Authors: Leonardo Padura
Yoyi Pigeon nodded: his trading ethics appreciated Barqué’s logic. But Conde pondered over the star’s thoughts, and remembered how in her interviews he’d never heard her mention any of the great
boleristas
, the really great ones, the ones who might make it obvious that Barqué’s rise had most to do with self-promotion and opportunism of every stripe, including the sexual and political varieties.
“I never found out who the man was behind her. There was a lot of gossip in Havana, but he never showed his face. He must have been a wealthy fellow and full of prejudices and he didn’t want to be seen with a cabaret singer, who, what’s more, certainly had a peculiar look about her: lovely hair and all that, but don’t anyone try to fool me, she looked like a nigger.”
The absence of a clinching name, however, confirmed the Count in his idea that the mysterious lover was none other than Alcides Montes de Oca. And that was reinforced by his suspicion that for some unknown reason Katy Barqué was avoiding identifying a person he was sure she knew, so intent was she on waging her individual war against Violeta del Río.
“After that row I never saw her again, fortunately . . . Five or six months later, she announced she was giving up singing and promptly disappeared from the scene. I was as happy as Larry: one less, another with no stamina for the fight, sleepless nights, and the struggle to get good performing and recording contracts. If she was going to marry that wealthy individual, she could put all that behind her and enjoy her good luck, because she wasn’t like me, an artist devoted night and day to my art. She was a just a bed-hopper who’d struck lucky . . . Later on, when I barely remembered she’d ever existed, I found out she’d committed suicide. That’s right: she killed herself . . . By the way, how the fuck did you come across her?”
The news of her suicide, right out of the blue, provoked a primitive response from Yoyi and sent the Count’s mind and body into a whirl. The certainty that Violeta del Río was now just a press cutting and a voice heard dimly on an old crackling 45 killed at a stroke Mario Conde’s high hopes, nourished over the two days he’d been dreaming, that he might find the mysterious, seductive woman alive: she whose image and way of singing had begun to obsess him as if were an infatuated adolescent. A wave of frustration hit him. He suddenly felt lost in the tragic final lines of a bolero: lines written to shatter expectations raised by a sultry love song.
“Where the fuck does that old man live?” enquired Yoyi when a bewildered, disappointed Count pointed him out of calle Zanja and into Rayo, in search of Silvano Quintero’s residence.
Despite a few recent cosmetic touches, Havana’s old Chinatown was still the same sordid, oppressive place. Over decades the Asians who’d come to the island had huddled together there, vainly hoping they’d find a better life, even dreaming they’d get rich, a dream that had been quickly flattened. These ancient, increasingly obsolete Chinese businesses had postponed their inevitable and natural demises, by changing into restaurants – their greasy offerings got pricier by the day – and had brought life and atmosphere to the area. But the district was still gripped by its rapid, apparently unstoppable, degeneration. It emerged from potholes in the streets brimming with stinking water, climbed over metal bins packed with detritus and scaled walls gnawing at them, and occasionally causing them to collapse. Those old buildings from the beginning of the twentieth century, many now turned into tenements where several families crammed in, had long ago shed any charm they might have once had, and unremitting decline now offered up vistas of horrific poverty. Blacks, whites, Chinese and mestizos of all bloods and beliefs lived in a poverty that didn’t discriminate between skin tone or geographical origins, putting everyone on an equal footing in a struggle to survive that made everyone aggressive and cynical, like the hopeless beings they’d become.
“Go another two blocks in that direction,” the Count instructed him, imagining Pigeon couldn’t be well-pleased at having to navigate his shiny, white-stripe-tyred Bel Air between the puddles in the street and razor-sharp eyes giving them the once over.
“The other day the television said the worst of the crisis was over . . .” Yoyi talked as he steered round the potholes in the street. “The guy who said that hadn’t been round here. It gets worse and worse . . .”
“It always was a barrio in a bad state,” the Count recalled.
“Never like this. With all this restaurant mess and tourist riffraff this place is about to explode. And to cap all that now they’re pushing drugs . . . And we’re not talking opium . . . What should do I do?”
“Go on, it’s the next corner . . . You ever tried drugs, Yoyi?”
“Where you going with that, man?” he replied jumpily.
‘I’m not a policeman anymore. I was just interested to know . . .”
“The odd spiked rum, a party spliff, but nothing harder, I swear. Look at this body on me: it takes some looking after . . .”
“How’d you react if I told you I’d never done any drugs at all?”
“I’d not react any different, man: you and your friends are Martians. They put you lot into a test tube . . . And how did you come out? The New Man you mentioned the other day? No, they filled the tube with alcohol and you lot got off on that fix . . .”
“Why do you reckon so many people get hooked? Is it that easy to get drugs?”
“You have to be kidding. There’s zero money here and zero money equals zero trade. Ten, twenty, say a hundred tourists, prepared to buy the odd drug? A hundred kids with enough dollars for a line? That’s not enough to start trading . . .”
“So where do they get it? Because there are drugs out there . . .”
“Consignments float in from the sea and someone fishes them out. The cycle kicks off: the guy who gets it out of the ocean invests nothing and sells it cheap to the man who sells it in Havana. It’s pure profit from day one, no big investments, that’s how the trade started. But after the police cleanup it’s got more difficult, though some lunatic will always take a risk and sell whatever washes up. The worst of it is that it’s more expensive now and more diluted, so dealers earn more and junkies get into bigger messes trying to get money . . .”
“When we were fifteen or twenty, we’d not even seen a joint. I had to join the police to find out what one smelled like . . . And look at me now.”
The lad smiled.
“I believe you . . .”
“Stop, it’s here.”
“Conde, you know that woman committed suicide years ago . . . so what are you after exactly?”
“I don’t know,” he confessed again. “Whatever I’ve yet to find out, I suppose.”
Yoyi parked his car in front of the building. It was typical of the area, and in a state of decline the Count had anticipated. In the adjacent half ruin, a swarm of people busy cleaning century-old bricks, salvaging rusted metal bars and prehistoric tiles, ready to recycle rather than to patch up their houses, while others sniffed among the debris looking for the unexpected something they’d almost certainly never find. Several people were dragging fifty-five gallon tanks of water along the street, on trolleys cobbled together with old bearings, as if sentenced to hard labour, and the only two real Chinamen the Count could see – so old they might be millenarian – were sitting on a doorjamb selling small tins of the Chinese ointment the Count got through so quickly as balsam for his headaches. From windows open onto the street, small counters hawked pizzas made from dubious cheeses, pastries made from stolen flour, coffee blended with cat paw, and dubiously filled croquettes. Men chatted on each street corner, as if they owned time itself. The Count calculated that on that hundred-yard stretch of street more than sixty people were inventing ways to sort their lives or at least endure them with the least trauma possible. The feeling of decline in the air alarmed the ex-policeman, and his skin trembled with fear: it was a situation at explosion point, and nothing like the pleasant city he’d known for so many years. Too many people without hopes or dreams. Too much heat and pressure under the lid of a pot that, sooner or later, would have to burst.
While Pigeon agreed a price for protecting his car with two black guys who looked like ex-convicts, the Count crossed the street, sidestepping a swollen rat floating in a puddle, and bought four tins of pomade at ten pesos apiece from the Chinamen. He surveyed the scene and was reminded of images of African cities he’d seen on television. A return to our origins, he thought, as he geared himself up for the bigger shocks in store.
Conde and Yoyi went into the building and up the stairs. A smell of rank damp and fermenting urine hit them, and despite feeling queasy, Conde didn’t dare touch the grimy banister, and kept his distance from the wall and its hanging garden of dozens of frayed electric cables, constantly threatening to short circuit. On the first floor the stairs led to a narrow passage dotted with mostly open doors. Conde peered over the metal parapet and down at an inside yard, where several people sat around a domino table, seemingly immune to the fetid atmosphere, exacerbated by the contribution from a pen where two pigs slept and a cage where several spindly hens pecked. On each corner of the table, Conde registered bottles of beer and plates with leftover food.
“Obviously nobody here works,” the Count said almost to himself.
“Everybody lives by his wits,” Yoyi reminded him. Those guys are playing dominoes purely for cash, evidently. But one of them rents out the space; another sells beer; that guy does the food; yet another sells cigarettes; another breeds fighting dogs; another rents out his room; another keeps an eye out for the police . . .”
“How come we walk in and they don’t budge?”
“Those big black guys looking after my car, man . . . they’re the security and they gave us a safe-pass . . . They circulate the money among themselves and get by that way. At night, one of them changes hats and burgles houses, offers whores to tourists and, obviously, sell drugs , as you know . . .”
“What the fuck is this? Hell?”
“Yes . . . but only the surface. Like the first circle. But you can sink even lower, I swear. Been a while since you went around Prado at night? Go take a look and you’ll really see fireworks, and all out in the open . . . Your ex-colleagues take their Alsatians with them when they go there.”
The Count didn’t look into the interiors of the flats he walked by and came to the door marked number seven, which was shut tight, and knocked.
Silvano Quintero turned out to be younger than the Count was expecting. He was in his seventies and his extreme – if not genetic – thinness might have flattered him, but the purple shade of his skin marked him out as card-carrying, diehard alcoholic. Silvano needed a shave, a haircut, and was crying out for a good bath. When he ushered them in, Conde noticed the man’s right hand: it was like a stiff, half-closed claw, with a gaping hole in the smooth flesh at the top. The small room was in the same wretched state as its tenant. The foulest stench wafted across the threshold of the small doorless lavatory and the place didn’t appear to have been cleaned since some remote date in the previous century. Under the wooden zinc-covered table supporting a kerosene stove, the Count’s trained eye spotted an army of empty bottles that had certainly been drunk in honour of the man’s leathery liver.
Silvano pointed them to two rickety chairs and settled himself on the edge of the bed on a steely grey sheet. Conde couldn’t stop thinking about himself and his own alcoholic inclinations and was alarmed to think he might be watching a science-fiction film, perversely intent on showing him his future.
“Well, then?” asked Silvano.
The Count took out a packet of cigarettes and handed one to the man, who took it in his left hand, then placed it, as if in an ashtray, between the two fingers of his crippled right, while the other searched his shirt pocket for a cigarette holder where he slotted the cigarette, an operation entirely executed by his left hand.
“I explained yesterday . . . my friend and I are in the business of buying and selling books and old records . . .”
“And can you live on that?” asked a suspicious Silvano, drawing on his holder in a rather finicky, old-fashioned way.
“Sometimes we can, sometimes we can’t . . . In one deal we came across a record of one Violeta del Río, and someone told us you definitely knew her.”
“Who told you I did?” he rasped, wiping his snot away in the same sophisticated style he adopted when smoking.
“Rogelito the
timbalero
.”
“Is he still alive?” he almost droned.
“He’s about to hit a hundred,” the Count assured him. “He reckons he doesn’t know how to die.”
Silvano took a few more drags, as if he were reckoning up his own options, which the Count had reduced to two: speak up or shut up. From then on the situation threatened to get complicated. The Count produced the page from
Vanidades
devoted to Violeta del Río’s farewell. The old journalist took it in his left hand and rested the fold on his garrotted right.
“For Christ’s fucking sake,” he whispered, folding the page and returning it to a Count already intrigued by what might have prompted his outburst. “Why are you looking for her? Don’t you know she died in 1960?”
Conde nodded.
“We’d like to find out more about her. Pure curiosity.”
“Curiosity killed the cat,” the other retorted. “It’s a long story which I don’t like telling . . .”
“Nobody seems to know anything about Violeta, not even that she committed suicide and—” the Count implored.
“Why do you say she committed suicide? As far as I know, that was never resolved . . .”
The Count half-closed his eyes, trying to process the old man’s words.
“What are you implying?”
“As far as I know, it wasn’t clear whether she took her own life or someone else saved her the bother.”
Conde tried to make his buttocks comfortable before continuing.
“You mean she might have been killed?”
“I believe I am speaking Spanish.”
“And how do you know?”