The new life re-surfacing in the city, after the deep lethargy it was plunged into by the Crisis’s darkest years, had a pace and density the ex-policeman couldn’t pin down. Rappers and rastas, prostitutes and drug addicts, the newly rich and newly poor were redrawing the geography of the city, now stratified according to the number of dollars possessed and which was beginning to seem more normal, although it always made him wonder which was for real, the life he’d known in his youth, or the one he was now contemplating in his mature, illusion-free years
Conde wasn’t particularly looking for a right answer, and moved away from the night-time bustle, taking to the slope of La Rampa. The chronological boundaries of nostalgia were set way beyond his most distant memory, and so he tried to find the still visible traces of a dazzling, perverted city, a distant planet, familiar from hearsay, heard on forgotten records, discovered in infinite reading, always appearing, peopled with lights, clubs, cabarets, tunes and characters he now knew Violeta del Río must have been familiar with almost fifty years ago, her hopes soaring, in search of her place in the sun.
He walked non-stop past the revitalized luminous sign of The Vixen and the Crow, where she’d once sung, and which was now off limits to anyone not carrying the five US dollars necessary to guarantee a seat; he contemplated the barred and bolted entrance to The Grotto, which didn’t betray the slightest echo of the late night chords that echoed in that musical cave when the sun was about to rise; he looked with no particular emotion at the charred ruins of the old Montmartre, proletarianly re-christened Moscow and prophetically devoured by fire years before that empire disintegrated; he passed by the soulless entrance to the Las Vegas cabaret, where a man, around his own age, caught his attention, looking distinctly nostalgically at the place that was now boarded up where for so many years you could drink your last cup of coffee in the early hours; he walked without a glimmer of hope past the garlanded mansion of the White Peak, no longer enticing passersby with graceful guitar arpeggios; he walked up towards the now darkened Red Room at the Capri, its doors shut and chained, and finally entered the gardens at the National Hotel, under the gaze of grumpy security guards equipped with walkie-talkies, who let him off and through without asking a single question, although they visually arrested him on charges of being Cuban, not possessing dollars or belonging to that scene; he lingered for a few minutes in front of the luxurious, equally dollarized portico of the Parisién, the cabaret where the immortal Frank Sinatra once performed – to an audience of Luciano, Lansky and Trafficante – as well as a young, now forgotten woman who went by the name of Violeta del Río and sang for the supreme pleasure of singing.
In front of the door to this cabaret, reserved for the tropical pleasuring of ephemeral foreign visitors, accompanied by their willing, nationally produced and tariffed escorts, Conde felt, for the first time in his almost forty-eight years, that he was wandering through an unknown city, one that didn’t belong to him, and one moving him on, shutting him out. That cabaret wasn’t his; nothing about its visible decor enticed him or induced nostalgia. The night air, the long walk and feeling of alienation had freed him from the spell of alcohol, but an annoying lucidity had commandeered his battered feelings, set on making him understand that, except for the odd almost faded memory, Violeta del Río and her world of lights and shadows no longer lived at that address, and had departed leaving no other signs of life beyond the physical remains of those boarded up, burnt-out or inaccessible scenarios, even in the memory of a man stubbornly opposed to ultimate oblivion. The Count’s fascination with that world had received the kiss of death, and he realized that the only way he could revive it was by giving himself the satisfaction of finding out the final truths about Violeta del Río and the reasons why she’d turned up inside a book of impossible recipes he’d found in an equally impossible library.
With sadness spreading through his soul, the Count returned to the street and contemplated the vista of buildings that were once pretentiously modern and were now bent double by premature senility. He observed, almost loathed the young woman with the permanent smile who, back to the wall, was letting an old, Nordic-looking guy whom she called “mi amor” slaver all over her. He listened to the din created by young lads coming up O Street as they let out cries of potentially drug-inspired glee and kicked at sacks of rubbish they encountered en route. He was alarmed by a gleaming Lada that sped past, its sound system blasting out at top volume, keen to show off its ostentatious, prefabricated happiness. He went down towards Twenty-Third and watched two well-equipped policemen walk by, as jumpy as their gigantic Alsatians. He looked around, not having the slightest idea and hadn’t the slightest idea what direction he should take to exit the labyrinth his city had become and realized that he too was a ghost from the past, a member of a species galloping towards extinction, witnessing, on this night, lost in the city, the evidence for genetic failure as embodied by himself and his brutal dislocation between one world that had faded and another that was fast disintegrating. All in all, thought Mario Conde, Yoyi wasn’t wrong, though he hadn’t got it quite right: it wasn’t that he seemed so incredible he was like a lie, but rather that he was a living lie, and his whole life had been one stubborn, if unsuccessful, manipulation of reality.
The Calzada de Monte and the only in name hopeful calle Esperanza form an inverted wedge, ready to gouge the most flaccid urban flesh, opening up the entrails of what was once the old walled town of Havana. The Calzada and calle Esperanza almost create a vortex in the barrio of the Single Market neighbourhood, until they peter out on the bustling calle del Egido, a perpetually run-down triangle that still throbs on the city map. Over the centuries its guts have accumulated the human, architectural and historic debris generated by a bullying capital always marching westwards, and moving away from that bastion of poorly paid proletarians, lumpens of every stripe, whores, drug traffickers and emigrants from other regions of the island and the world, all eager for a slice of the action that will almost always elude them. The Calzada, its shops run by Lebanese, Syrians and Polish Jews selling remnants, second-hand clothes and a selection of trinkets, marked out the frontier between the palaces, luxurygoods shops, parks, fountains, theatres, dance halls and hotels of Havana’s splendid commercial centre, and that other down-atheel area, the adjacent Atarés and Jesús María barrios, home to poor blacks and whites, in cheap buildings with no pretence of style, on narrow streets, their inhabitants crammed together and ground down by poverty and marginalization. In the memories of Havanans that neighbourhood of the city, frequently invaded by black exhalations from the Tallapiedra power station, poisoned by leaking butane gas and besieged by effluvia from the bay’s most polluted streams, was like territory conceded to infidels they never expected or intended to reconquer. History seemed to have passed down its winding streets and never stopped, while generation after generation hoarded pain, oblivion, rage and a spirit of resistance that expressed itself in illicit, sinful, violent acts, ruthlessly seeking to survive, at any cost and by any means.