Havana Fever (40 page)

“My mother’s dog-like behaviour made me completely lose my self-control. I had cleared the path for her and she put up no fight, not for herself, not for me. I decided to play my last card: if Mummy had no way out, perhaps I did. I wrote a letter to Mr Alcides where I told him everything my mother had confessed to me about their relationship, her suspicions about Virgilio Ferrero’s disappearance, and told him that Mummy had confessed to me she’d prepared the cough syrup with the two cyanide pills in order to get rid of that woman. And I assured him that I’d tried to stop her, since for me his happiness was as valuable as my own, after all he was my father and I’d always loved him as such. Then I put the letter among the clothes Mr Alcides had packed in his suitcase and waited for my reward.

“Mr Alcides left and it was the last we heard of him: not a single letter or call. That silence filled my mother with despair and she became more and more distressed. She wasn’t the same woman and shut herself away for days on end without talking to me, sometimes refused to eat, heard voices in the night and even started writing letters to Mr Alcides. They were long letters she sometimes wrote over several days and put in airmail envelopes, before starting another, not imagining that with every explanation she sank deeper into the swamp where I’d pushed her. She rarely left home, but as I was out almost all day working in the bank, I supposed she’d found someone to post her letters, perhaps the postman, because she used to wait for him every morning, hoping to get correspondence from Mr Alcides.

“That lasted several months. And I waited patiently, thinking my letter must have fulfilled its function because Mummy never received a reply. I felt she was increasingly tense and obsessed by that woman’s death and Mr Alcides’s forgiveness . . . until everything collapsed. The news of Mr Alcides’s death in a traffic accident, drunk and driving along a road in the Keys in southern Florida, was the coup de grâce. The first sign something strange had happened was the fact Mr Alcides was drunk, because he never drank more than a couple of glasses of wine with a meal or a beer at a party. The other was the fact he was driving, when we all knew he didn’t like to, which was why he always employed a chauffeur. What was he doing by himself, drunk and driving on a road in the Keys? It all pointed to premeditated death, to suicide, and Mummy realized that straight away, and, subsequently, two or three days after receiving the news, she told me she knew about that woman’s death and accused me of being to blame for all her misfortunes . . .

“One night, about a week later, Dionisio rang me at the bank. He’d gone by chance to see Mummy and had found her dying in her bedroom. She’d cut her veins. Clotting prevented her from losing all her blood, but she’d lost a lot and her life was in danger. When I reached the hospital the doctors assured me she’d survive, but that she was suffering from severe shock. At the time I wanted her to die, for her suffering to be over and done with and, above all, for her never to look at me so reproachfully again. Mummy did recover, although she seemed to be in a state of lethargy . . . and she never spoke again. It’s incredible, she remained silent for three or four years after that, until she completely lost her reason and started to live her previous life again, saying things that made no sense, talking about her correspondence with Mr Alcides, the children’s schooling, the illness of her master’s deceased wife, about cleaning the books so he wasn’t thrown into a bad mood when he went to work in the library . . .

“That’s the whole story. My story . . . Those letters Mummy wrote can never have reached their destination, which is what she wanted. But poor Dionisio ruined everything. Overwrought by the money we were earning through the sale of books, he invited home an old army colleague of his, who’d also been demobbed, because his friend, or so he said, knew a lot about books and had had dealings with a few foreigners. Dionisio wanted to show him the books this gentleman said were the most valuable, to ask his friend if he’d any idea who might be interested in them. He invented the story of the tall black dealer looking for books afterwards, to force you to hike up your offer and have an excuse if his friend found a buyer. He messed everything up when he decided to check through the whole library, looking for items you’d not touched and which seemed valuable, and that’s when he found four of those damned letters. He read them, especially what must have been the last one, and then he came to my room, accused me of murder and causing Mummy’s madness because I was a selfish megalomaniac because I thought I was a Montes de Oca. I told him it was a pack of lies, asked where’d he got all that from, and he showed me the letters. ‘Read them, for Christ’s sake,’ he said, throwing them in my face. When I read them, I felt the whole world I’d tried to shore up through oblivion and self- sacrifice, looking after Mummy for forty years, not marrying, not having children, not living my own life, was falling apart as a result of letters written by a woman on the verge of madness, who blamed herself for what happened because she’d incorporated me into her story of frustration, never imagining, poor thing, that I was the one who sealed her fate and pushed Mr Alcides over the precipice.

“Killing my brother was easy. I couldn’t spend the rest of my life looking at those accusations in Dionisio’s eyes and living with the threat he’d tell the police everything. Mummy’s death is a matter of days, of hours even, but Dionisio’s might have been a long time coming, his threat to inform on me might have been a spur of the moment thing, but it was also a real possibility. He was capable of doing such a thing and, worst of all, I wasn’t strong enough to resist his hatred or the fear I might be accused and sentenced because I’d done my duty, first to save my mother, then to save myself and possess what was mine . . . I decided there and then and killed him with his own knife, then I looked around the bookcase, found five more letters and destroyed the lot. I buried the knife in the patio, rang the police and sat down to wait for Mummy’s death and prepare my own.

“I’d never thought Mummy would have written a letter to Mr Alcides after he died . . . When I searched hard, I took five more letters out of the books, all written between the day Mr Alcides departed and the one Mummy wrote and sealed two days before he died. Who’d ever imagine she’d write a letter to a dead man and hide it on another bookshelf? The wretched, crazy, sad old . . .

“Now you can do whatever you want with me, it makes no odds. I suppose you are going to have me shot, aren’t you?”

What will happen to you now? Where the fuck will you end up? Mario Conde caressed the book, sorrowfully contemplated the highly desirable remains of the library and felt his poverty weigh heavily on his heart, as he’d rarely felt it before. When he was a kid, with his first friends in the barrio – almost all now defeated by life, exile and, recently, even by death – Conde would sit under the tamarind trees in Grandfather Rufino’s cockpit and play at being rich and buying the most coveted items: a pellet gun, a baseball glove, or a Niagara bike for the biggest dreamers. But the scant realities from which they could choose and lack of possibility they would ever own any of the riches they imagined finally gave them a frugal sense of their needs and pleasures, that, with time, some transformed into a kind of existential asceticism, while others tried to find a solution by crossing the water in search of the world of abundance they longed for. Conde would never forget saying goodbye to his close friend, Miguelito el Ñato, at the age of fourteen. The night before his departure for Miami, after getting the two old baseballs that were his due in his friend’s distribution of goodies, they remembered the fantastic evening when Miguelito had found the perfect investment for his imaginary millions: “If I had money, lots of money,” the boy’d said, “I’d buy myself a magic wand.” Standing in the centre of that library he’d like to take with him, Mario Conde wondered if the best solution for his bookish greed might not have been to possess Miguelito el Ñato’s magic wand: an ordinary bit of wood extracted from some Scottish woods, but endowed with the power to shift to his house, with a little flick of the wrist, each and every one of those books, with their burden of wisdom and beauty, the summation of two hundred years of literature and thought from that lopsided country where he’d been lucky to be born and had obstinately stayed on, against all the odds.

As the aftertaste of frustration settled in his mouth, Conde tried to recall the precise order in terms of a quest for perpetuity that had existed there for forty-three years, but it wouldn’t gel in his mind. The disturbed shelves, the mountains of books classified according to their commercial value, the noteworthy absence of items they’d taken off to the market and the recent disarray provoked by his insistent hunch, had disrupted a structure that had seemed perfect when, in fact, its entrails hid painful secrets, ready to trigger greater upheavals than those the eye could easily encompass. Conde wondered if anything else extraordinary remained to be discovered in that sanctuary. To be quite sure he consulted his hunch thermometer and got a negative reading: no, there were only extraordinary, irreplaceable, disturbing books, beautiful books that were worth a fortune and books that enriched you when you read them, many books he wanted to take with him . . . but only books, no more mysteries or revelations.

He walked past the shelves and touched several of the volumes he would most like to possess, but soon abandoned an inventory that threatened to become endless. A magic wand. That was the solution. For everyone . . . Poor Amalia, poor Nemesia Moré, poor Catalina Basterrechea, poor Dionisio Ferrero, poor Alcides Montes de Oca, poor Juan the African, poor Silvano Quintero: dead, mad or mutilated. With the same magic wand Mario Conde would perhaps repair the tragic destiny they’d all been drawn into, removing them at a stroke from that story and giving them another life. But his assets as a bookseller didn’t stretch to the purchase of that instrument of salvation and he had to accept the idea that, despite Rafael Giró’s theories, the fact is that life can seem too much like a bolero and the only elegant way out is to give its joys and sorrows to a voice that can release it from its intrinsic burden of misfortune: a voice as warm as Violeta del Río’s.

“Who’s going to cut the cane now, man? Who the fuck’s going to make a pile from those books? Go on, tell me . . .”

Conde blew twice before sipping his coffee. He liked drinking it like that, when it had just percolated, but lowering its temperature until it felt warm on his palate and ready to yield up its deep bitterness.

“It’s really a pity. Amalia has no heirs. Dionisio’s children left Cuba ten years ago, with all the raft-people . . . I expect the books will be confiscated and taken to the National Library.”

“Every single fucking one?” Yoyi Pigeon’s incredulity was like a kite taking off and trying to break free from its cord.

“Every single one,” the Count acknowledged, almost smiling, his cigarette smoking on his lips, as he qualified his statement. “If only.”

Skinny Carlos looked at him from his wheelchair.

“I think you’re pleased really, if I’m not mistaken, you savage. Those books were driving you crazy, weren’t they?”

“The books and lots more besides. I suddenly discovered I like the feeling I’ve got lots of money; Violeta del Río’s ghost got inside my body and, when I was beaten up, I talked to Salinger. Then, when I was investigating other things, I discovered my father was a man who could get drunk and weep when he fell in love, but above all that he was a coward . . . and last of all I tried to turn into a magician and magic those books away. The sooner they take them wherever, the better . . .”

“You’re mad, you’re all mad,” protested Yoyi. “Abnormal, I swear, incurably abnormal.”

“And what’ll happen to her?” Candito wiped the sweat from his brow. “May God forgive her . . .”

“I’m not sure . . . They took her mother to hospital. She was completely dehydrated and apparently there’s no hope. Amalia had her tied up for five days and didn’t give her food or water . . .”

“She’s what you call hard,” said Carlos. “One day without food and I’d fade away.”

“But that woman’s mad, isn’t she?” Rabbit asked, leaning towards the Count.

“I think she is, and that’s the problem,” said the Count: “She has to be mad, but she doesn’t look as if she is. She doesn’t talk like a madwoman and does things fully aware of the consequences. She killed her brother without giving it too much thought and now wanted to kill her mother and kill herself. No, she can’t be right in the head.”

“A bloody bastard is what she is,” Yoyi fulminated. “And those poor books . . .”

Conde shook his head, accepting it was his business partner who was the really incurable one, and tried to fill his lungs with the peace from that afternoon. The confession made by Amalia Ferrero, or Montes de Oca, as she’d have preferred always to be known, had swept him like a tidal wave to the boundaries of depression and that’s why he preferred not to bind his state of mind to alcohol. Despite his efforts, he couldn’t throw off the feeling of guilt that had been tormenting him from that morning, when he took responsibility for taking the lid off that regrettable story through his own presence. Drained by his own sorrow and the sorrow of others, he realized his recent experience was a macabre warning about his inability to patch up other people’s lives and, in particular, his own.

“What did Manolo say when he saw your hunch was spot on and you put the solution in his hand?” Carlos felt pleased he’d asked the question and that his wording paid tribute to his friend’s wit.

“He apologized again. He didn’t have much choice. Although this time I wish I’d got it wrong, you know?”

“You wished what?” Yoyi smiled. “Hey, Conde, if it hadn’t been for Amalia, that stiff would still be haunting you and me . . .”

“I don’t mean that. I’d rather Amalia hadn’t done any of this. She’s been an unhappy wretch her whole life.”

“Yes, that’s the bloody conundrum in this story,” Rabbit anxiously declared. “Who’s the bad guy? Alcides because he fell in love? Violeta because she got in the way of Amalia and her mother quite unawares? The Ferreros’ mother because she told her daughter who her father was? Amalia because she thought she had a right to be a Montes de Oca and wanted to rescue her mother’s love or wanted to have what was hers? Dionisio because he always took a hard line with everything he felt to be improper and decided to inspect the books?. . .”