Havana Black by Leonardo Padura Page A

depends . . . Let’s say it depends what’s more valuable: what he was after, or seeing justice done.”
    â€œForgive me, but you’re talking rubbish . . . I still think they killed Miguel, I mean, the people who intended killing him . . . So, anything else?”

    â€œYes, there’s something you perhaps know . . . I spoke to Gómez de la Peña today and he says Miguel left his house claiming he had to see a relative of his about very important business. Can you throw any light on that?”
    Down came her eyelids and her carnivorous eyelashes almost swallowed Mario Conde.
    â€œNo, he never mentioned that to me. I can’t think which relative it was, even less what important business he might – ”
    â€œAnd why did Miguel go to see Gómez de la Peña?”
    â€œThey’d known each other for years, hadn’t they? But I don’t think they were friends. I don’t know why he insisted on seeing him. Didn’t Gómez tell you?”
    â€œHe told me but I wasn’t convinced and I think he’s a great liar. And if that’s so, the truth might be somewhere there.”
    â€œSo you want to find out the truth . . .”
    The Count threw his cigarette butt into the sea and expelled all the smoke from his lungs: “I’d also like to know how old you were when you married Miguel.”
    â€œEighteen. And Miguel was forty. Anything else?”
    The Count smiled again. “Miriam, why do you take everything as an insult?”
    She was the one who then attempted a smile, but the smile never reached her lips: the grimace, brought on by tears, pulled her lips down. Down and down, like a waterfall that seemed unstoppable. But the large, shiny tears welling in her eyes seemed unreal: as if they came from another face, or another person, or other feelings, which were very far from that place, perhaps on the other side of the sea. Hollow pearls, concluded the Count.
    â€œBut don’t you understand anything? Don’t you
realize I don’t know what the hell I’ll do with myself when I get back to Miami?”
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    â€œCalle 8 was what I wanted to see first. Before getting to his house, before going to bed with him. I’d created Calle 8 in my head, and it was like a fiesta and a museum. I couldn’t imagine it any other way: a place of entertainment, full of bright lights and bustle, where the music played at full volume and people walked along the pavements, happy and carefree, enjoying that Little Havana where the good and the bad survived that had died out in this other Havana. That’s why it also had to be a place that had stayed still in time, where I would find a country I didn’t know and had always wanted to discover: like this country was before 1959, a café on every street corner, a jukebox playing boleros in every bar, a game of dominoes in every arcade, a street where you could get anything without queuing or finding out whether it was your turn or not according to the ration book. Like everybody else I’d heard the stories here in Havana and turned that blissful Calle 8 into a myth, and transformed it mentally into something like the heart of Cuban Miami . . . I remember how it was already dark when we left the airport and after three years without seeing each other I told Miguel my first wish and he asked me what it was I wanted to see on Calle 8 that was so pressing, and I told him: ‘That’s it, Calle 8, Little Havana . . .’ And to do something as simple and straightforward as eating a steak sandwich on a street corner.
    â€œBut that is all Calle 8 is: a street manufactured by the nostalgia of those who live in Miami and the dreams of those of us who want to go there. It is like
the fake ruins of a country that doesn’t exist and never existed, and what remains is sick from an overdose of agonizing and prosperity, of hatred and oblivion. And consequently what I found, in the