Authors: Leonardo Padura
He walked non-stop past the revitalized luminous sign of The Vixen and the Crow, where she’d once sung, and which was now off limits to anyone not carrying the five US dollars necessary to guarantee a seat; he contemplated the barred and bolted entrance to The Grotto, which didn’t betray the slightest echo of the late night chords that echoed in that musical cave when the sun was about to rise; he looked with no particular emotion at the charred ruins of the old Montmartre, proletarianly re-christened Moscow and prophetically devoured by fire years before that empire disintegrated; he passed by the soulless entrance to the Las Vegas cabaret, where a man, around his own age, caught his attention, looking distinctly nostalgically at the place that was now boarded up where for so many years you could drink your last cup of coffee in the early hours; he walked without a glimmer of hope past the garlanded mansion of the White Peak, no longer enticing passersby with graceful guitar arpeggios; he walked up towards the now darkened Red Room at the Capri, its doors shut and chained, and finally entered the gardens at the National Hotel, under the gaze of grumpy security guards equipped with walkie-talkies, who let him off and through without asking a single question, although they visually arrested him on charges of being Cuban, not possessing dollars or belonging to that scene; he lingered for a few minutes in front of the luxurious, equally dollarized portico of the Parisién, the cabaret where the immortal Frank Sinatra once performed – to an audience of Luciano, Lansky and Trafficante – as well as a young, now forgotten woman who went by the name of Violeta del Río and sang for the supreme pleasure of singing.
In front of the door to this cabaret, reserved for the tropical pleasuring of ephemeral foreign visitors, accompanied by their willing, nationally produced and tariffed escorts, Conde felt, for the first time in his almost forty-eight years, that he was wandering through an unknown city, one that didn’t belong to him, and one moving him on, shutting him out. That cabaret wasn’t his; nothing about its visible decor enticed him or induced nostalgia. The night air, the long walk and feeling of alienation had freed him from the spell of alcohol, but an annoying lucidity had commandeered his battered feelings, set on making him understand that, except for the odd almost faded memory, Violeta del Río and her world of lights and shadows no longer lived at that address, and had departed leaving no other signs of life beyond the physical remains of those boarded up, burnt-out or inaccessible scenarios, even in the memory of a man stubbornly opposed to ultimate oblivion. The Count’s fascination with that world had received the kiss of death, and he realized that the only way he could revive it was by giving himself the satisfaction of finding out the final truths about Violeta del Río and the reasons why she’d turned up inside a book of impossible recipes he’d found in an equally impossible library.
With sadness spreading through his soul, the Count returned to the street and contemplated the vista of buildings that were once pretentiously modern and were now bent double by premature senility. He observed, almost loathed the young woman with the permanent smile who, back to the wall, was letting an old, Nordic-looking guy whom she called “
mi amor
” slaver all over her. He listened to the din created by young lads coming up O Street as they let out cries of potentially drug-inspired glee and kicked at sacks of rubbish they encountered en route. He was alarmed by a gleaming Lada that sped past, its sound system blasting out at top volume, keen to show off its ostentatious, prefabricated happiness. He went down towards Twenty-Third and watched two well-equipped policemen walk by, as jumpy as their gigantic Alsatians. He looked around, not having the slightest idea and hadn’t the slightest idea what direction he should take to exit the labyrinth his city had become and realized that he too was a ghost from the past, a member of a species galloping towards extinction, witnessing, on this night, lost in the city, the evidence for genetic failure as embodied by himself and his brutal dislocation between one world that had faded and another that was fast disintegrating. All in all, thought Mario Conde, Yoyi wasn’t wrong, though he hadn’t got it quite right: it wasn’t that he seemed so incredible he was like a lie, but rather that he
was
a living lie, and his whole life had been one stubborn, if unsuccessful, manipulation of reality.
The Calzada de Monte and the only in name hopeful calle Esperanza form an inverted wedge, ready to gouge the most flaccid urban flesh, opening up the entrails of what was once the old walled town of Havana. The Calzada and calle Esperanza almost create a vortex in the barrio of the Single Market neighbourhood, until they peter out on the bustling calle del Egido, a perpetually run-down triangle that still throbs on the city map. Over the centuries its guts have accumulated the human, architectural and historic debris generated by a bullying capital always marching westwards, and moving away from that bastion of poorly paid proletarians, lumpens of every stripe, whores, drug traffickers and emigrants from other regions of the island and the world, all eager for a slice of the action that will almost always elude them. The Calzada, its shops run by Lebanese, Syrians and Polish Jews selling remnants, second-hand clothes and a selection of trinkets, marked out the frontier between the palaces, luxurygoods shops, parks, fountains, theatres, dance halls and hotels of Havana’s splendid commercial centre, and that other down-atheel area, the adjacent Atarés and Jesús María barrios, home to poor blacks and whites, in cheap buildings with no pretence of style, on narrow streets, their inhabitants crammed together and ground down by poverty and marginalization. In the memories of Havanans that neighbourhood of the city, frequently invaded by black exhalations from the Tallapiedra power station, poisoned by leaking butane gas and besieged by effluvia from the bay’s most polluted streams, was like territory conceded to infidels they never expected or intended to reconquer. History seemed to have passed down its winding streets and never stopped, while generation after generation hoarded pain, oblivion, rage and a spirit of resistance that expressed itself in illicit, sinful, violent acts, ruthlessly seeking to survive, at any cost and by any means.
In his years in the force, Mario Conde suffered immensely when an investigation led him to that Havana backwater where nobody had ever known, seen or heard anything, where people poured their hatred into scornful looks they directed at the representatives of a distant establishment that always repressed them. Violence, the means to vent chronic frustration, was the everyday currency used to repay debts or insults and lawlessness had long ruled that ravaged territory, where to be frail was the worst illness imaginable.
Since the day he’d entered the book trade, the Count hadn’t been back to that rough corner of the city: he knew in advance he’d have been wasting his time – and would perhaps have lost his wallet, shoes and other bodily possessions – if he’d dared to meander down its streets, searching suspiciously for something as exotic as a book for sale. Consequently, although he’d assumed the darkest days of the Crisis must have decimated that Bermuda triangle, he hadn’t imagined how hard the degeneration from the years of the worst shortages – bad times the country had now supposedly overcome – had hit.
Conde abandoned his taxi at the miserable, downtrodden crossroads of Cuatro Caminos – that once mythical location, where a restaurant stood on each corner, competing in quality and prices with its equidistant colleagues – and walked down a couple of alleyways in search of calle Esperanza. He immediately began to understand Yoyi Pigeon’s claim that Chinatown was only the first circle in the urban hell, because a first glance made it clear he was penetrating the heart of a world of darkness, a shadowy bottomless pit that was barely held in check by any wall. Breathing that atmosphere of hidden danger, he progressed through a labyrinth of impassable streets, like a city ravaged by war, strewn with potholes and debris, tottering buildings, cracked beyond repair, propped up by wooden supports rotted by sun and rain, containers overflowing with putrefying mountains of rubbish, where two men, still in their youth, sniffed after any recyclable bounty. Packs of mangy dogs wandered about, with nothing in their stomachs to shit on the street, alongside raucous sellers of avocados, brooms, clothes pegs, piles of torches, second-hand lavatories and wood for cooking; next to hard-faced women, sharp as knives, all geared up in lycra Bermudas that got tighter and tighter, ideal garments for emphasizing the quality of the nipples and sex on proud display. The feeling that he was crossing the borders a land of chaos warned him he was witnessing a world on the brink of an Apocalypse that it would be difficult to escape.
No sooner was he past those borders than Conde realized he’d set himself an almost impossible mission. None of the ploys he’d considered – introducing himself as a journalist, a distant relation of someone, a public health officer looking for an AIDS victim, or a desperate hunter after rented rooms – was going to help once he’d asked his initial questions and revealed his real concerns. So, his only chance of finding the faint trail of Elsa Contreras, Lotus Flower the dancer, resident in the area as Silvano Quintero had recalled – was the hope that his old informant Juan Serrano Ballester, alias Juan the African, was around in the barrio and not in prison – his normal location.
When he was in front of the tenement in the dead-end callejón Alambique where Juan the African had been born and lived the few years of freedom he’d enjoyed in his lamentable existence, Conde was pleased to see nobody in the entrance. He immediately wondered why that man had bothered to spend his life stealing, defrauding and looting if it’d never got him beyond that elemental state: it was a three-storey building from the beginning of the twentieth century and its sombre, balcony-less façade strongly resembled that of a prison. Where there’d once been a front door supposedly separating the street from the passage and stairs leading to the higher flats, only a gaping hole now remained, and the Count imagined how, in the direst days of the Crisis, the wooden frame and door must been sacrificed to a wood-burning stove. Steam from pig shit and urine rose from the floor, while equally fetid water dripped down the stairs, no doubt leaking from dilapidated sewage pipes. Juan lived on the third floor of that phalanstery, in a half room he managed to retain after ceding the remainder of an already oppressive flat to the country girl from Guantanamo who’d borne him twins. As the room was at the back of the building, you had to negotiate a narrow door-lined passage, one part of which had collapsed in some remote prehistoric era and been replaced by two planks that gave access to the back rooms. The Count filled his lungs to avoid taking a breath on his journey across the planks, arms spread like an intrepid tightrope walker. When he was finally opposite the door the African had added to the passage, Conde wondered whether his stubborn quest for the truth about the fate of a lost songstress made any sense at all, and again logic said it didn’t, though something inexplicable compelled him to knock on the door.
When Juan recognized him he almost fainted. He was only two months out from his last stay behind bars, after a three-year sentence for repeated fraud. Seeing that policeman from a dark corner of his past in his house could only signal impending disaster.
“Don’t be scared, for fuck’s sake, I’m not in the police any more,” the Count quickly explained, while the other man shook a jet-black head profiled like a Dahomey sculpture. “I swear, man, I’ve been out more than ten years . . .”
“You swear on your mother?” the African said threateningly, sure nobody would take his mother’s name in vain unless it was a very last resort.
“I swear on my mother,” the Count replied, reminded of Yoyi and his oaths. “I need your help: I can pay cash,” he added, tapping his pocket.
“Did they kick you out of the police?”
“No, I left because I wanted out.”
The African half shut his eyes to process that information.
“I get it: now you work for foreigners and run one of those so-called corporations, right? You getting lots of the green’uns?”
“I don’t run a thing. Can I come in?”
“Swear again you’re not a policeman. Come on, swear on your children, who you’ll find dead when you get home if you’re lying . . .”
“I swear.”
In his peculiar situation, the Count had decided it was better to tell the African the truth, or at least part of the truth related to his search for the lost past of Violeta del Río, however incredible it might seem to a rational ear. While he told the story, he tried to imagine how his ex-informant could help him, but he’d only just started to say why he was so interested, when the man dashed his hopes of a quick fix by stating he knew the names of every stray dog in the barrio, but had never heard of Elsa Contreras, let alone any Lotus Flower.
“You’re fucked. I can’t help you,” Juan concluded, a happy smile in his bloodshot eyes, no doubt pleased to think that, now he could be no help, the Count would beat a quick retreat back the way he’d come.
“I need to be sure that woman doesn’t live around here. I’ve got to talk to someone who really knows this barrio. Or don’t you want to earn yourself a few pesos? Look, can’t you introduce me as your ex’s cousin who’s going to spend a few days with you . . . I don’t know, because I’ve just got out of the clink, OK?”
The African laughed, almost roared.
“You gone mad? Conde, everybody here’s just out of the cage. What prison do I say you were in if nobody saw you, whichever one you were in?”
Conde agreed it wasn’t a good idea, and then the African suggested: “I know, we’ll say you’re a cousin of the girl from Guantanamo, but have come from Matanzas . . . Your business was killing cows and the police were after you and you came here to let things cool down. What do you reckon?”
“I’d buy that.”
“But you can’t stay here. There’s no room . . .” He opened his arms wide and almost touched the walls of the two and a half by four-yard hole.