Authors: Leonardo Padura
“I told you Mummy can’t . . .” whispered Amalia before Dionisio interrupted her.
“Look here, Conde, Amalia’s problem is she always gives half the picture, uses euphemisms . . . right, euphemisms, because she finds it hard to spell things out: mummy has been completely mad for the last forty years. And when I say mad, I mean really mad, incurably so . . .”
“Well, forget it then . . .” the Count lamented. “Let’s get on with the books.”
Amalia apologized; she had to get back to work – off to the market again – and the men went into the library.
“Which books did that buyer look at?” the Count enquired.
“He started by looking at the ones you say are very valuable. Then he crouched down over there, by the bookcase, the lower shelves,” pointed Dionisio. Yoyi went over to the area in the library he’d indicated, strangely enough, on the left-hand side they’d not yet inspected, and immediately called to his partner.
“Come here, Conde, come here . . . Look at this . . .”
Pigeon’s index finger ran over the spines of several books and the Count crouched down to get a better view.
“God! No, that’s not possible . . .”
The ex-policeman’s exclamations and negatives alarmed Dionisio Ferrero, who walked over to the bookcase, from which the Count, who’d opened the glass doors, now extracted two very large, leather-bound tomes.
“What do you mean?” asked Dionisio.
“How could the guy know, man?. . . Did he walk straight towards these books?... I don’t get it, man, I swear I don’t,” Yoyi confessed. “It can’t be true . . .”
Conde felt his heart racing, opened the first of the books read the motto that advised “
Labore et Constantia
”, ran his eyes over the hand-tinted etchings that reproduced the appearance of some fish so exactly it was as if they’d been photographed still dripping wet after they’d been fished from tropical seas. But anxiety spurred him on and he immediately began to leaf through the other volume, a heavy album, some seventeen by twelve inches. The buyers’ dazzled eyes viewed a succession of lithographs: a port where several sailing boats were moored, a valley planted with sugar cane, a country landscape captured in all its detail and various views of sugar refineries in action. As delicately as he knew how, Conde caressed the heavy paper with the engraving of the proud, idyllic image of La Flor de Cuba sugar mill, then closed the volume, got up and leaned awkwardly against the shelves, pressing the two books against his chest, as if wanting to protect them against the endless dangers out there in the big, wide world.
“These are two jewels. They’re priceless. They’re unique,” he muttered, feeling that his language was inadequate, wondering what adjectives he should use to describe those invaluable wonders of Cuban publishing . . . “Everybody calls this one ‘The Book of Fishes’, but its proper title is” – he opened the cover and read the frontispiece – “
Description of different items of natural history mostly from the maritime branch and illustrated with 75 plates
. It’s the first important book printed in Cuba . . . in 1787 . . . And the other one, you can see, is
The Sugar Mills
, printed in 1857, that should have twenty-eight plates by Eduardo Laplante and is one of the most beautiful books ever made in the world. Needless to say they are two of the most valuable books ever published in Cuba.”
“What do you mean by ‘valuable’?” nerves betrayed Dionisio, his martial voice cracking as he asked the question.
“Well, I mean they’re worth a fortune . . .” Conde’s emotions didn’t subside, his mouth got drier, as if he’d been struck down by a raging fever. “If all the engravings are in place, I think the National Library might even be capable of unearthing enough money to buy them . . . We’re talking about more than ten thousand dollars a piece, more even . . .”
Dionisio Ferrero turned pale.
“That’s impossible,” he retorted, convinced Conde was hallucinating. “I’d never touched them before.”
The Count had forgotten Dionisio and, keeping them close to his chest, caressed the books’ leather. “If only Cristóbal could see them . . .”
‘Cristóbal?’ Dionisio seemed more and more in a dither, unable to understand what was unravelling so unexpectedly in front of his very eyes. “Who might Cristóbal be?”
“But how the fuck did that black guy, who limped out of his mother’s fucking cunt, ever walk straight to these books?” an angry Yoyi almost shouted, in a state of shock increasingly fanned by bad vibes about the future.
“Far too great a coincidence,” allowed the Count, finally taking the books to the bookcase they’d chosen for the editions they were putting in the not-for-sale category. “Far too great,” he repeated, caressing the awesome spines of the two volumes yet again, as if amorously bidding them farewell, and he tried to shake off the sensations gripping him. “Down to work, Yoyi, unless we want that man to beat us in a little fraternal socialist rivalry, right?”
Until he’d turned into a professional predator of books, intent on feeding from his profits, Mario Conde had enjoyed a respectful, almost mystical relationship with libraries. Although the overheated, quarrelsome barrio where he’d been born wasn’t home to a single library of more than twenty books, luck would have it that there were a dozen books in his own house – all belonging to his mother, for his father, like his Grandfather Rufino the Count, never opened a book in his life – that had got there along the most diverse paths, and were now arrayed proudly and prominently, and as if someone suspected those objects might be valuable, at one end of the sideboard top, next to his parents’ wedding photo, a Viennese porcelain clock and a small art nouveau vase. Throughout his adolescence, Conde read those books in his odd moments – two volumes of Reader’s Digest
Selections
, the tearful, as far as he was concerned abominable
Heart
, by Edmundo de Amicis, one of Sandokán’s adventures and, above all,
Huckleberry Finn
, in a cheap edition that was falling to pieces – and felt timidly enthused at being attracted by an activity that was so uncommon in members of his family and inhabitants of his barrio, who were generally not very fond of such passive hobbies. Even when the Count preferred to spend his time playing ball-games, idling around the streets and stealing mangos, his innate curiosity led him to take his first step to becoming a bibliophile when, after reading
The Count of Montecristo
in a state of emotional ecstasy, he decided to find out about Edmund and Mercedes’ final destinies. He’d hunted out the second act of that fabulous adventure, only to encounter a disappointing, almost cruel Dumas, who in
The Dead Man’s Hand
destroyed the happiness over which generous-hearted Dantès and his beloved Mercedes had expended so much effort. A couple of years later, now enrolled at Pre-Uni, curiosity again came to his aid, this time conclusively, after reading a ridiculously abridged version of
The Iliad
, as an exercise in class. Conde visited the wellstocked library in the old La Víbora grammar school in search of a complete version of Homer’s poem and, intrigued by the fates of its warriors, looked for answers in
The Odyssey
and naturally, without any effort on his part, fell into a trap with no way out as he tried to discover the fates of the remaining Greek heroes. It was Cristóbal, the old one-legged librarian, who first encouraged him to read the
Aeneid
and later other sagas of Achean heroes.
His relationship with Lame Cristóbal, as they all called him at the Pre-Uni, was an encounter that decisively shaped the life of Mario Conde, who soon became a voracious, compliant reader, able to finish any book he started – he got the better of
Les Misérables
and even
The Magic Mountain
– and began to love books and libraries the way believers worship their shrines: as sacred places only to be profaned at the risk of eternal perdition.
Apart from supplying him with books and guiding him in his reading, Cristóbal was the first to detect that the boy had latent sensitivities and to urge him to try his hand at writing. Mario Conde, who always possessed an acute sense of his many limitations, was terrified of looking like a fool and so discounted the idea, but the seed lodged in a hidden corner of his consciousness, ready to germinate. In the meantime, he deepened his relationship with books and, thanks to the old librarian, familiarized himself with the important books published in Cuba in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth, and began to value books not only for their content, but often for their frequently ignored continent, age and origin.
One of Cristóbal’s most persistent challenges was to bring the young man closer to a part of Cuban literature that was being concealed by new political and aesthetic tendencies. Consequently, he made him read the innumerable writers damned and slandered in the arid decade of the seventies, writers who Conde wouldn’t hear about in public until many years later. To open the door to that past world, Cristóbal selected Lino Novás Calvo and Carlos Montenegro, with whom he intuited – quite rightly – the young man would soon easily connect, thanks to their tales of slavetraders, thugs and convicts. Then followed Labrador Ruiz, Lydia Cabrera and Enrique Serpa, and he was later thrust into the caustic worlds of Virgilio Piñera, who at the time was sentenced to the most crushing silence, where he met his death. As a result of all those writers he read at the age of sixteen and seventeen, Conde shaped a complex view of his past, of the past of all the island’s inhabitants, and gleaned that the world could enjoy a variety of colours and truths infinitely more complex than those officially on offer.
In his wild youth Mario Conde committed various excesses – he stole food on sugar-cane encampments where they were sent off harvesting for several months, cheated in examinations when the questions were leaked by the management of the Pre-Uni to guarantee high rankings, was deceitful when it came to paying in the ice-cream shop next to the school, and filched books from The Woodworm bookshop – but he never dared take a single school library book for personal gain, even though Cristóbal made him an unthinkable exception and let him go into the store-cupboard to sniff around and choose books to read. The conviction that the world was a battlefield whereas a library could be an inviolably neutral, collective terrain, took root in his spirit as one of the most pleasant insights in life, a notion he’d have to revisit, when the Crisis came, in order to survive, as so many others had to with their memories and even dignity intact.
In spite of the years he’d invested in book buying and selling, Conde always felt quite uneasy when he worked as a library predator and, as a matter of principle, decided never to buy any book that was stamped as public property. However, in all the time he’d devoted to such commercial dealing, he’d never sensed he was so acutely engaged in an act of profanation as with the library of the Montes de Ocas. Perhaps the fact he knew the treasure had remained untouched during more than forty years of revolutionary hurricanes – until the moment he had entered the sanctuary – as a consequence of an unbending pledge, contributed to his feeling of unease. Knowing that three generations of a Cuban family had devoted money and effort to that wondrous array of close to 5,000 volumes, that had travelled half the globe in order to find a place in these bookcases which were immune to damp and dust, seemed like an act of love he was now mercilessly destroying. Most painful of all was the certainty that profanation would lead to chaos and that chaos often sparked off the collapse of the most solid of systems. Wasn’t his presence helping to verify that equation? His hands and economic interests were violating something sacred, and the Count anticipated his deed would provoke a chain reaction he still couldn’t imagine, but which was imminent.
It was on one of those lethargic afternoons when young Conde had taken shelter with a book in the coolest, most out-of-theway corner of La Víbora Pre-Uni library, that Lame Cristóbal, leaning on his crutches, interrupted him on the pretext that he wanted to share a cigarette with his pupil. For the rest of his life, Mario Conde would never forget how that initially nondescript conversation suddenly changed tone when Cristóbal began to speak about the library’s uncertain future. His retirement date was long past and, at some fast-approaching date, he’d have to take his crutches and love for books elsewhere, perhaps to the grave. The old man most fretted about what was going to happen to the books he’d preserved and defended for almost thirty years, books he was sure nobody would love and look after as he had.
“Each of the books back there,” he pointed to the stacks, “has a soul, has a life of its own, and retains part of the lives and souls of boys, like you, who’ve passed through this library and read them over these thirty years . . . I’ve classified every one, put them in place, cleaned, refurbished and glued them whenever necessary . . . Condecito, I’ve seen so much lunacy in my lifetime. What on earth is going to happen to them? You’re graduating this year and will leave. I’ll retire or die, but will have to go as well. The books will be abandoned to their fate. I hope the next librarian will be like me. It will be a calamity if he or she isn’t. Each book here is irreplaceable, each has a word, a sentence, an idea that’s waiting for its reader.” Cristóbal put his cigarette out, pulled himself up on the table, and stuck a crutch under an arm. “I’m going to have a bite to eat. Look after the library . . . Before I get back, go in and choose the books you need or like. Take them, save them, and above all, look after them.”
Astonished by the very suggestion, the Count watched Cristóbal leave, swaying on his wooden supports. Half an hour later, when the old man returned, Conde was still in the same place, reading the same book.
“Why didn’t you do what I told you to do?” enquired the librarian.
“I don’t know, Cristóbal, I can’t . . .”
“You’ll be sorry . . .”
Fifteen years later, when Detective Lieutenant Mario Conde went back to the old Pre-Uni in La Víbora, to investigate the murder of a young chemistry teacher, one of the first places he visited was the once neat and tidy library, where Cristóbal had urged him to read Virgil, Sophocles, and Euripides, Novás Calvo, Piñera and Carpentier. To his eternal grief, the ex-student had had to acknowledge that Lame Cristóbal’s fears had been surpassed. A few battered, moribund books were dozing among the empty spaces on the once packed shelves, whence Greek and Latin classics, tragic Englishmen and Italian poets, chroniclers of the Indies and Cuban novelists and historians had flown their nest. The plundering had been merciless and systematic, and apparently nobody had been held responsible for the vandalism. Conde thought how, in his grave, Lame Cristóbal must have felt that wilful profanation whiplashing his bones, destroying his poor life’s finest work as a handicapped librarian who loved his precious books.