Ever since he’d been promoted to detective, Mario Conde had always avoided that kind of labour: reviewing legal documents, probing archives, checking though papers. Although he often had recourse to investigative routine, his approach was more and more based on hunches, prejudices and intuitions rather than assembling statistics or proceeding to logical conclusions, and that was why he preferred to leave the scientific side of the investigation to his aides. But the rush imposed by the day and a half deadline meant he had to shut himself up with Sergeant Manuel Palacios in that oppressive study in the National Archive and dive in to locate two remote facts: the address of the Garcia Abreus in Miramar and the existence of the inventory of objects made in that house by the functionaries working for Expropriated Property, who must have included Miguel Forcade. The Cuban itinerary of that Matisse brought by Sanchez Menocal, later purchased by the Acostas de Arriba, and supposedly sold to a Batista minister in 1954, could perhaps be plotted further if it could be proved the work had been in that house in Miramar that Friguens assured him had belonged to the Garcia Abreus, who must have had a good reason not to make their million-dollar acquisition public. Moreover, the Count’s inability to visualize the yellow patch the old critic identified as a dog had started to gnaw at him as irritatingly as a nagging suspicion.
“Did you take a good look at the painting, Manolo?”
The Sergeant marked the file he was examining and looked at his boss.
“Fuck, Conde, I looked at it. And I really don’t think I like it very much. You can hardly see anything, man.”
“You’re an ignorant savage, and insensitive to boot. It’s post-impressionist… But did you see the dog?”
“The yellow dog?”
“Uh-huh.”
Manolo closed his eyes for a moment, like old Friguens. The Count supposed he must be reviewing the picture mentally, and when he raised his eyelids he said: “No, to be honest, I can’t remember.”
The Count sighed and accepted defeat.
“All right, get on, keep looking.”
And they turned to the bundles of documents. It was only at moments like that that the Count longed for the efficiency of computers, which could digest a name – “Garcia Abreu” perhaps – and tell the whole story with photos included. Otherwise, his cybernetic inadequacies made him think of those machines as an aberration of human intelligence, which had perhaps created in them one of the monsters of its own selfdestruction. The infinite trust placed by people in the electronic reasoning of those insensate gadgets scared him in the end: it was inevitable that if man transferred all his wisdom and analytical ability to those soulless creations such an unnatural act would wreak devastation. Luckily for the Count, the island’s chronic underdevelopment and pre-post-modern intellectual stance had vaccinated it against that unstoppable world pandemic. Although, at the end of the day, he thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea if the archive did possess a little engine of salvation, which could tell the whole story (canvases included) in response to a single name: Henri Matisse, for example.
“We’ve got three days’ work here,” he declared desperately and lit a cigarette as he stood up. A physical need to flee had hit his stomach, and threatened to drill through.
“You’ve given up so soon?” Manolo asked with a smile. “You almost lasted an hour…”
“The fact is I can’t stand it.”
“But I have to…?”
The Count took a drag, looked at the bundles, and said: “You shouldn’t have to. Nobody should have to… but if somebody has to do this shit, I think it’s your turn today…”
“It always is…”
“Don’t start, Manolo, I let you off when I can,” he replied, searching his repertory for an excuse that rang with elegant conviction. “Look, while you try and find something, I’ll go and see somebody who can help us. I’m not sure how but I think they can. It’s ten past eleven? Well, let’s meet back at Headquarters at two. If you don’t find anything, I’ll tell Colonel Molina to send some people… Because I can’t get into this, even if they turn me back into an ordinary policeman… I just can’t: look, I’ve already got a rash…”
The old avenue down to the port, between the area around the National Archive and the church in Paula, must be the eyesore of Havana, thought the Count, as he always had: it’s not even ugly, dirty, disgusting or disagreeable, he listed some adjectives, discarding others: it’s alien, he concluded, contemplating it beneath the harsh light of a midday that was summery rather than autumnal, as he walked up the street lined by anti-aesthetic stores on the sea side and unfriendly blocks on the city side: brick and concrete blocks built to the single criterion of utility with no concession to beauty, forming an impenetrable, ochre wall on both sides of the street, covered in rubbish that had fallen from the overflowing bins where a few dogs sniffed, hoping against any real hope. What was terrible was that people, probably too many, inhabited those buildings without balconies, arches or visible columns: their tiny flats designed in function of the rapid pleasures bestowed by prostitutes on passing sailors, port-workers and city dwellers who dared to descend to the last frontier of the old district of San Isidro, in the heart of Apache territory: the “quays”, that place permeated with the whole history of modern pirating, vice and perdition, those dark annals through which the Count felt a longing for the unknown, inherited by way of stories he’d heard from old men who’d swum in those lagoons of bottomless evil. Later, many of those practitioners of sex, morally redeemed and socially recycled, had stayed on to live in rooming-houses, thus transformed into family residencies by ex-whores who now had children that couldn’t always be dubbed sons of whores for reasons of timing: because, in fact, the correct classification depended on the moment they were born: before or after maternal rehabilitation… The Count had occasionally visited those sad apartments, marked by a sordid past, which, after one fine morning, thirty years ago, were no longer reached by running water, and now he thought of the additional daily sadness of those people, trapped by the cruel fatalism of town-planners, people who went into the street only to see that same dark, desolate panorama, so far removed from a possible landscape by Matisse or Cezanne, or by chairs and tables tropicalized by Chinese mulatto Wifredo Lam. No, it couldn’t be pleasant to spend your life in that area, a bucket of water in each hand and congenital ugliness behind you, he told himself as he walked by the old church of Paula, now marooned in the middle of the street by utilitarian modernity, and turned his prow towards the Alameda in search of a tree able to give shade and a bench from which he could contemplate the sea. Nor was that really the sea he was looking for, since he judged that corner of the bay to be equally sordid, its waters polluted by oil and gases spilled there, a sea without life or waves, but he reaped the reward of a patch of freedom he so desperately needed: an open space to pitch against archival claustrophobia and streets bordered by peeling walls and whorish anecdote.
As he breathed in the putrid stench of the bay, the Count realized why he had fled the Archive where the legal memory of his country rested: he really couldn’t care less whether he found anything. An unhealthy apathy had invaded him at the revelation of so much dead past, so much existence reduced to certificates, declarations, forms, extracts, protocols, registers, in duplicate and even triplicate, emptied of passion and blood: the whole devalued detritus of history without which it wasn’t possible to live but with which it was impossible to co-exist. The violent revelation that all was reduced to a piece of paper, numbered and filed according to entries of birth, marriage, divorce and death had been far too apocalyptic an illumination for his spirit on the eve of a birthday and liberation from work: the arid wake of nothingness left by being thirty-six less one day exposed to him the alarming futility of his efforts, as man, as human being, as supposedly intelligent animal. What could he do to hold off that pathetic, dismal destiny, as someone who considered his memory and memory itself to be a most precious gift? Perhaps art, as the unashamedly queer dramatist Alberto Marques had reminded him recently, might be the remedy most within his grasp in order to escape oblivion. But his art, he knew already, would never enjoy the transcendence able to save him (art and myself, as Marti had cried on a day of despair; either we save each other or go down together). Or perhaps it would? he wondered, remembering that other genius who had committed suicide sure he’d failed artistically and whose novel then won prizes and recognition that were well and truly deserved. No. He’d never write anything like that, he shouldn’t delude himself, he concluded, and depressed himself a little bit more before standing up and walking along the old Alameda de Paula, Havana’s elegant eighteenth-century promenade, equally devalued by age and neglect, with its leonine fountain distressingly dry, before heading to the still distant mouth of the bay. It was inevitable his steps would take him past that mythical bar in the port, The Two Brothers, where Andres had once lived his most memorable bout of drinking, and had learned – then communicated the experience to his friends – that having a whore as a mother doesn’t turn the offspring (necessarily) into the son of a whore, despite being born (as he had been) while his progenitor was still on the job… There were then more than temporal or labour issues that determined whether you were to be (or not to be) a son of a whore. The Count, on the other
