Havana Black

ever. But they came to believe that all frontiers to adulthood were marked by that alluring avenue, which belonged to the sinful side in their adolescent lore, a slope they were to go up and down – or down and up – in droves, always aiming for an ice-cream at the top and the prize of the sea – always the sea, accursed and inevitable – at the bottom, though their only real obsession was to walk up and down the Rampa, unaccompanied by parents, hoping to find love on one of its street corners. It was almost a second baptism to ascend and descend that street that was like life itself, the only avenue in the city with pavements carpeted in polished granite, where you trod, aesthetically unaware, on unique mosaics fashioned by Wifredo Lam, Amelia Pelaez, Rene Portocarrero, Mariano Rodriguez and Martinez Pedro, because your eyes were glued to the captivating neon signs of night clubs that were banned till the hurdle of a sixteenth birthday was cleared – The Vixen and the Crow, Club 23, The Grotto Cocktail Club – to the mysteries of the Cuba Pavilion and May Salon, exhibiting the last cry of the avant-garde, flanked by the two best cinemas in Havana, showing strange films with titles like Pierrot le Fou, Citizen Kane, Stolen Kisses or Ashes and Diamonds, which you struggled to see though they were impossible to enjoy. And you also practised urban mountaineering to catch a fleeting glimpse of a few underfed tropical hippies, fake and already damned, or else take a mocking glance at those pansies who insisted on showing what they were, and conduct a drooling survey of the mini-skirts that had only just hit the island, first worn on that incline where all the rivers of the new times seemed to flow: including the first rapids of intolerance, whose rigours they had to flee, though they were still such young, correct and dewy-eyed students, when the politically and ideologically correct hordes started to persecute youths, armed with scissors ready to snip any hair that fell beneath the ear or widen trousers whose thighs couldn’t encompass a small lemon: sad recollections of scissors and armoured cars exorcising pernicious cultural penetration, led by four long-haired English lads who repeated such reactionary, pernicious slogans as All You Need Is Love… Politics and hair, consciousness and fashion, ideology and arse, the Beatles and bourgeois decadence, and at the end of the road the Military Units to Aid Production with their prison-like rigours as a corrective to shape the New Man.

The Count was surprised by the exaggerated innocence of his own youthful initiation as he made that unexpected autumnal ascent, on the cusp of thirty-six, more than twenty years after he’d made his first ascent – or was it descent? – with Rabbit, Dwarf, Andres, perhaps Pello as well, each armed with a cigarette, chewing a rubber band as if it were enemy chewing gum, with a dream in their hearts – or perhaps a bit lower down. (All you need is love, right?) The Count rediscovered on that very same Rampa, which Heraclitus of Ephesus would have dialectically described as different, his hunting ground from the old days, now all in darkness, closed clubs, a dingy Pavilion, the boarded-up pizzeria and the absence of that long-gone girlfriend he would wait for on the corner by the Indo-China shop, where they now sold what must be the last watches sent from a Moscow that was every day more distant and impervious to tears. It was all far too pathetic, but at once moving and squalid, as he replayed that innocent snapshot of his awakening to life, and the policeman on active service thought he could see some remote causes of later disappointments and frustrations: reality had turned out not to be a question of capricious, wilful ascents and descents, unconsciously alternated, with the sea or an ice-cream as a goal, but a struggle to go up and not down, to keep on up, to go up and stay up, for ever and ever, pursuing a philosophy of finding a room at the top from which they had been excluded and definitively locked out – Andres was right again – and sentenced – almost to a man – to the eternal labour of Sisyphus: to go up only to go down, to go down only to go back up, knowing you’d never stay at the top, getting older and more exhausted, as when he climbed up that night, after walking down, looking for the blonde now waving at him from the corner of Coppelia and who enquired of the Count as he walked up to her: “What’s up, Lieutenant? Anyone would think you’re about to burst into tears.”

“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 Malecon?”

“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 Fermin?”

“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, Fermin?”

“Yes,” she replied, looking at the Count. “A ’56 Chevrolet Fermin 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