Authors: Leonardo Padura
“You’re crazy,” she said when she assumed he’d finished his tale. “You have to be crazy to get mixed up in a shitty barrio like this . . .”
“So you are?. . .”
“What was it you said about your father?”
“I think he once saw Violeta, probably heard her sing and fell in love. He’d listen to her record at night, by himself, in the dark. I think he even mentioned her name to me . . .”
“Violeta was like that,” she said, slowly lifting her right arm to point to a ramshackle sideboard. “The first drawer. A cardboard box.”
Conde obeyed and, under a mountain of pills encapsulated in plastic, phials, syringes and tubes of cream, he saw an eight by twelve-inch cardboard box.
“Take it out and look inside,” she ordered.
Conde took the box out, rested it on the sideboard and lifted the lid. A sheet of stiff white paper filled the box. When Conde extracted the paper, he realized it was a sheet of photographic paper folded in half. Not looking at the elderly lady he unfolded the huge photo and beheld a woman in her twenties, as blonde as blonde could be, a supple, smiling beauty, saved from complete nudity by garlands of gorgeous lotus flowers draped over her pubes and the nipples of her prodigious breasts.
“You’re now looking at Elsa Contreras when she was Havana’s Lotus Flower,” she said, adding, “Look this way: you’re now looking at a half dead crone by the name of Carmen Argüelles.”
16 February
Dear love:
Since I last wrote I have hardly made any headway in my search for a truth I need so badly for my own sake but I keep finding other truths to torment me.
Several days ago I went to see the wretched nosey-parker journalist your friends almost took a hand off. I found an alcoholized human wreck, in a state of permanent fear that he can only throw off by swigging hard liquor. The man refused to tell me anything, but thanks to him I did track down that
bolerista
who once rowed with that woman, and we talked at length about what happened and, though she was a tart from the world of singers and cabaret girls, I would almost say she was genuine. As far as she was concerned, as she said at the outset, her problem with the deceased ended the day they had the row, because she realized she was on to a loser in that war when she knew who the powerful people backing her foe were. But she assured me she got satisfaction from the four things she did say to her hypocritical face about her role as the little innocent. She never went near her again and heard next to nothing about her until she found out about her death several weeks after it happened, on her return from the performances she gave in Mexico. We spoke at length and, when she felt like confiding more, she told me almost casually something I refuse to believe, that only you can deny or endorse. According to her, she backed off from that woman forever because, a few days after they rowed, you went to her house with the black chauffeur you employed towards the end, and told her to keep well away and not to speak to her ever again if she wanted to go on singing and eating. At that moment a friend of hers (as she described him) came out of her bedroom, heard your threats and started to protest, but the black chauffeur, without saying a word, took out a pistol, put it between his eyebrows and, almost immediately, brought the pistol down on his mouth and split his lips. Then, still according to her, you said she was lucky you had come on a peaceful footing, but that they might imagine what a second visit would be like if they decided to declare war or started to talk openly about the fact you’d paid them a visit . . . The singer burst into tears as soon as she’d finished telling that horrible story, and do you know what I told her? I said it was all lies, and left.
Nonetheless, that woman seemed so sincere I am compelled to ask you: did something like that happen? Please tell me it didn’t, and also please tell me that the disappearance of the poor chauffeur you used to conceal our secret wasn’t also the result of actions I’d rather not imagine. Tell me, did you declare war on him when he was foolish enough to blackmail you?
I assume one often pays a very high price to find out a truth. While looking for one that still eludes me, I have come up against something else I would have preferred not to know and it showed me how much I was struggling against the current where you’d put your life after you went crazy over that woman, the cause of my unhappiness . . .
22 February
Dear love:
I was so saddened by my exchange with the singer that I felt I had to speak to your daughter about it and everything else I’d been thinking over recent months. We hadn’t had a conversation of any significance for several weeks, only exchanges on everyday matters, because what with my obsession and increasingly depressed state of mind, and the new responsibilities she had taken on at work, there are days when we only see each other for a few moments, if at all, over breakfast or when she’s swallowing a couple of mouthfuls of something at night.
To my surprise, your daughter seemed delighted to hear the story. She said she wasn’t surprised, she wouldn’t expect any other attitude from you, because you were always selfish, thought only about yourself and used those around you for your own ends: your parents, for their name and prestige, your wife for her money, me for my fidelity . . . On the other hand, you treated her and her brother like strangers despite them being of your blood, as much your children as your others, who you also used to get favours from your parents-in- law with their money and influences. And she added, as if wanting to drive me mad, given I was already a total wreck, that she’d been wondering for some time, and my story was confirmation you had eliminated or ordered that woman be eliminated because of something she asked you for, something you didn’t want to give her or simply because her presence was inconvenient and didn’t fit with your new life; she knew too many things that you preferred to bury, next to her body . . . Your daughter only shut up when I slapped her... But she’d already spat her poison out.
If I’d once suspected she might feel spitefully towards you, I now realize how much she hates you because of the way you denied her everything that belonged to her. It was very unpleasant to face that terrible truth, and I felt guilty that I had been so weak and told her about where she really came from. But you must realize I did so hoping she’d feel proud and confident, although in the end, as you see, I only generated more resentment. A resentment that makes her feel happy, because she possesses one more proof of your real character and, with that proof, the certainty you were the one who ordered that woman be silenced forever.
Do you know what is most painful, most cruel about this terrible revelation? That I now understand that even when I always loved you and dared defy all conventions, even gave you two children, I too was afraid of you and perhaps that’s why I was never determined enough to rebel against the role and fate you moulded for me, while you broke every promise you’d made over the years . . . And even now, I dare write all this only because I know this letter will never reach your hands. In fact, I would never dare to have sent it for two reasons you are well aware of: fear and love. I prefer to think out of love. Out of a love able to forgive everything.
Your Nena
Here you have me now, a human mess, living in this shitty slum, and still thinking life has been generous. Very generous. I’ve been whiplashed, like everyone else, at times viciously, but I’ve seen and enjoyed what others could never dream of, even if they lived two hundred years and didn’t sleep a single night.
Look, when I celebrated my thirteenth birthday, I discovered something that would be my salvation: I had something special, and I told myself: I’m going to use this gift of nature to survive. Go on, take a second look at that photo, a good look . . . Can you feel it? That something’s in my face, my hair, in my firm tits, which were like two apples when I was twelve, and above all down here, between my legs. When I was thirteen, my father died: he fell from a building where he was cleaning windows, and as he didn’t belong to a union and we didn’t have money to hire a lawyer, we didn’t get a single peso in compensation. Not even funeral expenses. My mother, little sister and I lived in a tenement three blocks from here on Indio, and were left totally skint, were almost starving to death, really starving, had nothing to eat: that hunger forced me to stop being a young girl, like that, over night. When I went into the street, men stared at me and some said things, and I thought: If God’s given me this body, the biggest sin I could commit would be to let it die, and let my mum and my sister die . . . I started to lay the Spaniard who owned the room where we lived so he didn’t throw us out, and then it was the turn of the butcher, the owner of the corner store and the baker, and, as it seemed to work well, I went on to the tailor and the furrier. I really never saw or felt it was at all dirty or immoral, because when I did it I felt good: I liked giving men a good time, and thought it was wonderful when they gave me one too. So, as easy as pie and without guilty feelings or any shit like that, because as the wise man said, the one who seemed to know what he was talking about: the best thing about being a whore is that you work on your back in bed and in the worst scenario, if you don’t earn much, at least you get something hot in your belly . . .
By the age of fifteen I knew all there was to know about men, what they need and what you must do to soften them up, what they like and sometimes don’t dare ask for, and most important of all: I learned how to make them think they fuck better than anyone else and make them feel happy when they give you money and things for one little fuck . . . That’s why I told myself, right, you can get more than your food and clothing out of this, you could turn professional and earn real money if you could get to people who pay for a good night between the sheets without protesting. I say this quite brazenly: the least of it was my fantastic body; what decided it was the fact I was more intelligent than most whores. I had a wild animal’s natural intelligence, and realized there were two very dangerous things in this trade: one is to fall in love with a bastard who’ll pimp you for all the money you’ve earned and the other is not to know your limitations, because you need to know that however well you look after yourself, by the age of thirty you’ll be in decline, and what you don’t get by that age you’ll never get. Like most things in life. That was why I started to look for a way to be more than a common whore: I decided to speak to the impresarios who ran the Shanghai and told them I wanted to dance in their shows. The Shanghai had a bad reputation as a clip joint, people said, but the key thing was that every night guys with money went there, high society guys, some on a binge, others who liked to get their thrills looking at naked girls, and I felt I’d catch a good fish there if I worked on it. When the theatre people saw me dance naked, they saw I’d be a star and for a few pesos bought me a birth certificate in the name of Elsa Contreras, that said I was twenty-one, and not just sweet seventeen.
I was dancing within a fortnight and men went crazy: they packed out the theatre to see me, and I met Louis Mallet, a fortyyear old Frenchman, the representative of Panama Pacific, a big shipping line in New Orleans, who also ran a business in Cuba importing wood from Honduras and Guatemala, in partnership with a Cuban, Alcides Montes de Oca. And my life changed, just as my name had changed. Louis and I started seeing each other and within the month he’d rented me a flat near the university, so we had a nice place together. Louis was a good man, affectionate even and never banned me from dancing at the Shanghai. He’d say: you’re an artiste. As he spent three or four months in Cuba and the rest of the time in New Orleans or Guatemala, I used that time and worked extra, but only with people who paid over the odds, and I started to save money, wear expensive clothes, use classy perfumes and my customers got even classier.
But my life really changed in 1955 and I was able to give up the theatre and all that. Louis was in Havana around that time and told me to ask for a week off from the Shanghai, we were going to go to Varadero, because he wanted a rest and to introduce me to some friends who were going to make me a really profitable offer. When we reached Varadero we checked in at a beautiful sea-front hotel, a wooden building straight out of an American movie. During the day we swam on the beach, like a honeymoon couple, and swanned around in a convertible. That night we went for dinner in a big house on the banks of the canal, near the spot where they built the Hotel Kawama, soon after. Alcides Montes de Oca, Louis’s partner, was there, who I’d seen a couple of times before, and a very elegant man with a clown’s face who spoke softly although he never laughed, and turned out to be Meyer Lansky. When it was time to eat, another man, Joe Stasi came along. It was a really boring dinner, because Louis, Alcides, Stasi and Lansky spent the whole time talking about imports and exports, and as Lansky only drank a couple of glasses of Pernod and hated drunks, we hardly saw a drop of wine. Then, when they offered us cognac and coffee on the terrace, opposite the canal, Alcides Montes de Oca finally told me what they wanted me for. They were organizing a scheme to attract millions of American tourists to Cuba and these tourists required four essential items: good hotels, casinos, readily available high quality drugs and young, healthy, elegant, dissolute women. If I accepted, my responsibility would be to work with those women. They were planning special journeys to Havana for extremely wealthy people, celebrities, artists, journalists, and so on, and would treat them all so they felt they’d been to paradise, so they’d spread the good news about holidays in Havana. I had to create the kind of agency with only top-notch girls – none of your average, unsophisticated whores. I’d to choose the best and create a quality service. Sometimes these women wouldn’t only go to bed with their men, they’d also have to accompany them in Havana and needed to know how to behave in a restaurant, cabaret, casino or even at the theatre. The women would be paid a fixed wage, a high wage, whether they had lots or little work, so they weren’t soliciting all over the place. If I accepted, one of Stasi’s men would set up the whole structure: he’d be a kind of accountant-administrator, working with hotels and casinos, and I’d look for the women and be responsible for training them, together with an etiquette expert who’d teach them to behave and dress well. Then I’d deal directly with the girls, be like a manager and get a three per cent cut of whatever the rich and famous lost gambling in casinos, which might be quite a lot . . . Initially, in the three or four months necessary to get the agency up and running, I’d be paid a salary of 500 pesos. 500 pesos! Do you know what 500 pesos meant back then! A small fortune.