Leonardo Padura - Havana Fever

“What about that one?” asked Pigeon, pointing his glass of rum at the volume half hidden under his bag.

“It’s a present for Skinny’s mother. It’s a cookbook I’ve been after for a while.”

The youth swigged his rum and smiled again.

“A cookbook? To cook what? Hey, man, you and your friends are incredible: Skinny, Rabbit, black Candito who’s crazy about Jehova and all that jazz… Fuck, they’re like a bunch of men from Mars, I swear. I look at them and wonder what the fuck they stuffed in their heads to make them like that…”

Conde took a swig and lit up. He took one of the books and started sandpapering gently along the top edge, to remove any traces of damp or specks of dust.

“They made us believe we were all equal and that the world would be a better place. That it was already better…”

“They fooled you, I swear. Everywhere you go some people are less equal than others and the world is going to the dogs. Right here, if you don’t have any green’uns you’re out of the running, and there are people getting rich, and not exactly on the straight and narrow…”

Conde nodded, his eyes wandering dreamily in between the trees in the yard.

“It was nice while it lasted.”

“That’s why you’re all so fucked now: too long spent dreaming. What the hell was the point of it all?”

Conde smiled, put the sandpapered book to one side and selected another. He recalled that Yoyi was an avid reader of the sports pages of the dailies, which always went on about winners and losers, the only valid division, he reckoned, for the Earth’s inhabitants.

“So you think we wasted our time and there’s no way out?”

“You wasted your time and half your lives, but there is a way out, Conde: the one you take on behalf of yourself, the people around you, your family and friends. And this isn’t pure selfishness: with this business of mine, not stepping out of my house, sleeping at midday with air-conditioning, and stealing from no one, I earn more money than if I worked for a whole month as an engineer, getting up at six and struggling onto the bus (if the damned bus actually came), eating the slops on offer in the works canteen and putting up with a boss set on clearing up at the expense of everyone else, hoping he’ll get a job that will take him abroad… and to score points he makes everyone’s life a misery harping on about coming top of the league, voluntary work and production targets. The name of the game is clear enough, man.”

“You may be right,” allowed the Count, who was perfectly aware of the reality sketched by Pigeon, and blew along the top of the book, signalling he’d cleaned it up.

“The thing is you were a policeman so you believe what’s legal is right. But if people didn’t do business on the sly and wheel and deal, how would they survive? That’s why even God and his next-door neighbour thieve here… And some, as you know, are dab hands at it.”

“Yoyi, I left the police more than ten years ago, but I’ve always known how people lived… It’s more likely I’m going soft inside because I’m getting old,” Conde picked up the first edition of The Slave Trader and put it to one side; he needed to attend to the stitching on the spine. He reached for the next one on the pile, one of the censuses, and started sandpapering gently.

“Well, factor that in… you are knocking on,” agreed Pigeon with a smile. “And old age slows you down. OK, I’m going to have a bath, I’m going out on the town tonight with a hot date. Hey, you want me to come with you tomorrow to give that place a look over?”

Conde put the book on the table and gulped down his rum. He thought his answer through.

“All right. There are a lot of books and the two of us can size it up much quicker… But get this straight: I found this library, and if you come, I’m the one in charge, get it? I don’t want you doubledealing these poor people…”

“Ah, these poor people, is it?” Pigeon stripped off his T-shirt and the Count stared at the thick gold links of the chain, with an enormous medallion of Santa Bárbara, resting on the young lad’s prominent pecs. “Wasn’t the guy a big deal in the army and then in a corporation? Did they tell you why they booted him out and put him on the shit-heap? You really think they’re ‘poor people’?… Fine, you’re calling the shots. I’ll swear to that, man.”

“I’ll call you in the morning before I leave home,” the Count stood up, a second cigarette between his lips.

“Say, Conde, what will you do with that money you earned today?” Pigeon asked, smiling as sarcastically as only he knew how.

“Up you get, folks, and put your ration books away. Get ready to live it up…” Conde shouted as he walked in the front porch and slapped the palm of his hand against the sturdy bulk of that fine food compendium the mere contents page of which had activated all his hunger-related organs, glands and ducts. As usual, Skinny Carlos’s house was wide open to the world, and as usual, after shouting his welcome greeting, the Count walked in without further ceremony.

“We’re out here,” he heard his friend’s voice when he was already across the dining room and emerging into the yard, shaded by mangos and avocado trees, their trunks swathed in pliant orchids, luxuriating after the recent rain. Carlos and his mother sat there in silence, hanging on the last glimmers of twilight, like shipwrecked survivors from a life that was also closing down on them before any small island could appear on the horizon to come to their rescue.

Conde went over to the old woman, kissed her forehead and was rewarded in kind.

“How are you, Jose?”

“Getting older by the day, Condecito.”

Then he went over to Skinny Carlos’s wheelchair, who hadn’t been skinny for twenty years and whose sickly flab spilled over the sides of that chair he was now condemned to, and with his free hand he pulled his friend’s sweaty mass to his chest.

“What’s new, savage?”

“Nothing changes here, don’t you know?” Carlos replied, twice slapping Conde’s empty stomach which echoed like a drum that wasn’t properly tensed.

Conde sat down in one of the cast-iron chairs, giving a sigh of relief as he did so. He looked at Josefina and Carlos and felt the peace of twilight and the flow of love prompted by those two irreplaceable individuals he’d shared almost all his life with, not to mention most of his dreams and frustrations. From that increasingly remote, unforgettable day when he’d asked Skinny for a penknife to sharpen the point of his pencil, in a classroom in the Víbora Pre-Uni, without making any extra effort, they realized they’d be friends and would start off as such. Since then, fate or destiny had bolted them into an unbreakable relationship when Carlos returned from his short stay in the war in Angola with his spine shattered by a bullet shot from a place and hatred he’d never understood. The irreversible injuries of his friend, who underwent numerous futile acts of surgery, had become a spiritual burden the Count assumed with a painful guilt – Why Carlos? Why him in particular? he’d wondered all those years. Giving his friend companionship and material support had subsequently become one of his missions in life, and during the bleakest years of the Crisis, in the early nineties, when blackouts and shortages dominated their lives, Conde invested every cent he earned in his new profession as a bookseller in the quest for little comforts to make Skinny’s atrophied everyday life tolerable. But in the last three or four years, when immobility, obesity and insane orgies of eating and drinking had clearly begun to endanger Carlos’s life – kidney failure, hardening of the liver and an irregular heartbeat – Conde faced the terrible dilemma of either refusing to collaborate in such self-punishment or, in full knowledge of the outcome, helping his old friend towards the finale he himself tirelessly seemed to be seeking: a dignified termination of a shitty life that had been destroyed forever at the age of twenty-eight. Conscious of the terrible burden he was taking on by embracing the option of militant solidarity, Mario Conde thought it was his duty to be at his friend’s side in life and death, and tried to find the resources and motivation to accelerate as happily as possible, the onset of his longed for liberation, through the slow but sure method of poisoning his bloodstream and lining his arteries with the fat, nicotine and alcohol Carlos ingested in huge amounts.