Havana Black (13 page)

“You know, my dear boy, as far as I am aware there are three that could submerge in pesos whoever owns them. But I don't think they exist any longer, because some people who left, rather than abandon their possessions, preferred to hide or set fire to them. That was what Serafín Alderete did, the man who owned half Varadero, when he set fire to guess what: to a Titian . . . You know, just the thought gives me the shakes,” and to exorcize his trembles he downed his rum in one gulp. “Poor imbecile. Well, as I was saying, apart from that Matisse I still have to see to believe, there are three other works on which silence descended and that must now be worth several millions, with the added bonus of the mystery of their disappearance thirty years ago. These eyes of mine saw one when it was still a sketch, a table by Lam. You're familiar with
The Chair
, I expect? Well, Lam was working on a diptych, which was that chair and a table, on which he was going to paint a kind of ‘active' still life, as he put it to me. But as Chinese Lam was always hungrier than a church mouse, when he finished
The Chair
he sold it to the Escarpentiers, I think for three hundred pesos. We never knew the exact sum, because the Escarpentiers never let on and Lam forgot within the week, after eating away half the money and drinking the other half with his friends, and owing another half to several individuals . . . And that was when he began to work on the sketch of the table, which was going to be better than the famous chair. I know he finished it, but Lam never said where that painting went. Nobody saw it in a finished state, but I can assure you it exists, although Lou Lam, his widow, told me the last time she was in Cuba that he never finished it. But, believe me, for I know more than that French girl:
The Table
exists . . . The other is a Cézanne owned by the family of the
marquesses of Jaruco. I never saw it, but María Zambrano did when she once went to their house and she told me about it: Mariita said it was a Normandy landscape, with a lake reflecting the surrounding trees. In '51 they announced the theft of the painting and no more was ever heard of it, and the fact is it's not in any known museum or private collection anywhere in the world. Can you imagine, my dear boy, a Cézanne gone missing? And the third is a blue-period Picasso owned by a family in Cerro because Alfonso Hernández Catá gave it to them. The gossip is that when Picasso still gave drawings away as presents, he gave it to Hernández Catá in Paris and that Alfonso, on one of his trips to Cuba, had an old man's affair with the daughter of the household and to show them he was a true gentleman, he gave her the Picasso. Then, when those people left, a fake Picasso was found in their house, a dreadful copy of the supposed original: the strange thing is that those people, who still live in Miami, never sold the picture and have never exhibited it. My brother, the one who lives over there, knows them, and he's asked after their Picasso and they always say it was a fake, which is why they left it in Havana, but I don't believe a word. Hernández Catá wasn't a poor fool who'd go giving bad fake Picassos as presents to a woman who had sent him crazy, now was he?”

“No, that doesn't sound right, though you can expect lecherous old men to get up to all manner of tricks, can't you? One final thing: what size were those canvases?”

Juan Emilio shut his eyes and the Count thought he was looking at a dead man. But he knew the brain of the apparently deceased man was working overtime. “I'm no lecherous old man, you know . . . Well, the
Lam must be about two and a half yards by two. Yes, more or less. And the Cézanne, from what Mariita Zambrano told me, must be around a yard square. And the Picasso was smaller: forty-five by thirty inches . . .”

The Count calculated the sizes as Friguens gave out the measurements and concluded: “The Picasso and Cézanne can be carried pretty easily. But the Lam is too big.”

“Yes, my dear boy, it's large even when rolled up,” the old journalist agreed and he asked: “Another little tot?”

The Count stood up and looked at his bereft glass. He felt like filling the void, but opted to fly the white flag of alcoholic truce.

“No, Juan Emilio, thanks. I've got to keep a clear head because the plot's still thickening . . . but you're the one who can help me clear a way through . . . But we must go now,” he said, though his last wish was a lament that Friguens hadn't repeated his alcoholic invitation.

 

 

Ever since he'd been promoted to detective, Mario Conde had always avoided that kind of labour: reviewing legal documents, probing archives, checking though papers. Although he often had recourse to investigative routine, his approach was more and more based on hunches, prejudices and intuitions rather than assembling statistics or proceeding to logical conclusions, and that was why he preferred to leave the scientific side of the investigation to his aides. But the rush imposed by the day and a half deadline meant he had to shut himself up with Sergeant Manuel Palacios in that oppressive study in the National Archive and dive in to locate two remote facts: the address of the
García Abreus in Miramar and the existence of the inventory of objects made in that house by the functionaries working for Expropriated Property, who must have included Miguel Forcade. The Cuban itinerary of that Matisse brought by Sánchez Menocal, later purchased by the Acostas de Arriba, and supposedly sold to a Batista minister in 1954, could perhaps be plotted further if it could be proved the work had been in that house in Miramar that Friguens assured him had belonged to the García Abreus, who must have had a good reason not to make their million-dollar acquisition public. Moreover, the Count's inability to visualize the yellow patch the old critic identified as a dog had started to gnaw at him as irritatingly as a nagging suspicion.

“Did you take a good look at the painting, Manolo?”

The Sergeant marked the file he was examining and looked at his boss.

“Fuck, Conde, I looked at it. And I really don't think I like it very much. You can hardly see anything, man.”

“You're an ignorant savage, and insensitive to boot. It's post-impressionist . . . But did you see the dog?”

“The yellow dog?”

“Uh-huh.”

Manolo closed his eyes for a moment, like old Friguens. The Count supposed he must be reviewing the picture mentally, and when he raised his eyelids he said: “No, to be honest, I can't remember.”

The Count sighed and accepted defeat.

“All right, get on, keep looking.”

And they turned to the bundles of documents. It was only at moments like that that the Count longed for the efficiency of computers, which could digest a name – “García Abreu” perhaps – and tell the whole story with photos included. Otherwise, his cybernetic
inadequacies made him think of those machines as an aberration of human intelligence, which had perhaps created in them one of the monsters of its own selfdestruction. The infinite trust placed by people in the electronic reasoning of those insensate gadgets scared him in the end: it was inevitable that if man transferred all his wisdom and analytical ability to those soulless creations such an unnatural act would wreak devastation. Luckily for the Count, the island's chronic underdevelopment and pre-post-modern intellectual stance had vaccinated it against that unstoppable world pandemic. Although, at the end of the day, he thought it wouldn't be a bad idea if the archive did possess a little engine of salvation, which could tell the whole story (canvases included) in response to a single name: Henri Matisse, for example.

“We've got three days' work here,” he declared desperately and lit a cigarette as he stood up. A physical need to flee had hit his stomach, and threatened to drill through.

“You've given up so soon?” Manolo asked with a smile. “You almost lasted an hour . . .”

“The fact is I can't stand it.”

“But I have to . . .?”

The Count took a drag, looked at the bundles, and said: “You shouldn't have to. Nobody should have to . . . but if somebody has to do this shit, I think it's your turn today . . .”

“It always is . . .”

“Don't start, Manolo, I let you off when I can,” he replied, searching his repertory for an excuse that rang with elegant conviction. “Look, while you try and find something, I'll go and see somebody who can help us. I'm not sure how but I think they can. It's ten past eleven? Well, let's meet back at Headquarters at two.
If you don't find anything, I'll tell Colonel Molina to send some people . . . Because I can't get into this, even if they turn me back into an ordinary policeman . . . I just can't: look, I've already got a rash . . .”

 

 

The old avenue down to the port, between the area around the National Archive and the church in Paula, must be the eyesore of Havana, thought the Count, as he always had: it's not even ugly, dirty, disgusting or disagreeable, he listed some adjectives, discarding others: it's alien, he concluded, contemplating it beneath the harsh light of a midday that was summery rather than autumnal, as he walked up the street lined by anti-aesthetic stores on the sea side and unfriendly blocks on the city side: brick and concrete blocks built to the single criterion of utility with no concession to beauty, forming an impenetrable, ochre wall on both sides of the street, covered in rubbish that had fallen from the overflowing bins where a few dogs sniffed, hoping against any real hope. What was terrible was that people, probably too many, inhabited those buildings without balconies, arches or visible columns: their tiny flats designed in function of the rapid pleasures bestowed by prostitutes on passing sailors, port-workers and city dwellers who dared to descend to the last frontier of the old district of San Isidro, in the heart of Apache territory: the “quays”, that place permeated with the whole history of modern pirating, vice and perdition, those dark annals through which the Count felt a longing for the unknown, inherited by way of stories he'd heard from old men who'd swum in those lagoons of bottomless evil. Later, many of those practitioners of sex, morally redeemed and socially recycled, had stayed on to live in rooming-houses, thus
transformed into family residencies by ex-whores who now had children that couldn't always be dubbed sons of whores for reasons of timing: because, in fact, the correct classification depended on the moment they were born: before or after maternal rehabilitation . . . The Count had occasionally visited those sad apartments, marked by a sordid past, which, after one fine morning, thirty years ago, were no longer reached by running water, and now he thought of the additional daily sadness of those people, trapped by the cruel fatalism of town-planners, people who went into the street only to see that same dark, desolate panorama, so far removed from a possible landscape by Matisse or Cézanne, or by chairs and tables tropicalized by Chinese mulatto Wifredo Lam. No, it couldn't be pleasant to spend your life in that area, a bucket of water in each hand and congenital ugliness behind you, he told himself as he walked by the old church of Paula, now marooned in the middle of the street by utilitarian modernity, and turned his prow towards the Alameda in search of a tree able to give shade and a bench from which he could contemplate the sea. Nor was that really the sea he was looking for, since he judged that corner of the bay to be equally sordid, its waters polluted by oil and gases spilled there, a sea without life or waves, but he reaped the reward of a patch of freedom he so desperately needed: an open space to pitch against archival claustrophobia and streets bordered by peeling walls and whorish anecdote.

As he breathed in the putrid stench of the bay, the Count realized why he had fled the Archive where the legal memory of his country rested: he really couldn't care less whether he found anything. An unhealthy apathy had invaded him at the revelation of so much
dead past, so much existence reduced to certificates, declarations, forms, extracts, protocols, registers, in duplicate and even triplicate, emptied of passion and blood: the whole devalued detritus of history without which it wasn't possible to live but with which it was impossible to co-exist. The violent revelation that all was reduced to a piece of paper, numbered and filed according to entries of birth, marriage, divorce and death had been far too apocalyptic an illumination for his spirit on the eve of a birthday and liberation from work: the arid wake of nothingness left by being thirty-six less one day exposed to him the alarming futility of his efforts, as man, as human being, as supposedly intelligent animal. What could he do to hold off that pathetic, dismal destiny, as someone who considered his memory and memory itself to be a most precious gift? Perhaps art, as the unashamedly queer dramatist Alberto Marqués had reminded him recently, might be the remedy most within his grasp in order to escape oblivion. But his art, he knew already, would never enjoy the transcendence able to save him (art and myself, as Martí had cried on a day of despair; either we save each other or go down together). Or perhaps it would? he wondered, remembering that other genius who had committed suicide sure he'd failed artistically and whose novel then won prizes and recognition that were well and truly deserved. No. He'd never write anything like that, he shouldn't delude himself, he concluded, and depressed himself a little bit more before standing up and walking along the old Alameda de Paula, Havana's elegant eighteenth-century promenade, equally devalued by age and neglect, with its leonine fountain distressingly dry, before heading to the still distant mouth of the bay. It was inevitable his steps would take him past that mythical bar in the port,
The Two Brothers, where Andrés had once lived his most memorable bout of drinking, and had learned – then communicated the experience to his friends – that having a whore as a mother doesn't turn the offspring (necessarily) into the son of a whore, despite being born (as he had been) while his progenitor was still on the job . . . There were then more than temporal or labour issues that determined whether you were to be (or not to be) a son of a whore. The Count, on the other hand, had downed so much alcohol on binges others would find unforgettable and that he'd forgotten and blurred in terms of quantity and incident, cause and effect. And something similar happened with the sons of whores: he knew such a quantity that to classify them according to maternal trade and time of birth would have required a real investment in cybernetics. But the bar's façade managed to activate the magnet: Lieutenant Mario Conde looked at the swing doors and found the bar semiabandoned at high noon, occupied by a few drinkers beyond salvation. Yes, he did like that place. But it was the deep, rancid smell of a place dedicated for over fifty years to the sale of alcohol that propelled him remorselessly into the cool, welcoming inner reaches – or at least so he thought – of that dirty, irresistible bar.