Conde sat on the bench and leant towards her.
“I apologize, I’ve probably got it all wrong… The person I’m hunting for was called Elsa Contreras… lots of people knew her as Lotus Flower.”
“Why are you after her?”
Conde jumped in at the deep end.
“I was told she was the best friend of a singer. Violeta del Río.”
“And who might you be?” the elderly woman asked again, not changing her expression, and the Count realized he’d no choice but to tell the truth.
As he’d run through who he was and why he was looking for Elsa Contreras, the Count began to see how ridiculous his story was: he was trying to erect an impossible structure without foundations or supports, that would collapse under its own weight. Even so, apart from Dionisio Ferrero’s murder, he told all, including his father’s silent infatuation, still not knowing if that elderly lady was the person he was after and without the slightest hope that, if she were Elsa Contreras, he had aroused her interest and could perhaps extract the missing links from her memory to bring together the disconnected parts of that incredible story that was lost in the past. The Count saw a first flicker of light when he related the beating he’d received and glimpsed a sign of life: the woman’s cracked lips puckered into a smile.
“You’re crazy,” she said when she assumed he’d finished his tale. “You have to be crazy to get mixed up in a shitty barrio like this…”
“So you are?…”
“What was it you said about your father?”
“I think he once saw Violeta, probably heard her sing and fell in love. He’d listen to her record at night, by himself, in the dark. I think he even mentioned her name to me…”
“Violeta was like that,” she said, slowly lifting her right arm to point to a ramshackle sideboard. “The first drawer. A cardboard box.”
Conde obeyed and, under a mountain of pills encapsulated in plastic, phials, syringes and tubes of cream, he saw an eight by twelve-inch cardboard box.
“Take it out and look inside,” she ordered.
Conde took the box out, rested it on the sideboard and lifted the lid. A sheet of stiff white paper filled the box. When Conde extracted the paper, he realized it was a sheet of photographic paper folded in half. Not looking at the elderly lady he unfolded the huge photo and beheld a woman in her twenties, as blonde as blonde could be, a supple, smiling beauty, saved from complete nudity by garlands of gorgeous lotus flowers draped over her pubes and the nipples of her prodigious breasts.
“You’re now looking at Elsa Contreras when she was Havana’s Lotus Flower,” she said, adding, “Look this way: you’re now looking at a half dead crone by the name of Carmen Argüelles.”
16 February
Dear love:
Since I last wrote I have hardly made any headway in my search for a truth I need so badly for my own sake but I keep finding other truths to torment me.
Several days ago I went to see the wretched nosey-parker journalist your friends almost took a hand off. I found an alcoholized human wreck, in a state of permanent fear that he can only throw off by swigging hard liquor. The man refused to tell me anything, but thanks to him I did track down that bolerista who once rowed with that woman, and we talked at length about what happened and, though she was a tart from the world of singers and cabaret girls, I would almost say she was genuine. As far as she was concerned, as she said at the outset, her problem with the deceased ended the day they had the row, because she realized she was on to a loser in that war when she knew who the powerful people backing her foe were. But she assured me she got satisfaction from the four things she did say to her hypocritical face about her role as the little innocent. She never went near her again and heard next to nothing about her until she found out about her death several weeks after it happened, on her return from the performances she gave in Mexico. We spoke at length and, when she felt like confiding more, she told me almost casually something I refuse to believe, that only you can deny or endorse. According to her, she backed off from that woman forever because, a few days after they rowed, you went to her house with the black chauffeur you employed towards the end, and told her to keep well away and not to speak to her ever again if she wanted to go on singing and eating. At that moment a friend of hers (as she described him) came out of her bedroom, heard your threats and started to protest, but the black chauffeur, without saying a word, took out a pistol, put it between his eyebrows and, almost immediately, brought the pistol down on his mouth and split his lips. Then, still according to her, you said she was lucky you had come on a peaceful footing, but that they might imagine what a second visit would be like if they decided to declare war or started to talk openly about the fact you’d paid them a visit… The singer burst into tears as soon as she’d finished telling that horrible story, and do you know what I told her? I said it was all lies, and left.
Nonetheless, that woman seemed so sincere I am compelled to ask you: did something like that happen? Please tell me it didn’t, and also please tell me that the disappearance of the poor chauffeur you used to conceal our secret wasn’t also the result of actions I’d rather not imagine. Tell me, did you declare war on him when he was foolish enough to blackmail you?
I assume one often pays a very high price to find out a truth. While looking for one that still eludes me, I have come up against something else I would have preferred not to know and it showed me how much I was struggling against the current where you’d put your life after you went crazy over that woman, the cause of my unhappiness…
22 February
Dear love:
I was so saddened by my exchange with the singer that I felt I had to speak to your daughter about it and everything else I’d been thinking over recent months. We hadn’t had a conversation of any significance for several weeks, only exchanges on everyday matters, because what with my obsession and increasingly depressed state of mind, and the new responsibilities she had taken on at work, there are days when we only see each other for a few moments, if at all, over breakfast or when she’s swallowing a couple of mouthfuls of something at night.
To my surprise, your daughter seemed delighted to hear the story. She said she wasn’t surprised, she wouldn’t expect any other attitude from you, because you were always selfish, thought only about yourself and used those around you for your own ends: your parents, for their name and prestige, your wife for her money, me for my fidelity… On the other hand, you treated her and her brother like strangers despite them being of your blood, as much your children as your others, who you also used to get favours from your parents-in- law with their money and influences. And she added, as if wanting to drive me mad, given I was already a total wreck, that she’d been wondering for some time, and my story was confirmation you had eliminated or ordered that woman be eliminated because of something she asked you for, something you didn’t want to give her or simply because her presence was inconvenient and didn’t fit with your new life; she knew too many things that you preferred to bury, next to her body… Your daughter only shut up when I slapped her… But she’d already spat her poison out.