Havana Noir (2 page)

INTRODUCTION

A F
ERAL
H
EART

T
o most outsiders, Havana is a tropical wreckage of sin, sex, and noise, a parallel world familiar but exotic—and embargoed enough to serve as a release valve for whatever pulse has been repressed or denied.

Long before the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the United States’ economic blockade (in place since 1962), Havana was the destination of choice for foreigners who wanted to indulge in what was otherwise forbidden to them: mojitos and ménages, miscegenation and revolution. A photo taken in Havana has always authenticated its subject as a rebel and renegade.

Havana has frequently existed only as myth: a garden of delights, a vortex of tarantism, but also—perversely—the capital site of a social experiment in which humans somehow deny the worst of our natures. In this novel narrative, Cuba is mystical: without hatred, ism-free, brave and pure, a stranger to greed and murder.

But Havana—not the tourist’s pleasure dome or the Marxist dream-state, but the Havana where Cubans actually live—is a city of ironic and often agonizing contradiction. Its name means “site of the waters” in the original indigenous tongue, yet there are no beaches. It’s legendary for its defiance, but penury and propaganda have made sycophants of many of its citizens before both local authority and foreign opportunity. Its poverty is crushing, but the ingenuity of its people makes it appear resilient and bountiful.

In the real Havana—the aphotic Havana that never appears in the postcards, tourist guides, or testimonies of either the political left or right—the concept of sin has been banished by the urgency of need. And need inevitably turns the human heart feral. In this Havana, crime and violence, though officially vanquished by revolutionary decree, are wistfully quotidian and vicious.

In the stories of
Havana Noir
, current and former residents of the city—some internationally known, like Leonardo Padura, others undiscovered and startling, like Yohamna Depestre—relate tales of ambiguous moralities, misologistic brutality, collective cruelty, and the damage inured by self-preservation at all costs.

The noir, it seems, may be particularly apt for Havana: Descriptive rather than prescriptive, noirs explore the symptoms of an ailing society but rarely suggest remedies. They are frequently
contestaire
in their unblinking portraits but unnervingly apolitical. Their protagonists are alienated and at risk, caught in ethical quandaries outside of their control, and driven to the very edge.

Perhaps surprisingly, these stories—though fresh and original—have precedent in Cuban literature. And I don’t just mean Padura’s morally conflicted detective fiction of the ’90s, nor the recent novels of Daniel Chavarría and Arnaldo Correa (who’s included here with “Olúo”).

Crime stories, especially those with detective protagonists, try to find order, to right things; noirs wearily revel in the vacuum of values, give in to conflict not as a puzzle to be solved but as a cul-de-sac. Noirs explore and expose but refuse to solve.

As such, the stories in this volume may have more in common with the nihilistic prose of Carlos Montenegro’s 1938 novel
Hombres Sin Mujer
(
Men Without Women
), Lino Novás Calvo’s 1942 psych-thriller
La Noche de Ramón Yendía
(
Ramón Yendía’s Night
), or even Virgilio Piñera’s hellish 1943 poem about national identity, “La Isla en Peso” (“Island Burden”)—all secured within the canon of mainstream Cuban literature—than with what might pass as normative crime fiction, or even the usual noir.

Actually, when a master like Alejo Carpentier produces a suspense story like 1956’s
El Acoso
(
The Chase
), and Eliseo Diego opens his 1946 book of blasters,
Divertimentos
, with a wicked murder story like “Las Hermanas” (“The Sisters”), it’s clear that noir is so bold a streak in Cuban literature that it barely contrasts enough with the mainstream to be recognized as such. And did Reinaldo Arenas ever write anything in which the protagonist—nearly always an alter-ego—wasn’t vehemently alienated and at risk?

In all of
Havana Noir,
there’s only one detective—Alex Abella’s pre-revolutionary Jason Blue—and he’s not even Cuban.

Instead, there are the merciless and doomed young men and women of Michel Encinosa Fú’s “What for, This Burden,” and Yoss’s street toughs, trapped by mediocrity and hopelessness on “The Red Bridge.” These are the children of the Revolution—both the writers and their characters—wandering aimlessly in a post-revolutionary world, a place with no past or future or blame to assign.

Even Padura goes from ambivalent to eerily bleak. “Staring at the Sun” features an irremediable and forceful confrontation instead of the peaceful arrests and conclusions familiar to fans of his Mario Conde novels.

These, however, don’t come close to the chilling amorality of Depestre’s “Abikú” or Mariela Varona Roque’s “The Orchid.”

In the meantime, Cuban-born but U.S.-raised, Carolina García-Aguilera marinates “The Dinner” in a macabre nostalgia that stubbornly underscores what was lost for so many, on and off the island, after the Revolution. Moisés Asís, who left Cuba as an adult, walks an uncertain tightrope in “Murder at 503 La Rosa” and grieves for the greatest loss of all—that of the soul.

Ena Lucía Portela’s “The Last Passenger,” with its deliciously caustic and unreliable narrator, lifts the veil of life in the best and most beautiful country in the world, where there is no crime and no crime report but a constant battle against imperialism and the enemy and…can she trust what she sees and hears on TV, in the courtroom, on the phone, or at the open-air bar across the street from Colón Cemetery? “The truth is, I don’t know what the hell to believe,” says her protagonist, whose mission seems to be to witness.

There are other stories here by writers young and old, established and emerging, male and female, on and off the island, of clear and of dubious sexualities, black and white, and—because it’s Cuba—everything in between.

We begin with Miguel Mejides’s marvelous “Nowhere Man,” which takes place in a beautiful, sinister, and very real Havana. It’s the story of a life, many lives perhaps, in which the possibility of finding happiness is experienced as moments in time to be treasured later, only as memories in the dark, when the final sentence has been pronounced.

Achy Obejas

Havana, Cuba

March 2007

PART I

S
LEEPLESS IN
H
AVANA

NOWHERE MAN

BY
M
IGUEL
M
EJIDES

Old Havana

To the memory of my father

T
here are people who need to go against the grain but I’m not going against anything. Perhaps everything stems from the great handicap which life has given me: I’m cross-eyed. Ever since I’ve been able to reason, since the first time I was able to contemplate my image in a mirror and saw my own eyes, I told myself I was a man meant for silence, for meditation, a man made to work at smiling, fated to take long walks through the city I choose for my solitude.

My mother, thank God, always knew about the shadow of the silent songbird that surrounded me. Likewise, she understood my decision to leave my hometown to go to Havana and find work. I’ve never been able to forget her, bidding me farewell at the train station with her linen handkerchief waving between the smoke and her saintly smile, which never left her, not even in death.

Even though it’s rained a lot these years, until very recently I could still give myself the pleasure of contemplating Havana through the same lens as when I first glimpsed it in January 1990. Back then, Havana still retained that halo of light and mystery. My bus came in on the old central highway, continued past Virgen del Camino, and straight through the disastrous streets of Luyanó. At the end of my journey, I was awed by the statue of Martí in the Plaza de la Revolución and the sparkling Ferris wheel in the amusement park in front of the bus terminal.

I’ll never forget the taxi that took me to Infanta 234; it was a mandarin-colored De Soto, with the coat-of-arms from an ancient Spanish province affixed with the number
13
. The driver was a little old man with an Andalusian accent and a multicolored hat.

“That’s the place.” I remember the stains on his teeth that flashed when he talked. As I paid him, he betrayed a certain anxiety about my eyes. “Buddy, buy yourself some dark glasses,” he told me.

My Aunt Buza welcomed me half-solicitous and a bit taken aback too. She looked at me just like the taxi driver and talked about spells that could cure whatever was wrong with my eyes. Her husband greeted me gruffly and asked me if I knew how to drive. When I said no, he began talking about modern times, how a man of this century must learn how to handle machinery. Later, he coached me about the interview I had scheduled for the following morning.

“Say only what’s necessary, don’t blow your nose, and lie: Say that you know how to drive.”

To this day I have no idea what any of that had to do with the job for which I was interviewing. That night they set me up in a tiny room adjacent to the kitchen whose only charm was a large window looking out at Havana. Everything was so different from my hometown. I was struck by the city’s traffic, by the sea on the horizon which at night I could only imagine, and by Radio Progreso’s building right in front of me, from which flowed the station’s love stories that made my mother sigh. I was in Havana, I told myself, and now I would never leave its flame—which could easily become either pleasure or hell.

But because I was still in a grieving phase—I don’t know if I’ll ever really get over it—the interview was a disaster. At 8 o’clock in the morning, we planted ourselves in front of the manager’s door at the Hotel Nacional. I was so nervous that I told my aunt’s husband I needed to go to the bathroom. He pointed the way, and I found myself in front of a mirror. I noted that I’d never been more cross-eyed. I was afraid my pupils would fall out of their sockets and drop into the bathroom sink.

When I came back, they were already waiting for me. We went into the manager’s office. He was a man in his thirties, with a mole on his nose. He said something about Greek beauty, or Greek ideals of beauty, and that hotels were like the palaces of kings.

“You have to understand, Jerónimo,” he said abruptly.

“Maybe with dark glasses no one will be able to tell,” my aunt’s husband said.

“But he won’t be able to use them at night, and a hotel is a living organism,” the man declared. “If there’s a single alien cell, its beauty is spoiled.”

On the way back, I remembered what the taxi driver had said. I needed to buy myself a pair of dark glasses. My mother had managed to convince her sister to have Jerónimo get me a job interview at the Hotel Nacional, where he’d worked since his youth. But the one thing my mother had not mentioned was my eyes. She had sent photos of me in profile, as if I were the most beautiful boy in the world. Now my eyes were going to force me back to my hometown, they were going to force me to grow old in that part of the world where only a tiny cemetery marks the turn to the single road that connects to Camagüey. “Stay a week if you like, then buy a ticket back,” suggested my Aunt Buza.

“There aren’t any opportunities there,” I said.

“In small towns, people get used to oddities like yours more easily,” she declared.

That same day, in the afternoon, I went out and bought a pair of cheap glasses. I decided to walk all over Havana with my new face.

At 7 the next morning I was already on the street. First, I explored all of El Cerro, then Marianao; by the time I began to stroll by Carlos III, it had been more than a week. I didn’t spend much. I didn’t turn the lamp on at night, I rarely flushed in the bathroom. In the morning I only drank coffee, and when I returned late at night, I ate whatever was left for me on the stove. I had the firm hope of finding work and staying in Havana. But everywhere I went, I was told there were no openings and everyone looked at me funny.

After a month, my aunt’s patience was finally exhausted. I still remember the night I arrived and found nothing to eat for me. Where there had always been a pot, there was just a note telling me they’d bought me a ticket on the next morning’s train. That’s when I knew I was truly alone in Havana.

Without asking questions, I took my suitcase and left. I headed for Prado Boulevard and made myself comfortable on a marble bench in front of the Hotel Sevilla. The laurel trees made a fine roof over my abandoned self. I put the suitcase near my feet and crossed my arms under my neck and settled in to sleep.

I was just drifting off when I heard voices coming from the roots of the laurel trees. It was a debate about the previous Christmas, about curses that had befallen the city.

“Who’s there?” I asked.

I thought about the kinds of dreams hunger provokes. Yet that endless conversation had a strangely calming effect on me. The voices seemed to be coming from a megaphone. Now and again, they were drowned out by a droning laugh.

“Eh!…What are you? Fish? Angels? What?” I pleaded.

I threw myself down at one of the laurel trees and put my ear to its roots, where I could now hear a jazz band, Glenn Miller and his “String of Pearls.” I stayed there a long time, my face resting on the ground. Finally, I heard a bizarre dialogue. “That hive of humanity that lives up there, that Havana that is enslaved by the light, will one day build a monument to our catechistic work, a monument to our galleys which sail the earth’s furrows, a monument to our warehouses chock-full of salt and coffee, cured meat and garlic, brimming with commerce and customer service, filled with the soundtrack of the world’s life.”

It was at that moment that I heard the scraping sound of my suitcase being lifted from the park bench on the Prado.

I saw two people fleeing with it into the night through the street next to the Sevilla. Laughter rose from the bowels of the earth, and I uttered one of those words reserved for when you’re miserable. My voice was completely drowned out by the sound of the jazz band.

I didn’t sleep that night. I spent it running up and down the Prado and Central Park. A lot of people think that if you’re cross-eyed, you see objects differently. But I saw the city as it really was. Even though I’d only seen it for about one month, I could, in an instant, sense danger. There was no light in the public areas. All I could make out was the marquee of the Hotel Inglaterra. The García Lorca Theater seemed like a sylph’s castle. The Payret movie house sign featured Catherine Deneuve. The capitol building was the city’s ultimate reflection. Central Park looked like it does anytime people go out to find the latest gossip. Black guys in colorful shirts looked like they were AWOL from a carnival. Women wearing dresses made by pious seamstresses on Monte Street strolled through the shadows. Sodomites tattooed trees with men’s hearts, and other creatures of the night lost their money on the Chinese lottery.

I was walking through the forbidden city. My hunger chased after the smells, my guts doing somersaults.

A mulatto made me an offer from his selection of sweets: “C’mon, big man, buy a little piece of rum cake.”

“Pain and fate,” I muttered like a fool.

I was thinking about what I’d just said, that phrase that I’d always heard coming from my mother when talking about human travails. Havana was so different from my hometown, the sounds of the night so alien. My hometown didn’t have the nightlife that now spread before me, only a few early commuters taking the train to Camagüey. The great city was like a shop window on display for those who were denied the light of day, creatures who lived in caves in the tenements, in shacks where the daughters’ beauty was discovered too soon by the fathers, shacks where the sky was never seen, where the sun was a curse on the law of switchblades and blood, the law of an Old Havana made for carriages and slaves, for light from bitter firewood, a city still getting used to the workings of the modern era.

In the farthest corner of the park, there was a newsstand with little or no sign of life, a newsstand with an old man selling and buying old magazines: Nat King Cole singing at the Tropicana, Che Guevara with his visionary gaze, Camilo Cienfuegos astride his huge mount, the 1962 missile crisis, Khrushchev with a black showgirl on his arm…People bought the magazines that were the biographies of their souls. And me, I was running from those experiences, from the photos that weren’t of me, and yet were all about me. I wandered aimlessly by the doorways of the tobacco factories, still hearing the echo of the fluttering of leaves from Pinar del Río, the specter of the binnacles whose treasures were Romeo y Julietas, Partagás, Montecristos.

I searched for the Prado again via the sleepy routes of the buildings in ruins, and then, once there, just killed time until it was morning and I had to take my train back to the pastoral world of the provinces, back to my mother, back to the habit of pissing every night at 10 and going to bed, beaten down by obedience and pretense.

I was now standing right in front of the marble bench from which my suitcase had been stolen, the laurel trees placid in the absence of Glenn Miller.

“Get your peanut brittle right here!” chanted a dwarf at the corner of the Hotel Sevilla. He repeated his mantra like a suicide: “Hey, kid, peanut brittle!”

I wanted to tell him I didn’t have one red cent, that I felt like the biggest loser and nothing could save me, except maybe the train, which would take me far away from Havana.

Then the dwarf crossed the street and stood right in front of me, grinning, wearing a corduroy cap, giant shoes, and muslin pants.

“Here,” he said, extending a piece of peanut brittle my way. “It’s on the house. C’mon, c’mon, take it.”

I looked at him and he looked at me.

“Who do you sell to at night?” I asked himy.

“No one. Nighttime’s just fun.”

He left, intoning his chant.

Everyone here’s nuts
, I said to myself, and looked out at the abandoned streets, where the only sound was a distant voice coming from the upper floors of the Sevilla, a woman’s voice wailing because of the loneliness that boleros provoke, then this was followed by quieter words of comfort, coming, I think, from another woman.

I woke when a crow’s shit splattered next to me. The sun was coming up and the crow seemed polished with tar. Sparrows flew from their hiding places to initiate anonymous battles in the laurel trees. I checked my pockets and realized I still had the train ticket, the ticket that would spirit me away from all hope.

I started to make my way to the train station when I saw the Prado had come alive. People hurried from one side of the boulevard to the other aimlessly, lining up at bus stops to board nonexistent buses. On my way to the trains, there wasn’t a single restaurant open, not the slightest aroma of coffee. As day broke, the city was a mere geographical point, with no odors, only a fresh breeze that blew in from the sea; that was probably the only smell: the morning sea, awakening.

“God exists,” a fifty-something woman said as she passed me near the station.

“So does the devil,” I replied, not giving her another thought.

I was soon showing my ticket to the security guard at the door of the station lobby, then standing in line for the window where they would verify that the ticket was mine. I took out my ID, my stamped photo, which showed my crossed eyes. The woman looked at me, then at the photo, checking my ID number as if it were the number of some domesticated animal, my height in inches, the nervous tic on my mouth, my travel permit.

“The train will leave early for the first time in fifty-two years,” the woman said ecstatically. “Go to platform three, coach fifty-two, seat eighty-one. If you’re traveling with food, it may be confiscated; no animals are allowed; the traveler’s responsibilities include…”

I stopped listening and made my way to the entrance to platform three, where they asked for my ticket again and insisted on seeing my ID. This time it was a short, fat man with a graying mustache. Finally, with a little push, he let me through and I ran down the platform, always terrified that I’ll be late for everything. Where was coach fifty-two? All were there but that one. I started screaming. A crowd of about thirty gathered around me. The locomotive whistled its final warning.

“Coach fifty-two!” I demanded.

The fat man came up to me and explained that because of an unforgivable error, they had not hooked up coach fifty-two. Later, with an asthmatic voice, he told us our fares would be refunded and we could leave the next morning. I drew up to my full height and demanded to see the supervisor, anybody, to claim coach fifty-two. Pulling on his mustache, the man muttered something about the effects of the imperialistic blockade, the need to have a conscience and a spirit of sacrifice.