Leonardo Padura - Havana Fever

“Just one of the crowd?” hazarded the Count, apparently heading for a big disappointment.

“She was no Elena Burke or Olguita Guillot, but she did have a real voice of her own. And a style. And a body. I never saw her, but Rogelito, the timbalero , once told me she was one of the most fantastic women in Havana. A real traffic-stopper.”

“And what happened?”

“One day she said she wasn’t going to sing anymore and disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

“In a manner of speaking. She didn’t sing again and… vanished like a hundred other boleristas who had their days of glory followed by their years of oblivion…”

“Any idea why?”

“I heard things… That her voice failed her. She had a smallish voice, it wasn’t a torrent like Celia Cruz’s or Omara Portuondo’s, although she performed well with what she had. But I never bothered to find out where she ended up… Katy Barqué did talk to me about her once. She said they had a row.”

“A row?” the Count smiled. “I can’t imagine a woman as spiritual as Katy Barqué getting into a row.”

“Katy Barqué is a little she-devil, don’t believe all they say about her being the gentle singer of love songs… But their row was just words. They didn’t see eye to eye because they had similar styles. Truth be told several boleristas sang more or less the same way, with lots of feeling, lots of high drama, as if they held everything in contempt. It was a very fifties style. Did you never hear the recording they made of ‘Freddy’? In the sixties, La Lupe changed that style into some thing else rather sorrowful, contempt turned to scorn, drama to tragedy: La Lupe marks another era… But when Violeta started out, Katy Barqué was the best known in her style, and apparently she thought the other woman was competition… Hence the row.”

“But wasn’t there room for everyone?” wondered Yoyi.

“Down at the base of the pyramid, there was. It wasn’t the same at the top. These boleristas were very special ladies, full of character. A bolero isn’t any old song, obviously: to sing one you really make it yours, don’t just feel it. Boleros aren’t about reality but a desire for reality you reach via an appearance of reality, if you follow me? No matter… That’s the philosophy behind boleros, I wrote about that in my book… And that was its golden age, because the classic composers who’d been writing since the twenties and thirties came together with these young men with lots of feeling who read French poetry and knew what atonal music was. And that encounter created those boleros that now seem to speak of life… Real life. Even though it’s all lies: pure theatre, as La Lupe said.”

“What about Violeta’s record?” asked the Count, clinging to the edge of the precipice.

“I’ve got it in there… but my record player’s broken. I’m waiting for a friend to bring me one from Spain, because… Do you know how many LPs, 78s and 45s I’ve got in there?”

Rafael followed his question with such an abrupt silence the Count was forced to follow his cue.

“No, how many?”

“12,622. What do you reckon?”

“Fantastic,” conceded Pigeon.

“They cost me a fortune, and now with CDs nobody’s interested. Every day someone comes with a box of records and gives them me for nothing.”

“What do we have to do to listen to Violeta’s?” the Count implored.

Rafael took his glasses off and rubbed them on his shirt-flap and the Count was shocked to see he hardly had any eyes. The sockets were two deep round holes, like bullet holes, darkened by the circles from the bags obscuring his mulatto skin. When he put his glasses back on, the man restored his wakeful owlish eyes and the Count felt relieved.

“I never lend my records, books or press cuttings. As you can imagine, people have nicked things hundreds of times…”

The Count’s brain began to spin in search of a solution. Come back with a record player? Bring a needle for Rafael’s system?… Or leave something in lieu?

“How about this for a deal? We’ve got seven boxes of books in our car boot you won’t find anywhere else. I’ll swap you the book of your choice for Violeta del Río’s record…”

Rafael’s unreal eyes glinted wickedly.

“Good books?”

“They’re something special, believe me. Take a look and chose the one you want. Come on.”

The Count stood up and held a hand out to Pigeon, wanting the car keys. The look on the young man’s face showed his disapproval: that whim could cost them dear and, as Yoyi swore, you shouldn’t gamble your children’s food away – though he had none and didn’t intend having any. The suggestion brought Rafael to his feet and they went into the street.

Pigeon opened the boot and pressed a button to switch on the light. Like any bibliophile stricken by the bug, the musicologist didn’t hide the desire aroused by boxes stuffed with books and, turning to the Count, he checked: “Whichever?”

“Uh-huh…”

The musicologist inspected the books one by one, slowly, lifting them up level with his face, just a few inches from his spectacles, as if he needed to smell rather than see them. He lingered over some of the tomes he greeted with sporadic cries of “How wonderful!”, “Christ, look at this!”, or a self-satisfied shout of “I’ve already got this one”. Finally, when he’d spread all the copies over the carboot, Rafael focused his desire on the original 1925 edition of The Crisis of High Culture in Cuba , by Jorge Mañach, and another first edition, from 1935, of The Universal History of Infamy . Borges or Mañach? he tried to make his mind up and, sorrowfully, stretched out a right hand and put Mañach’s essay back in one of the boxes he’d just emptied, while he patted his newly acquired copy of the Borges classic.

“Right then,” he declared, as he caressed the book’s spine, seemingly more frustrated by his inability to have them all than satisfied at being the owner of a rarity half the world was after, “let’s get that record.”

28 October

My dear,

Dawn brought rain today. It was a gentle, persistent rain, as if the sky was weeping and had no intention of stopping, so profound was its grief. God must know I have not seen you or had any news for thirty-nine days. Did you realize that? I never thought this would happen, but I have learned over the years that we often grow in strength, and have a strange, hidden capacity to resist the hardest blows, which compels us to keep on.

Tell me, how do you feel? I hope you have fought off the migraines that tormented you so in those last months and have new worries to occupy you, which must be both a blessing and a risk: the blessing being that time will not drag so and the risk that you might welcome the relief resignation and oblivion bring…

The cyclone that appeared to be heading towards us swerved and thankfully passed us by, its gales never touched us, though it did leave this rain in its wake. I had prayed to the Virgin: you know how afraid I am of hurricanes (I must have inherited that from my father, poor man, who trembled at the mere sound of the word cyclone). And, I must say, we have quite enough to deal with, if not too much, with the other whirlwind that has hit the country. There is something new every day, a new law is passed or an old one repealed, someone talks for hours in front of a television camera while another silently departs (many of your old friends, your university colleagues have left), or somebody renounces what he once was (some of these were also friends of yours), wraps himself in the flag and swears he was always a patriot (though he had never done anything to show it), and publicly salutes the freedom and national dignity we’ve finally been given, or so they tell us. We’re living pages of history that are too turbulent: everything is collapsing and new myths are being thrown up; heads roll and things are being renamed. As in any revolution. As a distant witness, with no need to leave the house, I think I have a better view of all that’s happening outside and for the first time I fear the situation may take a really tragic turn and, above all, become irreversible. Is it the definitive end to our world?