Havana Fever (23 page)

I hope you enjoy a lovely end to the year. We’ve experienced twelve wretched months, with all manner of misfortune, exacerbated by your being so far away for more than three months now. I hope these festivities and holy celebrations bring a little peace to your soul and that you have a happy respite. In my solitude, I console myself as ever with the idea that we will soon be into another year, and that it will be a year to favour us all.

I really hope you are very happy, as happy as one can be, because I love you . . .

Your Nena

One of the blessings Mario Conde never ceased to be thankful for was the fact he had three or four good friends. The almost fifty years spent in this world had taught him, sometimes perversely, that few states are as fragile as the state of friendship, and hence he fiercely protected his many layered camaraderie with Skinny Carlos, Candito and Rabbit, because he considered it to be one of his most precious gifts from life. Several years earlier, Andrés’s departure to the United States had provoked a sense of desertion among the remaining friends, but, at the same time, it had had the beneficial secondary effect of bringing them closer together, welding their connections, making them more tolerant of each other and transforming them into life members of the party of eternal friendship.

The permanent threat represented by Carlos’s physical deterioration meant the Count never failed to safeguard the time he spent near his old friend, dedicating all the hours he could to him, aware it was the best way to act in preparation for a future emptiness, the arrival of which drew nearer by the day.

In spite of Carlos’s insistence that his friend should set time aside to write the stories he invented and frequently promised to put on paper, the Count felt strangely fulfilled when he spent his evenings and nights in lethargic conversations meandering through the unpredictable labyrinths of memory, obstinately chasing a no doubt imaginary state of grace they dredged up from a rosetinted past, spurred on by dreams, projects and desires reality had crushed long ago. In these repetitive exchanges, refusing to discover anything new, they allowed themselves to be swept along by the illusion they’d once been really happy, and while they spoke, drank and reminisced, put despair to one side and resurrected the happiest moments from their sad lives.

That night the Count lamented Rabbit’s absence, then started to tell Carlos and Candito about the recent events he’d been implicated in and his corrosive reflections on the duties of a policeman that had come to him when he was being put on file. He concluded by telling them of the decision he’d taken that afternoon after the conversation with Silvano Quintero: to start searching for the once famous Lotus Flower, real name Elsa Contreras, about whose existence the journalist had received some vague but reliable information about ten years ago.

“So, after all that, you’re back to being a policeman, but on false pretences?” smiled Carlos as he poured himself a shot of the genuine rum they could now drink thanks to the Count’s economic good health.

“Ironies of destiny, as a good bolero might say. Although you said it: on false pretences.”

“Do you want me to help you look for her?” Candito ventured, and the Count shook his head.

“No, not now. I might need you to give me a hand later, but I’d rather start off by myself. I don’t want to kick up any fuss and frighten her off.”

“And do you really think that business is connected to what’s just happened?” enquired Carlos.

“How the hell should I know, Skinny? I’d certainly like to find out what happened to Violeta del Río. Yesterday I promised to forget her, but now she won’t budge from here . . .” and he hit his forehead with the palm of his hand, “at least until I know why the fuck she committed suicide. Or had it committed for her . . .”

“You’ve got it bad,” said Candito and the Count nodded vigorously, weighing up if that was the moment to relate the strange story of his father’s platonic love affair. But he opted to keep that under wraps.

“From the minute I first saw that picture something strange happened: it was as if I’d once known something about her and had forgotten whatever it was. I don’t know where the idea came from, but if I find out what happened to her, I’ll probably discover why I had that feeling . . . Later on, when I heard the record, she really did start to complicate things.”

“I’d liked to have seen her sing as well. Nobody sings like that nowadays, do they?” asked Carlos.

“Maybe it’s because we’ve spent the last twenty years listening to the same old singers?” asked Candito.

“Twenty?” reflected the Count. “You mean thirty plus . . . Fuck, you know, we’re just a bunch of old farts.”

“Do you remember, Conde, when they shut the clubs and cabarets because they said they were dens of vice and relics of the past?” recalled Carlos.

“And as a reward they sent us to cut cane in the harvest in 1970. All that sugar that was going to save us from underdevelopment at a stroke,” Candito remembered. “I was cutting cane for four months, every single day God brought.”

“I sometimes think . . . How many things did they take away, ban, refuse us for years in order to catapult us into the future and make us better?”

“A hell of a lot,” declared Carlos.

“And are we any better for it?” enquired Red Candito.

“We’re different: are we three-legged or one-legged? I’m not exactly sure . . . The worse thing was we weren’t allowed the chance to live to the rhythms people were enjoying on the rest of the planet. To protect us . . .”

“Do you know what most pisses me off?” Rabbit interrupted, sticking his teeth round the door. “They killed dead our dream of going to Paris at the age of twenty, which is the right time to go to Paris . . . Now they can stick Paris up their asses and Brussels too, if there’s room.”

“What kept you, Rabbit?” the Count welcomed him, handing him the bottle of rum, after he’d helped himself.

“All the time, day in, day out we’ve been living out our responsibility for this moment in history. They were bent on forcing us to be better,” said Rabbit, but the Count shook his head, hardly able to restrain himself.

“And why do so many young people now want to be rastas, rockers, rappers and even Muslims, and dress up like clowns, abuse themselves putting rings everywhere and even tattooing their eyelids? Why do so many do the hardest drugs, why do so many become whores, pimps, and transvestites, and wear crucifixes and voodoo necklaces though they don’t even believe in their own fucking mothers? Why do so many cynics swear one thing and believe another, and why do so many live by thinking up what they can steal to get money so they don’t work themselves to death? Why do so many just want to leave the island?”

“I have a name for that,” the group’s historian picked up the baton: “historical exhaustion. After being so exceptional, so historical and so transcendent, people get tired and want a bit of normality. As they can’t do that, they decide to be abnormal. They want to be like other people, not like themselves, that’s why they are rastas, rappers or whatever, and drug themselves up to the eyeballs . . . They don’t want to belong, don’t want to be forced to be good. Above all they don’t want to be like us, their fathers, a load of failed shits . . .”

“These aren’t the ones that piss me off most,” the Count reflected. “The ones who make me want to vomit are those who look perfect and trustworthy but are in fact a bunch of opportunists.”

Rabbit nodded and sipped on his rum. Something prickly and sour refused to go down his throat.

“Have you ever considered what kind of place we were lucky enough to be born in? Have you or haven’t you?” he waited for an answer that never came and spelt it out. “Well, you should. This is a country pre-destined to exaggeration. Christopher Columbus started the rot, when he said that this was the most beautiful land ever seen by man and all that jazz. Then we had the geographical, historical misfortune, to be where we were when we were, and the bliss or bad luck to be like we are. And you see, there was even a time when we produced more wealth than this island needed and we thought we were wealthy. Aside from that considerable misconception, we have produced more geniuses per inhabitant and square yard than we had a right to and long thought we were better, more intelligent, stronger . . . This exaggeration is also our greatest burden: it threw us into the midst of history. Remember how Martí wanted to put the whole world to rights from here, the whole world mind you, the entire planet as if he’d got his hands on the blasted lever Archimedes was after. And you can see the consequences . . . A decent sense of history and shocking memory, lethargy and predestination, grandeur and frivolity, idealism and pragmatism, as if balancing out virtues and defects, right? But exhaustion follows all that. Exhaustion at being so historic and so predestined.”

“Historical exhaustion,” the Count savoured Rabbit’s definition, downed his rum and looked at his friends, model sufferers from acquired historical exhaustion syndrome: Skinny who was no longer skinny, his spine destroyed in a war, that was of course historic, but about which nobody now spoke; a gawky Rabbit, his increasingly long teeth sticking our from a skull much in evidence, still able to theorize on insular exaggeration but who’d never written any of the history books he’d dreamt of writing; Red Candito, historically anchored in the noisy tenement where he’d been born, going hungry ever since he gave up his countless illicit endeavours and insisted on looking for transcendental answers in a chronicle written 2,000 years ago, and which spoke of an apocalypse bristling with terrible punishments for all those who didn’t deliver their soul up to the Saviour. And finally, how could the absent presence, Andrés, possibly have concluded that to erase his nostalgia and mock his historic fatigue, it was best never to return to the island? Or even see another baseball game in the Havana stadium? Or even come to a drinks, music and conversation session with those friends, who, in spite of their mutilations, frustrations, beliefs and disbeliefs, historic exhaustion and physical and intellectual hunger, never said no to a night of shared evocations, vaguely but latently aware that if they had given up that friendship they’d perhaps have forgotten what living was a long time ago?

“Life was passing us by on all sides,” said Rabbit, “and to protect us they gave us blinkers. Like mules. We should only look ahead and stride towards the shining future awaiting us at the end of history and, obviously, we weren’t allowed to get tired on that road. Our only problem was that the future was very far off and the path went uphill and was full of sacrifices, prohibitions, denials and privations. The more we advanced, the steeper the slope and more distant the shining future, which was fading quickly anyway. The bastard had run out of petrol. I sometimes think they dazzled us with all that glare and we walked past the future and didn’t even see it . . . Now we’re halfway round the track and are going blind, as well as bald and cirrhotic, and there’s not even all that much we want to see anymore.”

Listening to Rabbit, the Count felt the bittersweet taste of immeasurable sadness congeal in his mouth.

“You can always seek out God,” Candito pronounced.

“Nobody’s up there looking after us, Red. We’re completely on our own,” the Count contradicted him.

“Don’t you believe in miracles?”

“Not any more. But I do trust in my hunches. And that’s why I won’t fail to find out what happened to Violeta del Río,” concluded the Count, whose mouth was then overwhelmed by the feeling he still lacked a really plausible motive, and so he spelt out the first that came to his lips. “I want to find out why history swallowed her up.”

Not worried why he was doing so – and not really interested in finding out – perhaps driven by a mixture of alcohol and the persistent allure of certain phantoms and fascinations, Conde hailed a taxi going in the opposite direction to his house and asked the driver to take him to the corner of Twenty-Third and L, or any other street corner that might encompass the same evocative ciphers. He was pleased to see that even at that late, late hour of the night, the fast-beating heart of the city was still packed with spaced-out youths and adults trawling for illicit offerings. In the doorway and vicinity of the cinema, and on the other side of the street, next to the iron rails protecting the ice creamery, an insomniac crowd slipped past under the sleepy gaze of various pairs of policemen. Gays of every tendency and category, rockers with no stage or music, savage hunters and huntresses of foreigners and dollars, bored birds of the night with one, two and even three hidden agendas seemed anchored to that spot, not fearing the imminent dawn, as if hoping something out of the blue might drag them down the street, perhaps out to sea, or maybe up into the sky.

The new life re-surfacing in the city, after the deep lethargy it was plunged into by the Crisis’s darkest years, had a pace and density the ex-policeman couldn’t pin down. Rappers and rastas, prostitutes and drug addicts, the newly rich and newly poor were redrawing the geography of the city, now stratified according to the number of dollars possessed and which was beginning to seem more normal, although it always made him wonder which was for real, the life he’d known in his youth, or the one he was now contemplating in his mature, illusion-free years

Conde wasn’t particularly looking for a right answer, and moved away from the night-time bustle, taking to the slope of La Rampa. The chronological boundaries of nostalgia were set way beyond his most distant memory, and so he tried to find the still visible traces of a dazzling, perverted city, a distant planet, familiar from hearsay, heard on forgotten records, discovered in infinite reading, always appearing, peopled with lights, clubs, cabarets, tunes and characters he now knew Violeta del Río must have been familiar with almost fifty years ago, her hopes soaring, in search of her place in the sun.