Leonardo Padura - Havana Fever

Poor Violeta was desperate to leave. After she’d announced her retirement she was adrift here and just wanted out, but Alcides kept delaying his departure, waiting to see if something might change so he wouldn’t be forced to leave and lose so much. Six or seven months went by, and everything suddenly got hectic when the government declared it was nationalizing American businesses in Cuba… The following day Violeta told me about their travel plans. They were off within a month, and now it was for real, because the next Sunday Alcides was intending a crucial step: he was going to take her home and introduce her formally to his children, who were now adolescents, and tell them of his decision to marry her.

Never for one moment did I think that that afternoon I was talking to my friend Catalina Basterrechea, Lina Beautiful Eyes for the last time… Apart from the political complications, which she didn’t understand, there wasn’t a cloud on her horizon; on the contrary, it was all light and promises of bliss. What fucking shit, right? I’ve wondered a thousand times why they didn’t just say to hell with all this and leave Cuba two or three months earlier, happy, in love, with the best of their lives ahead of them…

I found out what happened the following Monday, when I went to Violeta’s flat to see how she’d got on in what we’d dubbed her opening night in the big world of the Montes de Ocas. When I got there, I was surprised to see strange things going on and found myself face to face with Nemesia Moré, Alcides’s secretary. She received me as if I were a total stranger and asked me to leave immediately. “Who the fuck do you think you are? This is my friend’s house,” I started to reply, and the bitch blurted out, as hard as nails: “Your friend’s dead and you’re not welcome here…” I was in a state of shock and barely managed to ask her what had happened. “She’s committed suicide,” she said, and told me: “Don’t ring Mr Alcides, he’s very upset and it would be best to leave him in peace.”

As Alcides Montes de Oca was still Alcides Montes de Oca in Cuba, and had kept Lina’s private life out of the public eye, there was only a brief mention of her suicide in a couple of newspapers and the whole matter was shelved. I was desperate to find out what had happened, but the people in the know sealed their lips. Eventually, thanks to a lad I knew who lived near my place and was in the police I did find out a bit more: Lina had used cyanide to commit suicide. But why? Why kill herself when she was at her happiest? Because she’d given up singing? That was impossible, it must have been hard, but she did so of her own free will. Because she had to leave Cuba? No, she wanted to leave, was leaving with her man and the promise of marriage… The only explanation was that something had gone wrong between her and Alcides. I couldn’t imagine what that might be, if he was now preparing to take her on publicly as his new wife.

I was desperate and started following Alcides. I needed to speak to him, to know what he knew, and find out why Lina had dared do something so terrible. I called several times but he’d never come to the phone, I sent him messages via a couple of friends but he didn’t reply and in the end I started trailing him. One day I saw him leave home, in his Chrysler, driven by his chauffeur and I followed him in my car as far as Old Havana where I saw him enter the Western Union offices and followed him in. When he saw me next to him, he barely seemed surprised, but looked grim. I thought for a moment that he was going to cry. He’d delivered a few messages, picked up others and we left. As he was opening his car door, he said: “Lina broke my heart. I was going to give her everything, why did she have to do that?”

Without a second glance, he got into his car, which turned the corner and disappeared from sight. It was the last time I saw Alcides Montes de Oca and the last time I tried to find out why the girl we all thought so happy ended it all, as if she were living out one of those boleros she so liked to sing.

A primitive jungle instinct urged the Count to ask the questions he’d been stifling as he went further into the tragedy of frustrated love recounted by that elderly woman. But when he saw the tears flooding the deep wrinkles on Carmen Argüelles’s face, he held back, restrained by the sorrow brought by death: he decided to live with his doubts. Although the woman’s confession rounded out a story that still lacked clinching detail, he finally had something firm in place and a first mystery he’d definitively cleared up. In effect, Violeta del Río had died more than forty years ago, as he already knew, but had done so under her real name of Catalina Basterrechea, and that circumstance helped by the last ripples from Don Alcides Montes de Oca’s muscle, explained the strict oblivion into which her other ego, Violeta del Río the singer, had been relegated a few months before.

Mario Conde promised to be back in a few days and said goodbye to the old woman, who now seemed even more feeble and shrunken, as if that descent into her past had worn her out physically. He stopped on the doorstep, then went back inside. He put his hand in his pocket and took out a few notes: one hundred and forty pesos, all he was carrying on him. He placed them gently in her lap.

“It’s not much, Carmen. Today’s pesos, but it all helps,” he said and, unable to contain himself, caressed the woman’s sparse, dank hair.

His team of bodyguards on Factoría slouched like troops defeated by boredom and the stench. They sat on the jamb of a staircase, surrounded by a cemetery of peanut shells, cans of soft drink and even two abandoned newspapers, remnants of the strategies they adopted to resist attacks of hunger and the long wait.

“Fuck, man, how long did that old woman witter on for,” protested Yoyi, and the Count imagined he was reckoning up the time invested in economic terms. “I suppose you know everything there is to know now?”

“What did she tell you, Conde, what did she tell you?” repeated Rabbit, and Conde promised to tell, but first wanted to rid himself of a thorn in his side.

“You lot coming with me into the barrio?” he asked, looking at his friends.

“Hey, Conde, what are you after now?” asked Rabbit, in the tone of someone already familiar with all the potential answers.

“Nothing really, just a walk across the barrio to show them I’ve not surrendered. Yoyi, do you agree with Juan that the guys in charge here are mafiosi? Well, they’ll see killing is the only way they’ll get rid of me. You coming?”

“Why the strongman tactics, Conde?” Rabbit smiled anxiously, displaying all his dentures. “You’ve never been the strongman type.”

“Well, must say I do like the idea. Let’s see if anyone wants a bundle and a round of grievous bodily harm from me,” spoke up Yoyi, touching the side where he’d got his steel bar. “Fancy daring to lay a finger on this guy who is blood of-”

“Cut it out, Yoyi. I want to go because I’ve got a hunch…”

“Not another?” quipped Rabbit, hurrying to keep up with the crowd.

With his left eyebrow bandaged, a black eye and slight limp in one foot Conde strode off towards calle Esperanza. A group of evil-looking black and white youths on the next corner watched the strange retinue advance: their keen sense of self-preservation warned them of approaching danger and they scattered swiftly like insects, much to the relief of the invasion party.

Conde stopped his friends in front of the slum where he thought he’d been beaten up. They looked inside the building, down both sides of the street, and he looked for a cigarette and lit up, as if to say, here I am. But only two uniformed police, a few cyclists, and a hard-pressed taxi-cyclist came along the street and, along the pavement, a couple of tarts, including one the Count identified as the mulatta from his frustrated whoring episode.