Leonardo Padura - Havana Fever

Within a month or month and a half of Lina being in Havana, Louis returned from New Orleans and told me we must go back to Varadero and meet Lansky, Alcides and two American entrepreneurs who were going to build hotels in there. I don’t know why but I persuaded Louis it would be a good idea to take Lina, because I thought she’d sing for his friends and make dinner a little less boring… That was how Alcides Montes de Oca and Lina Beautiful Eyes met up: he was almost fifty and she was under twenty, but when the business talk ended and Lina started to sing, Alcides fell madly in love with the girl, her looks and her voice.

Alcides Montes de Oca was a character with some strange baggage, I should tell you. He came from a high society family and was very wealthy, even more so since he’d inherited the fortune belonging to his wife who’d just died. He liked talking politics and was very proud to be a grandson of a general in the Army of Liberation; he loathed Batista. According to him, Batista was the worst disaster that had ever hit this country, and I’m sure that at the time he supported the rebels, because many had belonged to the Orthodox Party which Alcides had been a member of when Batista struck with his coup d’état and suspended the elections the Orthodoxers were about to win. He was also a very cultured man who read a lot, and Louis told me he had books galore in his house. But at the same time he had a nose for business and although he didn’t appear to own anything, because he didn’t need to, he owned shares in all the big companies in Cuba. Through his business concerns he got on with Lansky like a house on fire, though this friendship was never reported in the newspapers, because everyone knew the Jew had been a drug-trafficker in the States, although here he only operated legal business and behaved, well, as I said, like a gentleman.

So Alcides and Lina became infatuated; they were crazy about each other, and, to please her, he got her a singing spot in the second show at the Las Vegas and quickly moved her from my place to a flat in Miramar, in a building that had just received its finishing touches. The only problem complicating their romance were Don Alcides’s political aspirations and his social situation. He’d been widowed only recently and couldn’t enter a formal relationship with a poor country-girl, who was thirty years his junior… If it had been nowadays! But in those days a scandal like that could have damaged Alcides’s position considerably and so they decided to keep things quiet: he kept her, saw to all her wants, paid for the flat and gave her a car, although Louis appeared as the legal owner of everything in order to avoid nasty gossip.

The person responsible for looking after Lina’s needs and expenses was Alcides’s personal secretary, an awesome woman by the name of Nemesia Moré. She saw to all his commercial and political paperwork, as well as being something like the administrator of his household, but with more power, because since Alcides became a widower, Nemesia had assumed the role of lady of the house. She was in her forties, had retained her good figure, and had a real gift: she was always able to anticipate Alcides’s thoughts and satisfy them before he’d even asked for anything. Consequently Alcides would say, half jokingly, half seriously, that the most important woman in his life was Nemesia Moré: he couldn’t live without her.

In the meantime, Lina had started singing and the owner of the Las Vegas only imposed one condition before contracting her: a change of name. Just imagine a compère announcing: “And now ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Catalina Basterrrrrechea!” After a moment’s thought Alcides said: “Violeta del Río”, as if he’d already got the name in his head, and so Catalina Basterrechea, Lina Beautiful Eyes died, and Violeta del Río the bolerista was born. She immediately got a big reputation and sang in the best places, even made the Parisién, by which time Havana knew her as the Lady of the Night, and she had countless men chasing after her to hear her sing and, naturally, trying to seduce her, because the country-girl had transformed herself into a spectacular woman, wearing clothes from New York, perfumes from France and with her hair styled by the best hairdressers in Havana… Was this the woman your father fell in love with? Poor man, how he must have suffered…

As far as I know, Lina saw life through Alcides’s eyes, and the only thing she refused was classes from a singing teacher he’d insisted on hiring for her; she wanted to sing from her soul, and if someone taught her, she said, they’d damage the desire she’d had naturally from childhood and that had saved her from going crazy. And I think she was right. She needed a microphone, not classes. On stage she was a fantastic act, I’d never seen or heard anything like her – and I’d seen plenty in my lifetime – she turned everything into magic. Even today, after all these years, I shut my eyes and see her holding the microphone, throwing her hair back that fell like a mantle over her beautiful eyes, wetting her lips with the tip of her tongue, and I can hear her sing those songs that came straight from her soul… Poor girl…

Violeta was a happy woman, the happiest woman in the world while her dream lasted. It sounds like a radio soap, but that’s how it was. And she was still happy when 1959 came and everything suddenly changed: for Lansky and Alcides, for Louis and me, and for the girls who worked for the agency. Because the country changed… The rebels won the war and Batista left Cuba, which was what everybody wanted. Although people only spoke about Revolution to begin with, some people were already mentioning the word communism and Lansky was the first to grasp what might happen: he immediately started to pack his bags. Louis also thought it would be better to be on the other side of the sea and he persuaded Alcides to take whatever he could out of Cuba and forget about politics now his moment had come and gone. Initially Alcides refused, but within a few months, deeply upset, he saw Louis and Lansky were right. Even so, when he decided to leave he did so thinking he’d be back in a few months, a few years at most, and only took the money he’d already taken out and what was most important to him: his children and his wife-to-be, Violeta del Río.

I wasn’t very surprised when Violeta accepted Alcides’s suggestion that she should stop singing and go the States. She was probably persuaded by Alcides’s promise that they’d be able to marry and lead a normal life where nobody knew them. Or maybe he convinced her by saying she’d be able to take up singing later on. Or perhaps she agreed because she thought the most important thing was to safeguard her relationship with a man who idolized her and whom she loved deeply. Whatever the reason, Violeta announced she was retiring from the stage at the end of 1959 and Alcides began to prepare his departure from Cuba, trying to salvage what he could, although he lost an enormous amount of money when they started to take over sugar plantations and nationalize American companies in which he held shares.

Violeta and I saw lots of each other over those months. Lansky had returned to Cuba for the last time in March or April 1959, shut his business ventures down and returned to the States. Obviously, one of the ventures that died the death was the escort agency, so I was soon unemployed, with lots of time on my hands and money in the bank. Louis, for his part, promised he’d still come to Cuba whenever he could, but it was clear he couldn’t take me to New Orleans because that’s where his wife and children were, a life where I didn’t fit. Anyway I wasn’t too concerned by all that: several girls wanted to carry on working with me and I told myself: this revolution may be a big deal, but if one line of business will never close, it’s whoring. So, while this or that did or didn’t happen, I had lots of time to decide what to do. You know, sometimes you do fucking stupid things, however clever you are…