Leonardo Padura - Havana Black

The Count also looked towards the coast, on the other side of the wall, and saw the waves gently lapping against the rocks.

“The hurricane’s heading this way,” he said, looking at the woman.

“You think it will get this far?”

“Sure it will.”

“Well I’m off as soon as he’s buried. I mean, if you’ll let me.”

“I have no objections,” acknowledged the Count almost without thinking what he was saying.

In fact he’d have preferred for Miriam to stay: something about her strength – and thighs, and face, and hair and those eyes protected by eyelashes like twisted bars, which made him wonder, poetical as the Count was, whether she would ever go deaf, and that was why God gave her those eyes – attracted him as if it were fated: the blonde, presumably fake, reeked of bed, like roses smell of roses. It was something that seemed natural and endemic and it made him imagine he might breathe that scent in fact in a bed, with its four legs weakening, when she commented: “After all, there’s nothing for me here,” and she looked at her feet, prey to a persistent pendulum.

Rising from the floor where he’d been lying on the now-shattered dream bed, the policeman searched for an exit: “What about your family?”

Miriam’s sigh was long, possibly theatrical.

“My brother Fermin’s the only member of my family I care about. The rest got upset when I started with Miguel, and later, when I went to Miami, they practically excommunicated me… The assholes,” she said, almost unable to contain her rage. “But now I’ve come with dollars, they don’t know which altar to put me on… All for a few jeans, designer T-shirts and a couple of Chinese fans.”

“And why do you care about your brother?”

“It was through him I met Miguel… they worked together. And always got on well. He was the only one who didn’t condemn me… He’s also been the unluckiest in the family. He was in jail for ten years.”

“What did he do?”

“Money problems in the firm he worked for.”

“Fraud?”

“Are we talking about Miguel or Fermín?”

“Miguel, of course… But I need to know more. Who is Adrian, for example?”

“What’s he got to do with any of this?”

The Count effortlessly allowed patience to come to his aid. He had to wave his cape at the bull in each confrontation and, without goading, try to guide it to the right pen.

“Nothing as far as I can see. But as he was with you today…”

“Adrian used to be my boyfriend, thousands of years ago. My first boyfriend,” and something seemed to loosen the moorings of millennial woman.

“You’ve carried on being friends?”

She almost smiled as she said: “Friends…? We haven’t seen each other for ten years. I have nothing here, and nothing there either. But I like talking to him: Adrian is a calm man who reminds me of what I once was and makes me think of what I might have been. That’s all.”

“I understand the car your husband was driving belonged to your brother, Fermín?”

“Yes,” she replied, looking at the Count. “A ’56 Chevrolet Fermín inherited from an uncle of mine, one of my mother’s brothers. They confiscated the one the government gave him when he was jailed, in order to set an example… Is that the kind of thing you wanted to know?”

He lit a cigarette. It was pleasant being there, your back to the sea, opposite the Rampa, the night still young, in the company of that edible blonde. But a dead man floated on that still-becalmed ocean, like a dark, infinite mantle.

“That and much more… For example, do you think your husband’s death was prompted by another husband’s jealousy or something of the sort?”

“Are you mad? That was no jealous husband, more like a savage who – ”

“It is a possibility though, isn’t it?”

“No, of course not. That wasn’t Miguel’s style. He was more the romantic sort and besides… Well, recently he couldn’t… if you get me?”

“Perhaps it was something that happened a long time ago and that he resurrected…” the Count continued, warming to Miriam’s confiding tone.

“I’ve already told you it wasn’t, but you can think whatever you want. That’s why you’re a policeman, even why they pay you to be one.”

“True, but not enough,” confessed the Count trying to relieve the tension before heading off in another direction. “And what other reason did Miguel have, apart from his sick father, to risk returning to Cuba after leaving the way he did?”

She looked him in the eye and the policeman saw such a profound gaze he could have lost himself in its pursuit.

“I don’t understand you.”

He was now the one to sigh, looking for the least stony path. “I mean did he return to resolve something he’d left hanging when he defected… Or perhaps to salvage something very important that he’d left behind…”

“I see where you’re coming from. What sign are you?”

The Count breathed out before replying: “Libra… Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“Almost. You seem more a Sagittarian.”

“But I’m a classic Libra, I swear to you… Was he after something?”

“Like what?”

“A very peculiar Matisse, for example. Or perhaps even a Goya. I don’t know, something worth much more than a few Tiffany lamps…”

She turned her head to look at the sea for a moment. The sea was still there, she seemed to be confirming, before saying: “If that was why he came, he’d have told me… And do you think I’d tell you?”

“I’ve no idea, it all depends… Let’s say it depends what’s more valuable: what he was after, or seeing justice done.”

“Forgive me, but you’re talking rubbish… I still think they killed Miguel, I mean, the people who intended killing him… So, anything else?”

“Yes, there’s something you perhaps know… I spoke to Gómez de la Peña today and he says Miguel left his house claiming he had to see a relative of his about very important business. Can you throw any light on that?”

Down came her eyelids and her carnivorous eyelashes almost swallowed Mario Conde.

“No, he never mentioned that to me. I can’t think which relative it was, even less what important business he might – ”

“And why did Miguel go to see Gómez de la Peña?”

“They’d known each other for years, hadn’t they? But I don’t think they were friends. I don’t know why he insisted on seeing him. Didn’t Gómez tell you?”

“He told me but I wasn’t convinced and I think he’s a great liar. And if that’s so, the truth might be somewhere there.”

“So you want to find out the truth…”

The Count threw his cigarette butt into the sea and expelled all the smoke from his lungs: “I’d also like to know how old you were when you married Miguel.”

“Eighteen. And Miguel was forty. Anything else?”

The Count smiled again. “Miriam, why do you take everything as an insult?”

She was the one who then attempted a smile, but the smile never reached her lips: the grimace, brought on by tears, pulled her lips down. Down and down, like a waterfall that seemed unstoppable. But the large, shiny tears welling in her eyes seemed unreal: as if they came from another face, or another person, or other feelings, which were very far from that place, perhaps on the other side of the sea. Hollow pearls, concluded the Count.

“But don’t you understand anything? Don’t you realize I don’t know what the hell I’ll do with myself when I get back to Miami?”

“Calle 8 was what I wanted to see first. Before getting to his house, before going to bed with him. I’d created Calle 8 in my head, and it was like a fiesta and a museum. I couldn’t imagine it any other way: a place of entertainment, full of bright lights and bustle, where the music played at full volume and people walked along the pavements, happy and carefree, enjoying that Little Havana where the good and the bad survived that had died out in this other Havana. That’s why it also had to be a place that had stayed still in time, where I would find a country I didn’t know and had always wanted to discover: like this country was before 1959, a café on every street corner, a jukebox playing boleros in every bar, a game of dominoes in every arcade, a street where you could get anything without queuing or finding out whether it was your turn or not according to the ration book. Like everybody else I’d heard the stories here in Havana and turned that blissful Calle 8 into a myth, and transformed it mentally into something like the heart of Cuban Miami… I remember how it was already dark when we left the airport and after three years without seeing each other I told Miguel my first wish and he asked me what it was I wanted to see on Calle 8 that was so pressing, and I told him: ‘That’s it, Calle 8, Little Havana…’ And to do something as simple and straightforward as eating a steak sandwich on a street corner.