“The name cropped up yesterday and, for some reason or other, it sounded familiar. I had the feeling that something sleeping had suddenly woken up. But I can’t think where or why…”
“Who is this woman?” enquired the priest.
The Count explained, trying to fathom why Violeta del Río seemed both mysterious yet remotely familiar in this perplexing story that made no sense at all.
“How old were you in 1958?” asked the priest, staring at him.
“Three,” the Count replied. “Why?”
The old man pondered for a few seconds. He seemed to be weighing up his responses and which words he should say or keep to himself.
“Your father fell in love with a singer around that time.”
“My father?” rasped the Count. The parish priest’s words clashed with the strict, home-loving image he cherished of his father. “With Violeta del Río?”
“I don’t know what her name was, I never did, so it might have been her or somebody else… As far as I knew, it was a platonic affair. But he did fall in love. He heard her sing and became infatuated. I don’t think it went any further. I think… She lived in one world and your father in another: she was beyond his grasp, which I think was something he realized from the start. Your mother never found out. What’s more, I didn’t think anyone was in the know, apart from your father and me…”
“So why does the name sound familiar?”
“Did he ever mention her to you?”
“I don’t think so. I’m not sure. My father never spoke to me about what he did – you know what he was like.”
Conde tried to reshape the monolithic image he had of his father, with whom he never succeeded in establishing the channels of communication he’d enjoyed with his mother or his grandfather, Rufino the Count. They’d loved each other, certainly, but neither had ever been able to express that affection verbally, and silence governed almost every aspect of their lives. Besides, the idea he might have been chasing after a beautiful singer in bars and cabarets didn’t fit with the image of his father that he clung to.
“Well it must have been him… I expect he told you one day and you just forgot. Men in love do do crazy things.”
“I know. Tell me about it. But not him.”
“How can you be so sure? He wasn’t that different.”
“We didn’t speak much.”
“What about Grandfather Rufino? Might he have said something to you?”
“No.”
“I expect he did, he told old Rufino everything and it got through to you and…”
“But what was this woman like my father fell for?”
“I haven’t a clue,” smiled the priest, “he just told me he couldn’t get the singer, Violeta or whatever her name was, out of his head. Your father came to see me because he said he was going mad. He told me everything right here. Poor man.”
Conde finally smiled. The image of his father infatuated with a singer of boleros seemed unreal, but it was so human he found it reassuring.
“So my father fell in love with a singer and watered at the mouth at the mere thought of her. And nobody ever found out…”
“I did,” the priest corrected him.
“You’re different,” explained Conde.
“Why am I different?”
“Because you are. Otherwise, my father would never have told you.”
“True enough.”
“So why didn’t you ask him what her name was?”
“It wasn’t important. For either of us. It was as if desire had struck like lightening: it came and turned his life upside down. What’s in a name? I just told him to take care, that some changes can’t be reversed,” answered the priest, standing up and grumbling, “Well, I must get ready for mass. Will you be staying? Look, the altar boy’s not come yet…”
“I’d fancy myself as an altar boy… Keep your hopes up, but don’t get too excited… Know what? If I discover my father did in fact fall in love with Violeta del Río I’ll start believing in miracles.”
It was inevitable: as soon as he saw their faces he recalled Rubbish’s early morning jubilation at the feast of leftovers; recalled the worst nights during the Crisis, when his desolate larder forced him to toast old bread and drink glasses of sugared water; he even recalled the old man who several days ago had asked him for two pesos, one peso, anything, to buy something to eat. The now happy but still emaciated faces with which Amalia and Dionisio Ferrero welcomed him told the Count that both had got to the market the previous evening before it closed and, like himself, had feasted on an exceptional banquet that, because they were out of gastric training, had made sleep difficult. Such an irritation, though, would never mar their real satisfaction at feeling stuffed, and safe from the cruel, stabbing pain of hunger. They might well have had some milk with their breakfast that morning and restored a creamy bliss to their gruel, even luxuriated in bread and butter, and drunk proper strong coffee, like the coffee they now offered their buyers, perhaps over-sweetened, as the ex-policeman’s expert palate detected, though it was no doubt genuine, and not the ersatz powder sold in minimal amounts according to a strict ration book.
On arrival, Conde had introduced them to his business partner: flustered by the proximity of the treasure, Yoyi Pigeon hurried through the polite chit-chat and asked to see the library, as if it were a warehouse full of hammers or a container of scissors.
Amalia gave her apologies, because she had to wash and feed her mother, go to the market – did she still have money left? – and do a thousand things in the house, but Dionisio stayed with them in the library, hovering mistrustfully by the door. At the Count’s suggestion, the buyers began their prospecting among the bookshelves located on the right of the room, a less crowded area where the bookcases had been cut back to create space for the ironbarred window overlooking the garden now dedicated to growing vegetables necessary for survival. Following the Count’s plan, they started to make three piles on the desk’s generous surface: books that should never be sold on the market, books of less interest or no interest at all, and books for immediate sale. Conde placed in the first group nineteenth-century Cuban publications that seemed straightforwardly rare and very valuable and a number of European and North American books, including a first edition of Voltaire’s Candide that made him sweat excitedly and, especially, exquisite, invaluable original printings of the Most Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, by Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, dated 1552, and The Inca’s La Florida: the History of Hernando de Soto, Governor and Captain-General of the Realm of La Florida and Other Heroic Indian and Spanish Gentlemen, printed in Lisbon in 1605. But the books that most disturbed the Count were unimaginable treasures from Creole publishing, some of which he now saw and touched for the first time, such as the four volumes of the Collection of Political, Historical, Scientific and Other Aspects of Life on the Island of Cuba, by José Antonio Saco, printed in Paris, in 1858; The First Three Historians of the Island of Cuba: Arrate-Valdés-Urrutia, printed in three volumes, in Havana, in 1876 and 1877; The Annals of the Island of Cuba, by Félix Erenchun, printed in Havana, in 1858, in five hefty tomes; Land Surveying as Applied to the System of Measuring on the Island of Cuba, by Don Desiderio Herrera, also printed in Havana, in 1835; the extremely rare 1813 edition of the History of the Island of Cuba and Especially of Havana, by Don Antonio José Valdés, one of the first books ever made on the island; and as if handling gold bars, he lifted out the thirteen volumes of the Physical, Political and Natural History of the Island of Cuba, by the controversial Ramón de la Sagra, published in Paris between 1842 and 1861 and that, if it was as complete as it appeared to be, should have 281 plates, 150 coloured by hand, which meant they might fetch more than ten thousand dollars even in the most sluggish of markets.