Havana Fever (15 page)

“You added biscuits?” asked Carlos rather forlornly.

“Six raw eggs, an eighth of a pound of butter, a spoon and a half of salt and a quarter of a nutmeg, one apple, one melon pear, four stoned prunes, a quarter of a pound of roasted almonds and a small tin of truffles . . .”

“My God, truffles, I just love ’em . . .” the Count couldn’t restrain himself. “I could spend my whole life eating white truffles from Alba . . .”

“What on earth are truffles?” enquired Yoyi Pigeon, astounded by the Count’s
recherché
tastes.

“They’re little, titchy animals, with feathers and a few hairs on their head . . . How the fuck should I know!” replied the Count. “I’ve not seen a truffle, dead or alive, in my whole damned life.”

“We put all the ingredients together, stuff the turkey, put it on a tray and baste it with lemon, lard and crushed cloves of garlic. Put it in the oven at 350° for two hours, until it goes golden brown and dries completely,” Josephine took a breath. “It can be served in its own gravy or with strawberry, apricot or apple jam.”

“The Barata woman fucked up badly there,” interjected Carlos. “Keep that sweet stuff off mine . . .”

“Hey, watch your language, young man,” the Count complained, immediately adding: “Don’t put it on mine either, Jose. Give me gravy . . .”

“There’s enough for twenty people,” concluded Josefina to a fresh round of applause, and cries of “The days of plenty are upon us!” “Onwards and upwards”, “Industriales for champions!” and “Viva Josefina!”

“And is it all ready?” asked Conde.

“Yup. Candito got all the ingredients, Rabbit and Carlos were my kitchen porters . . .”

More applause and exclamations followed, but Carlos raised his hands and tried to put a brake on the general jubilation. When silence was restored, Skinny looked solemnly at his mother.

“Mum . . . you forgot something.”

“Oh, of course,” the old lady remembered, “I made a pot of rice and black beans, and prepared a bunch of fried ripe plantains, a salad of tomato, lettuce, avocado and cucumber . . . And a simple sweet: chocolate ice cream sprinkled with ground coconut and nuts . . .”

“Is this all for real?” asked Manolo, historically, rationally and politically unable to surface from his state of stupefaction.

“And I brought along a crate of red Rioja,” declared Yoyi, “plus four bottles of champagne . . .”

“The end of the world is nigh. Armageddon is upon us,” commented Candito.

“You must have been toiling all day, Jose,” Tamara sympathized.

“We’ve been on rice and beans for a week,” recalled Carlos, “and we’ve not had any meat since our last ration of one ninth of a chicken . . . which was, in the last century, right, mum? She was in need of some exercise.”

“How much did all that cost?” enquired Manolo and Conde jumped in: “Refuse to answer that, Jose. Let’s eat, for fuck’s sake. We rich guys don’t worry over a few cents here and there.”

“So how long will your wealth last you, Conde?” enquired Candito.

“At this rate . . .” Conde calculated, “eating out in
paladares
, using taxis, buying flowers, preparing banquets for a band of starving bastards . . . I’ll return to a state of poverty the day after tomorrow. But it was worthwhile being a rich man for three days, wasn’t it?”

“Of course it was, for hell’s sake,” Carlos agreed. Now we can probably face another forty years of imperialist blockades and ration books with greater strength and courage than ever before . . .”

When he opened his eyes, Mario Conde wearily felt as if his body was a sack of potatoes someone had dumped down on the middle of his bed. His accumulated experience – what the more philosophical Rabbit, with enough memory to recall the disquisitions in Marxist manuals, would call “praxis as the criterion for truth” – was again demonstrating to him with a sly dig that, after a night of gorging and tippling, he could expect a rough awakening.

“And what are you doing here?” he asked when he went to find the second pillow and it moved: “Who invited you into my bed?”

In reply, Rubbish lifted a paw, demanding that a hand scratch his belly, stuffed with the latest leftovers from his owner.

On mornings like these, the Count had the overpowering sensation he was hurtling, at breakneck speed, towards the dreadful figure of half a century’s residence on earth. In that ascent – in effect one of his many descents, if not the most definitive – he had had to learn to coexist with his body, grow in awareness of its valves, axles, hinges and exhausts, in a way he’d not had to before his forty-fifth birthday. In his distant youth, after a boozy night, he might perhaps have suffered a headache, a rebellion in his stomach he resolved by expelling shit – in his case, generally, a lot of shit – and a shooting pain in his knee because of the way he’d knocked against the sharp edge of the bed, he’d curse as a son of a bitch after each collision: but it was all transitory, cured by a quick shower, a couple of pain-killers and an anti-diuretic. Not any more: he now knew, for example, that he had a heart where, as well as feelings and battle scars, there was a mechanism for pumping blood and, on certain post-orgy dawns, that pump galloped to the point he could feel it in his chest. He’d learnt he was the owner of kidneys which could hurt in the treacherous early hours; and he knew, sadly, that an ultra-alcoholic night required a whole day – this time he thought it would take two – to guarantee physical and moral recovery. For his body now refused to simply process the doses of rum it had received in a few hours, and instead wreaked its revenge in the most varied, cunning ways . . .

But the previous night could be etched in letters of gold among his memorable experiences, because not even Manolo’s news that there was no trace in the police files of a person called or nicknamed Violeta del Río could dampen the Count’s joy as he surveyed the turkey’s bare rib cage, the bottles of rum, beer, wine and champagne that had been cheerfully emptied of their contents, and witnessed the obvious delight he’d given his friends, in particular Skinny Carlos.

With two painkillers in his stomach, a cigarette on his lip and a double espresso in his fist, he went out on his terrace and remembered that, when he’d arrived in the early hours, Rubbish had been waiting for him, as if he too had been expecting to partake in a banquet.

“Rubbish, don’t get too used to this. When the party’s over, we’ll be back to the usual . . .”

As he watched the animal yawn, while a back leg tried to shake off a particularly annoying flea, Conde vaguely envied this dog that, despite its age, seemed ready to resume life every morning. For a moment he reflected that he should stop postponing the decision to take exercise and reduce his daily quota of cigarettes to a single packet, but shelved this thought immediately, as he realized that if he made the effort he might still have time to meet Katy Barqué before going to the rendezvous agreed with Silvano Quintero the journalist. Right then he was forced to recognize that the basic impulse fuelling this super human sacrifice was an unhealthy curiosity demanding to know – in a quite disproportionately violent fashion – more about Violeta del Río.

“I’ve always said this: you need two things if you want to sing boleros: a heart this size for all that feeling, and steel-plated, blockbuster ovaries. Your voice is the least of your worries . . . And it’s a fact that, apart from this voice that God gave me and preserves for me as if I were a young fifteen year old, I’ve always had more heart and ovaries than all the other singers put together, starting with Violeta del Río.”

Conde scrutinized the singer’s mummified face. Katy Barqué was bordering on eighty though perhaps you could agree she was well preserved for her age. But her efforts to look twenty years younger, including surgery to give her face an artificial tautness, were rounded off with several layers of cream, swathes of re-energizing blusher, eyelashes like fans, lips stuffed with silicone and a foulard anchored in the middle of her forehead to pull back towards her skull the most rebellious folds of drooping skin.

“The bolero is feeling, pure feeling with lots of drama. It speaks about tragedies of the soul and in language that goes from poetry to reality. That’s why you can sing just as well about a cloudy sky, say yours is a strange way to love, or shout ‘be gone, the heat’s gone from between your legs’ . . . The important thing is for it all to come from your soul, making it seem credible, you know?... That’s what I do, and I’m a big star; I’ve done films, musical theatre, operetta, lots of shows . . . Does your film producer know all this?”

She accompanied her harangue with florid gestures, would-be intense looks and melodic support from snatches of old boleros, as if she were facing the most critical of audiences.

“Europeans and Americans are very cold, that’s why they don’t understand what a good bolero is, and lately they’ve been going for records full of versions sung by pretty boys, versions that make you want to shit your pants. But really shit them. The bolero is from the Caribbean, that’s why it was born in Cuba, and took root in Mexico, Puerto Rico and Colombia. It’s the love poetry of the tropics, always telling the truth, rather thickly laid on at times, but then we are thickly laid on, nothing we can do about that. Listen to Arsenio Rodríguez’s lyrics and tell me what you think:

After you’ve lived
twenty disappointments
what does one more matter,
after you’ve seen
life in action
you shouldn’t cry.
Just accept
everything is a lie,
nothing is true.
Just live for the moment,
learn to enjoy what’s there,

(She shakes her head, endorsing Arsenio’s deep truths. Her intense gaze devours Yoyi’s exultant youthfulness.)

because all considered
life is a dream
and nothing sticks.
Only birth and death
are for real

(A second, more categorical affirmation. She gazes at Yoyi again, more suggestively.)

why get so anxious,
to live is to suffer eternally,
the world’s a place . . . without joy.

“Hell, look at my hair standing on end . . . Do you know when poor Arsenio wrote that? When New York’s best doctors said there was no cure for his blindness and he realized he was going to be blind forever . . .”

Conde looked at Yoyi and, as if by prior agreement, they both nodded. The old diva had more malice than voice, but there was something pathetic about how she sang Arsenio’s memorable bolero, from behind that face mask, wrapped in a kimono covered in Chinese or Japanese characters.

“As I was saying . . . There was terrific rivalry at the time, you had to be really good to get a slice of the action. You couldn’t imitate anybody, you had to find the best composers, get the arrangers to work to your style, and be lucky enough to put on a good show and then shift to television, which was already in colour here when in Spain they had one television set for Madrid and another for Barcelona . . . I got it all, purely on the strength of my lungs and talent, because I was the best and everybody knew I was the best. By the way, did you read the last interview I gave to
Bohemia
?”

Right then Conde had a flash of insight as to why he’d always spontaneously rejected Katy Barqué: it wasn’t, as he’d previously thought, down to the almost masculine timbre of her voice, the ridiculously aggressive, at times filthy lyrics she often wrote herself in her self-appointed role as self-sufficient-woman-able-to-scorn men, or even the opportunist versions of revolutionary anthems and political eulogies she’d slotted into her repertoire at different stages, or the facile poses she adopted on stage – and not only on stage, as he now saw. In fact, his rejection was altogether more visceral, down to the singer’s patent disregard for any sense of historical boundaries and her attempt to cling, against the wind, tide, logic, time and fear of the grotesque, to a pre-eminence that was no longer hers and that for the last twenty years or more had turned her into a singing caricature of herself, a kind of circus act. Unlike others Conde knew, Katy Barqué would never get off her high horse: you’d have to unsaddle her or be resigned to watching her die, disastrously, holding the reins, leaving no heirs and playing the worst of roles in the theatre of life: that of the buffoon.

“Then Violeta appeared from nowhere all ready to snatch what was mine by right. She was young, with a good body and heart on her, I think, but lacked ovaries . . . and a maestro to teach her how to sing. Poor woman, at times she sounded like she was about to choke . . . But she was a cunning bitch! She landed herself a lover who was mad about her and gave her a push up to get her name in lights. Just imagine an upstart like her as the star on the second bill at the Parisién, when that cabaret was
the
place to meet those who decided who was or wasn’t any good in Havana, in Cuba . . .”

From the moment they reached the well-lit penthouse in that big house on Línea, Conde and Pigeon felt that they’d visually entered a kind of museum of bolero kitsch. An evidently amateur portrait in oils, of Katy Barqué at the height of her physical splendour, occupied the premier spot on the wall in a reception room crammed with china and glassware – the height of bad taste was a metal flower, now rusting, on a plinth that declared:
Prize for the Most Popular
– awarded in recognition of her fifty plus years in the business.

“Besides that she had a nerve. Really quite shameless. One day I found out she was saying things behind my back and I just had to put her straight: I grabbed hold of her and even told her to go to hell. Because it’s one thing to defend yourself as best you can, quite another to clamber over the heads of others to get some of the limelight. I wasn’t having any of that. We had some good singers here, Celia Cruz, Olguita Guillot, Elena Burke, a good number, but each trod her own path and nobody ever trespassed on somebody else’s terrain. It was like an unwritten law. But that girl didn’t understand a thing and was messing us all about. Do you know what singing all night in a club for no pay means? Excuse my honesty, but they were bad tactics and it was bad for business . . . Don’t you think?”