great-granddaughter responsible for caring for Rogelito, a creamy-white mulatto with over thirty solid, steamy years behind her, owner of nipples intent on drilling through her flimsy blouse and jutting buttocks where a man could sit, led the old man to a sprung armchair with extra cushions that looked like a throne for a patriarch fallen on bad times. Rogelito tottered out of his bedroom on his great-granddaughter’s arm, now unable to lift legs that had once danced in Havana’s best venues and the Count had the impression he was watching a candle burning the last thread of its wick. Apart from his irrepressible ears, that had once belonged to a man of average build, and his false teeth, keen to lend him a permanent, grotesque leer, everything about the old man seemed about to vanish and turn to dust as a consequence of the implacable chemistry of time.

  Sitting back in his armchair, eyes wide open, trying to reap benefit from the light, Rogelito looked like a chick prematurely hatched from a giant egg, and the Count concluded that excessive old age might be the worst punishment ever meted out to man.

  “Why did you want to see me, young man?”

  “First of all to greet a real maestro,” replied the Count, thinking it would be rather indelicate to plunge straight into the reason for his visit.

  “That’s strange. Nobody ever remembers me now.”

  “Lots of books mention you. And there are old records . . .”

  “That don’t put no food on the table.”

  “True enough,” agreed the Count now hit by the aroma from the coffee percolating in a kitchen mixed with a poverty-stricken smell of burnt kerosene. “When did you stop playing, maestro?”

  “Agh . . . about fifteen years ago. Something odd happened to me: I couldn’t read music any more, but was able to play any piece I’d played before. If you said, Rogelito, we’re about to start, El bombín de Barreto, or Almendra, I’d start thinking and wouldn’t remember a thing . . . But if I waited until the paila, and the piano or double bass played the first notes, I’d pick up the drumsticks and start to play, almost without knowing what I was doing, but never missing a beat. My hands were doing the thinking, not my head. But then I lost it,” and he waved his huge hands at Conde, out of proportion in relation to the rest of his physique, “these sons of a bitch gave up on me.”