Authors: Leonardo Padura
You know that, because of you and your love, I agreed to play the saddest of roles and defer my desires and rights when you embarked on the most ridiculous affair in your whole life. To love her was to kill me. You knew that but didn’t hold back. Often the heart sends out orders when the brain should exercise common sense (something I know only too well) and nothing can resist these orders, although there are times when one has to curb feelings to reach a truth that is just.
3 November
My dear:
Here I am, again.
I left the house yesterday, for the first time since you left. That outing has given me strength to resume this letter I broke off a few days ago, numbed by grief that brought tears and made my hands shake.
Can you imagine where I went? I hope you can, because I did it for you. It was All Saints Day and, as was our wont, I visited the graves of your parents and grandparents, and took them the flowers you liked to place in their pantheon. It was a strange experience because it was the first time I’d done this without you. It was even more difficult because your son came with me. I was afraid to go alone, to go out into a world I feel is increasingly hostile, and, once in the cemetery, the poor boy didn’t understand why his mother cried as if we were attending the burial of a loved one who had recently died. Happily, he doesn’t know and doesn’t suffer. He just thinks I am going mad because I weep over the graves of people who died so many years ago.
This outing helped me to realize how much the country has changed in very few months. From my taxi, I could see how the streets and especially the people still seemed overwhelmed and happy at what is happening, and live normally, without fear of the dangers that increasingly darken the firmament. I found their faces and their eyes expressed a joy that had been hidden too long and, above all, I thought I saw they had hopes and were enjoying a new dignity. How long will this state of collective grace last? . . . I must confess, my love, that I envied them: they have continued with their lives or rediscovered them (your son, in his fanatical enthusiasm, says they have been re-born) and are enjoying the time they will spend on this Earth with an intensity I could only have felt with you at my side, either here or there. As I watched I was persuaded that this time something important had happened, that nothing would ever be the same again. I suddenly understood that people like you and I belong to a time that has been played out. We are the dead from that past and perhaps that is why the cemetery is the place I saw most changes. You can’t imagine how many graves where the people closest to the family used to gather on this day were quite solitary, without flowers, without the consolation of a beloved hand on the cold gravestone. It was then I had a real measure of what is occurring in a country where the living go far away, in search of happiness, or adapt as best they can and put on a smiling front, while their dead lie abandoned in the most unpleasant solitude.
I didn’t seek to sadden you and make you feel guilty with news like this. You must have a thousand worries on your mind and, it is best for everyone if the dead are left where they are and in the peace they deserve. All the dead. And for life to go on, for those who may still possess such a thing.
My love, lots of kisses to the children and remind them how much I love them. And please, don’t ever forget who most loved you,
Your Nena
He felt his hands sweat as he ever so gingerly lifted up the pick-up arm between two fingers, and moved it backwards so the turntable received its electric go-ahead and started to spin. Then he lowered it slowly, trying to find, though shaking slightly, the first groove on the small acetate. Conde rubbed his hands on his trouser legs and closed his eyes, about to embark on that voyage into the past.
Bitten by the curiosity bug, Yoyi Pigeon had driven him to Skinny Carlos’s house, where the Count knew an old portable RCA Victor record player existed, that might still be coaxed into action. Thanks to that small machine, whose original speaker they once successfully swapped for a German democratic variety, Conde and his friends had listened hundreds of times to the plastic plaquettes on which Cuban engineers, helped by mysterious processes, pressed the music of Paul Anka, the Beatles and The Mamas and the Papas – now on the final strait to his fifties, Conde still got goose-pimply listening to “Dedicated to the One I Love”. Those distant years, when only such quaint methods enabled you to hear groups on the island that were all the rage in the decadent, capitalist remainder of the planet, where they made and broadcast their petty bourgeois music, unsuitable for the ears of a young revolutionary, according to the wise, Marxist decision taken by the state’s ideological apparatus that banned it from radio and etherized it from television. Only a few privileged children of what you’d hardly call groovy mamas and papas in government posts, who were occasionally allowed to set foot in Mexico, Canada or Spain, had access to the original records, which were so excessively used and abused that they often lost their grooves.
Like wizards before a mouth-watering brew, on unforgettable evenings and hot nights, Conde, Carlos, Andrés, Rabbit and Candito, all without the privilege of carrying a single drop of leadership blood in their plebeian veins, resigned themselves to those worn-out discs and, gathered round that same record player, dived in and soaked up the hot sounds and words outside their understanding that could leave no trace of ideology but which nevertheless touched sensitive nerve ends. Several years later, when Carlos finally got hold of a small cassette recorder, his friends ratcheted up their enjoyment of music, on copies no less tatty than the previous plaquettes, recorded on corrosive Orwo cassettes – German and democratic to boot. They entered the world of Blood, Sweat and Tears, Chicago and, above all, Credence Clearwater Revival, and turned “Proud Mary” and the gravely voice of Tom Fogerty into icons of the blood ties they had forged from those harsh times, plagued by material shortages and restrictions and slogans that had to be rigorously obeyed, socialist targets and massmeetings to bolster political commitment. It was, nonetheless, a past that they’d think of as almost perfect, perhaps because of their romantic insistence on keeping it intact, as if hibernating in the favourable mists from the best years of their lives.
Conde and Yoyi had dropped by Carlos’s place with pizzas they’d bought en route and two bottles of rum to clear their throats and brains. While Josefina improved the so-called pizzas by adding a few slices of onion, tomato purée and slivers of green pepper requested by her son, the Count delved into the cupboard on the terrace to unearth the record player, fearing all the while it would be unable to produce a single note. After dusting it inside and out, he cleaned the needle with a handkerchief soaked in a high octane, recently purchased rum, and finally connected it to the current, to see if the turntable at least spun round.
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.