Havana Black (8 page)

“I am, but I won't . . . The fact is I've just found out that some nice kids I knew have just died. But nothing to worry about . . . Anyway, where shall we go and talk?”

The woman stroked her hair and looked to the heavens for an answer. “The Coppelia is impossible, though I do fancy an ice-cream. Shall we go down to the Malecón?”

“Well, back we go down again,” said the Count, as he set off in search of the sea.

 

 

“I think I made a bad choice, don't you? They only fished the corpse of my dead husband out of this very same sea two days ago and we still haven't been able to bury him. They say tomorrow . . . It's complete madness . . . Do you know something? The worst aspect of Miguel's death was that they threw him into the sea: he had some complex or other and didn't like bathing on the beach. But I like the sea, any sea . . .”

The Count also looked towards the coast, on the other side of the wall, and saw the waves gently lapping against the rocks.

“The hurricane's heading this way,” he said, looking at the woman.

“You think it will get this far?”

“Sure it will.”

“Well I'm off as soon as he's buried. I mean, if you'll let me.”

“I have no objections,” acknowledged the Count almost without thinking what he was saying.

In fact he'd have preferred for Miriam to stay: something about her strength – and thighs, and face, and hair and those eyes protected by eyelashes like twisted bars, which made him wonder, poetical as the Count was, whether she would ever go deaf, and that was why God gave her those eyes – attracted him as if it were fated: the blonde, presumably fake, reeked of bed, like roses smell of roses. It was something that seemed natural and endemic and it made him imagine he might breathe that scent in fact in a bed, with its four legs weakening, when she commented: “After all, there's
nothing for me here,” and she looked at her feet, prey to a persistent pendulum.

Rising from the floor where he'd been lying on the now-shattered dream bed, the policeman searched for an exit: “What about your family?”

Miriam's sigh was long, possibly theatrical.

“My brother Fermin's the only member of my family I care about. The rest got upset when I started with Miguel, and later, when I went to Miami, they practically excommunicated me . . . The assholes,” she said, almost unable to contain her rage. “But now I've come with dollars, they don't know which altar to put me on . . . All for a few jeans, designer T-shirts and a couple of Chinese fans.”

“And why do you care about your brother?”

“It was through him I met Miguel . . . they worked together. And always got on well. He was the only one who didn't condemn me . . . He's also been the unluckiest in the family. He was in jail for ten years.”

“What did he do?”

“Money problems in the firm he worked for.”

“Fraud?”

“Are we talking about Miguel or Fermín?”

“Miguel, of course . . . But I need to know more. Who is Adrian, for example?”

“What's he got to do with any of this?”

The Count effortlessly allowed patience to come to his aid. He had to wave his cape at the bull in each confrontation and, without goading, try to guide it to the right pen.

“Nothing as far as I can see. But as he was with you today . . .”

“Adrian used to be my boyfriend, thousands of years ago. My first boyfriend,” and something seemed to loosen the moorings of millennial woman.

“You've carried on being friends?”

She almost smiled as she said: “Friends . . .? We haven't seen each other for ten years. I have nothing here, and nothing there either. But I like talking to him: Adrian is a calm man who reminds me of what I once was and makes me think of what I might have been. That's all.”

“I understand the car your husband was driving belonged to your brother, Fermín?”

“Yes,” she replied, looking at the Count. “A '56 Chevrolet Fermín inherited from an uncle of mine, one of my mother's brothers. They confiscated the one the government gave him when he was jailed, in order to set an example . . . Is that the kind of thing you wanted to know?”

He lit a cigarette. It was pleasant being there, your back to the sea, opposite the Rampa, the night still young, in the company of that edible blonde. But a dead man floated on that still-becalmed ocean, like a dark, infinite mantle.

“That and much more . . . For example, do you think your husband's death was prompted by another husband's jealousy or something of the sort?”

“Are you mad? That was no jealous husband, more like a savage who – ”

“It is a possibility though, isn't it?”

“No, of course not. That wasn't Miguel's style. He was more the romantic sort and besides . . . Well, recently he couldn't . . . if you get me?”

“Perhaps it was something that happened a long time ago and that he resurrected . . .” the Count continued, warming to Miriam's confiding tone.

“I've already told you it wasn't, but you can think whatever you want. That's why you're a policeman, even why they pay you to be one.”

“True, but not enough,” confessed the Count trying to relieve the tension before heading off in another direction. “And what other reason did Miguel have, apart from his sick father, to risk returning to Cuba after leaving the way he did?”

She looked him in the eye and the policeman saw such a profound gaze he could have lost himself in its pursuit.

“I don't understand you.”

He was now the one to sigh, looking for the least stony path. “I mean did he return to resolve something he'd left hanging when he defected . . . Or perhaps to salvage something very important that he'd left behind . . .”

“I see where you're coming from. What sign are you?”

The Count breathed out before replying: “Libra . . . Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“Almost. You seem more a Sagittarian.”

“But I'm a classic Libra, I swear to you . . . Was he after something?”

“Like what?”

“A very peculiar Matisse, for example. Or perhaps even a Goya. I don't know, something worth much more than a few Tiffany lamps . . .”

She turned her head to look at the sea for a moment. The sea was still there, she seemed to be confirming, before saying: “If that was why he came, he'd have told me . . . And do you think I'd tell you?”

“I've no idea, it all depends . . . Let's say it depends what's more valuable: what he was after, or seeing justice done.”

“Forgive me, but you're talking rubbish . . . I still think they killed Miguel, I mean, the people who intended killing him . . . So, anything else?”

“Yes, there's something you perhaps know . . . I spoke to Gómez de la Peña today and he says Miguel left his house claiming he had to see a relative of his about very important business. Can you throw any light on that?”

Down came her eyelids and her carnivorous eyelashes almost swallowed Mario Conde.

“No, he never mentioned that to me. I can't think which relative it was, even less what important business he might – ”

“And why did Miguel go to see Gómez de la Peña?”

“They'd known each other for years, hadn't they? But I don't think they were friends. I don't know why he insisted on seeing him. Didn't Gómez tell you?”

“He told me but I wasn't convinced and I think he's a great liar. And if that's so, the truth might be somewhere there.”

“So you want to find out the truth . . .”

The Count threw his cigarette butt into the sea and expelled all the smoke from his lungs: “I'd also like to know how old you were when you married Miguel.”

“Eighteen. And Miguel was forty. Anything else?”

The Count smiled again. “Miriam, why do you take everything as an insult?”

She was the one who then attempted a smile, but the smile never reached her lips: the grimace, brought on by tears, pulled her lips down. Down and down, like a waterfall that seemed unstoppable. But the large, shiny tears welling in her eyes seemed unreal: as if they came from another face, or another person, or other feelings, which were very far from that place, perhaps on the other side of the sea. Hollow pearls, concluded the Count.

“But don't you understand anything? Don't you
realize I don't know what the hell I'll do with myself when I get back to Miami?”

 

 

“Calle 8 was what I wanted to see first. Before getting to his house, before going to bed with him. I'd created Calle 8 in my head, and it was like a fiesta and a museum. I couldn't imagine it any other way: a place of entertainment, full of bright lights and bustle, where the music played at full volume and people walked along the pavements, happy and carefree, enjoying that Little Havana where the good and the bad survived that had died out in this other Havana. That's why it also had to be a place that had stayed still in time, where I would find a country I didn't know and had always wanted to discover: like this country was before 1959, a café on every street corner, a jukebox playing boleros in every bar, a game of dominoes in every arcade, a street where you could get anything without queuing or finding out whether it was your turn or not according to the ration book. Like everybody else I'd heard the stories here in Havana and turned that blissful Calle 8 into a myth, and transformed it mentally into something like the heart of Cuban Miami . . . I remember how it was already dark when we left the airport and after three years without seeing each other I told Miguel my first wish and he asked me what it was I wanted to see on Calle 8 that was so pressing, and I told him: ‘That's it, Calle 8, Little Havana . . .' And to do something as simple and straightforward as eating a steak sandwich on a street corner.

“But that is all Calle 8 is: a street manufactured by the nostalgia of those who live in Miami and the dreams of those of us who want to go there. It is like
the fake ruins of a country that doesn't exist and never existed, and what remains is sick from an overdose of agonizing and prosperity, of hatred and oblivion. And consequently what I found, in the Calle 8 I'd been fabricating while waiting for my exit visa, was an ugly, lifeless, spiritless avenue, where almost nobody walked on pavements, where I heard no music I wanted to hear, found no carefree entertainment, or fry-up stalls selling the steak sandwich I wanted. Not even arcades with lots of columns, because there are no arcades in Miami . . . Three drunks cursed cars driving by. ‘They came out from Mariel,' said Miguel almost contemptuously, and two old people like my grandparents drinking coffee by a restaurant . . . The rest was silence. The silence of death.

“ ‘Miami is a strange place; not at all like you imagine it, is it?' commented Miguel as we turned at the end of Little Havana and went off towards Flager and his house. ‘Take a good look: Miami is nothing. Because it's got everything but lacks the vital element: it has no heart.”

“He had a bad time of it in those early years. In Madrid he'd depended on the charity of nuns and when he finally made it to the United States and to Miami, he'd worked as a hotel porter, a toll-collector on the freeway, on a supermarket till, until he got a job in a firm that imported and exported produce from Santo Domingo, and then things improved. But he never got involved in politics, though he had several visits from people who tried to involve him. You know, with the position he held in Cuba, it might have smoothed his way if he'd made a few declarations and ingratiated himself with some of the local political grandees, but he'd already written to me in a letter how he was afraid someone would find out he'd been
in charge of expropriating properties owned by many people who now lived in Miami. And people in Miami are not the kind to forgive and forget, I can tell you, although they like to turn a blind eye to the renegades who jump ship: it's mathematics really, a simple matter of addition, you know?

“That night, in his house, Miguel and I could at last talk about why he'd stayed in Spain without telling me anything beforehand and without any proper preparations. I'd never wanted to reproach him for his decision, for I knew there must be an important reason behind such an unexpected exit, living as we did in Cuba, with almost everything that one could wish for. Finally he told me his situation at work wasn't what it had been, and that any day it might have all collapsed, as it did not long after, and he also told me my brother Fermín was getting money together to buy a boat and would leave with me for Miami while he'd defect in Spain because he didn't want to leave by sea. You remember, his trauma about the sea? Well, not long after, they found Fermín had been embezzling, put him in jail and the whole plan collapsed . . . though I never knew anything about it.

“And so there we were, in Miami, a city Miguel couldn't stand, living on a wage and trying to relaunch his life, and I can tell you it wasn't easy. Calle 8 was like a premonition of everything I was and wasn't going to find in Miami and immediately I understood why Miguel said it wasn't how you thought it should be. Although it's full of Cubans, people don't live like they lived in Cuba anymore or behave as they behaved in Cuba. Those who don't work here can only think about working over there and possessing things: every day a new purchase, even though they are working themselves to death. Those who were atheist over
here become religious and never miss a mass. Those who were militant communists become even more militant anti-communists, and when they can't hide what they were, they shout it from the rooftops, parade their renunciation like a trophy, fully aware of the consequences, you know? There are even people who left here cursing the place, and who are even more fucked in Miami and so they decide it's their business to say dialogue would be best and that it should all be sorted through talk. Besides, something similar is happening there to what happened here with the image of Miami: the people there are beginning to turn Cuba into a myth, to imagine it as a desire, rather than remembering it as it was, and they live in a halfway house, going nowhere: they can't decide whether to forget Cuba or be new people in a new country, and finally they're neither one thing nor the other, like me, because after living there for eight years I don't know where I want to be or what I want to be . . . It's a national tragedy. Miami is nothing and Cuba is a dream that never existed . . . The truth is I don't know why I'm telling you about my life, about Miguel and Fermín. Perhaps because I think I can trust you. Or probably because I'm afraid and know that the worst of all this is that I must go back and Miguel won't be there to help me to live that peculiar life he forced on me. Do you still think it's strange that I curse the day we decided to return to this blessed isle for ten days?”