Authors: Leonardo Padura
What the fuck am I doing here?. . . Conde stood in the church entrance and took in a far too pleasurable lungful of the damp draught blowing down the aisle of the modest slate and brick building he’d entered for the first time on the day he was baptised. Forty-seven years ago, according to his calculations – a number that never got smaller. Once again he saw in the distance the rather modest high altar and its peaceful image of the clean, pink-cheeked archangel Raphael, a heavenly being immune to the pull of world. The rows of dark pews, empty at that time in the morning, contrasted with the bustle the Count had left behind in the street, populated by its motley crew of churro and pastry sellers, passersby rushing or dawdling, grumpy morning drunkards propping up the bar on the corner and resigned pensioners waiting for the deferred opening of the cafeteria where they would comfort their groaning stomachs.
Over the last ten to twelve years, Conde had begun to visit the local church suspiciously frequently. Although he’d never been to another mass and never contemplated the possibility he might kneel by the confessional, the urge to sit for a few minutes in the deserted temple, freeing up the floodgates of his mind, repaid him with a feeling of calm he argued had nothing in common with mystical or extra-terrestrial spiritual longings apart from its basic function that the Count never used – he never prayed or asked for anything, because he’d forgotten all his prayers and didn’t have anyone to include in them – the church had begun to provide a kind of shelter where time and life lost the savage rhythms of the struggle for daily survival. Nonetheless, his conscience warned that, despite his lack of belief in life after death, a diffuse feeling did exist he’d yet to pin down, that wasn’t sapping his essential atheism but was beginning to entice him into that world and its persistent, magnetic appeal. Conde had come to suspect that the blend of aging and disillusion overwhelming his heart might finally cast him back, or just return him, to the fold of those who find consolation in faith. But the mere thought of that possibility irked him: the Count was a fundamentalist in his loyalties, and converts might be contemptible renegades and traitors, but re-conversion verged on the abominable.
That morning Conde felt full of expectation: he wasn’t entering church in search of passing solace, but to find an unlikely response, quite unrelated to mysteries of transcendence, but rather connected to those of his own past, in the most earthbound of all possible worlds. Consequently, rather than sitting anonymously on one of the pews, he crossed over the central aisle and headed for the sacristy, where he found, as he’d hoped he would, the ever-stalwart figure of octogenarian Padre Mendoza, Bible open at a page of the Apocalypse, searching no doubt for the text for his next sermon.
“Good morning, Padre,” he said, entering the precinct.
“Ready then?” asked the old man without looking up.
“Not yet.”
“Don’t leave it too long,” the priest warned.
“What did we agree? Is or isn’t the Lord’s time infinite?”
“The Lord’s is, your’s isn’t. Nor is mine,” he retorted smiling at the Count.
“Why are you so keen to convert me?” asked the Count.
“Because you’re crying out for it. You insist on not believing but you are somebody who can’t live without belief. All you need is to dare to take the final step.”
Conde had to smile. Could that be true or was the wily old priest merely exercising his sibylline logic?
“I’m not prepared to believe in certain words again. What’s more, you will ask me to do things I can’t and don’t want to do.”
“For example?”
“I’ll tell you when you give me confession,” wriggled the Count and, coming back to earth, he handed the priest a cigarette, as he put another to his own lips. He lit both with his lighter and they were soon enveloped in a cloud of smoke. “I came to see you because I need to find something out and you can perhaps help me . . . How long have you known my family?”
“For fifty-eight years, since the day I first came to this parish. You weren’t even a twinkle in your father’s eye . . . Your Grandfather Rufino, who was even more of an atheist than you, was my first friend around here.”
Conde nodded and again worried about what had really driven him to Padre Mendoza’s door. A skilled hand in these uncomfortable situations, the priest helped him make the next step.
“So what is it you need to know?”
Conde looked him in the eye and felt the trust-suffusing gaze of that old man who’d once placed in his mouth a flour wafer that, he claimed, was the very body of Christ.
“Have you ever heard of a woman called Violeta del Río?”
The priest looked up, perhaps surprised by that unexpected question. He took a couple of drags, then put out the cigarette in the ashtray and returned Conde’s gaze.
“No,” came his firm reply. “Why?”
“The name cropped up yesterday and, for some reason or other, it sounded familiar. I had the feeling that something sleeping had suddenly woken up. But I can’t think where or why . . .”
“Who is this woman?” enquired the priest.
The Count explained, trying to fathom why Violeta del Río seemed both mysterious yet remotely familiar in this perplexing story that made no sense at all.
“How old were you in 1958?” asked the priest, staring at him.
“Three,” the Count replied. “Why?”
The old man pondered for a few seconds. He seemed to be weighing up his responses and which words he should say or keep to himself.
“Your father fell in love with a singer around that time.”
“My father?” rasped the Count. The parish priest’s words clashed with the strict, home-loving image he cherished of his father. “With Violeta del Río?”
“I don’t know what her name was, I never did, so it might have been her or somebody else . . . As far as I knew, it was a platonic affair. But he did fall in love. He heard her sing and became infatuated. I don’t think it went any further. I think . . . She lived in one world and your father in another: she was beyond his grasp, which I think was something he realized from the start. Your mother never found out. What’s more, I didn’t think anyone was in the know, apart from your father and me . . .”
“So why does the name sound familiar?”
“Did he ever mention her to you?”
“I don’t think so. I’m not sure. My father never spoke to me about what he did – you know what he was like.”
Conde tried to reshape the monolithic image he had of his father, with whom he never succeeded in establishing the channels of communication he’d enjoyed with his mother or his grandfather, Rufino the Count. They’d loved each other, certainly, but neither had ever been able to express that affection verbally, and silence governed almost every aspect of their lives. Besides, the idea he might have been chasing after a beautiful singer in bars and cabarets didn’t fit with the image of his father that he clung to.
“Well it must have been him . . . I expect he told you one day and you just forgot. Men in love do do crazy things.”
“I know. Tell me about it. But not him.”
“How can you be so sure? He wasn’t that different.”
“We didn’t speak much.”
“What about Grandfather Rufino? Might he have said something to you?”
“No.”
“I expect he did, he told old Rufino everything and it got through to you and . . .”
“But what was this woman like my father fell for?”
“I haven’t a clue,” smiled the priest, “he just told me he couldn’t get the singer, Violeta or whatever her name was, out of his head. Your father came to see me because he said he was going mad. He told me everything right here. Poor man.”
Conde finally smiled. The image of his father infatuated with a singer of boleros seemed unreal, but it was so human he found it reassuring.
“So my father fell in love with a singer and watered at the mouth at the mere thought of her. And nobody ever found out . . .”
“I did,” the priest corrected him.
“You’re different,” explained Conde.
“Why am I different?”
“Because you are. Otherwise, my father would never have told you.”
“True enough.”
“So why didn’t you ask him what her name was?”
“It wasn’t important. For either of us. It was as if desire had struck like lightening: it came and turned his life upside down. What’s in a name? I just told him to take care, that some changes can’t be reversed,” answered the priest, standing up and grumbling, “Well, I must get ready for mass. Will you be staying? Look, the altar boy’s not come yet . . .”
“I’d fancy myself as an altar boy . . . Keep your hopes up, but don’t get too excited . . . Know what? If I discover my father did in fact fall in love with Violeta del Río I’ll start believing in miracles.”
It was inevitable: as soon as he saw their faces he recalled Rubbish’s early morning jubilation at the feast of leftovers; recalled the worst nights during the Crisis, when his desolate larder forced him to toast old bread and drink glasses of sugared water; he even recalled the old man who several days ago had asked him for two pesos, one peso, anything, to buy something to eat. The now happy but still emaciated faces with which Amalia and Dionisio Ferrero welcomed him told the Count that both had got to the market the previous evening before it closed and, like himself, had feasted on an exceptional banquet that, because they were out of gastric training, had made sleep difficult. Such an irritation, though, would never mar their real satisfaction at feeling stuffed, and safe from the cruel, stabbing pain of hunger. They might well have had some milk with their breakfast that morning and restored a creamy bliss to their gruel, even luxuriated in bread and butter, and drunk proper strong coffee, like the coffee they now offered their buyers, perhaps over-sweetened, as the ex-policeman’s expert palate detected, though it was no doubt genuine, and not the ersatz powder sold in minimal amounts according to a strict ration book.
On arrival, Conde had introduced them to his business partner: flustered by the proximity of the treasure, Yoyi Pigeon hurried through the polite chit-chat and asked to see the library, as if it were a warehouse full of hammers or a container of scissors.
Amalia gave her apologies, because she had to wash and feed her mother, go to the market – did she still have money left? – and do a thousand things in the house, but Dionisio stayed with them in the library, hovering mistrustfully by the door. At the Count’s suggestion, the buyers began their prospecting among the bookshelves located on the right of the room, a less crowded area where the bookcases had been cut back to create space for the ironbarred window overlooking the garden now dedicated to growing vegetables necessary for survival. Following the Count’s plan, they started to make three piles on the desk’s generous surface: books that should never be sold on the market, books of less interest or no interest at all, and books for immediate sale. Conde placed in the first group nineteenth-century Cuban publications that seemed straightforwardly rare and very valuable and a number of European and North American books, including a first edition of Voltaire’s
Candide
that made him sweat excitedly and, especially, exquisite, invaluable original printings of the
Most Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
, by Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, dated 1552, and The Inca’s
La Florida: the History of Hernando de Soto, Governor and Captain-General of the Realm of La Florida and Other Heroic Indian and Spanish Gentlemen
, printed in Lisbon in 1605. But the books that most disturbed the Count were unimaginable treasures from Creole publishing, some of which he now saw and touched for the first time, such as the four volumes of the
Collection of Political, Historical, Scientific and Other Aspects of Life on the Island of Cuba
, by José Antonio Saco, printed in Paris, in 1858;
The First Three Historians of the Island of Cuba: Arrate-Valdés-Urrutia
, printed in three volumes, in Havana, in 1876 and 1877;
The Annals of the Island of Cuba
, by Félix Erenchun, printed in Havana, in 1858, in five hefty tomes;
Land Surveying as Applied to the System of Measuring on the Island of Cuba
, by Don Desiderio Herrera, also printed in Havana, in 1835; the extremely rare 1813 edition of the
History of the Island of Cuba and Especially of Havana
, by Don Antonio José Valdés, one of the first books ever made on the island; and as if handling gold bars, he lifted out the thirteen volumes of the
Physical, Political and Natural History of the Island of Cuba
, by the controversial Ramón de la Sagra, published in Paris between 1842 and 1861 and that, if it was as complete as it appeared to be, should have 281 plates, 150 coloured by hand, which meant they might fetch more than ten thousand dollars even in the most sluggish of markets.
But the mountain that grew most, as if powered by inner volcanic forces, was the one of books that could be sold, which, apart from calming a neurotic Yoyi, worried by the quantity of books the Count considered unsaleable, brought a metallic glint to the eyes of that young man, transformed momentarily into a scavenging hawk.
While they checked the books, constantly surprised by dates and places of publication, caressed gnarled leather or original board spines, lingered occasionally to admire engravings or hand-painted illustrations, Conde felt the sharp pain from the previous day’s hunch return, warning he’d yet to uncover all the surprises that were undoubtedly awaiting him in some corner of that sanctuary. Nonetheless, he couldn’t avoid the uncomfortable truth: that he was introducing chaos into a universe of paper that, for more than forty years, had safely orbited beyond the wrath of time and history, thanks to a simple pledge that had been honoured with iron determination.
When another set of coveted books passed through his hands – as he fingered like a delicate child the now fragile, profusely illustrated volumes of the
Picturesque Stroll Around the Island of Cuba
, printed in 1841 and 1842 – he tried to persuade himself they might herald other surprising encounters, and wondered if his hunch related to the palpable possibility he was going to scale the heights all specialists in the trade dreamed of: the discovery of the unimaginable. Perhaps among those volumes lurked one that pre-dated
The General Tariff for the Price of Medicines
, the flimsy pamphlet published by Carlos Habre in Havana in 1723 and considered to be the first-born child of Cuban typography; might he find slumbering there with one eye half open the original parchment manuscripts to prove that the Gaelic writings of the mythical Ossian were awesomely genuine?; or the gold plaques etched with hieroglyphics of the Book of the Mormons, never seen by anyone after Joseph Smith found and translated them – with indispensable divine help – only for an angel to pick them up and return them immediately to heaven, according to every account? Or
The Mirror of Patience
that had never been described, let alone touched, although it supposedly marked the birth of poetry on Cuban themes in 1608? Its appearance would end once and for all the debate raging over the clever forgery or authenticity of an epic poem peopled with satyrs, fauns, wood folk, pure, limpid, frolicking naiads and napeas, enjoying life between Cuban streams and forests despite the island’s perennial heat waves.