Authors: Leonardo Padura
“I can leave at night and come back in the morning.”
“And as soon as you find the woman, you disappear . . .”
“I’ll disappear,” the Count agreed
“If that’s it, then OK. Now down to the serious stuff: how much is the job worth?”
“A thousand pesos,” said the Count, sure such a figure would clinch it.
“I don’t put my life on the line for a thousand.” The African yawned and stroked one of the three scars on his face, that were blacker and shinier than the rest of his skin. “Two thousand, and you pay for food and everything else.”
“OK,” replied the Count without flinching.
“Right then, to get a feel for the place, let’s have a few drinks down the street, then we’ll eat in Veneto’s underground chop shop. He knows about everything that moves around here. I’ll make sure he sits down with us and you find a way to find out about that woman without him realizing you’re really after something else. But be warned: if they smell a rat, we’ll both be done for . . .”
“It’s not such a big deal,” replied the Count, and the African shrugged his shoulders.
“Give me the money. I need it right now.”
Conde looked at the ex-convict and shook his head.
“I might seem crazy or an asshole, but I’m not . . .”
“All right, give me half,” the African almost pleaded. “Look, just so you know: people here want my guts. I did a bit of business, it went bad and I owe them. If I can give them something on account, they’ll calm down a bit. If not, I can’t set foot in the street . . . Those guys don’t believe anything . . .”
Conde pondered for a moment and realized he didn’t have much choice.
“All right, I’ll give you half. And the rest when the woman puts in an appearance.”
When they went out into the street, the raging midday sun had dispersed the crowds. Music now filled the spot once occupied by people, flooding the space, melodies criss-crossing, competing in volume to blast the minds of anyone who risked entering that atmosphere steeped in sones, boleros, meringues, ballads, mambos, guarachas, hard and soft rock, danzones, bachatas and rumbas. The houses with entrances onto the street, open windows and doors, tried to take in a little of the warm air, while men and women of all ages rocked on their chairs, enjoying the artificial breeze from fans and the deafening music, while, resigned to their lot, they watched dead midday hours pass by.
They walked into a tenement and in the inside yard several men were drinking beer, equally gripped by the music. A mulatta in her forties, with coloured beaded plaits and sheathed in lycra pants straining to contain the excessive poundage of her buttocks, seemed to own the establishment and she stared straight at the African when she saw him come in with a stranger.
“Two lagers and don’t piss around. This guy’s my buddy.”
“I couldn’t care fucking less if he’s your buddy: I just don’t like strangers around here . . .” the mulatta shouted, looking defiantly at the Count.
“Africa, let’s go fucking elsewhere, she can stick her beers up her ass,” reacted the Count, half-turning round to leave, when a voice from behind stopped him in his tracks.
“Hey, friend, not so fast.” The Count looked round. Michael Jordan was now standing next to the African, or at least his double was: a huge, brawny black guy, with a shaved head, wearing the uniform of the Chicago Bulls. “This woman talks a lot of shit.”
“Why all the secrecy, if the whole barrio knows you sell beer?” asked the Count, accepting the freezing beer on offer from Michael Jordan, whose other hand held one for the African.
“I’ll have that lager please,” Juan demanded, smiling.
“So you’re safe to walk the streets?” enquired Michael Jordan, handing it over.
“Next stop is Veneno’s. I’m getting there.”
“Pleased to hear it,” said Michael Jordan, smiling in turn, “you’re ugly enough when alive, dead you’d scare the living daylights . . .” and he flashed the whitest of smiles at the Count.
Three beers on, Mario Conde had explained how rustling and slaughtering cattle worked in the increasingly scalped plains of Matanzas and was himself informed about the spots in the barrio where they sold basketball kit, baseball and football shirts, powdered milk, cooking oil and the site of the best supplied stock of electrical goods in the city, all sourced directly from nearby warehouses in the port. By his fifth he had a pretty accurate idea where and when in the barrio you could get marijuana or pills to pop, and discovered it was possible to buy crack and coke, and what the going rates were for: head-downers specializing in fellatio, slags, who came the cheapest but highly unrecommended, the Juanitas-of-all-trades, ready for anything and down-on-their-luck whores, easy goers who could be hunted down, in the late early hours, sometimes at very reasonable price (though always in dollars), if they were desperate after a night of wasted incursions into city hotels and tourist spots . . . They lived a life that was at once frantic and slow, with time to drift along and time to struggle by, in that ghetto, the streets of which were periodically visited by a couple of police on the beat or a patrol car, as a reminder that the cage doors were always open.
“Let’s eat. I’m ravenous,” suggested the African, and they went back into the noise and the sun.
They crossed filthy streets, each as filthy as the next, until they clambered through a hole in a ramshackle wood and zinc wall that barely hid the ruins of a three-storey building. It now had neither roof nor mezzanine, only a skeletal frame, where small zinc and canvas panels hung, held in place by wire and wooden props, attempting to shelter a few shapeless objects and some huge cardboard boxes.
“The people living there don’t have homes. Most have just arrived from Oriente. They nearly all drive taxi-bikes. They sleep on their bikes, shit on bits of card they throw into the rubbish, and wash when they can,” explained the African.
“And they’re allowed to live there?” the Count ingenuously tried to bring a little logic to bear.
“Every now and then they pull their roofs down and chuck them out, but they’re back within a week. Them or others . . . It’s all about not starving to death . . .”
They walked through the ruins and the African pushed a wooden door and poked his head inside. A few minutes later a mulatto swathed in gold chains appeared astride the doorstep.
“This is my mate, Veneno,” said Juan, turning towards the Count. “And this is my buddy, the Count,” he told Veneno, who looked critically at the stranger and without uttering a word moved a few steps away to the back of the demolished building. Conde couldn’t overhear the conversation between the two men, but he did see Juan take out the wad of banknotes he’d only just handed him and give it to Veneno, who took it but hardly jumped for joy.
Sitting in that clandestine open-air eatery ruled over by Veneno, bent on extracting from the Count every last cent he could, the African ordered the most expensive dishes on offer: lobster enchilado and steak in bread crumbs. When they were on their post-coffee beers, Juan invited Veneno to chat with them for a while and, casually, mentioned a cousin of the Count’s mother who, according to his friend, lived in the barrio.
“Elsa Contreras?” asked Veneno, gulping his beer down. Veneno was a light-skinned, almost white mulatto, keen to show off his prosperity by displaying numerous teeth crowned in eighteen carat metal, three chains with medallions (living in harmony with a couple of coloured bead necklaces), bejewelled rings, two bracelets and a Rolex of similar golden purity that all told must have weighed in at a good four pounds. Such a load of precious metal couldn’t be the fruit of earnings from the culinary delights of that down-atheel eatery and the Count imagined that was only the most visible illicit business Veneno engaged in, intuitions he put to one side to light a cigarette and drink his beer.
“She was a real character. Nobody mentioned her much at home though, because she was a whore and danced naked at the Shanghai . . .”
“The girl must be older than an Egyptian mummy, right?” Veneno asked.
“Must be eighty, I reckon, if she’s . . .”
“I really haven’t a clue. If you’re in the barrio a few days, I’ll find out.”
“Great. I’d like to pay her a visit . . .” said the Count, pointing a hand and three erect fingers at the waiter.
That night, while he scrubbed himself in the shower, trying to wash off the filth, infamy and sordidity in which he’d spent one of the strangest days of his life, Mario Conde again wondered how a perverted universe like that could possibly exist in the heart of Havana: a place where people lived who’d been born at the same time, in the same city, as he, but who seemed alien, almost unreal in their level of degeneracy. The experiences he’d suffered in a few hours surpassed his wildest predictions and he now wondered if he’d have it in him to continue his nauseating quest.
After eating and drinking several beers at Veneno’s, the African demanded a second advance of 300 pesos that, so he said, were indispensable if the search was to go on. Trapped in a net of his own making, the Count separated out a couple of twenty notes and handed his material and spiritual guide the three hundred pesos he had left.
“Let me tell you something,” he said, looking him in the eye, and flourishing the money in one hand. “I’m no longer police, but I’ve got lots of friends in the force. So I don’t think it would be a good idea to try to trick me. I can still fry you alive, right?”
“Hell, Conde, I wouldn’t ever . . .”
“So make sure you don’t ever,” he warned, handing over the notes. “Remember I’ll always track you down.”
Cheered up by the beers drunk and the sum received, Juan asked him to wait on a street corner and went into an even gloomier tenement than the one with Michael Jordan’s clandestine bar. He emerged five minutes later, smiling cheerfully, and suggested the Count accompany him to the roof terrace, so he could show him a panoramic view of the barrio.
Between two uncovered water tanks and sad clotheslines full of patched up clothes, Conde peered out over the eaves to get a prime view of the twilight hustle and bustle in the barrio. He calculated the sea was in front, behind various dark concrete blocks, past the blackened towers of the power station, so near, yet so alien to that place. Lost in geographical and philosophical musings, he snapped back to reality summoned by the sweetish smell of burning grass, and turned round to find Juan the African, leaning back on one of the tanks inhaling from a spindly joint.
“Now I’ll see if you really are police. Go one, have a drag,” Juan threatened, holding out a roll of paper.
“I don’t care a fuck what you think. I’m not going to smoke.”
“And if I get in a mess, are you going to put the police on to me?”
“They already are, and have been from the day you were born. I’m the one they’ll piss on if they see me with you . . .”
“You never smoked?” the African asked, looking happy, waving the joint, and broadening his smile when he saw the Count shake his head. “I’ve smoked from the age of thirteen. And whenever I can I smoke here, by myself, so I really enjoy my drag . . . Look, this is my little hidey hole. I’ve hid things here ever since I was a kid,” he said, showing the Count how he put two other joints in a little nylon bag, that he lowered down an air vent protruding by the side of one of the water tanks.
“Who you hiding them from?” enquired the Count, flopping down against the other tank.
The African took a heavy drag.
“I owe five thousand pesos. I’m a loser, right? I always get bad luck. I got involved in a spot of business, took out an advance and gave it my best . . .”
“A five thou advance?” the Count thought aloud. “That was drugs or a contract killing . . . Right?”
“Don’t get too nosy,” and the African started smoking again, almost burning his fingers.
“Was the business with Veneno?”
Juan smiled and shook his head.
“No, Veneno was the middleman. The business was with other guys. Not from the barrio. Real hard guys who don’t get their hands dirty for four pesos. They handle quantities of loot that would make you shit your pants.”
“Did you meet them?”
“Negative. You can’t get to see them just like that. They’re people who’ve got it here,” and he tapped his temple, indicating intelligence. “They’re whites who are OK, well set up and only doing the big stuff.”
“Sounds like mafia?”
“Well, what do you think?” Juan took a last drag and ditched his tiny fag end.
“Were you told to kill someone, Juan?” the Count asked again, afraid he’d say yes.
“I told you not to ask so many questions. End of interrogation . . . Now let me enjoy the moment, man.”
Conde got up and looked for the best angle from which to survey calle Esperanza. On a neighbouring terrace he spotted a hut probably built for pigeon-rearing, behind which some fifteen-year olds were noisily taking turns with binoculars, masturbating all the time, watching a scene the Count also wanted an eyeful of.
When night started to fall, the African, now very high and uninhibited, suggested going for a walk, to see what was on, and the Count, not imagining what he was letting himself in for, accepted his invitation. They went up Esperanza, towards the edge of the barrio, and along one of the alleys that cut across, its name hidden under tons of historic grime, where his companion suggested they wait a minute, ostensibly, to test the temperature. Several people greeted the African, two stopped to have a chat, and walked off seemingly convinced the Count was an expert cattle slaughterer, a cousin of the African’s ex from the countryside and a friend even of Veneno and Michael Jordan. Just after eight, the African bought a pack of cigarettes from a street-seller and offered the Count one.
“You’ll smoke one of these, won’t you? Now you see how I share my money around,” he said, smiling, and added: “and I’ll now invite you to lay some whores.”
Taken aback, Conde was at a loss for what to reply. In an existence entirely spent between the island’s four walls, he’d joined in the most diverse moral and physical adventures, some in, others out of the police, some drunk and others horribly sober. He’d never before been invited to have sex you paid for and he was shocked to feel doubt impishly coursing through his veins and wondered whether he might not like to try that for once.