Havana Fever

“I don’t know… to keep you company, I suppose. You’re the maddest, arsiest character I know, but I like your company. Know what, man? You’re the only straightforward fellow I ever deal with in this and all my other businesses. You’re like a bloody creature from Mars. As if you weren’t for real, I mean.”

“Is this praise, coming from you?” enquired the Count.

“More or less… You know, we live in a jungle. As soon as you leave your shell, you’re surrounded by vultures, people set on fucking you up, stealing your money, getting laid with your woman, informing on you and making sure you get busted so they can make a buck… A bunch of people who don’t want to complicate their lives, and most just want out, to cross the water, even if it’s to fucking Madagascar. And fuck anyone else… And don’t expect too much from life.”

“That’s not what the newspapers say,” Conde egged him on, to see if he’d jump, but Yoyi only seethed.

“What newspapers? I bought one once, I wiped my butt on it, and it left it covered in shit, I swear…”

“You ever hear talk of Che’s New Man?”

“What’s that? Where can you buy one?”

When they reached the crossroads of 51 and 64 Streets Pigeon turned right and looked for the number Pancho Carmona had given them.

“That’s where the blind guy lives. Look, he’s in the doorway,” he said as he parked the car next to the pavement. “Don’t slam the door, man, this is a real car, not one of your Russian tin-cans on wheels…”

Conde let the car door go and watched it gently swing to, pulled by its own weight. He crossed the small garden and greeted Rafael Giro. He explained how they were friends of Pancho Carmona, and appealed to his vanity by saying he’d read his book on mambo and thought it excellent.

“So why this visit? Do you want to sell me a book?” asked Rafael, who didn’t stop his wooden chair from rocking. His eyes were like two powerful, round lamps behind the thick concentric lenses of his cheap, poor imitation tortoiseshell spectacles.

“No, it’s not that… Pancho told us he sold you a record by a bolero singer, Violeta del Rio, about fifteen years ago…”

“The Lady of the Night,” said Rafael just as Pigeon joined them.

“You heard of her then?’ he asked cheekily, flopping on an armchair before he’d even been invited to sit down.

“Of course, I have. Or do you think I’m one of those musicologists – at least that’s what they call themselves – who talk about music they’ve never listened to and haven’t written an effing book in all their effing lives?… Please take a seat,” he said finally, addressing the Count who sat down in one of the armchairs.

“Well, we’ve asked a number of people…”

“I know, hardly anyone remembers her. She only made one record and as she worked in clubs and cabarets… Just imagine, in Havana at the time there were more than sixty clubs and cabarets with two or three shows a night. Not counting restaurants and bars where trios, pianists and combos played…”

“Incredible,” said a genuinely astonished Pigeon.

“Can you imagine the number of artists required to sustain that rhythm? Havana was a crazy place: it was the liveliest city on the planet. You can forget fucking Paris and New York! Far too cold… the Nightlife was right here! True, there were whores, there were drugs and there was the mafia, but people enjoyed life and night-time started at six p.m. and went on till dawn. Can you imagine in a single night being able to drink beer, listen to the Anacaonas in the Aires Libres on Prado, eat at nine listening to the music and voice of Bola de Nieve, then in the Saint John and listening to Elena Burke, after going to a cabaret and dancing to Benny More, with the Aragon, Casino de la Playa, the Sonora Matancera, then taking a break to swing to the boleros of Olga Guillot, Vicentico Valdes, Nico Membiela… or off to listen to the crooners, grainyvoiced Jose Antonio Mendez, or Cesar Portillo and, rounding off the night, escaping to the beach to see Chori play his timbales, and sitting there cool as anything, between Marlon Brando and Cab Calloway, next to Errol Flynn and Josephine Baker. And, if you’d any breath left, down to The Grotto, here on La Rampa, to see the dawn in with a jazz session with Tata Guines, Barreto, Bebo Valdes, Negro Vivar, Frank Emilio and all those lunatics who are the best musicians Cuba has ever produced? They were here in their thousands, music was in the air, you could cut it with a knife, you had to push it aside to walk down the street… And Violeta del Rio was one of them…”

“Just one of the crowd?” hazarded the Count, apparently heading for a big disappointment.

“She was no Elena Burke or Olguita Guillot, but she did have a real voice of her own. And a style. And a body. I never saw her, but Rogelito, the timbalero, once told me she was one of the most fantastic women in Havana. A real traffic-stopper.”

“And what happened?”

“One day she said she wasn’t going to sing anymore and disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

“In a manner of speaking. She didn’t sing again and… vanished like a hundred other boleristas who had their days of glory followed by their years of oblivion…”

“Any idea why?”

“I heard things… That her voice failed her. She had a smallish voice, it wasn’t a torrent like Celia Cruz’s or Omara Portuondo’s, although she performed well with what she had. But I never bothered to find out where she ended up… Katy Barque did talk to me about her once. She said they had a row.”

“A row?” the Count smiled. “I can’t imagine a woman as spiritual as Katy Barque getting into a row.”

“Katy Barque is a little she-devil, don’t believe all they say about her being the gentle singer of love songs… But their row was just words. They didn’t see eye to eye because they had similar styles. Truth be told several boleristas sang more or less the same way, with lots of feeling, lots of high drama, as if they held everything in contempt. It was a very fifties style. Did you never hear the recording they made of ‘Freddy’? In the sixties, La Lupe changed that style into some thing else rather sorrowful, contempt turned to scorn, drama to tragedy: La Lupe marks another era… But when Violeta started out, Katy Barque was the best known in her style, and apparently she thought the other woman was competition… Hence the row.”

“But wasn’t there room for everyone?” wondered Yoyi.

“Down at the base of the pyramid, there was. It wasn’t the same at the top. These boleristas were very special ladies, full of character. A bolero isn’t any old song, obviously: to sing one you really make it yours, don’t just feel it. Boleros aren’t about reality but a desire for reality you reach via an appearance of reality, if you follow me? No matter… That’s the philosophy behind boleros, I wrote about that in my book… And that was its golden age, because the classic composers who’d been writing since the twenties and thirties came together with these young men with lots of feeling who read French poetry and knew what atonal music was. And that encounter created those boleros that now seem to speak of life… Real life. Even though it’s all lies: pure theatre, as La Lupe said.”

“What about Violeta’s record?” asked the Count, clinging to the edge of the precipice.

“I’ve got it in there… but my record player’s broken. I’m waiting for a friend to bring me one from Spain, because… Do you know how many LPs, 78s and 45s I’ve got in there?”

Rafael followed his question with such an abrupt silence the Count was forced to follow his cue.

“No, how many?”

“12,622. What do you reckon?”

“Fantastic,” conceded Pigeon.

“They cost me a fortune, and now with CDs nobody’s interested. Every day someone comes with a box of records and gives them me for nothing.”

“What do we have to do to listen to Violeta’s?” the Count implored.

Rafael took his glasses off and rubbed them on his shirt-flap and the Count was shocked to see he hardly had any eyes. The sockets were two deep round holes, like bullet holes, darkened by the circles from the bags obscuring his mulatto skin. When he put his glasses back on, the man restored his wakeful owlish eyes and the Count felt relieved.

“I never lend my records, books or press cuttings. As you can imagine, people have nicked things hundreds of times…”

The Count’s brain began to spin in search of a solution. Come back with a record player? Bring a needle for Rafael’s system?… Or leave something in lieu?

“How about this for a deal? We’ve got seven boxes of books in our car boot you won’t find anywhere else. I’ll