That corner of the old neighborhood of el Cerro was known as el Canal and had always been famous across the island as a place where human temperaments heated up. It had been the stomping ground of bad boys, switchblade owners, fight-pickers, and hit men ever since colonial times. In its territory and in that of the neighboring el Manglar, the negros curros who came from Seville had settled down, these loud Andalucíans with dark skin who distinguished themselves from their poor African relatives by the red handkerchiefs they tied around their necks, their skill at spitting to the side, and the knives of shining Toledo steel that they always wore sheathed at their waists … until the time came to take them out.
As Conde followed the hazy directions that would take him to the house of Yúnior Colás’s friend, known as Platero for the similarity in his phallic proportions to that of the most famous—and, to Conde, the most idiotic—donkey in Spanish-language literature, he wondered whether this story about the Virgin that he was following wasn’t forcing him to see each and every side of a city that, if you really looked at it, seemed affected by leprosy.
By asking around just enough not to turn anyone off, his shirt soaked with sweat and his feet burning inside the killer boots, Conde came to find out the exact address of the young prostitute. In front of the house, whose peeling-paint door opened right onto the sidewalk, Conde saw that on the nearest corner, three of the neighborhood’s inhabitants were analyzing him with an interest he would not qualify as anthropological. It was to be expected, he thought, and he dried off as much sweat as he could from his face before finally knocking at the door.
An old woman opened the door. She was about seventy, with a poorly coiffed mane that was a mix of black hair, gray knots, and tresses that had once been dyed and were now faded from chestnut to rat-colored. Conde greeted her and asked if he could see Platero. The woman studied him more slowly than the delinquents on the corner had, perhaps evaluating whether the visitor was a policeman or some perverted client.
“What do you want him for?” the hostess asked.
“I need to talk to him … regarding his friend Yúnior, or Raydel, I don’t know which one he knew him as. The mulato from the east…”
The woman immediately cast aside perverse reasons and opted for police-related ones.
“That’s the one they killed, right?”
“That one.”
“Poor boy. Yes, my grandson knew him, but he had nothing to do with him…”
“The thing is, Platero talked to him about something important … Incidentally, what’s Platero’s name? I don’t like to call him that…”
“My grandson is called Yamichel and I already told you that he doesn’t have anything to do with that Raydel … My grandson studies at the university.”
“I’m glad,” Conde said. He was beginning to understand some things and not understand many others. That Yamichel could be someone who was well-informed, maybe even refined, a university student. But at the same time, he was in the profession of dispensing pleasure for pay. Was that also normal? Was it normal now? “Ma’am, I only want Yamichel to tell me something he found out about a Virgin that Raydel had seen.”
The woman with the multicolored hair and nearly grimy appearance muttered, “The Virgin of Regla who was not from Regla.”
“The very one.” Only at that moment, seeing the cavity-filled grin of the grandmother of Yúnior-Raydel’s friend, did Conde have the certainty of the rapid loss of his faculties. If Yamichel knew about the Virgin’s real value … couldn’t he be part of the plot that led to Her disappearance and the death of two people? He felt like punching himself, although he was relieved when the woman spoke again.
“Are you a policeman?”
The question was bound to come up. And he decided to test a response that would allow him to advance a few steps.
“More or less.”
The woman weighed the information. And she deemed that Conde was more or less a policeman. And she surely thought, since she must be well aware, that when there’s nothing else to be done, it’s better not to annoy the police: the ones in that fraternity, even with faces like Conde’s, were usually ill-tempered.
“Yamichel is at the university. But he’ll be back in a moment. He’s coming home for lunch … Do you want to wait for him?”
“Yes, of course,” Conde reacted, surprised by that possibility.
“Well, then come in.”
The old woman held out her hand to wave him in toward the small living room that looked more like a grotto. Like most of the houses in the neighborhood, built one wall against the other, it lacked side windows and the light came from the street or from the door that, in the back, should lead to a small outdoor area for washing. On one of the side walls, on an angle broken up by one of the columns holding up the ceiling, Conde saw the image of the small version of Our Lady of Regla that he had always known, the cheap, popular replica of the original that existed in the chapel dedicated to the Holy Mother.
“Take a seat.” And she pointed at the old armchair made of dark wood, of the same model as the ones that Conde had had in his childhood home. “My grandson is a good kid. He’s young and does things young people do, but he’s good … Did I tell you that he’s studying at the university? Can I offer you a lemonade?”
“Yes, thank you, this heat…” he muttered, after refraining from the impulse to ask if she would use boiled water. No, he could not give in to that.
“And that’s with it being September already,” the woman added as she headed toward the kitchen. “This country is an inferno…”
“It would be better to live in Alaska,” Conde dared to add.
“On the moon, even!” the old woman let out before immediately adding, “Because of the heat, I mean…”
Half an hour later, the lemonade ingested and Yamichel’s spotless student and political biography, in his grandmother’s version, told, Conde saw the young man arrive and was no longer surprised by his face: he seemed like a normal kid, very different from the shady aspect of the deceased Ramiro the Cloak and the Bat. He only noted the fact that Yamichel was blacker than shoe polish, while his grandmother was, or appeared to be, white. The young man’s gestures and face were without a doubt masculine and accentuated the shine of his shaved head and the volume of his weight-lifter arms.
The grandmother hurried to explain to Yamichel who the visitor was. Conde did not have any difficulty decoding the message the woman was transmitting to her grandson: Careful, he’s a policeman; I warned you. So he decided to provide more information and told him what he was looking for: he needed him to explain why Yamichel thought Raydel’s Virgin was valuable, just that.
The young man listened to his grandmother and the presumed policeman silently as he drank his glass of cold lemonade. Conde knew without fearing he would be wrong that he was dealing with an intelligent person, and perhaps because of that, he was as or more dangerous than the common criminals of Raydel’s sort with whom he had been dealing.
“So what can you tell me?” he asked, waiting.
“I don’t have anything to do with Raydel’s mess … But I’m going to help you. Just a moment,” Yamichel said and grabbed the backpack he had brought in and removed a laptop from it. With the skill of systematic use, he opened the machine, turned it on, waited a few seconds, and operated the built-in mouse in search of something. When he found what he was looking for, he handed Conde the laptop. During the operation, the grandmother with tricolored locks had followed the young man’s precise movements with admiration, as if she were trying to figure out a magician’s tricks.
Conde took the machine carefully. On the screen, wide and tall, was the image of a Virgin very similar to the one he had seen in Bobby’s photos.
“She looks a lot like Her…” Conde moved cautiously.
“Too much … As if they were sisters … That Virgin is in a church in the north of Spain. She is a medieval sculpture, Romanesque, and it’s possible that She was brought from the north of Africa in the time of the Crusades, twelfth century…”
“That old?”
“Yes, very old … And priceless.”
“What do you mean priceless?”
Yamichel smiled at last. He had very white teeth that contrasted with the brilliant black color of his skin and even his gums.
“That those Virgins are very rare and are not for sale … And if someone sells one, they can ask a fortune for Her. I don’t know how much, but a serious amount of money. It all depends on how much the buyer wants Her and of the seller’s skill. And on how dirty She is … These are relics.”
Conde nodded. He was thinking. “So you told Raydel this?”
“I told him because he told me about a Virgin of Regla who had some power and he showed me the photo he had on his cell phone. I knew right away that it was not a Virgin of Regla,” he said and pointed at the sculpture to his left. “I grew up in Regla and I know that Virgin by heart … The rest I found out on the internet.”
“So, what was Raydel going to do when he found out what the Virgin’s worth could be?”
Yamichel smiled again. “Steal Her, of course. And then go to Miami and try to sell Her there … There is no buyer here for that gem.”
“So whom did he speak with to get out of Cuba?”
“That, I don’t know … I didn’t want to know, and I’m glad … Because it seems like the Virgin punished him. Or that Raydel spoke with the wrong person, right?”
“Conde, Conde, Conde … How generous … Well, if you’re letting me choose: an aged Santiago. You know that rum is the only one that they still make in the old Bacardi factory with the same formula that they used to use to make original Bacardi? Well, what the hell am I going to tell you about rum, right? But that’s why it’s so damned good. Look, you can have a whole liter and the next day you’re good as gold, without the hangover you get from this hooch they make these days with pretty labels, and they put coloring in them and say they’ve been aged for whatever time they damn well feel like, as if you’re an idiot, right?”
Miki Dollface was a couple of years older than Conde, although he already displayed a collection of folds, wrinkles, and stretch marks on his face. He had once been so good-looking as to earn the nickname which compared him to female beauty. The implacable revenge of time, Conde thought every time he saw him. And despite meeting with him as infrequently as possible, the social information accumulated by the supposed writer who did not write forced him to seek him out again and again.
In the private, ice-cold bar, where everything had to be paid for in Cuban convertible currency, Conde observed the line of spirits behind the bar with attractive labels, like powerful magnets: scotches and bourbons, gins and brandies, creams and vodkas, wines and cordials all arrived from the most varied parts of the planet. The possibility of sitting in a bar like that, with the option to torment oneself over not knowing what to pick had been a dream of his throughout his whole life. The strange thing was that it was thanks to the circulation of strong currency and even to the renaissance of burgeoning private enterprise on the island that such a worn possibility had been recovered. So he decided to give himself the pleasure and the luxury as part of a commercial and work transaction. And because in a place like that—clean, ice-cold, discreetly lighted—it was easier to egg on Miki Dollface’s loquacity than in the noisy bar belonging to the Writers’ Union, where Miki was a usual, or in the aggressive Bar of the Hopeless, where, surrounded by the drunks of his neighborhood and four flea-ridden dogs, Conde tended to buy his daily alcohol. And because he would later send the bill to Bobby.
When he inhaled the aroma of the Santiago añejo served in the low, round-bellied cup, the most propitious one for those golden, warm contents, he felt like the character out of a novel who’d been moved to another book. A mistake.
“My thing, you know, is not people looking to deal works of art, but one hears about everything. Look, to give you an idea: there’s a writer, well-known, who has moved heaven and earth to build himself a collection of Cuban paintings that would make you shit yourself. Those works of art must be worth millions. And he gets them through all the ways you can imagine. As favors, through tricks, however … He’s insatiable. And he’s good friends with René Águila. Since that writer likes to be told he’s the best in the world, when you tell him that, he feels so deservedly recognized that he begins to talk like a parrot … And he’ll tell you some things! He was the one who told me that René bought himself a house in the Alturas de Guanabo. A house that looks like a fortress. He completely remodeled it, put some medieval castle walls around it, installed cameras and alarms, and even has a bodyguard, because what he has in there is madness: furniture, sets of china, paintings, jewelry … That René buys everything, but always at a deal, without paying what it’s worth, because he’s a son of a bitch without any scruples or rules and he would trick even Muhammad…”
“That guy talked to me about the ethics of the guild…” Conde recalled.
“Ethics? My friend, the only ethics I know are the ones Spinoza wrote … Do you understand anything Spinoza says? Well, it’s that this is no longer what it used to be, brother, don’t think that for a second. Look, before, only the big, big fish and the sons of the big fish and the wives and the beloveds of those big fish had things and lived the good life. Now, besides the big, big guys, there’s a whole lot of sons of bitches who have made themselves cash getting what they can out of people who are fucked and need some money to get by. And that’s what René Águila does. Ethics? That guy is capable of any son-of-a-bitch move. But killing a kid who’s a shitty thief who doesn’t really know what he has in his hands? I don’t know, Conde, I don’t know … That’s another thing entirely.”
“What about the other guy, that Elizardo?”
“I can tell you lots of things about Elizardo: The first is that he has a geographic history that is strange as all hell. Imagine, he spent about fifteen years living in France and came back about ten years ago, when taking that backward step was more difficult in this country than buying soap that wouldn’t scratch up your skin … But he did it. How did he get to France; what was he doing there; how did he come back? All urban legends. They say he married a rich Swiss woman. That he went in search of the inheritance from a Catalan grandfather who was a millionaire. That he was a double-oh-seven super agent sent to fight against imperialism in that battleground … There is enough to choose from. The fact is that he has money or at least seems like he has money, and if he has it, it’s also because of the things that he has bought and sold here. And the house where he lives! A palace … But when I say palace, I mean paaaaaalace … One of his businesses, and this seems true, is that since he met several art dealers in France, and Switzerland, and Germany, the guy puts them in touch with some Cuban painters and charges a commission for the sales. And he gets a ton from that. Because in Cuba there are more painters than sparrows: they’re rustic, but some end up being really good. And since everyone thinks that at some point, around the twenty-fourth century, things between Cuba and the United States could improve, American collectors have come in search of what there is and … Everything is going to be bought and sold already. And whoever wants something will have to pay for it dearly to those who have harvested it now. Elizardo also focuses on Cuban classics: many of the works by good twentieth-century painters that move go through his hands and that’s another nice sum. What’s interesting is that this character has class. René is a smooth talker who comes off as nouveau riche, as a businessman; Elizardo tries to come across as a cultural promoter or facilitator or whatever in the hell you want to call it, but something more refined, and he has friends in official circles … Or at least, that’s what he says … The truth is that, at heart, he’s just the same, because he also buys and sells jewelry, ornaments, furniture, sets of china, but he does this through front men, so that he doesn’t seem like a flea market, like René … The guy is insatiable, he has delusions of grandeur, that’s certain … But to kill for a valuable piece? I don’t really think so, to be honest…”
“I have my doubts … Money’s a bitch.”
Miki took a sip from his glass. “Yes, when I really think about it, brother, things have gotten so fucked-up here that anyone does anything to stay afloat. Look, I still remember when today’s bestselling painters were giving away their works to their friends, or would trade them with foreigners for a pair of jeans or a tape recorder. Here, nobody knew what their work was worth, and less still how to sell it. But not even a memory remains from that romantic time, Condemned, not even a memory. In this country, people have to fight tooth and claw to live, because if they don’t, they don’t live … Tell me, how do you live, how do Carlos and Rabbit live? In a permanent state of poverty, purely by a miracle. And look who came to throw you a lifesaver: Bobby the goose … Because that one, who was Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist, and all the other-ists you know, what he was doing was hiding his homosexuality so they wouldn’t eat him alive, and when they ended up eating him alive anyway and he decided to open his eyes, he said no to communism and yes to consumerism … He went into business and they say—they say, don’t believe me, but they say”—Miki lowered his voice—“that he had something to do with some fake paintings by Tomás Sánchez that they released in Miami…”
Conde made a gesture to stop Miki’s speech. “Bobby was in the falsification business?”
“I couldn’t swear it, but there are rumors … Do you believe that because he was a moron before he can’t be a tiger now?”
“I believe in less and less lately, Miki…”
“Good for you … Anyway, the fact is that there’s Bobby, rolling in cash and living like a king with sexual servants and everything. But he’s in a sorry state, because he was fucked over by the revolt of the humble and they left him stark naked … That’s why I’m telling you, Conde, I don’t know what the police must know, but a guy like Bobby has to know what that shitty Virgin was worth and he was hurt because his boyfriend fucked him over … Do you really think he wouldn’t be capable of killing that kid the way they killed him? I don’t know about that other criminal, Ramiro, you said? Well, this looks more like a Raymond Chandler book, including the blow to the head you got … You tell me if that isn’t true…”
“Marlowe got knocked on the head every once in a while…”
Miki drank again, almost as if he was thirsty, and drained the rest of his drink.
“But Raydel or Yúnior, I don’t even know his name, Bobby could’ve taken it out on him … In a fight, when he was angry … I’m saying … Damn, Conde, my rum ran out. With everything I told you, I earned another one, didn’t I?”
Like he had seen it done in movies, Conde lifted a finger to the bartender and carried out the classic gesture of asking him to refill both drinks. He felt fulfilled through this action he had never imagined he could practice and with the success of it in the Havana commercial arena. How long would this miracle of private cordialness and efficiency last? That would cause itching and they would fuck it over: mark his words.
“Earn it for real, Miki … What about Karla Choy?”
The barman refilled the glasses and, to pick on, he placed a plate with several olives and some dried fruit. Were they living in reality or in one of the Bogart films that Conde loved? A mystery with a femme fatale included?
“Whoever tells you something about that woman and thinks it’s the truth is a moron. Because the only thing known about her that is absolutely sure is that she is fine and has a face that … can stop traffic. When you see her…”
“I already saw her … And I had a drink with her…”
“Damn!” Miki couldn’t help but exclaim. “Did you see what a thing of beauty she is!”
“Bocato di cardinale…”
“No, of the Roman bishop … In my time…”
“Forget that dirty old-man bullshit and talk, Miki.”
“Well anyway, no one knows anything about her … There are some who say she’s the lover of a super minister, one of the historic ones, as they say now, and that the guy is her shield. Others say that she’s actually the daughter of one who is even higher up, one of the big, big fish, and that that father is her antimissile shield and that’s why she does what she does … There is even talk of a husband who is an Italian count, the owner of vineyards in Tuscany. But I think those are all tall tales. The truth, for me, is that the chick is a rainmaker: she has the art of doing business in her blood…”
“Her Chinese genes…”
“Yes, but the Chinese of today … That’s why I am telling you that, as far as I know—and it’s not that I know much, Condemned—that woman wouldn’t get involved in any business like that, and less still if there are dead bodies in the way…”
“The dead bodies could have come later,” Conde advised, “like unforeseen complications. Collateral damage…”
“So you think that…?”
“I only think that for three or four million euros, anyone could take the Bastille and bring it down, Miki.”
“Well, that’s true … as true as this being the best rum in Cuba because it’s the one made in … Hey, listen, did you hear that Rabbit is outta here?”
Conde felt his heart leap. That Miki knew about his friend’s plans was already outrageous, but that he would talk about them in public was suicide.
“Listen, Miki, do you have to yell it out like that? We don’t talk about that…”
The other man smiled and sipped from his drink. “What world are you living in, Condemned? Damn, you seem like an extraterrestrial … That already happened, it left, it’s over … Before, if you knew someone was leaving and didn’t say anything, your light and water got shut off. Just remember what happened to your friend Fernando Terry … Now, the ones who leave, whether they’re doctors or baseball players or writers, they have a party before taking off and everyone’s all easy, smooth. Good luck to you, my friend, we’ll see each other here in a couple of years or maybe there if I get the visa … Of course, there are still some morons who have an issue with that, and talk all low … But the fuss is over. Have you seen how many baseball players leave every week? And have you seen how many later come back to Cuba on vacation? And how many people have a Spanish passport now and bring back packages from Panama or from Burkina Faso for two hundred dollars a trip? No one can stop this now … Even Rabbit is leaving us, buddy, he’s leaving us!”
When he left the ice-cold bar, forty dollars less in his pockets because of the six drinks he bought, Conde was hit by the humid heat of that September afternoon. He immediately felt himself being overcome by an overwhelming lethargy capable of taking his emergent desire to write about the feeling of being outside something and being close to it, of belonging and apartness that he had felt in that bar which had seemed to him—God knew why—squalid, Chandler-esque, and moving. Besides, the base of his skull still hurt from where he had been hit; the information accumulated in his mind was a tangle from which he did not manage to gain any clarity; and the certainty of how the world worked now, according to Miki Dollface’s conclusions, was not a landscape that could be seen as encouraging for the country in which he had lived all these years, where slowly and silently the scramble and rush seemed to be taking shape for any solid useful castoffs available. Someone had summarized it for him in two words in his police days: the jungle.
Exhausted, he decided to retire to the safety of his winter quarters, but before that he resolved to improve the health of his feet with some affordable option in a nearby store that sold in dollars. Once he was wearing his new moccasins—another forty dollars down the drain—he took a private taxi to his house (traveling for half an hour to the rhythm of reggaeton and breathing in carbon monoxide in its purest state), where he fed and spoiled Garbage II for a while, took a long shower, cold, disinfecting—Miki was contagious and the aroma of gas from the old taxi had stuck to him like a tick—and he changed his outfit. When it was beginning to get dark and the sun’s fury was lessening in intensity, he took the route toward Skinny Carlos’s house after making a stop at the Bar of the Hopeless to stock up on a liter of the terrible alcohol they usually drank there. He didn’t feel like having another drink. With the mood he was in that afternoon, there was a high possibility of another encounter with the Devil. But he sensed that Carlos would be itching to drink. And indulging him was one of his greatest life missions: a bottled dose of unconsciousness was always well received. Although, he suddenly felt petty. When he thought about how, just to get some Havana gossip, he’d drunk Santiago rum with a bad writer and a fake with a viper’s tongue like Miki while he was taking flammable liquid to his best friend. His burden of guilt won him over in round one, and, before he reached his destination, he went into another one of the stores where everything was sold in convertible currency, bought a bottle of rum (at least it had a label), and tallied the day’s expenses: he had already spent the hundred dollars he was supposed to have earned. How could one live in this country without a hundred dollars to spend a day? Wearing shoes that killed and drinking rotgut, that was the only possible response.
As soon as he saw him arrive, Skinny immediately noticed his old friend’s bad mood. He confirmed it when Conde handed over the two bottles of rum, one good and one bad, and asked him not to serve him a single drink, not that night, and to tell Josefina he wouldn’t dine there, since he wanted to arrive early, sober, and hungry at Tamara’s house.
“You’re not fucked-up, Conde, you’re dying,” Skinny Carlos proclaimed, in the face of his surprising state. “What in the hell is wrong with you, Beast? You’re not going to drink rum and you’re not going to eat the arroz con pollo the old lady is cooking up? Did that knock to the head make you stupid?”
“I don’t know, I’m … I don’t know … I think that … I’m all confused in the head.”
“In my opinion, it’s menopause. And an asparagus soup isn’t going to make you feel better…” Skinny decreed and served himself a drink of rum, from the labeled bottle, of course.
Conde tried to explain his lethargy to his friend: without needing to think about it too much, he went over everything he’d been through in those days, from learning of Rabbit’s plans and the scolding he received from Tamara, to Bobby’s confessions, Miki’s revelations, the visit to Rangel, and the journeys to the Inferno of the “settlements,” and all the way to an almost intimate knowledge of two bloodied murders and even a shoeless destitute man. It was like a tsunami of emotions that had shaken him badly and connected him in the worst way with the reality of life and of his country.
“That really is a bitch,” Carlos admitted. “Please clarify something … Is all of this rum for me?”
“All yours,” Conde confirmed and watched as his friend raised his shoulders, grabbed one of the bottles, and served himself another drink. Conde made an effort to restrain himself, but didn’t manage it. “Did you say something about an arroz con pollo?”
“A la chorrera … soupy, with some red peppers on top and…”
It was already dark out when he left for Tamara’s house. He decided to walk, to accelerate the digestion of the arroz con pollo, and tried to piece his spirits back together by absorbing the beneficial air of a neighborhood that was not his own, but that awoke sentimental memories: his high school years, his friendship with Carlos, his relationship with Tamara, the small stadium where he played ball with friends like the now-absent Andrés, the image of the area’s pleasant, cozy parks where he kissed his first girlfriends. Even though he knew that between his memories and the present, there stood decades deployed in demolishing everything with intensity and malice, with a nearly calculated perversity, he was still surprised by the tangible state of deterioration and abandonment that also extended over everything there like a plague. Braced houses that had never been painted again; mountainous heaps of garbage on the corners; sidewalks and streets recently imported from the Gaza Strip; new businesses erected on the basis of improvisation, poverty, and poor taste; stray dogs who would have given a leg to trade places with his poor Garbage II. Nothing that could improve his mood.
Tamara greeted him with a kiss capable of removing half of the burden of indifference that accompanied him, admiring how well his new shoes fit and giving him the news that Yoyi had been calling his house, Carlos’s house, and her own. He wanted to see him urgently, his business partner had emphasized, regretting again that Conde did not have a cell phone, although he was already aware of his incapacity to operate them and his tendency to lose them.
As he watched Tamara skillfully cutting vegetables to make a soup, Conde called the Pigeon from the landline in the kitchen. When he got through, Yoyi’s voice surprised him with its capacity for anticipation.
“Where the hell were you hiding, man?” his friend asked.
Conde made the gesture of looking at the receiver. “Yoyi, you have half of Havana calling you … How in the hell did you know it was me?”
“Oh, Conde … The cell phone recognizes the numbers calling you … And on the screen, because you know they have a screen, right? Well, Tamara’s name came up because … What kind of an idiot conversation is this, man?”
Conde smiled in the face of his partner’s exasperation. “Well, what’s going on that’s so urgent?”
“Something I found out and other things I’m thinking about. We have to talk…”
“Aha, talk to me.”
He heard the Pigeon sigh. “Not on the phone, it’s very complicated … Look, get yourself a car and come over to the paladar where I’m going to eat with my girlfriend…”
Conde looked over at Tamara, who was putting the vegetables in a pot.
“It’s just that today … Tamara is cooking … And I already…”
“This is important, man. And you know I don’t play around with important things. Come on, write down the address and come over here … Besides, I want to introduce you to my girlfriend and for you to see with your own eyes what a luxury paladar is. This one’s in vogue … Look, look, come with Tamara, I’m treating.”
“But…”
“Conde, come on already … Let’s see, get Tamara on the phone,” Yoyi ordered.
He turned around and told Tamara that Yoyi wanted to speak to her, while he wagged his finger no. The woman, intrigued, dried her hands on her apron and took the receiver her companion was holding out to her.
“Hello, Yoyi,” she said, listened, and repeated “aha” to him three times, capping it with a smile and a nod. “I won’t forget the address. I’m getting dressed and we’re headed over there. I’ll drag him by the ear. Yes, okay, see you soon,” she confirmed and hung up.
The little mansion in El Vedado had enjoyed glamorous times as well as long years of decay on the verge of ruin. But when a Cuban entrepreneur managed to purchase it (at a bargain-basement price) with the idea in mind of starting a restaurant, the building was revived and, befittingly, entered its glory. The reparation and remodeling of the property covered everything from the front gate to the last inch of the roof, and now everything gleamed with the shine of lamps, furniture, folding screens, daringly designed decorations, polished metal, lacquered paint; everything arrived from far afield in unknown ways. The first thing Conde asked himself as he entered the place, reserved for foreigners and very privileged Cubans (or others like him, invited by either of those two possible options), was how much they must have paid for the building and its reparation and decoration. Just imagining the raw sum made him feel dizzy and awoke more questions like, for example, where had the money come from to make this investment before there were any profits? Another Cuban mystery. The last question he would ask himself, three and a half hours later when Yoyi paid with cold, hard cash for everything they’d consumed, just like the dozens of diners preceding them and who would follow, was how much money that place generated per day. Instead of dizziness, what Conde felt was suffocation. That place was a gold mine. Thus were made the fortunes that Miki Dollface was talking about that very afternoon, and he could not help but ask the same question: How long would that last?
The Pigeon was a regular customer of the restaurant and the maître d’s college friend, since both had received their engineering degrees and now barely used their diplomas as decoration, since they earned a living doing other things and in more productive ways for their personal economies than designing bridges that would never be built, like Karla Choy had said. Knowing that Conde was a chain-smoker when he drank alcohol, Yoyi had asked his friend for a table on the terrace, the most set apart and comfortable one possible, and to keep cool two bottles of a good Spanish red for when his guests arrived.
With a glowing, beautiful, and perfumed Tamara hanging on his arm (so she could better show off her wedding ring), the plebeian Conde (who, luckily, was shod with dignity) crossed the room in search of his business partner, and confirmed that his long-running girlfriend was still capable of attracting attention: coming and going. He felt proud to be the exclusive beneficiary of such attributes. But when he arrived at the table reserved by Yoyi and saw his friend’s new girlfriend, he felt his legs shake: the woman was finer than the house in which the restaurant stood, almost, almost as fine as the Chinese-Cuban Karla Choy. Her platinum hair, green eyes like traffic lights saying go, her thick lips, and carefully sculpted body with abundance in all the right places proved that Yoyi was a gourmet in all of life’s important ways. The beauty of the day was named María de la Merced, she liked to be called Merche, and with the additional feat of having a classic name and nickname, Conde felt that the whole package was perfection: she was one of the few people of about thirty years of age born in the country who did not have an invented name or an outrageous nickname, of which one or the other began with a Y. To cap her virtues, Merche was the general manager of a private interior-decoration agency and was even a good conversationalist, reasonably educated, sufficiently well-informed, as discreet as to remain silent or chat directly with Tamara when the men entered rocky territory. Where in the hell did Yoyi find angels like this one?
Following the introductions, they each had a whiskey, enough to read the menu, put in their orders, and ask for the cooled-off Ribera del Duero wine. As usually happened when he had to choose between many possibilities, Conde opted for the first thing on the menu that promised to satisfy him gastronomically: grilled hogfish with herbs (what kind of herbs?) that he asked for with white rice, black beans, an army of fried plantains, and malanga fritters, plus an avocado salad with plenty of olive oil, since his stomach had already forgotten the arroz con pollo he’d ingested a few hours before. Tamara, meanwhile, decided on a Cuban plate with a French name, of sparse quantity and low in calories, while Yoyi and Merche opted for green salads followed by an octopus carpaccio with slices of Parmesan. Abundance, abundance, dammit!
As he savored the wine and picked at some olives and anchovies, Conde focused on observing the surrounding landscape, without ceasing to think of the unbearable variety on the menu and the wine list, a crossroads of selection whose possible existence his generation had never experienced in the establishments of socialist gastronomy, cultivated on mental agility and the most affectionate treatment: “My beautiful boy, there’s this and this and nothing else, and hurry up and order, because you know it will run out: this and also this. And, you already know, heart of my hearts, that it’s two beers per person. And they’re not very cold, honey.” He had to control the policeman he carried inside, and studied the atmosphere with interest while trying to demonstrate class, something that was complicated in a brute like him. He listened with real attention to Merche’s explanation about the restaurant’s decor, where, she said, neo-Nordic and minimalist styles converged, with straight lines dominating and light-colored wood, and he contained himself when it occurred to him to ask how much that building and everything in it had cost, further still, where it had all come from. As far as he knew, the closest stores selling neo-Nordic or minimalist or even well-made furniture were on the other side of the sea, of the damned circumstance.
When Conde was beginning to suspect that Yoyi’s rushed invitation had as its only objective inviting him and Tamara to dinner in a pleasant place with exclusive prices, the Pigeon took advantage of their silence to reveal his other reason: incomplete but rather reliable information had reached his ears regarding the presence in Cuba of a Catalan antiquarian, Jordi Puig-something-or-other, who was very well-connected in the sale of artwork from Europe. According to what they said, the man, although he dealt in everything, specialized in pieces of medieval origins … As far as Yoyi knew, during the medieval period, in Cuba, there was no art: just some starving Indians, who were hunting Cuban hutias and eating cassava, without any mojo, to boot. And based on what Conde had said, Bobby Roque’s lost Virgin could very well be a piece that was nothing less than medieval. Two plus two, Yoyi calculated with his knowledge as an engineer, equaled four, Conde. Or, almost always, he corrected himself. Confirming that he’d awakened his business partner’s interests as a detective, the Pigeon promised to find out a little more about the reason that had brought that specific antiquarian, medievalist, Puig-something-or-other, to Cuba, who was, of course, Catalan, like Bobby’s grandfather, like the statue of the Virgin, Catalan … Puigventós, dammit!
“If the man came for what we are thinking,” Conde began after receiving the new information, “it’s because someone was already talking to him about selling him something that interests him. And if that something is Bobby’s Black Virgin, who appears to be a truly valuable antique, it’s because She is or is supposed to be in the hands of someone who knows the Virgin’s worth and where and how to find Her … And that person is not on the same team on which Raydel and the Cloak were playing. It’s a guy in the business … or in the guild.”
“Which means,” Yoyi continued, “that if we’re talking about the Black Virgin, who is still in Cuba, and that people from the guild are behind the robbery or connected, as far as I know, there are only four or five lions in Cuba with those connections, man, among them your friends René Águila and Elizardo Soler. And that Chinese earthquake…”
“So do you know the others?”
“At least two others … A guy who worked for years on restoring old Havana and who they say even stole nails from the cross … He’s called Enrique Garcés. And he is gay, just like your friend Bobby, but he has more spurs than the finest fighting cock … The other one I remember is an Italian guy who comes and goes, a die-hard whoremonger, Guido I-don’t-know-his-name-either, because everyone calls him Guido Corleone, pronouncing it as if it were a Spanish name, without the u…”
“So how are you going to find out more, Yoyi? This story is red-hot. Remember there are already two and a half dead guys…”
Merche stopped the fork in midair with which she was taking a portion of the carpaccio to her mouth and opened her green eyes so widely it seemed possible to see them fall on her plate. To speak so calmly about two dead and one half of another was far beyond her universe of designs, fashion, decorations.
“Two and a half dead guys?”
Yoyi smiled and caressed his girlfriend’s hair. He winked at Tamara, asking for her help, and the doctor put all of her capacities into the task, acquired in the long years of living with a former policeman.
“You exaggerate so much, Mario! Two guys get killed in an accident racing motorcycles and you stick them in the story … I know that you fell in the bathroom and almost killed yourself, but it’s because you’re old.”
Merche looked at Tamara, who smiled at her, then at Conde, who was looking at Tamara with a dour grimace, and last at Yoyi, who was looking at her.
“Mami, you know that my business is with people like the owners of this place … And they only kill you when they bring you the bill. Or, when you want to leave without paying…”
The young woman, who was not completely convinced, took the carpaccio to her lips and caressed the remains of the octopus as she chewed.
“Anyway, Conde,” Yoyi added, “if I hear anything, I’ll tell you and that’s it … Okay, man?”
At that moment, the maître d’ with an engineering degree approached the table and asked them how things were going. They all responded, “Marvelously,” and Conde enjoyed watching the man refill their wineglasses with the dry and simultaneously delicate Ribera del Duero.
“Well if you’d like, I can set aside a table for you up at the bar on the terrace. Tonight, there’s live music,” and he mentioned the name of a famous musician. “Some Mexican tourists hired him to play for them.”
“What do you say?” Yoyi asked Tamara and Conde. “This doesn’t happen every day.”
“It’s fine with me,” Tamara accepted, and Conde went along without any resistance.
“We’ll finish and go up, so don’t close my bill,” Yoyi communicated to his friend, who withdrew to his other tasks.
Half an hour later, the two couples went up to the terrace’s bar, where a loving breeze from the nearby sea glided across them. While the Mexicans had paid for the show (how much had they paid, Conde was asking himself, withdrawing numerical question marks from his bottomless pit of questions), the table that was set aside for Yoyi and his guests was in the first row, in front of the small stage along which ran a bar with all the necessary attributes to make it typical and pleasant, including strings of lights.
Since they had decided not to eat dessert, Yoyi ordered a plate of French cheeses and a bottle of Bordeaux, according to him, the best accompaniment. Conde, in addition, asked for coffee. In the conversation that followed, Yoyi informed them that Merche was choosing to take a specialization fellowship in Canada and that, if she traveled that way, she had plans to remain and explore the territories in the north … Conde watched the girl who glowed and felt that her beauty and good taste were attacking him: Another one who was saying goodbye? What in the hell was this?
The ambience of the bar-terrace was lively, youthful, full of conversation and laughter, music that was perhaps by pure miracle projected at a volume that did not interfere with the communication among the clientele. Conde, his professional baggage on his back, looked around and confirmed that the majority of those present, except for the long table occupied by about ten Mexicans, were members of the national fauna and almost all of them were young. The feeling of finding himself in a place where he didn’t belong, where he was more of a foreigner than the Mexicans themselves, became very tangible at that moment. But he managed to even feel happy because of Tamara’s happiness, although at the same time he was dissatisfied that he could not treat himself to enjoying places like this with his old friends, who would surely be incapable of even imagining their existence, which were becoming more common in the city (per Yoyi), spaces that were so in demand they required previous reservations and where people didn’t fight each other for anything because there was enough for everyone. For all who could pay those prices. And, asking himself—what a damned tic of his, he just couldn’t avoid it—Conde questioned the source of the money in the hands of those young people who were so young and seemed so at ease, comfortably installed with genetic harmony in the reserves of Havana’s revived bon vivant scene with which he himself had been in intimate and well-fed and well-imbibed contact that day.
The musician joined the stage with his band and began his concert. It seemed significant to Conde that the young people present, including Yoyi and Merche, knew the words of the songs he sang by heart, some of them made to listen to, and others to enjoy while dancing, dancing. Yoyi and Merche went out to the dance floor and, under the pretext of observing her abilities, Conde was in ecstasy contemplating every inch of that woman’s magnetic body. Was he seeing her for the first and only time? Then Tamara asked him, more out of duty than conviction, if he wanted to try to move a little. But he said no with all of his fundamentalism: in Cuba, there were only two ways to dance. Well and badly. And he danced badly. And people look down upon those who danced badly. It was enough already that people were looking at him because of his face, his age, his surprised expression before the revelation of an exotic world sprouted from God knew what folds of society that shone in all its splendor with new riches, and exultant post-anything glamour. Tamara said yes to everything, said of course, but left her chair and her tormented near-husband, and went to dance.
As he savored the drink of cognac—courtesy of the house—with which he resolved to end the night, Conde remembered for a moment the circles of Havana’s Inferno through which he had traveled in recent days. He patted the still-painful wound on the back of his head and told himself that in reality, that Inferno existed as much as this paradise under the stars where he was drinking cognac, also French, whose price would guarantee food for a day for an entire family. Two neighboring worlds between which a wall was rising similar to the one that, in the time to which Bobby’s Black Virgin seemed to belong, separated nobles from plebeians: a wall perhaps more subtle although no less distinct than on the island they had tried to demolish but that, persistent like life, continued to rise at the slightest chance. Then, in the midst of his socio-historico-philosophical meditations about the circularity of time and its worst manifestations, through the extreme left angle of his vision, Conde sensed a gold reflection, luminous, powerful, capable of making him turn his face. In that sector, in front of the bar, a long dozen of girls, amid whom was Merche, danced and sang the musician’s song, and Conde understood that the vigorous light that had touched him came from those bodies, those dresses, those shoes, those perfumes, the expansive elegance, and the sparkling hair of those women: all were beautiful, elegant, svelte, and blond. The wall existed and imposed its segregation.