“You’re kidding?” Yoyi reacted in shock. “How much?”
“Two thousand green ones, I didn’t want any hassle…” and he smiled, lifting his coffee to his lips.
“So where did you fish that out from?” the Count enquired.
Pancho shook his head at the naivety of the question.
“Fine… fine… what goes around comes around.”
“Anyway you bring your list, I’m sure we can do business.”
“What do you do with all that cash, Pancho?” Yoyi continued, intrigued, and unable to hide his admiration.
“That’s not for public consumption, my boy. But I dream: I dream I will have a real bookshop one day, with lots of books, lots of light, a café at the back, I see myself sitting there, like a pasha, with my coffee, my cigarette, recommending books… While I’m waiting for that dream to come true, I’ll sell from my front room and that wooden stand you see over there.”
“I want to be like you when I’m older, Panchón, I swear I do,” Pigeon declared and the Count knew this they weren’t empty words.
“OK, that’s enough bullshit,” the Count interjected. “Pancho, can you tell me anything about a single called Be gone from me. I think it’s a 78…”
“It’s a 45, by one Violeta del Río. The Gema company recorded it in 1958 or at the beginning of 1959, I think. Be gone from me on one side, by the Expósito brothers, and on the other You’ll remember me, by Frank Domínguez. I used to have a copy and it took a while to get rid of it.”
As he listened to the description of a record that finally assumed some kind of physical reality, the Count felt unexpectedly jubilant, as if Pancho Carmona had breathed vital life into his strange quest for knowledge.
“Did you ever listen to it?” he asked.
“No, I never felt like listening…”
“Who did you sell it to?”
“I don’t remember right now…”
“Of course you remember, think for a moment.”
“Lento, another coffee,” Yoyi anticipated. “And it’s for Pancho. And two more lagers…”
Pancho lit up another cigarette.
“What about the singer? What was she like?” Conde asked anxiously, lifting his smoke to his lips.
“Not the faintest fucking idea. I never knew anything about her… I got my hands on the record about fifteen years ago… Let’s see,” and Pancho Carmona shut his eyes, so he could see, he claimed: perhaps he was reading the lists of purchases and sales engraved on his brain. Finally, he raised his eyelids. “Got it, I sold it in a job-lot to the blind guy who writes about music…”
“Rafael Giró?”
“That’s your man…”
“What else do you know about the singer, Pancho?”
“Zilch. Or do you reckon I should know all there is to know about everything?”
“For two one-dollar coffees you might dredge a bit more up?” said Conde, slapping the shoulder of the oracle of calle Amargura, the man who dreamt of owning a fantastic bookshop where they’d also sell the best coffee in Havana.
That Chevrolet, the four-door, pillarless Bel Air model, manufactured in 1956 was considered by experts to be one of the most “macho” cars ever to roll along Havana’s ravaged streets. Driving it, gently pushing the horizontal gear lever, listening to that melodious combination of speed and power, feeling it slide along, robust, confident and proud, welcoming the breeze blowing through windows broad as an ecstatic smile, represented for Yoyi Pigeon the sensation closest to an erotic climax he’d ever experienced.
When Yoyi bought it two years ago, that Bel Air 56 was already a striking automobile, thanks to its classically distinguished lines and immaculate chroming, as a result of always being kept in a garage. It came into the newly graduated engineer’s possession, thanks to the $7,000 he’d earned from a sale of a Goya painting that easily changed hands and flew off to an unknown destination. His uncle, the most renowned mechanic specializing in that brand of car – about to be dubbed Paco Chevrolet in Havana – focused his much-prized wisdom on converting his nephew’s car into a holy relic on wheels. He tuned the engine in an attempt to maximize its horse-power, fitted it out with genuine spare parts, and added filters, carburettors and sensors to enhance its mechanical refinement and purring efficiency as a perfect piece of engineering, created for eternity. Then, the body-work was sandpapered to the tinplate, giving it a dazzling sheen when the car was repainted with the special metallic glow paint recommended by Ferrari, in a combination of sky blue for bonnet, boot, mudguards and doors, and brilliant white for the roof and the wedge-shaped side panels. The final elegant touch was achieved by halogenous headlights from Miami and white Firestone tyres from Mexico, so that this 1956 Bel Air Chevrolet was probably more magnificent than the one that emerged long ago from the automotive plant in Detroit, when its manufacturers could never have imagined that fifty years later it would still be the most beautiful, well-balanced, glamorous car that had ever rolled over the Earth.
The Bel Air zipped along the avenue of the Malecón and, sitting back in the high-backed beige imitation pigskin seat, Conde divided his attentions between the Marc Anthony music – broadcast from the CD player hidden in the glove compartment and amplified through the quadraphonic audio system Pigeon had incorporated, without sacrificing the original Motorola radio, luxuriating in its privileged position on the dashboard – and the contemplation of a tranquil sea, gilded by the last rays of that summer evening’s sun. The tropical sea would always remind him of his fading dream: of owning a small wood cabin, on the edge of a beach, where he could devote the mornings to his imagination and writing one of those novels he still planned, the evenings to fishing and strolling along the sand, and the nights to enjoying the company and moist heat of a woman, smelling of seaweed, sea breezes and the sweet scent of night-time secretions.
“Yoyi,” his words exploded uncontrollably, “is there anything you’d really like and were never able to get?”
Pigeon smiled, keeping his eyes on the avenue.
“What’s this about, man? Loads of things… I swear…”
“Of course, but doesn’t anything stick out?”
The lad shook his head, as if denying something only he knew.
“Before I bought this car I’d have given my life to have a Bel Air. Now I’ve got one, I’m not sure… I think… Yes, got it, I’d love to see Queen play live. With Freddie Mercury, of course…”
“Great,” conceded the Count, who’d expected a less spiritual reply.
Pigeon’s frustrated dream spoke of a sensibility lost or atrophied by the struggle for survival, and went back to a state of innocence before he’d turned ferocious predator.
“And come to think of it,” continued Pigeon after a silence, “I’d also have liked to know how to dance properly. I can swear to that. I love music but I’m a terrible dancer.”
“Ditto,” confessed the Count, probing further. “Have you ever thought about what you want from life?”
Yoyi looked at him for a moment.
“Don’t go so deep into things, man. You know that here we’ve got to live the day-to-day and not think too much. That’s where you get it wrong, you think too much… Take now for instance, why you got such a bee in your bonnet about what happened to Violeta del Río?”
Conde gave the sea a farewell glance, before they started their descent down the ramp of the tunnel under the river.
“It must be because I’m an obsessive-compulsive…”
“And what else, what else?” cried Yoyi.
“I still don’t know,” the Count allowed. “Maybe it’s just curiosity, a leftover from when I was a policeman, or something I haven’t yet worked out… You know what? Those stories and characters from the fifties are my Bel Air. I can’t get enough of going back over what people remember about it. It fascinates me. But what most intrigues me about her story is the strange way she retired and disappeared at the height of her fame, and that no one now remembers her, you know… So why did you want to drive me to Rafael Giró’s place?”