Leonardo Padura - Havana Black

“You finally got here, wild man. Well, what’s your verdict on life?” Skinny greeted him from his wheelchair. The Count saw anxiety ride across the face of his best friend, who was peering out of the front door scrutinizing the horizon for a sight of the birthday boy who was so late. “I called your place twice but no sign of you.”

“Fact was I was buying a dog,” replied the Count as he crossed Josefina’s garden, planted with picualas, malangas , violets and white vicarias , ideal for all eye illnesses, and he promised himself that he too would have a musical dialogue one of these evenings. Would these picualas like la Aragón’s cha-cha-cha or would they prefer a ballad by The Mamas and the Papas?

“Buying…? A dog…? Mario, don’t give me any more of that shit and give me a hug. Congratulations, my brother,” said Skinny, who’d not been skinny for some time, and spread his tentacles out in order to squeeze a skeletal Mario Conde.

“Thanks, brother.”

“Come on then, your fans are waiting inside.”

“Wait a minute, Skinny, let me ask you a question, and give it me straight: if I write about you, about me, and about the guys in there, and mention a few fucking things, will you get angry with me?”

“What sort of fucking things?”

“I’m not sure… Like you were left handicapped by the war you went to fight, for example.”

Skinny Carlos glanced at his legs and smiled when he returned his friend’s look. “That’s not the worst fucking thing, Mario. The worst came after: thinking what might have been if this hadn’t happened… But it happened, and don’t fucking go on about it anymore, I’m not in the mood today. You write whatever comes to you, but make sure you do it well. Come on, let’s go inside.”

With the experience of years, the Count stood behind the wheelchair and turned it round to go back in the house. They went down a passageway, already hearing the Beatles music with which the Count’s friends were beginning to stir their nostalgia, and entered the dining room, where the last of the faithful on earth were waiting. Josefina was the first to congratulate him and kissed him on the forehead, Rabbit copied in his best style, and gave way to a hug from Andrés, a precise, strong handshake from Candito, a kiss on the almost childlike cheek of Niuris – the girlfriend Rabbit was sporting that day – a competitive slap on the back from Baby-Face Miki and a liquid look from Tamara the twin, whom the Count kissed with a restraint that expressed his fear at the closeness of her skin, always prone to alarm him down to the last male hormone in his body.

“How come the miracle? What made you come?” the Count asked, looking into the woman’s moist almond eyes.

“Could I not come? Carlos called me and told me to be here and I…”

“Of course you could, Tamara. Thanks.”

“All right, enough of that,” shouted Skinny, giving the Count a glass. “If you want lovey-dovey, get off to the park.”

“Hey, matchmaker, quit the joking,” retorted the Count threateningly, aiming a finger between his eyebrows. “Or are you never going to grow up?”

“Me? No. And you?”

“Well, as today’s a special day I didn’t start on any great innovations and decided to follow a traditional recipe of steak with bacon and gruyère cheese, which goes like this: buy fresh fillets in the market, on the long and thin side, and cut to the same size. Spread the steaks out and lightly salt them; put a strip of bacon down the middle and the gruyère on the bacon. Then dust everything in herbs: personally I add thyme, basil, oregano and rosemary… Then fold over each fillet, as if it were a pasty, and join the ends with a couple of toothpicks, which I only managed to get today, to stop the stuffing leaking out. With me so far?”

“Uh-huh,” replied the Count, all his gastric juices rising up in a proletarian rebellion. “Uh-huh, uh-huh, with toothpicks, go on…”

“Well, then let them sit, so the smells of the cheese, the meat and the bacon infiltrate each other and are then impregnated with the smells from the herbs. After that, heat equal measures of oil and butter in the frying pan, fry the steaks on a full flame for a couple of minutes on each side, so they go brown, and then leave them for another eight minutes on a low flame… Then put the fillets in a dish and place them in the oven, but on the lowest heat possible, so they don’t go cold or cook too much. Meanwhile, remove the fat left in the pan and put in butter, mixed with the juice of a Seville orange, which is better than the lemon in the traditional recipe. Remove the orange and butter sauce from the burner when it’s hot and add two spoonfuls of cream. Next you take the steaks from the oven, sprinkle on a good amount of parsley and pour the sauce over them, and now it’s ready to serve or you can put it back in the oven for a short time, but on very, very low, until the guest of honour arrives, who may even go by the name of Mario Conde.”

“And who has now arrived, Jose. Tell us what else you’ve done?”

“What, you want more…? Right, well, there is more, because the fillets are served with potato puree, made with the oil and butter fat we separated out after frying the fillets, you remember…? But, as I know the scene, I took the necessary precautions: it’s only one fillet per head, so be warned: though you can have as much as you want of rice, mushy black beans, stewed yucca, flash-fried green bananas, onions in breadcrumbs, tomato, watercress, lettuce and avocado salad, guava shells with cream cheese and coconut jelly in fruit juice with savoury cheese.”

“I do not believe it, I do not believe it: gentlemen, the age of abundance is upon us!” quipped Rabbit.

“And don’t we have any coffee?” asked Andrés.

“Café from Oriente roasted and ground by yours truly,” the woman confirmed, looking into the feverish eyes of the Count, whose stomach, used to thirty years of strict food rationing, refused to believe what his ears had heard.

“Hey, Jose, now I’m no longer a policeman, you can damn well tell me: where the fuck do you find all these things?”

Carlos’s mother looked at the Count, then at her son and glanced at all the other friends, before turning to the Count, who was now in no doubt at all: Josefina was like the circus magician who conjured from nowhere an elephant dressed as a sailor.

“You really want to know, Condesito? Well, I get it out of here,” she said after a pause, and touched her temple: “out of this imagination of mine.”

From the first swig the Count’s experience of drinking had warned him that this mixture of rum, friends and old Beatles songs might be explosive. The special dinner served up by Josefina had prepared their stomachs to accept a larger intake of alcohol and bottles were emptying at a dangerous rate. After the meal Skinny had insisted on moving on to the presentation of the gifts that each guest had had to bring, including the two compulsory bottles of rum – a tax only Candito the Red had been spared because of his new religious affiliations. Seated at the head of the table, the Count received the presents in turn from his friends, and they catered for each and every one of his physical, material and spiritual cravings and desires. The first was Carlos, who gave him a small goldfish bowl with a fighting fish, for he’d heard of the death of his most recent Rufino.

“Great, now I’ve got a dog and a fish,” commented the Count, as he watched the fish’s slow, purplish flight.

Candito the Red presented him with a Bible with black, bound covers that, according to him, had more commentaries and maps than any other published in Spanish. Ever subtle and material, Tamara gave the Count the checked shirt he had always wanted: seemingly straight out of a Wild West film, and made of soft wool, just the job for the approaching winter, and in the pocket, behind the Levi’s label, a Schaeffer pen, ideal for the aspiring writer. Perhaps paying all his nicotine debts at once, Baby-Face Miki handed over a pack of twenty boxes of Popular cigarettes, and along with it, or so he said, the monthly allowance of one of the several children he’d scattered over the face of the earth. Gentle Niuris, in the full freshness of her sixteen years and obviously guided by Rabbit, gave him two cassettes of Chicago’s Greatest Hits , which the Count read from the top down: from “Make me Smile” to “Beginnings”, from “Saturday in the Park” to “Colour My World”, the titles sounded like cries of alarm at the huge number of years that had passed between the days when they’d listened to those songs together and that hurricane-force birthday-party night. With his loving eye for detail, Rabbit unfolded before the Count’s eyes a poster of Marilyn, asleep on a red sheet that emphasized the glow from her yellow (dyed, to be sure) hair, the precise undulations of her black woman’s buttocks and the magnetic pink of a single visible nipple. Andrés, who had patiently waited his turn, faithful to his profession as a medic, placed in the Count’s hands two jars of Chinese pomade – one from the tiger, the other the lion – and an envelope with a hundred analgesics, a combination of pills and ointment that would save the Count from death by migraine during his next hangovers. Last in the queue, Josefina walked over to the thirty-six-year-old she’d known for twenty, when her son was skinny and walked on two legs and shut himself in with the Count to listen to music at full volume and dream of a future in which war did not figure; and, without uttering a word, she gripped his cheeks, made him feel the roughness of hands ravaged by washing up, cooking and laundering, and then kissed him on his forehead.