Havana Fever (41 page)

“You’re right,” agreed Carlos. “A story with no bad guys is tricky shit.”

“I’m the bad guy,” Yoyi then said, “well, not the bad guy, the asshole, because after that first time we visited the house together, Dionisio rang me at home . . .”

“He rang you?” the Count felt his curiosity rising to the bait.

“Yes,” went on Pigeon, “after I gave him my number, he rang me to suggest the sale of the books you didn’t want to buy . . . That’s why he had the bit of paper with my telephone number in his pocket.”

“So what happened?”

“I told him we’d have to wait, because I couldn’t do anything behind your back in that library . . . That I’d try to persuade you, but that you were a champion asshole, and if you said no, then no it was.”

“You did that?” Conde looked at him unable to hide his astonishment.

“I swear I did. I mean, I swear I did.”

“You’re a bit loopy too, Yoyi, don’t you reckon?”

“The ways of the Lord are unfathomable,” decreed Candito.

“Forget your bloody Lord, Candito . . . I’m catching it from you. Abnormal is what I am. Do you know how many thousands I could have made from just one item? And now they’ll impound those books and you’ll see: less than half will make it to the library.”

“Do you reckon?” Rabbit shifted uncomfortably. His love of books, especially history books, could also reach irrational levels.

“Some always vanish en route,” agreed the Count. “It’s happened with other libraries . . .”

“That’s not right. No, siree,” declared Candito. “Look, if I weren’t a Christian and bothered about sinning and, if I were you,” he pointed at Conde and Yoyi, “I expect I’d get into that house and help myself to at least a couple of sacks of books. After all, you were going to buy them.”

Yoyi’s eyes drilled the Count’s. The young man’s mind must have been turning at supersonic speed, juggling with figures and considering final tallies.

“Don’t start fantasizing, Yoyi,” the Count warned.

“Hey, Conde, I think Red’s right,” interjected Carlos. “For a would-be saint the bastard still gets ideas . . .”

“And Manolo owes you one,” Rabbit opined. “And one favour repays another . . . I’d do that if I were you and, while I was at it, I’d suggest looking out a few books for your friends, that is . . . for us.”

“Don’t fantasize, I said, for hell’s sake. You won’t persuade me,” the Count asserted as he stood up and turned his back on his friends. He walked to the back of the patio, lit another cigarette and kicked a dead bottle of rum.

Yoyi was about to speak to him, to giving him more grief, but Carlos signalled to leave the Count to him, and smiled.

“Leave the savage alone, gentlemen,” he shouted. “After all, what’s in few poncy books—”

“Not one poncy book, Skinny,” the Count protested, half turning round, “It’s the best library I’ve ever seen or will ever see in my whole friggin’ life.”

“Come on, Conde, it’s not so bad,” Carlos continued, smiling at the others. His machinery of persuasion, oiled by the frequent use he put it to persuading the Count, was revving up.

He opened the book with the same relish he might have separated the legs of a woman vanquished by love, ready to meet ecstasy as he appropriated her secret perfumes and deepest shades of colour. He closed his eyes and breathed in: slightly darkened over the years, the paper oozed the breath of proud old age. Intoxicated by the aroma, he glanced at prints still displaying their original tints, and enjoyed the images of a powerful sugar mill at the height of the campaign and seemingly paradisiacal canebrakes that, like any duly manipulated and invented reality, concealed the daily inferno of men who were considered to be less than men, transported from afar to leave their sweat, blood and lives among the accursed sugar cane that contributed to increasing the wealth and national lack of proportion about which Rabbit had spoken. Perhaps, a hundred and fifty years ago, a man called Serafín Montes de Oca might have thought something similar when he felt that volume in his hands and, after enjoying its engravings and caressing its leather covers, he’d shut the book, ready to join in a war intent on changing the reality engraved within its pages.

Conde carefully placed the coveted copy that drove hunters after bibliographical jewels crazy on one of the shelves of his own bookcase, gently slotting it between the worn jacket of stories by his friend J.D. Salinger and the rough cover of the volumes of the Heredia’s poetry he’d placed there a few minutes earlier, and felt envy rushing back. Would he ever act that way with a book he’d written himself, where he’d tell some of those would-be squalid and moving stories he’d begun and abandoned, buried and exhumed, that he’d wanted to write for years? How could he demand J.D. continue writing if he didn’t dare to throw himself into an adventure he endlessly put off? What would happen to his past and memories if he didn’t get them into black and white and save them from oblivion?

He moved away from his bookshelf as if in flight from an accusing lawyer and went into the kitchen to put the coffee on. He opened the patio door to the night and met the happy figure of Rubbish, wagging his tail, his eyes sparkling.

“What’s up, mutty?” he hailed him and welcomed the animal’s paws, desperate to be stroked, up on his own legs. “Hungry are we? There’s still a bit left. But be warned,” the Count opened his fridge and took out the last portion of leftovers set aside for the dog, “don’t get used to this: any minute now we’ll be poor again, so keep some energy back for what’s in store, who knows how long this will last . . .”

Conde walked on as Rubbish jumped and barked, placed his food on the metal tray and stopped to watch him eat.

The smell of coffee lured him back to the kitchen. He put sugar in the jug and stirred the infusion before pouring it in the over-sized cup his body was demanding. He sat at his table and looked through the window at the clear, starry sky, the epilogue to summer. That dark, infinitely extending void was perhaps saying something in terms of his own life, although Conde didn’t want to know what. His quota of physical and spiritual aches and pains had overflowed after the crazy experiences he’d recently gone through and he needed the soothing balm of oblivion. But his gaze betrayed him, and his eyes returned, as if drawn by a magnet, to the sky’s impassive void set on enveloping him. He took two drags on his cigarette and crushed the butt.

“Have I no choice but to think? To stir up the shit in my head?” he asked the darkness as he stood up. “Well, let’s do it in style: no gloves and bare knuckles . . .”

He walked into his living room and opened Carlos’s old record player. There, on the turntable was Violeta del Río’s single which he’d refused to listen to for several days, and he switched it on. The record began to turn slowly and Conde lifted the arm and placed it on the musical plaque. He switched off all the lights and flopped on the sofa, as his father had done more than forty years ago.

The entry of the piano knocked him backwards, but he tried to stay firm, ready for the blow he received on chest from Violeta del Río’s live voice, and shuddered.

You, who fill everything with joy and youth
and see ghosts in the night’s half light
and hear the perfumed song of the blue.
Be gone from me . . .

Mario Conde realized that categorical order had always been directed at him, had always been waiting for him. Perhaps his father had anticipated something like that – is a propensity to hunches hereditary? – and, assuming all the anguish that record aroused, had kept a copy for his son, knowing the moment would come when he too would have to listen to it and feel the emotions stirred by that woman’s voice. What was beyond doubt, nevertheless, was that Catalina Basterrechea, young Lina Beautiful Eyes, had been telling the Count insistently to go away and let the dead and defeated sleep peacefully behind the mists of yesterday. But he’d insisted on finding out and had finally dug out the putrid mud, which hid only more and more putrefaction. That voice had been partly to blame, he tried to defend himself: that voice had pushed him on mercilessly, as if while demanding to be remote, it was also quietly asking not to be totally and irreversibly lost in oblivion. The voice was the most powerful testament to Violeta del Río, the girl who’d been on the verge of triumphing over the fate written on her forehead but who had committed the most terrible sin of infidelity when she’d dared sacrifice what she’d always wanted to be and do in life, to enjoy a possible happiness that perhaps had never been her right. Maybe it was self-betrayal that led to her death: if she’d refused to sacrifice her greatest pleasure and continued singing, time after time, those songs of frustrated loves, would she have given death the slip? Nobody could tell now, or ever hope to know, but the possibility that you could override the designs of fortune always alarmed the Count: he was certain that only fidelity to herself could have preserved Violeta del Río, only singing and more singing could have saved her from the hatred that ravaged so many lives.

When the song finished he turned the record over, ready to complete his descent, and now had no doubts: those two songs had been recorded for him.

You’ll remember me
when the sun dies in the afternoon . . .

A knocking on the door interrupted his dialogue with death and destiny. He felt life was calling out to him, opened the door and met Tamara’s smile.

“How long are you going to go on listening to that woman,” she asked, and he was shaken by the way she described Violeta del Río: forty years dead, “that woman” still provoked resentment.

“That’s it, finished,” he said as he let her in, and went to switch off the record player. The turntable turned, expended its last burst of energy and stopped. Finally obeying an order he’d heeded too late, he broke the small record into two, four, then eight pieces and threw them into the record player, lowered the lid and shut the catches.

“Why did you do that?” asked Tamara, astonished.

“I should have done it before. But you know how slow I am, at almost anything.”

‘Well, that’s not always a defect.’

“You’re right. Come here, I’ve made coffee.” They sat on the chairs and looked at each other over the table.

“So what brings you here?”

“Carlos rang. He said you were depressed and doing things he’d never imagined you’d get up to. And it’s true. I’ve just seen one.”

“I did nothing terrible. I broke an old record and buried a few dead . . . All I did before that was steal seven books – one for everyone in the gang.”

“You’re crazy, Mario. If they catch you . . .”

“I don’t know if José Martí ever said it, but he should have: stealing books is not stealing. It was a present to myself . . .”

“So, you self-presented books to Yoyi, Candito, Rabbit, Carlos and self-presented one to yourself . . . That leaves two.”

“One for Andrés: as he’s a long way away, we chose the
Picturesque Album of the Island of Cuba
, with illustrations by Bernardo May. A copy was sold at auction a year ago for twelve thousand dollars. If he wants he can sell it, although I know he won’t ever dream of such a thing . . . And the other is for you.”

Conde put the smoking cigarette on the ashtray and went to the bookcase, and extracted two dark volumes of Heredia’s poems, copies that, perhaps on some distant day, the poor poet in exile had himself held in his hands.

“This is yours,” he said.

“I’m honoured! What is it?”

“Listen and tell me what you think,” and he opened one volume at random, imagining any page would be compelling, and read, happy his eyes had settled on that verse:

But, what does my eager gaze seek in you
in a vain effort? Why don’t I look?
around your huge cavern
at the palms ay! the wondrous palms,
that on the plains of my ardent country
spring from the sun to a smile, and grow
and sway to the breath from the ocean breezes,
under the purest sky?. . .

“Heredia. ‘Niágara’,” she said, her voice choked with emotion.

“The 1832 Toluca edition. The most valuable, the one Heredia set with his wife’s help, the best . . . For you.”

“You’re crazy . . .” she started to protest, but when she looked into his eyes she realized it would be criminal to resist such an act of love. “Thank you,” she said, taking the books and standing up to kiss him on the lips.

“I wasn’t expecting so much in return,” he said, stroking her hair, and looking into her eyes. “Don’t ever leave me, I beg you.”

And Mario Conde felt he was casting off his moorings and the energy keeping him on his feet was draining away. He thought: hell, I’m going to cry. He realized he was crying when Tamara caressed his face and he felt the slippery moisture a woman’s fingers, his woman’s, were sliding over.

“I’m here,” she said. “And always will be. That’s my prize and punishment . . .”

Grateful she was there and existed, he looked from her to the window, and saw a round moon break through the darkness and light up a sky that glowed, where Violeta del Río sang to God an impossible bolero with a happy ending. Forever and ever.

Mantilla Summer 2003 – Autumn 2004

A Comment and Thanks

Havana Fever
is a story that ambushed, shoved and pushed me into writing it. I hadn’t planned to return to the character of Mario Conde so quickly, but the months I spent working hard to transform him into the protagonist of four possible films – that some day will be shot, God and finance willing – forced me to rescue him and write this novel, the central theme of which – the search for a forgotten singer of boleros from the fifties – had been buzzing in my head for some time. And as I know no one so stubborn or fit to embark on such a hunt, I decided to give the story over to the Count, that great lover of ghosts from the past.

In creating this book, as always, I’ve had to call on the knowledge and experience of several individuals. I would like to express my gratitude to Daniel Flores the book-seller for his indispensable help: he introduced me to the mysteries and tricks of his trade, guided me on the issue of the pricing of the rarest and most valuable books in Cuba’s bibliography and even prepared an “ideal” library for me, with the books that in his informed opinion had to be there. I was also helped in my research by the kind Naty Revueltas who even lent me some treasures from her own library; my essential friend, Marta Armenteros, from the National Library; the efficient and rigorous Olga Vega, head of the Section of Rare and Valuable Books at the José Martí National Library who after many requests allowed me to view and caress the most precious jewels in the treasure under her stewardship; and Dr Carlos Suárez, who introduced me to the world of narcotics and poisons, and their uses and effects.