Havana Black

“Where did Miguel say he was going and why did he go alone?” asked the Count, looking into the young woman’s eyes, though it was the old lady who replied.

“From the moment he got here, he hardly went out into the street, because… well, you know the story: he was afraid they’d keep him here, or something similar, because of the way he left… But that Thursday he said he wanted to go for a drive, to see a bit of Havana, and that he preferred to do so alone, because Miriam was going to be at her sister’s, in Miramar. And he left here around five.”

Manolo looked at the Count, as if seeking permission and the lieutenant’s eyes acceded. He knew his colleague was more skilful in that kind of verbal enquiry and besides if he were silent he could study at leisure the riches gathered in that room: that’s why he looked at the Tiffany lamps again and then at Miriam’s eyes, breasts and legs, all hot and anxious because it was now he could best evaluate the woman: Miriam was surely a ripe fruit, her shiny, smooth skin, like a beautiful peel protecting all those fleshly assets fashioned over time: and now she was ready to be eaten, her flavours, scents and textures at their zenith, beyond which it was impossible to scale higher. Her disturbing, full ripeness risked possible degeneration into flab as soon as the climactic moment passed: in the meantime it could be a banquet for the gods. A pity the fruit wouldn’t fall into his hands, the Count concluded, trying to pick up the thread of the conversation, driven by the insistent gaze of Adrian Riveron.

“Could there be someone who wanted to take revenge because of something that happened in Cuba before Miguel left?”

“That is very difficult to know, comrade,” replied the old lady, and she looked to her daughter-in-law for support. “He worked in important areas here, but as you know he took nothing from Cuba, and didn’t create a fuss over there…”

“He didn’t want to come,” interjected Miriam, uncrossing her legs: a vampirish Count studied the red circle of blood visible on the thigh that had borne the weight of the other leg. “He came because his father is very ill and Miguel always loved him deeply. But he came fearing they’d get at him. He knew only too well he hadn’t been forgotten. And he was right, wasn’t he? That’s why what happened to him makes one think – ”

“Please, Miriam,” hesitantly interjected the man called Adrian Riveron, not coughing on this occasion, though he remained on his feet, efficiently protecting the woman’s possibly vulnerable rearguard.

“Let me say what I want to say…” she demanded, keeping her eyes on the Count.

“Please, forgive her,” intervened Adrian, rushing to her defence again, smiling at the policemen. “She’s upset and she’s always been strong-willed.” And he cleared his throat a couple of times.

“There’s nothing to forgive,” said the Count, smiling, his gaze captivated by Miriam’s eyes: dry, magnetic eyes. “Senora, since you suspect so much, I want you to be frank and tell me something: whom did your husband go to visit that Thursday afternoon? And why did he prefer to go by himself, if he was really so afraid to venture out into the street?”

Like another hurricane, the name of Gerardo Gomez de la Pena stirred Mario Conde’s Ocean of Sunken Nostalgia. He still remembered him, in his cool, light blue guayabera and pale pink trousers, made from soft but strong material, descending with elegantly microscopic precision to his shoes: that unforgettable pair of shoes. The Count closed his eyes and saw them again: moccasins that were comfortable just to look at, a mahogany shading furiously to brown, hand-stitched edging and the lightest of soles, origins beyond dispute: they just had to be Italian. That afternoon Gerardo Gomez de la Pena entered the university theatre, and his feet entered the Count’s desires for ever: those were the shoes he wanted, he concluded, dismissing the thought, as he contemplated his stiff, heavy Russian boots, (like the heads of our Russian brothers, they would say), which they had to wear to school every day given the terrifying emptiness of their shoe cupboard. His father had died a year earlier and the family was totally broke. The idea he should abandon university and look for a job was not a possibility but an urgent necessity, and now Mario Conde wondered whether those shoes he saw walk by him – still a subject of dreams; he’d never owned anything remotely similar – weren’t the reason he became a policeman, who needed to make some money as quickly as possible and give his Russian boots, more suited to walking the steppes, tundra or taiga, to some less proletarian colleagues.

Gomez de la Pena climbed to the podium, followed by the Dean of the Faculty and the Secretary-General of the Youth. The super-minister was the protagonist of the evening, since from the peaks of his historicoeconomic responsibilities he was apparently the wondrous genius charged with giving material form to all the island’s productive miracles: to take the socialist economy to its final, magnificent conclusions till – through these conclusions and that economy – the country was transformed into a land free of underdevelopment, monoculture, unemployment, shortages, social differences and even potholes in its roads, euphemistic gaps in its gastronomy or waiting lists at bus stations.

And the alchemist of Planning, the prophet of prosperity expounded on that promised land to an audience that was literally captive: anyone who didn’t attend would have a black mark inserted on his record, the course directors had made clear, and the Count wasn’t that sorry to hear for almost two hours about the future realities he would enjoy, after a maximum of two five-year plans, because, according to the comrade minister’s speech, it was a fact that comrade Mario Conde would very soon possess all the shoes he needed, was it not?

Twelve years later history had demonstrated there wasn’t the remotest possibility that any of those promises would be kept, and not even several tons of faith and preferential trade would have been enough to spark the miraculous salvation. So that is why Gerardo Gomez de la Pena now wore pyjamas and beach sandals that displayed his thin, misshapen, irredeemably ugly toes. The power of shoes, thought the Count, and only then did he look at the smile on the man’s face as he saw the two policemen arrive. Of the abundant but greying hair that he remembered, the Count now saw only unkempt fringes, which had been allowed to grow to incredible lengths and then combed from above his left ear to cover his smooth pate and fall over his right ear before descending to the nape of his neck, as if that act of hairy trickery prevented its owner from being merely a bald man who accepted his state in a stoic, dignified way. The pink face of yesteryear had turned into a very ancient, poorly preserved parchment, rent with cracks and crevices: ten years of political, social and nutritional marginalization had been enough to age that fallen angel, mutated from one day to the next into the devil behind economic imitation and commercial surrender that had devastated any planned growth in the productive spheres, by introducing Australian techniques for cutting sugar cane, Czech bottling into the breweries and Siberian methods into agriculture, among the many horrors one still recalled but which people never now mentioned. The thunderous dismissal of Gomez de la Pena had resonated for a couple of weeks because the entire blame for the predictable catastrophe had fallen on that cold, hated technocrat’s head: all in all the economic bonanza had never been planned for present generations, who were required only to demonstrate inexhaustible austerity and a continually renewed, almost Christian spirit of sacrifice. Besides, it was a nonsense to copy foreign models, with the constant sun and heat of the island, wasn’t it? We should work looking only to the future and independently, was the conclusion of the summary sentence that took Gerardo Gomez de la Pena out of circulation and decreed the end of any possibility that a fellow like Mario Conde could ever wear a pair of shoes like the ones he’d seen on that unforgettable night: brown, supple, Italian…

Nonetheless, the dethroned leader had clung to some of a super-minister’s old privileges: the house in Nuevo Vedado, for example, which the Count pledged to pay more attention to, for it really warranted it, with its structure of asymmetric blocks, brick walls, multicoloured windows, the unusual spaces designed by fifties futurists who found one of their most fertile terrains in that upper-middle-class stronghold, far from the rabble that had landed in the heart of Vedado. Indeed, wondered the Count, who might have originally owned that mansion?

The policemen explained the reason for their visit and the execrated Gomez de la Pena replied that he already knew about Miguel Forcade’s death and invited them to come into what he called the reception-cum-living room. A sofa and four whitewashed, welcoming willow chairs were arranged around a similarly coloured table made of the same material, and on the wall where the sofa rested, the Count was struck by the magnificent reproduction of a work possibly by Cezanne that, apart from the plants, was the room’s only adornment: a street spread over the canvas – that didn’t seem Parisian but from a small coastal or provincial town – lined with trees caressed by an insistent wind, bowing their heads, their leaves dissolving into a round palette of autumnal greens and twilight ochres, which, thanks to a recondite magic, spread their own light, cleverly extracted from the blend of invisible breeze and leaves about to be swept away by the wind into a blue surround of sky, striped by brushstrokes of magenta.

“Do you like it, Lieutenant?” Gomez de la Pena whispered, when he saw the attention the policeman was devoting to the painting.