“How do you want your money, in pesos or dollars?” Pigeon tried to wrap the deal up. As ever, brother and sister consulted each other visually and the Count spotted a poison in those glances that hadn’t previously shown itself: the poison of ambition.
“Four dollars a book,” spat Dionisio, recovering the verbal power of command he must have deployed in his glory days as a military leader on the battlefield.
Yoyi smiled and looked at the Count, as if to say: “You see? they’re bastards, not poor wretches. Who are you kidding…”
“Half in Cuban pesos and half in dollars,” added Dionisio, fully in control of the situation. “It’s a fair offer and no arguments…”
“OK,” said Yoyi, not daring to contradict him, but showing he was none too happy. “That makes twenty-two thousand six hundred and seventy pesos. I’ll pay you ten thousand now and the remainder and the dollars tomorrow.”
And he held out a hand to the Count who put in it the wad of three thousand he’d given him the previous day and added the money he’d taken from the bumbag hanging under his stomach. He separated out the two bundles and gave them to Dionisio, tapping the notes against his open hand.
“5,000 per wad. Please count them. I still owe you 1,300 pesos and 436 dollars,” he spelt out to the ex-soldier, whose cockiness had evaporated on sight of the banknotes.
While Dionisio concentrated on counting the money, Amalia didn’t know where to point her watery gaze: it kept sliding over the money her brother was sorting into piles of hundreds and then thousands, on the table in the centre of the room. She couldn’t stop herself, lifted a finger to her mouth and began biting the skin around the nail that was shredded beyond the edge of the finger, as a shadow of painful, cannibalistic satisfaction flitted across her face.
“By the way, Amalia,” the Count had been resisting putting the question but decided to take advantage of her moment of ecstasy, “Have you ever heard of Violeta del Río?”
The Count thought Amalia’s expression of bewilderment and incomprehension genuine enough as she reluctantly abandoned her ragged fingernail.
“I don’t think so… Why?”
“What about you, Dionisio?”
Dionisio barely looked up from the money, but did interrupt his counting.
“Never heard of her,” he said, then resumed his tallying.
The Count briefly told them about the cutting he’d found, and then spoke to Amalia.
“Perhaps your mother might remember her?”
“I told you she’s lost it…”
“But old people sometimes remember things from the past. Might I at least ask her?”
“No… It would make no sense,” Amalia responded as if it upset her to admit as much, and added: “Excuse me, I must go to the bathroom.”
She walked off between the marble columns and Dionisio, his mind closed to everything but counting notes, concentrated even harder on his task.
“Why does that woman interest you so much, Conde?” enquired Yoyi, smiling ironically.
“I haven’t a clue…” the Count lied, unable to admit what he’d found out that morning, and added, “Which bookseller knows the most about old records?”
“Pancho Carmona. You remember, he used to sell records.”
“I need too see him today.”
“You know,” Pigeon shook his head, “you’re madder than an old coot, I swear, man.”
“All present and correct,” Dionisio piped up.
“We can take all the books, can’t we?” Conde asked, assuming his honest looks might have waned over the last twenty-four hours.
“Yes,” replied Dionisio, after hesitating for a moment. “That’s not a problem.”
“Let’s get on with it then. I’ll get some boxes. My car’s outside,” announced Yoyi as he left.
Amalia emerged from the inner recesses of the house and sat next to her happy brother.
“So…” began Dionisio. “You’ll bring the rest of the money, won’t you?”
“Of course,” the Count reassured him. “Don’t worry. We’ve got to select more books… By the way, Dionisio, and do excuse my nosiness: why did you leave that corporation you worked for after you were demobbed from the army?”
Surprised by the question, Dionisio looked at the Count and then at his sister, who’d tipped the bookseller to that particular story.
“Because I saw things I didn’t like. I’m a decent chap. A revolutionary too, and don’t you forget it.”
The early morning and late evenings were the most fruitful hours for the sellers of old books who’d set up shop in the plaza de Armas, in the shade of weeping figs, the statue of the Father of the Fatherland, and austere palaces that were once the seat of a colonial power that believed the island was one of the most precious jewels in its imperial crown. The tourist hordes, either eager or bored by their compulsory immersion in a bath of pre-packed history, usually began or ended their itineraries in the old city in the vicinity of what was once its central square. Although the booksellers always welcomed them as potential, if overly wary customers, experience had shown they could get them to pocket the odd book only with great difficulty and after much persuasive spiel, and then it was usually one that was generally of little historical or bibliographical value. That throng of civil servants, small businessmen, hard-saving pensioners, old militants shorn of their militancy, but determined to see with their own eyes this last outpost of the most real socialism, together with a motley band of night-owls, talked into Cuba, the low cost paradise, by scheming travel agents, and who tended to be addicted to other more primitive passions, that were sensual, climatic, even ideological but never book-loving.
In fact, the sample of books on display in the historic square represented only the more sightly leftovers from the real banquet. Valuable volumes, the ones that would unerringly find their way to auctions where they’d wear a three or four digit ticket, were banned from sale to the public and were never part of these modest offerings. Such delicacies were generally set aside for more or less well-established buyers: a few diplomatic bibliophiles; foreign correspondents and businessmen based in Cuba, with enough dollars to buy paper jewels; a small number of Cubans who’d got rich legally, semi-legally or entirely illegally, intent on investing in safe bets; and a few book lovers who were frequent visitors to the islands and had established preferences in matters of literature, cigars and women. However, the real recipients of the invisible bibliographical rarities were various professional dealers in valuable books, particularly Spaniards, Mexicans and a few Miami and New York based Cubans, who supplied auctions or owners of bookshops that were advertised on the internet. In the early nineties these specialists had detected the rich Havana vein, exposed in the harshest years of the Crisis, and came ready to purchase whatever their desperate Cuban colleagues might generously offer. Then, when they’d made their connections and plumbed the mine’s depths, they changed tactics and brought on each trip a list of exotic goodies already flagged by customers seeking a specific title by a well-known author, and in a particular edition. This underground trade was by far the most productive and most dangerous, and now the Cuban authorities had rumbled that some booksellers had conspired with library employees to take Cuban and universal treasures, bibliographical holdings, including manuscripts that could never be recovered, out of the country. It was almost impossible to eradicate this constant drain because on occasions the provider was a librarian on two hundred and fifty pesos a month who found it difficult to resist an offer of two hundred dollars – representing twenty months of his salary – for extracting a magazine or tome requested by a determined buyer. Such piracy on the sly had forced Cuban libraries to lock their most precious books in remote vaults, but nobody could put a stop to the leak from a tap beyond repair, thanks to which some found a temporary solution to material deprivation.