decent sense of history and shocking memory, lethargy and predestination, grandeur and frivolity, idealism and pragmatism, as if balancing out virtues and defects, right? But exhaustion follows all that. Exhaustion at being so historic and so predestined.”
“Historical exhaustion,” the Count savoured Rabbit’s definition, downed his rum and looked at his friends, model sufferers from acquired historical exhaustion syndrome: Skinny who was no longer skinny, his spine destroyed in a war, that was of course historic, but about which nobody now spoke; a gawky Rabbit, his increasingly long teeth sticking our from a skull much in evidence, still able to theorize on insular exaggeration but who’d never written any of the history books he’d dreamt of writing; Red Candito, historically anchored in the noisy tenement where he’d been born, going hungry ever since he gave up his countless illicit endeavours and insisted on looking for transcendental answers in a chronicle written 2,000 years ago, and which spoke of an apocalypse bristling with terrible punishments for all those who didn’t deliver their soul up to the Saviour. And finally, how could the absent presence, Andres, possibly have concluded that to erase his nostalgia and mock his historic fatigue, it was best never to return to the island? Or even see another baseball game in the Havana stadium? Or even come to a drinks, music and conversation session with those friends, who, in spite of their mutilations, frustrations, beliefs and disbeliefs, historic exhaustion and physical and intellectual hunger, never said no to a night of shared evocations, vaguely but latently aware that if they had given up that friendship they’d perhaps have forgotten what living was a long time ago?
“Life was passing us by on all sides,” said Rabbit, “and to protect us they gave us blinkers. Like mules. We should only look ahead and stride towards the shining future awaiting us at the end of history and, obviously, we weren’t allowed to get tired on that road. Our only problem was that the future was very far off and the path went uphill and was full of sacrifices, prohibitions, denials and privations. The more we advanced, the steeper the slope and more distant the shining future, which was fading quickly anyway. The bastard had run out of petrol. I sometimes think they dazzled us with all that glare and we walked past the future and didn’t even see it… Now we’re halfway round the track and are going blind, as well as bald and cirrhotic, and there’s not even all that much we want to see anymore.”
Listening to Rabbit, the Count felt the bittersweet taste of immeasurable sadness congeal in his mouth.
“You can always seek out God,” Candito pronounced.
“Nobody’s up there looking after us, Red. We’re completely on our own,” the Count contradicted him.
“Don’t you believe in miracles?”
“Not any more. But I do trust in my hunches. And that’s why I won’t fail to find out what happened to Violeta del Rio,” concluded the Count, whose mouth was then overwhelmed by the feeling he still lacked a really plausible motive, and so he spelt out the first that came to his lips. “I want to find out why history swallowed her up.”
Not worried why he was doing so – and not really interested in finding out – perhaps driven by a mixture of alcohol and the persistent allure of certain phantoms and fascinations, Conde hailed a taxi going in the opposite direction to his house and asked the driver to take him to the corner of Twenty-Third and L, or any other street corner that might encompass the same evocative ciphers. He was pleased to see that even at that late, late hour of the night, the fast-beating heart of the city was still packed with spaced-out youths and adults trawling for illicit offerings. In the doorway and vicinity of the cinema, and on the other side of the street, next to the iron rails protecting the ice creamery, an insomniac crowd slipped past under the sleepy gaze of various pairs of policemen. Gays of every tendency and category, rockers with no stage or music, savage hunters and huntresses of foreigners and dollars, bored birds of the night with one, two and even three hidden agendas seemed anchored to that spot, not fearing the imminent dawn, as if hoping something out of the blue might drag them down the street, perhaps out to sea, or maybe up into the sky.
The new life re-surfacing in the city, after the deep lethargy it was plunged into by the Crisis’s darkest years, had a pace and density the ex-policeman couldn’t pin down. Rappers and rastas, prostitutes and drug addicts, the newly rich and newly poor were redrawing the geography of the city, now stratified according to the number of dollars possessed and which was beginning to seem more normal, although it always made him wonder which was for real, the life he’d known in his youth, or the one he was now contemplating in his mature, illusion-free years
Conde wasn’t particularly looking for a right answer, and moved away from the night-time bustle, taking to the slope of La Rampa. The chronological boundaries of nostalgia were set way beyond his most distant memory, and so he tried to find the still visible traces of a dazzling, perverted city, a distant planet, familiar from hearsay, heard on forgotten records, discovered in infinite reading, always appearing, peopled with lights, clubs, cabarets, tunes and characters he now knew Violeta del Rio must have been familiar with almost fifty years ago, her hopes soaring, in search of her place in the sun.
He walked non-stop past the revitalized luminous sign of The Vixen and the Crow, where she’d once sung, and which was now off limits to anyone not carrying the five US dollars necessary to guarantee a seat; he contemplated the barred and bolted entrance to The Grotto, which didn’t betray the slightest echo of the late night chords that echoed in that musical cave when the sun was about to rise; he looked with no particular emotion at the charred ruins of the old Montmartre, proletarianly re-christened Moscow and prophetically devoured by fire years before that empire disintegrated; he passed by the soulless entrance to the Las Vegas cabaret, where a man, around his own age, caught his attention, looking distinctly nostalgically at the place that was now boarded up where for so many years you could drink your last cup of coffee in the early hours; he walked without a glimmer of hope past the garlanded mansion of the White Peak, no longer enticing passersby with graceful guitar arpeggios; he walked up towards the now darkened Red Room at the Capri, its doors shut and chained, and finally entered the gardens at the National Hotel, under the gaze of grumpy security guards equipped with walkie-talkies, who let him off and through without asking a single question, although they visually arrested him on charges of being Cuban, not possessing dollars or belonging to that scene; he lingered for a few minutes in front of the luxurious, equally dollarized portico of the Parisien, the cabaret where the immortal Frank Sinatra once performed – to an audience of Luciano, Lansky and Trafficante – as well as a young, now forgotten woman who went by the name of Violeta del Rio and sang for the supreme pleasure of singing.
In front of the door to this cabaret, reserved for the tropical pleasuring of ephemeral foreign visitors, accompanied by their willing, nationally produced and tariffed escorts, Conde felt, for the first time in his almost forty-eight years, that he was wandering through an unknown city, one that didn’t belong to him, and one moving him on, shutting him out. That cabaret wasn’t his; nothing about its visible decor enticed him or induced nostalgia. The night air, the long walk and feeling of alienation had freed him from the spell of alcohol, but an annoying lucidity had commandeered his battered feelings, set on making him understand that, except for the odd almost faded memory, Violeta del Rio and her world of lights and shadows no longer lived at that address, and had departed leaving no other signs of life beyond the physical remains of those boarded up, burnt-out or inaccessible scenarios, even in the memory of a man stubbornly opposed to ultimate oblivion. The Count’s fascination with that world had received the kiss of death, and he realized that the only way he could revive it was by giving himself the satisfaction of finding out the final truths about Violeta del Rio and the reasons why she’d turned up inside a book of impossible recipes he’d found in an equally impossible library.
With sadness spreading through his soul, the Count returned to the street and contemplated the vista of buildings that were once pretentiously modern and were now bent double by premature senility. He observed, almost loathed the young woman with the permanent smile who, back to the wall, was letting an old, Nordic- looking guy whom she called “
