favourable opportunity to resume its interrupted journey to Spain. And in August 1870 it was put on board the sailing ship
“On 23 August, in the teeth of several weather forecasts warning of the approach of a hurricane like the one on its way now, Captain Chavarria raised anchor after deciding that if a storm threatened he should seek shelter in the bay of Matanzas, where he would anyway have to put in for two days.
“And the Buddha disappeared once more, as if that were its cyclical destiny. Nobody heard anything about it for a long time, though in the course of the investigations I carried out over the years into the history of that Buddha I formed a very poor opinion of Captain Nathaniel Chavarria… Because it just happened that one day, when conversing about Basque genealogy with a Uruguayan botanist called Basterrechea, who came to Cuba some fifteen years ago, he told me of the existence of a town in Uruguay by the name of San Jose de Mayo, of rich cattle ranches where he had done soil analyses at the request of the owners, the Chavarria family, of Basque descent, naturally. On hearing that, I asked him to find out the origins of the family and he wrote to me soon after, relating how the present owner’s great-grandfather had come to Uruguay around 1880 with a substantial amount of money he quickly invested in land, to avoid losing it all on the night-time binges in which he used to indulge in the brothels of Montevideo and Buenos Aires, despite the fact that he was sixty. I suggested he find out if the family was aware of the existence of a gold Buddha from the T’ang dynasty and whether they knew where their great-grandfather’s fortune came from and what his line of work was before he emigrated to Uruguay. And the response was surprising and most revealing: they knew nothing of any Buddha or the source of Nathaniel Chavarria’s wealth, although they suspected he’d got it from an inheritance or his own commercial genius, because the old man was a poor second son who had been a military and then merchant sailor, only a few years before reaching that god-forsaken corner of South America, his pockets stuffed with gold and in the company of an Andalusian colleague who went by two names: Alberto Guarino, or Federico del Barrio.
“Chavarria’s ruse was thus exposed and anyone not possessing the information I managed to put together could imagine two alternatives: either the Basque had sold the Buddha somewhere in Europe or America, or he’d melted it down, a much safer option for him, and had sold the thirty-one pounds of pure gold and disappeared to a remote town in Uruguay… But the second possibility never made any sense, because thirty years after the Matanzas shipwreck the Buddha was known still to exist, as smiling and healthy as ever, and had even returned to the hands of Don Antonio Riva de la Nuez…
“Because after Cuban independence, in 1902, when Spanish law ceased to be in effect on the island, a man called Manuel Riva Fernandez, son of the Don Antonio who had lost and clearly recovered the gold Buddha, which he must surely have bought for a very goodly sum from Basque Captain Chavarria or his sidekick by the name of Guarino, showed the family relic to some friends and even allowed the press to photograph it. At the time there was talk of the statue costing more than two million dollars, because of its undoubted artistic value, since it was authenticated as a T’ang sculpture that had survived the disastrous banning of Buddhism in the ninth century, and was obviously one of the most extraordinary treasures from that time about which any information existed. And if any doubts remained as to its real origins, they could be forgotten after Manuel Riva was invited to an exhibition in Paris to exhibit his piece by the side of other treasures of ancient Chinese art. And Paris swooned at the feet of that magnificent Buddha, which was remarkable in so many ways.
“Manuel’s daughter, Zenaida Riva y Ponce de Leon, inherited the Buddha upon the death of her father, in 1936. Zenaida, who had married the Cuban banker Alcides Guevara, one of the richest men in Cuba, took the Buddha to their Miramar home, and placed it in a security-locked, unbreakable glass cabinet, specially built in London for the Guevaras. I know of several people who saw the sculpture there and it was undoubtedly the family’s pride and joy, which they could indulge the luxury of exhibiting and not selling, for if there was something the Guevara-Riva y Ponce de Leons had to excess it was money… but that was of no use when in 1951 thieves deactivated the alarms, broke the security lock and removed the item from the house in Miramar. It is very easy to trawl this part of the story, because the press at the time printed reams on the case, photos of the Buddha were circulated, and a famous detective was even commissioned to investigate the theft, apparently a semi-specialist in such
“But not a word about the Buddha. The theft couldn’t have been a put-up job like Chavarria’s, because after Cuban independence the Rivas had become the legal owners of the treasure and had no need to hide it, indeed, it was their misfortune that they did quite the opposite.
“Yes, the Revolution triumphed and from January 1959 the Cuban bourgeoisie began to emigrate to the United States, Spain, Mexico, Puerto Rico, taking with them anything they could. Some dallied a little longer and their lingering cost them dear: they could leave Cuba, but the government confiscated everything it considered part of the nation’s cultural patrimony and passed it into the hands of the State. Consequently, many people must have left real fortunes behind them: they didn’t always surrender them, though, but sought out every possible means to hide them so they could later take them out via an alternative route or recover them, if as they anticipated, the Revolution didn’t hold out for very long… But what you are imagining, Lieutenant, didn’t happen: Miguel didn’t steal in that way… be patient, the best is yet to come… or the worst, you will have to tell me.
“One of those Cuban bourgeois families was the Mena y Carbo family, who by chance lived only three blocks from the former residence of Alcides Guevara and Zenaida Riva… They fled Cuba in October 1960, leaving Senor Patricio Mena’s spinster aunt in the house. But that aunt, who was only fifty and lived comfortably on the income assigned her as a result of the Urban Reform requisitions, died suddenly in January 1962 leaving no heirs on the island, and consequently the house was also inventoried by the government and the objects of value it contained were expropriated as goods of the State, and my son Miguel was in charge… In reality, there weren’t many objects in the house of any importance: the mahogany furniture, a few Chinese porcelain vases of little merit, and that beautiful desk that caught your attention, which does have a special worth, though little appreciated by non- connoisseurs: it is the work of a pupil of Boulle, the famous French cabinet-maker who created a whole school for building cupboards and desks, which were particularly noteworthy because they had hidden compartments that could be barely detected if you compared the exterior and interior dimensions of the piece of furniture.
“It was just another bureau as it was for everybody else and Miguel knew I needed one for my papers and decided to buy it and give it to me as a present; we brought it here and found a suitable spot in that corner… As you already know I am a scientist, and I told you that I believe in God and the Virgin, didn’t I? Well, it was that combination that led me to look for references to the style of my strange bureau and hence I came across Boulle and his practice of constructing quasi-invisible secret compartments. And I thought if this piece of furniture belonged to that school, it might also have such a compartment and I decided to find it. Do you know what? I had to search for three days, groping, measuring, tapping the bottom, and when I was almost sure no such hiding-place existed, I decided to push back a flange at the back of the drawer on the left, and when I tapped it I heard a slight whirr in the wood: almost unawares I had found the spring to lift up the two boards forming the drawer bottom, where someone had built a small cavity in which I found two pieces of paper: a handwritten love poem, with no title or author’s name, and most certainly deficient in literary terms, and something that was clearly a map, with references to a house, a fountain, a grille and an avocado bush, and the distance in feet from each of those places
