Havana Fever (6 page)

“Well, meet the Lady of Hot Nights in Víbora,” quipped the Count.

“You look great, Mum,” came the compliment from Skinny, who immediately asked: “Hey, you ever heard of Violeta del Río, a bolero singer from the fifties?”

Josefina lifted a small handkerchief to her upper lip.

“No, I can’t say . . .”

“What did I tell you, Conde? She was a complete unknown . . .”

“Yes, probably... But I’ve heard of her somewhere or other . . .” and added: “Let’s go out the front, Tinguaro will be here any minute now.”

“Tinguaro?” asked Carlos.

“Yeah, the guy who used to be in the police. He’s set up as a cab driver and sells Montecristo, Cohiba and Rey del Mundo cigars, just the same or even better than those from the factory, and he hires out a bunch of painters who leave houses, blocks or mausolea gleaming like new pins. And he finds them their paint!”

2
^nd
October

My dear:

My only hope is that when this letter reaches you it finds you well, so far from here and yet so near. So near to my heart and yet so far from my hands that can’t reach you, although every heartbeat feels you, as if you were here, next to my bosom, which you should never have forsaken.

You cannot imagine what these days without sight of you have meant, made worse by my inability to calculate how long our separation will last. Every hour, every minute I think about you, because everything here brings you to mind, everything exists because you existed and gave your breath to everything, to everybody, but particularly to me.

When it’s still hot, and I go into the garden in search of a cool breeze and see the foliage of the trees you planted over the years, I feel that that breath of air, filtered through the sharp rustling leaves of the mamey, the whispering custard apple and faintly tinkling leaves of the old ceiba (your ceiba, do you remember how joyfully you greeted its first flowers every summer?), is a part of you coming to me from distant parts, and I dream that perhaps a particle of that air was once inside you and, summoned by my solitude, flew across the sea to console and nourish me and keep me alive for you.

My love, how are you? How do you feel? How have you spent your first days over there? Have you seen friends and colleagues? I know that place never appealed, that you preferred life here, but if you can think of this absence as a parenthesis in your life, the distance may seem more tolerable, and you will connect better with me. (For I like to think this time I spend here will be just that: a parenthesis in a passionate love that has been painfully truncated, but which will emerge strengthened and go on to a better finale). Don’t you agree?

There is little to report from here. Paralysed as I am, I feel I have become the enemy of time that refuses to pass, that prolongs every hour and forces me to look at my diary several times a day, as if I could find the answers I crave in its cold numbers. The feeling of immobility is even starker because I have not stepped outside the house since you left. What I need to remember you and feel you close is inside here, while the street is the realm of chaos, oblivion, haste, war on the past and, above all, of people jubilant at the changes, cheerful, ecstatic even at what they are confident will come to them in their naïve excitement, never thinking about the terrible demands the unquestioning faith they now profess will soon impose. My only hope is that, as your father would say, nothing lasts very long in this country: we are inconsistent by nature, and what now seems like a devastating earthquake, will break up tomorrow like a glittering carnival parade.

Worst of all, however, is feeling the emptiness that floats between the walls of this house, dominated by silence ever since the children stopped chattering and by the absence of your spirit that distinguished this space which seems huge, where I feel disoriented by so many absences.

I’ve had little recent news of your son. I know he’s in some out-of-theway corner of the island, making the most of his revolutionary exploits. I imagine him lean and happy, for he is forging his life and his desires with that character of steel he inherited from your blood. On the other hand, your daughter seems withdrawn, as if she were sad, and with good reason, because she always felt closer to the family (despite the respect your aloofness inspired in her) and your departure has snatched from her any hope of one day enjoying what should be hers by natural right. (Forgive me, I had to say this.) Luckily, she spends most of the day working, which makes me think that is how she tries to distance herself from her home: by losing herself in her own activities, as if she wanted to flee from something that was persecuting her, by surrendering herself (she too!) to the new life in a country where everything seems set on change, beginning with the people.

So, when will you ring me? I know that after the nationalization of the telephone company communications are going from bad to worse, but you ought to make the effort: you’re not like your grandfather. I’ll always remember him, the poor old man who always thought talking down a phone to a person who was far away was so unreal he refused to use the telephone to the day he died and forbad his friends from ringing him. I don’t think it is such an effort for you. The main thing is that you should want to do so. As you know, there is no way I can call you, since I don’t know which number to ring to get you. I so want to hear your voice!

That’s enough for now. I only wanted to tell you a little about myself and my feelings . . . Give the children a kiss on my behalf and keep reminding them how much I love them. Also greetings to your sister and brother-in-law, tell them to be themselves, and that they should write to me some time. As for you, please don’t forget me: write to me, ring me, or at least remember me, just a little . . . Because I shall always, always love you . . .

Your Nena

Mario Conde’s stomach was out of training and had to make a special effort to accommodate and then digest the astonishing nutritional challenge its inconsiderate owner now inflicted on it. While Josefina settled for a grilled fish fillet, a bright and cheerful green salad and a dish of almond ice cream for dessert, Conde and Skinny began the assault on their physical and intellectual, historical and contemporary hungers, with a cocktail of oysters and prawns, destined to subvert their palate with fishy flavours long lost in the crevices of memory. The former then prepared to disappear down a juicy path of meat and potatoes in purest Cuban style, while the latter flung himself into a spicy well of broth with chickpeas that made him sweat from every single one of his multitude of pores. Then, as their bodies warmed to the task, like long-distance runners getting into their best stride, they competed to see who could eat the most rice and chicken, served in ridiculous portions – of both rice and chicken, a friendly gesture from the management – before finishing off with a shared ham pizza that Skinny insisted on ordering and stuffing into a remaining space, which proclaimed its hatred of a vacuum. For their epilogue they chose fritters, drenched in fruit juices, with a
parfum
of aniseed and lime peel, and neither could refuse, being such gentlemen in the circumstances, a taste of the rice and milk infused with cinnamon that Fatman Contreras himself prepared – a recipe of his great-grandmother’s, an Andalusian whore who liked the good life and died at the ripe old age of eighty-eight, puffing on her cigar and sipping a shot of rum. They’d downed two bottles of Chilean Concha y Toro before getting to the desserts and then ordered two double shots of vintage rum to wipe their chops clean and accompany their coffees – doubles that quadrupled when the friends lit up the delicately layered cigars presented to them by the ex-policeman who’d converted to gourmet living and who flopped his voluminous mass of humanity down between them and Tinguaro at the end of the night, so they could toast one another with a glass of chilled Fra Angelico. The Count wasn’t taken aback by the bill for seven hundred and eighty pesos, and when he’d paid Tinguaro his hundred pesos, he happily brought to a close what had been one of his most profitable days ever with a net loss of three hundred and eighty pesos and the soothing feeling that he might be able to pass through the eye of a needle, because he’d never be a rich man . . .

Tossing in his bed, unable to read, Conde only got to sleep around four, and in the meantime, as he belched and sweated uncomfortably, his retina was revisited time and again by the almost irritatingly persistent image of Violeta del Río, a recent revelation to him and news to Fatman Contreras too. Perhaps his stubborn detective instincts had also been aroused by the surfeit and had forced him to notice a few incongruities in his find. The first and most perturbing was the strange decision, apparently unmotivated, at least as far as
Vanidades
was concerned, which led that “beautiful and refined” woman, “at the pinnacle of her career” to abandon the stage and, by all accounts, vanish so definitively that nothing was ever heard of her again. Might she have left the island, like so many thousands of Cubans around that time? The Count reckoned it was the most likely explanation, although he didn’t discount the possibility she might still be living in Cuba, under her real name – Lucía, Lourdes, or Teresa, because nobody could, in real life, be a Violeta del Río – as a private individual, stripped of the lamé, limelight and microphones. It wasn’t a wild conclusion to draw: in years of such radical change in the lives of the country and its inhabitants, there’d been an infinite number of political, ethical, religious, professional, economic and even sporting transformations: Grandfather Rufino had suffered the banning of cockfights as if it were a prison sentence and the Count’s own father didn’t see another game of baseball to the day he died, because he couldn’t imagine or accept that the blue Almendares club had ceased to exist, a club he’d fanatically supported for every minute of the first thirty-five years of his existence . . . But no artist can stop being an artist from one day to the next, just like that – just as no policeman could totally cease to be one, however long he’d been off duty – something Mario Conde knew for a fact. Maybe that was why he was so intrigued by that press-cutting, slumbering inside a cookbook nobody had opened in years, as witnessed by its state of preservation as well as the fact, endorsed by history, that its contents were of no use in a country that had been on food rationing for almost half a century. Hare stew with sultanas? Eggs in foie gras aspic? Foyot veal cutlets? . . . You must be joking! Conde conjectured that the book must have belonged to the wife of Alcides Montes de Oca, although he thought he remembered that she’d died around 1956, the year the book of recipes was published. If, as Amalia Ferrero asserted, her brother Dionisio stopped living with them when the revolution was victorious, it was unlikely he could have left a cutting there which was published in 1960. Five people remained on his list: the deceased Alcides Montes de Oca and his two adolescent children, the aged, now blank-minded Mummy Ferrero and Amalia herself. How could one of them have been involved with a ’50s Havana cabaret singer? The Count couldn’t imagine, but some link must have existed between one of those individuals and the vanished singer of boleros, the seductress who’d been dubbed the Lady of the Night and who beat faintly in some remote cranny of the Count’s memory as a diffuse, almost extinct presence, still able to send out disruptive tremors.

It was gone three a.m. when the Count heard a rather authoritarian scratching on his kitchen door. He knew it was useless to try to ignore it, since stubbornness was the scratcher’s most pronounced trait, so he got up to open the door.

“Hell, Rubbish, what kind of time is this to be coming home?”

On the brink of the advanced age of fourteen, Rubbish retained his streetwise ways intact, and would prowl the barrio every night in search of fresh air, frantic fleas and females on heat. Ever since the Count had brought him home to live with them on that stormy night in 1989, the quarrelsome Maltese had insisted on his freedom, which the Count accepted, seduced by the character of the animal who, alerted by the faint, lingering scent of the evening’s feast on his clothes, now barked twice, demanding to be fed.

“All right, all right, grub’s up.”

Conde fetched a metal tray from the terrace. He opened the bag of leftovers from the
paladar
and tipped part of the contents onto the tray.

“But you eat it outside . . .” the Count warned, taking the tray out on the terrace. “We’ll talk tomorrow, because this has got to stop . . .”

Rubbish barked twice again, and wagged his battered tail like a shuttlecock, urging him to get a move on.

Back in bed, Mario Conde smoked a cigarette. With the dark eyes of Violeta del Río floating in his mind, his memory slipping over her thick wavy hair and satin skin, he was finally blessed with sleep and, quite unexpectedly, slept soundly for five hours, feeling swindled when he woke up, because he couldn’t recall a single dream about the beautiful woman sheathed in lamé.