Authors: Leonardo Padura
“What about that one?” asked Pigeon, pointing his glass of rum at the volume half hidden under his bag.
“It’s a present for Skinny’s mother. It’s a cookbook I’ve been after for a while.”
The youth swigged his rum and smiled again.
“A cookbook? To cook what? Hey, man, you and your friends are incredible: Skinny, Rabbit, black Candito who’s crazy about Jehova and all that jazz . . . Fuck, they’re like a bunch of men from Mars, I swear. I look at them and wonder what the fuck they stuffed in their heads to make them like that . . .”
Conde took a swig and lit up. He took one of the books and started sandpapering gently along the top edge, to remove any traces of damp or specks of dust.
“They made us believe we were all equal and that the world would be a better place. That it was already better . . .”
“They fooled you, I swear. Everywhere you go some people are less equal than others and the world is going to the dogs. Right here, if you don’t have any green’uns you’re out of the running, and there are people getting rich, and not exactly on the straight and narrow . . .”
Conde nodded, his eyes wandering dreamily in between the trees in the yard.
“It was nice while it lasted.”
“That’s why you’re all so fucked now: too long spent dreaming. What the hell was the point of it all?”
Conde smiled, put the sandpapered book to one side and selected another. He recalled that Yoyi was an avid reader of the sports pages of the dailies, which always went on about winners and losers, the only valid division, he reckoned, for the Earth’s inhabitants.
“So you think we wasted our time and there’s no way out?”
“You wasted your time and half your lives, but there is a way out, Conde: the one you take on behalf of yourself, the people around you, your family and friends. And this isn’t pure selfishness: with this business of mine, not stepping out of my house, sleeping at midday with air-conditioning, and stealing from no one, I earn more money than if I worked for a whole month as an engineer, getting up at six and struggling onto the bus (if the damned bus actually came), eating the slops on offer in the works canteen and putting up with a boss set on clearing up at the expense of everyone else, hoping he’ll get a job that will take him abroad . . . and to score points he makes everyone’s life a misery harping on about coming top of the league, voluntary work and production targets. The name of the game is clear enough, man.”
“You may be right,” allowed the Count, who was perfectly aware of the reality sketched by Pigeon, and blew along the top of the book, signalling he’d cleaned it up.
“The thing is you were a policeman so you believe what’s legal is right. But if people didn’t do business on the sly and wheel and deal, how would they survive? That’s why even God and his next-door neighbour thieve here . . . And some, as you know, are dab hands at it.”
“Yoyi, I left the police more than ten years ago, but I’ve always known how people lived . . . It’s more likely I’m going soft inside because I’m getting old,” Conde picked up the first edition of
The Slave Trader
and put it to one side; he needed to attend to the stitching on the spine. He reached for the next one on the pile, one of the censuses, and started sandpapering gently.
“Well, factor that in . . . you are knocking on,” agreed Pigeon with a smile. “And old age slows you down. OK, I’m going to have a bath, I’m going out on the town tonight with a hot date. Hey, you want me to come with you tomorrow to give that place a look over?”
Conde put the book on the table and gulped down his rum. He thought his answer through.
“All right. There are a lot of books and the two of us can size it up much quicker . . . But get this straight: I found this library, and if you come, I’m the one in charge, get it? I don’t want you doubledealing these poor people . . .”
“Ah, these poor people, is it?” Pigeon stripped off his T-shirt and the Count stared at the thick gold links of the chain, with an enormous medallion of Santa Bárbara, resting on the young lad’s prominent pecs. “Wasn’t the guy a big deal in the army and then in a corporation? Did they tell you why they booted him out and put him on the shit-heap? You really think they’re ‘poor people’? . . . Fine, you’re calling the shots. I’ll swear to that, man.”
“I’ll call you in the morning before I leave home,” the Count stood up, a second cigarette between his lips.
“Say, Conde, what will you do with that money you earned today?” Pigeon asked, smiling as sarcastically as only he knew how.
“Up you get, folks, and put your ration books away. Get ready to live it up . . .” Conde shouted as he walked in the front porch and slapped the palm of his hand against the sturdy bulk of that fine food compendium the mere contents page of which had activated all his hunger-related organs, glands and ducts. As usual, Skinny Carlos’s house was wide open to the world, and as usual, after shouting his welcome greeting, the Count walked in without further ceremony.
“We’re out here,” he heard his friend’s voice when he was already across the dining room and emerging into the yard, shaded by mangos and avocado trees, their trunks swathed in pliant orchids, luxuriating after the recent rain. Carlos and his mother sat there in silence, hanging on the last glimmers of twilight, like shipwrecked survivors from a life that was also closing down on them before any small island could appear on the horizon to come to their rescue.
Conde went over to the old woman, kissed her forehead and was rewarded in kind.
“How are you, Jose?”
“Getting older by the day, Condecito.”
Then he went over to Skinny Carlos’s wheelchair, who hadn’t been skinny for twenty years and whose sickly flab spilled over the sides of that chair he was now condemned to, and with his free hand he pulled his friend’s sweaty mass to his chest.
“What’s new, savage?”
“Nothing changes here, don’t you know?” Carlos replied, twice slapping Conde’s empty stomach which echoed like a drum that wasn’t properly tensed.
Conde sat down in one of the cast-iron chairs, giving a sigh of relief as he did so. He looked at Josefina and Carlos and felt the peace of twilight and the flow of love prompted by those two irreplaceable individuals he’d shared almost all his life with, not to mention most of his dreams and frustrations. From that increasingly remote, unforgettable day when he’d asked Skinny for a penknife to sharpen the point of his pencil, in a classroom in the Víbora Pre-Uni, without making any extra effort, they realized they’d be friends and would start off as such. Since then, fate or destiny had bolted them into an unbreakable relationship when Carlos returned from his short stay in the war in Angola with his spine shattered by a bullet shot from a place and hatred he’d never understood. The irreversible injuries of his friend, who underwent numerous futile acts of surgery, had become a spiritual burden the Count assumed with a painful guilt – Why Carlos? Why him in particular? he’d wondered all those years. Giving his friend companionship and material support had subsequently become one of his missions in life, and during the bleakest years of the Crisis, in the early nineties, when blackouts and shortages dominated their lives, Conde invested every cent he earned in his new profession as a bookseller in the quest for little comforts to make Skinny’s atrophied everyday life tolerable. But in the last three or four years, when immobility, obesity and insane orgies of eating and drinking had clearly begun to endanger Carlos’s life – kidney failure, hardening of the liver and an irregular heartbeat – Conde faced the terrible dilemma of either refusing to collaborate in such self-punishment or, in full knowledge of the outcome, helping his old friend towards the finale he himself tirelessly seemed to be seeking: a dignified termination of a shitty life that had been destroyed forever at the age of twenty-eight. Conscious of the terrible burden he was taking on by embracing the option of militant solidarity, Mario Conde thought it was his duty to be at his friend’s side in life and death, and tried to find the resources and motivation to accelerate as happily as possible, the onset of his longed for liberation, through the slow but sure method of poisoning his bloodstream and lining his arteries with the fat, nicotine and alcohol Carlos ingested in huge amounts.
“What were you going on about just now, Conde?” Skinny asked.
“Didn’t you hear? That’s why you look so out of it . . . I was telling you to sharpen up your incisors; we’re dining out on the town tonight. I’ve booked a table at Contreras’s
paladar
. . .”
“You gone mad?” Carlos looked at him, smiling sheepishly, as if he’d misunderstood yet another of his friend’s bad jokes.
“I earned five hundred pesos today at a stroke. And get this: tomorrow I’ll earn double, triple, quadruple and the day after even more . . . I’m going to be filthy rich, so Yoyi says.”
“You’re a big liar, that’s what you are,” Josefina retorted. “What are you up to now? Who’s ever heard of old books being worth that much?”
“Jose, get your glad rags on, we’ll get a cab . . . Fuck, I mean it! I’m rolling in it . . .” the Count insisted, tapping the top of his trouser pocket.
“Mum, there’s no point trying to argue with this lunatic. Go and spruce yourself up and bring me a shirt,” said Carlos. “I could eat a horse. Anyway, we only live once, so let’s . . .”
“Too true, and, man, am I in the money!” Conde purred, standing up to help Josefina to her feet, who went into the house chuntering to herself.
“Skinny, how old’s your mum?”
“I don’t know . . . Gone seventy, not eighty yet.”
“She’s really getting old on us,” lamented the Count, returning to his chair.
“Change the subject,” insisted Carlos. “Hey, what’s that?” he asked, pointing to the envelope the Count was still gripping.
“Oh, it’s a present for your mother. A book of recipes. They say it’s the best ever published in Cuba. She can’t open it until we’re sat at a table groaning with food, otherwise you’d die of hunger just reading the first recipe . . . That’s why we’re off to Contreras’s
paladar
.”
“Contreras?” Carlos replied thoughtfully. “The fat guy who used to be a policeman?”
“The one and only . . . They gave him six years, he served two, and when he came out he became an entrepreneur. That guy was so streetwise, he must be loaded by now.”
“Conde, have you noticed how many people who used to be in the police or armed forces now do business on the side?”
“A whole heap of them.
C’est la vie
. Almost all of them have sorted out their little escape routes . . . Though today I bumped into a retired army major about to drop dead from hunger . . . You know, the one who sold me the books,” and he added enthusiastically: “Skinny, you’ve got no idea. I’ve found a real gold mine. They’ve got books you can’t put a price to . . . Look at this one: it’s a little treasure, illustrated by Massaguer to boot. We’re off to eat in a minute, so just listen to this.”
Conde risked opening it at the first page and, trying to find the best angle to benefit from the light in the yard and the best distance for his rampant farsightedness, he read out aloud: “
My Pleasure? An indispensable . . . culinary guide.
Under the auspices of the Godmothers of the San Martín and Costales Wards in the General Calixto García University Hospital . . . What do you reckon? It’s a book of delicious recipes, written from the guilty consciences of the Cuban bourgeoisie . . . It’s full of impossible recipes . . .”
“I reckon it’s a tad subversive,” Carlos chimed in.
“If not terrorist.”
The Count casually began to leaf through the book and read aloud, the names of some of the recipes, never going into enough detail to set off the gastric juices, but showing his friend the illustrations by Conrado Massaguer. Presently, between pages 561 and 562, he found a page of newsprint that had been folded in half and, with the care inculcated by his experience as a bookseller and policeman, he carefully extracted it to take a look.
“What have you got there?” enquired Carlos.
Because it had been kept out of the light and air, the magazine page, roughly fifteen by ten inches, had preserved its original light greenish colour. Conde found the name of the publication at the foot of the page:
Vanidades
, May 1960. The facing page advertised new General Electric washing machines on sale in Sears, El Encanto and Flogar. Convinced the paper carried another more substantial message, he opened it out and for the first time looked into the dark eyes of Violeta del Río.
“I’m not sure . . . ‘Violeta del Río says farewell’ . . . Fuck, Skinny, take a look at this woman.”
They’d printed a full-page photograph of Violeta del Río, sheathed in gold lamé – the Count assumed, although he’d never touched lamé – that it fitted her like a snake’s skin. While suggesting the presence of wild breasts, the material also revealed a pair of firm legs and cut back the evidence of forceful thighs opening out from a slim, tempting waistline. Her 1950s-style black, slightly wavy hair cascaded down to her shoulders, framing a smoothskinned face that highlighted her thick, sensual mouth, and eyes that now stared magnetically and vigorously at him.
“Hell, what a specimen!” agreed Skinny. “Who was she?”
“Let me see . . .” and he read, jumping from line to line: “ ‘Violeta del Río . . . the greatest singer of boleros . . . the Lady of the Night . . . revealed at the end of a wonderful performance that it was her last . . . Owner and leading lady at the
Cabaret Parisién
. . . At the pinnacle of her career . . . She had just recorded the promotional single
Be gone from me
, as a taster for her LP
Havana Fever
. . .’ You ever heard of her?”
“No, never,” confessed Skinny. “But you know what those magazines were like. They probably wouldn’t recognize her in her own bathtub but they make out she was the Queen of Sheba.”
“Yeah, probably. But I
have
heard her name somewhere,” responded the Count, not realizing his gaze was still transfixed by the dark eyes of that sultry, exultant woman in her early twenties, her frozen image from long ago still generating real, live heat. Josefina strutted back sporting the dress dotted with tiny flowers that she kept for her most important outings: her periodic visits to the doctor. The old lady had gathered her hair up, painted her lips a faint but shiny colour and now smiled shyly.