with that character of steel he inherited from your blood. On the other hand, your daughter seems withdrawn, as if she were sad, and with good reason, because she always felt closer to the family (despite the respect your aloofness inspired in her) and your departure has snatched from her any hope of one day enjoying what should be hers by natural right. (Forgive me, I had to say this.) Luckily, she spends most of the day working, which makes me think that is how she tries to distance herself from her home: by losing herself in her own activities, as if she wanted to flee from something that was persecuting her, by surrendering herself (she too!) to the new life in a country where everything seems set on change, beginning with the people.
So, when will you ring me? I know that after the nationalization of the telephone company communications are going from bad to worse, but you ought to make the effort: you’re not like your grandfather. I’ll always remember him, the poor old man who always thought talking down a phone to a person who was far away was so unreal he refused to use the telephone to the day he died and forbad his friends from ringing him. I don’t think it is such an effort for you. The main thing is that you should want to do so. As you know, there is no way I can call you, since I don’t know which number to ring to get you. I so want to hear your voice!
That’s enough for now. I only wanted to tell you a little about myself and my feelings… Give the children a kiss on my behalf and keep reminding them how much I love them. Also greetings to your sister and brother-in-law, tell them to be themselves, and that they should write to me some time. As for you, please don’t forget me: write to me, ring me, or at least remember me, just a little… Because I shall always, always love you…
Your Nena
Mario Conde’s stomach was out of training and had to make a special effort to accommodate and then digest the astonishing nutritional challenge its inconsiderate owner now inflicted on it. While Josefina settled for a grilled fish fillet, a bright and cheerful green salad and a dish of almond ice cream for dessert, Conde and Skinny began the assault on their physical and intellectual, historical and contemporary hungers, with a cocktail of oysters and prawns, destined to subvert their palate with fishy flavours long lost in the crevices of memory. The former then prepared to disappear down a juicy path of meat and potatoes in purest Cuban style, while the latter flung himself into a spicy well of broth with chickpeas that made him sweat from every single one of his multitude of pores. Then, as their bodies warmed to the task, like long-distance runners getting into their best stride, they competed to see who could eat the most rice and chicken, served in ridiculous portions – of both rice and chicken, a friendly gesture from the management – before finishing off with a shared ham pizza that Skinny insisted on ordering and stuffing into a remaining space, which proclaimed its hatred of a vacuum. For their epilogue they chose fritters, drenched in fruit juices, with a parfum of aniseed and lime peel, and neither could refuse, being such gentlemen in the circumstances, a taste of the rice and milk infused with cinnamon that Fatman Contreras himself prepared – a recipe of his great-grandmother’s, an Andalusian whore who liked the good life and died at the ripe old age of eighty-eight, puffing on her cigar and sipping a shot of rum. They’d downed two bottles of Chilean Concha y Toro before getting to the desserts and then ordered two double shots of vintage rum to wipe their chops clean and accompany their coffees – doubles that quadrupled when the friends lit up the delicately layered cigars presented to them by the ex-policeman who’d converted to gourmet living and who flopped his voluminous mass of humanity down between them and Tinguaro at the end of the night, so they could toast one another with a glass of chilled Fra Angelico. The Count wasn’t taken aback by the bill for seven hundred and eighty pesos, and when he’d paid Tinguaro his hundred pesos, he happily brought to a close what had been one of his most profitable days ever with a net loss of three hundred and eighty pesos and the soothing feeling that he might be able to pass through the eye of a needle, because he’d never be a rich man…
Tossing in his bed, unable to read, Conde only got to sleep around four, and in the meantime, as he belched and sweated uncomfortably, his retina was revisited time and again by the almost irritatingly persistent image of Violeta del Rio, a recent revelation to him and news to Fatman Contreras too. Perhaps his stubborn detective instincts had also been aroused by the surfeit and had forced him to notice a few incongruities in his find. The first and most perturbing was the strange decision, apparently unmotivated, at least as far as Vanidades was concerned, which led that “beautiful and refined” woman, “at the pinnacle of her career” to abandon the stage and, by all accounts, vanish so definitively that nothing was ever heard of her again. Might she have left the island, like so many thousands of Cubans around that time? The Count reckoned it was the most likely explanation, although he didn’t discount the possibility she might still be living in Cuba, under her real name – Lucia, Lourdes, or Teresa, because nobody could, in real life, be a Violeta del Rio – as a private individual, stripped of the lame, limelight and microphones. It wasn’t a wild conclusion to draw: in years of such radical change in the lives of the country and its inhabitants, there’d been an infinite number of political, ethical, religious, professional, economic and even sporting transformations: Grandfather Rufino had suffered the banning of cockfights as if it were a prison sentence and the Count’s own father didn’t see another game of baseball to the day he died, because he couldn’t imagine or accept that the blue Almendares club had ceased to exist, a club he’d fanatically supported for every minute of the first thirty-five years of his existence… But no artist can stop being an artist from one day to the next, just like that – just as no policeman could totally cease to be one, however long he’d been off duty – something Mario Conde knew for a fact. Maybe that was why he was so intrigued by that press-cutting, slumbering inside a cookbook nobody had opened in years, as witnessed by its state of preservation as well as the fact, endorsed by history, that its contents were of no use in a country that had been on food rationing for almost half a century. Hare stew with sultanas? Eggs in foie gras aspic? Foyot veal cutlets?… You must be joking! Conde conjectured that the book must have belonged to the wife of Alcides Montes de Oca, although he thought he remembered that she’d died around 1956, the year the book of recipes was published. If, as Amalia Ferrero asserted, her brother Dionisio stopped living with them when the revolution was victorious, it was unlikely he could have left a cutting there which was published in 1960. Five people remained on his list: the deceased Alcides Montes de Oca and his two adolescent children, the aged, now blank-minded Mummy Ferrero and Amalia herself. How could one of them have been involved with a ’50s Havana cabaret singer? The Count couldn’t imagine, but some link must have existed between one of those individuals and the vanished singer of boleros, the seductress who’d been dubbed the Lady of the Night and who beat faintly in some remote cranny of the Count’s memory as a diffuse, almost extinct presence, still able to send out disruptive tremors.
It was gone three a.m. when the Count heard a rather authoritarian scratching on his kitchen door. He knew it was useless to try to ignore it, since stubbornness was the scratcher’s most pronounced trait, so he got up to open the door.
“Hell, Rubbish, what kind of time is this to be coming home?”
On the brink of the advanced age of fourteen, Rubbish retained his streetwise ways intact, and would prowl the barrio every night in search of fresh air, frantic fleas and females on heat. Ever since the Count had brought him home to live with them on that stormy night in 1989, the quarrelsome Maltese had insisted on his freedom, which the Count accepted, seduced by the character of the animal who, alerted by the faint, lingering scent of the evening’s feast on his clothes, now barked twice, demanding to be fed.
“All right, all right, grub’s up.”
Conde fetched a metal tray from the terrace. He opened the bag of leftovers from the paladar and tipped part of the contents onto the tray.
“But you eat it outside…” the Count warned, taking the tray out on the terrace. “We’ll talk tomorrow, because this has got to stop…”
Rubbish barked twice again, and wagged his battered tail like a shuttlecock, urging him to get a move on.
Back in bed, Mario Conde smoked a cigarette. With the dark eyes of Violeta del Rio floating in his mind, his memory slipping over her thick wavy hair and satin skin, he was finally blessed with sleep and, quite unexpectedly, slept soundly for five hours, feeling swindled when he woke up, because he couldn’t recall a single dream about the beautiful woman sheathed in lame.
What the fuck am I doing here?… Conde stood in the church entrance and took in a far too pleasurable lungful of the damp draught blowing down the aisle of the modest slate and brick building he’d entered for the first time on the day he was baptised. Forty-seven years ago, according to his calculations – a number that never got smaller. Once again he saw in the distance the rather modest high altar and its peaceful image of the clean, pink-cheeked archangel Raphael, a heavenly being immune to the pull of world. The rows of dark pews, empty at that time in the morning, contrasted with the bustle the Count had left behind in the street, populated by its motley crew of churro and pastry sellers, passersby rushing or dawdling, grumpy morning drunkards propping up the bar on the corner and
