Havana Noir Read online

  This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2007 Akashic Books

  Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple

  Havana map by Sohrab Habibion

  Editorial assistance by Sarah Frank

  ePub ISBN-13: 978-1-936070-23-7

  ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-38-5

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2007926097

  All rights reserved

  “Abikú” by Yohamna Depestre first appeared, in Spanish, in D-21 (Pinos Nuevos/Letras Cubanas, Havana, Cuba, 2004); “Nowhere Man” by Miguel Mejides first appeared, in Spanish, in Las Ciudades Imperiales (Editorial Letras Cubanas, Havana, 2006); “The Last Passenger” by Ena Lucía Portela first appeared, in Spanish, in Crítica, No. 119, January–February 2007, the cultural magazine of the Universidad Autónoma in Puebla, Mexico; “Staring at the Sun” by Leonardo Padura first appeared, in Spanish, in La Puerta de Alcalá y Otras Cacerías (Ediciones Callejón, Olalla, Spain, 1997).

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  ALSO IN THE AKASHIC NOIR SERIES:

  Baltimore Noir, edited by Laura Lippman

  Bronx Noir, edited by S.J. Rozan

  Brooklyn Noir, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Chicago Noir, edited by Neal Pollack

  D.C. Noir, edited by George Pelecanos

  Detroit Noir, edited by E.J. Olsen & John C. Hocking

  Dublin Noir (Ireland), edited by Ken Bruen

  London Noir (England), edited by Cathi Unsworth

  Los Angeles Noir, edited by Denise Hamilton

  Manhattan Noir, edited by Lawrence Block

  Miami Noir, edited by Les Standiford

  New Orleans Noir, edited by Julie Smith

  San Francisco Noir, edited by Peter Maravelis

  Twin Cities Noir, edited by Julie Schaper & Steven Horwitz

  Wall Street Noir, edited by Peter Spiegelman

  FORTHCOMING:

  Brooklyn Noir 3, edited by Tim McLoughlin & Thomas Adcock

  D.C. Noir 2: The Classics, edited by George Pelecanos

  Delhi Noir (India), edited by Hirsh Sawhney

  Istanbul Noir (Turkey), edited by Mustafa Ziyalan & Amy Spangler

  Lagos Noir (Nigeria), edited by Chris Abani

  Las Vegas Noir, edited by Jarret Keene & Todd James Pierce

  Paris Noir (France), edited by Aurélien Masson

  Queens Noir, edited by Robert Knightly

  Rome Noir (Italy), edited by Chiara Stangalino & Maxim Jakubowski

  San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Peter Maravelis

  Toronto Noir (Canada), edited by Janine Armin & Nathaniel G. Moore

  For Eva, for so much patience

  Many thanks on this project to Arturo Arango, Haydeé Arango, Tania Bruguera, Kalisha Buckhanon, Norberto Codina, Arnaldo Correa, David Driscoll, Esther Figueroa, Ambrosio Fornet, Gisela González López, Casey Ishitani, Elise Johnson, Caridad López del Pozo, Bayo Ojikutu, Oscar Luis Rodríguez Ramos, Patrick Reichard, Juan Manuel Salvat, Lawrence Schimel, and the inimitable Yoss.

  I am especially grateful to Sarah Frank, whose assistance was invaluable throughout the project, and to Johnny Temple, for the opportunity and the faith.

  Yo no quito nada I don’t take anything away

  yo no pongo nada I don’t add a thing

  Yo no invento I don’t make stuff up

  Solo cuento lo que veo I just tell it like it is

  EL CURI, “SOLO CUENTO LO QUE VEO”

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  PART I: SLEEPLESS IN HAVANA

  MIGUEL MEJIDES Old Havana

  Nowhere Man

  ENA LUCÍA PORTELA Vedado

  The Last Passenger

  MYLENE FERNÁNDEZ PINTADO Malecón

  The Scene

  LEONARDO PADURA Marianao

  Staring at the Sun

  PART II: ESCAPE TO NOWHERE

  CAROLINA GARCÍA-AGUILERA Flores

  The Dinner

  PABLO MEDINA Jaimanitas

  Johnny Ventura’s Seventh Try

  ALEX ABELLA Siboney

  Shanghai

  MOISÉS ASÍS Ayestarán

  Murder at 503 La Rosa

  ARTURO ARANGO El Cerro

  Murder, According to My Mother-in-Law

  PART III: SUDDEN RAGE

  MARIELA VARONA ROQUE Santos Suárez

  The Orchid

  MICHEL ENCINOSA FÚ Vibora

  What for, This Burden

  YOSS Lawton

  The Red Bridge

  LEA ASCHKENAS Centro Habana

  La Coca-Cola del Olvido

  PART IV: DROWNING IN SILENCE

  ACHY OBEJAS Chinatown

  Zenzizenzic

  MABEL CUESTA Regla

  Virgins of Regla

  ARNALDO CORREA Casablanca

  Olúo

  OSCAR F. ORTÍZ Cojímar

  Settling of Scores

  YOHAMNA DEPESTRE Alamar

  Abikú

  About the Contributors

  INTRODUCTION

  A FERAL HEART

  To most outsiders, Havana is a tropical wreckage of sin, sex, and noise, a parallel world familiar but exotic—and embargoed enough to serve as a release valve for whatever pulse has been repressed or denied.

  Long before the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the United States’ economic blockade (in place since 1962), Havana was the destination of choice for foreigners who wanted to indulge in what was otherwise forbidden to them: mojitos and ménages, miscegenation and revolution. A photo taken in Havana has always authenticated its subject as a rebel and renegade.

  Havana has frequently existed only as myth: a garden of delights, a vortex of tarantism, but also—perversely—the capital site of a social experiment in which humans somehow deny the worst of our natures. In this novel narrative, Cuba is mystical: without hatred, ism-free, brave and pure, a stranger to greed and murder.

  But Havana—not the tourist’s pleasure dome or the Marxist dream-state, but the Havana where Cubans actually live—is a city of ironic and often agonizing contradiction. Its name means “site of the waters” in the original indigenous tongue, yet there are no beaches. It’s legendary for its defiance, but penury and propaganda have made sycophants of many of its citizens before both local authority and foreign opportunity. Its poverty is crushing, but the ingenuity of its people makes it appear resilient and bountiful.

  In the real Havana—the aphotic Havana that never appears in the postcards, tourist guides, or testimonies of either the political left or right—the concept of sin has been banished by the urgency of need. And need inevitably turns the human heart feral. In this Havana, crime and violence, though officially vanquished by revolutionary decree, are wistfully quotidian and vicious.

  In the stories of Havana Noir, current and former residents of the city—some internationally known, like Leonardo Padura, others undiscovered and startling, like Yohamna Depestre—relate tales of ambiguous moralities, misologistic brutality, collective cruelty, and the damage inured by self-preservation at all costs.

  The noir, it seems, may be particularly apt for Havana: Descriptive rather than prescriptive, noirs explore the symptoms of an ailing society but rarely suggest remedies. They are frequently contestaire in their unblinking portraits but unnervingly apolitical. Their protago
nists are alienated and at risk, caught in ethical quandaries outside of their control, and driven to the very edge.

  Perhaps surprisingly, these stories—though fresh and original—have precedent in Cuban literature. And I don’t just mean Padura’s morally conflicted detective fiction of the ’90s, nor the recent novels of Daniel Chavarría and Arnaldo Correa (who’s included here with “Olúo”).

  Crime stories, especially those with detective protagonists, try to find order, to right things; noirs wearily revel in the vacuum of values, give in to conflict not as a puzzle to be solved but as a cul-de-sac. Noirs explore and expose but refuse to solve.

  As such, the stories in this volume may have more in common with the nihilistic prose of Carlos Montenegro’s 1938 novel Hombres Sin Mujer (Men Without Women), Lino Novás Calvo’s 1942 psych-thriller La Noche de Ramón Yendía (Ramón Yendía’s Night), or even Virgilio Piñera’s hellish 1943 poem about national identity, “La Isla en Peso” (“Island Burden”)—all secured within the canon of mainstream Cuban literature—than with what might pass as normative crime fiction, or even the usual noir.

  Actually, when a master like Alejo Carpentier produces a suspense story like 1956’s El Acoso (The Chase), and Eliseo Diego opens his 1946 book of blasters, Divertimentos, with a wicked murder story like “Las Hermanas” (“The Sisters”), it’s clear that noir is so bold a streak in Cuban literature that it barely contrasts enough with the mainstream to be recognized as such. And did Reinaldo Arenas ever write anything in which the protagonist—nearly always an alter-ego—wasn’t vehemently alienated and at risk?

  In all of Havana Noir, there’s only one detective—Alex Abella’s pre-revolutionary Jason Blue—and he’s not even Cuban.

  Instead, there are the merciless and doomed young men and women of Michel Encinosa Fú’s “What for, This Burden,” and Yoss’s street toughs, trapped by mediocrity and hopelessness on “The Red Bridge.” These are the children of the Revolution—both the writers and their characters—wandering aimlessly in a post-revolutionary world, a place with no past or future or blame to assign.

  Even Padura goes from ambivalent to eerily bleak. “Staring at the Sun” features an irremediable and forceful confrontation instead of the peaceful arrests and conclusions familiar to fans of his Mario Conde novels.

  These, however, don’t come close to the chilling amorality of Depestre’s “Abikú” or Mariela Varona Roque’s “The Orchid.”

  In the meantime, Cuban-born but U.S.-raised, Carolina García-Aguilera marinates “The Dinner” in a macabre nostalgia that stubbornly underscores what was lost for so many, on and off the island, after the Revolution. Moisés Asís, who left Cuba as an adult, walks an uncertain tightrope in “Murder at 503 La Rosa” and grieves for the greatest loss of all—that of the soul.

  Ena Lucía Portela’s “The Last Passenger,” with its deliciously caustic and unreliable narrator, lifts the veil of life in the best and most beautiful country in the world, where there is no crime and no crime report but a constant battle against imperialism and the enemy and…can she trust what she sees and hears on TV, in the courtroom, on the phone, or at the open-air bar across the street from Colón Cemetery? “The truth is, I don’t know what the hell to believe,” says her protagonist, whose mission seems to be to witness.

  There are other stories here by writers young and old, established and emerging, male and female, on and off the island, of clear and of dubious sexualities, black and white, and—because it’s Cuba—everything in between.

  We begin with Miguel Mejides’s marvelous “Nowhere Man,” which takes place in a beautiful, sinister, and very real Havana. It’s the story of a life, many lives perhaps, in which the possibility of finding happiness is experienced as moments in time to be treasured later, only as memories in the dark, when the final sentence has been pronounced.

  Achy Obejas

  Havana, Cuba

  March 2007

  PART I

  SLEEPLESS IN HAVANA

  NOWHERE MAN

  BY MIGUEL MEJIDES

  Old Havana

  To the memory of my father

  There are people who need to go against the grain but I’m not going against anything. Perhaps everything stems from the great handicap which life has given me: I’m cross-eyed. Ever since I’ve been able to reason, since the first time I was able to contemplate my image in a mirror and saw my own eyes, I told myself I was a man meant for silence, for meditation, a man made to work at smiling, fated to take long walks through the city I choose for my solitude.

  My mother, thank God, always knew about the shadow of the silent songbird that surrounded me. Likewise, she understood my decision to leave my hometown to go to Havana and find work. I’ve never been able to forget her, bidding me farewell at the train station with her linen handkerchief waving between the smoke and her saintly smile, which never left her, not even in death.

  Even though it’s rained a lot these years, until very recently I could still give myself the pleasure of contemplating Havana through the same lens as when I first glimpsed it in January 1990. Back then, Havana still retained that halo of light and mystery. My bus came in on the old central highway, continued past Virgen del Camino, and straight through the disastrous streets of Luyanó. At the end of my journey, I was awed by the statue of Martí in the Plaza de la Revolución and the sparkling Ferris wheel in the amusement park in front of the bus terminal.

  I’ll never forget the taxi that took me to Infanta 234; it was a mandarin-colored De Soto, with the coat-of-arms from an ancient Spanish province affixed with the number 13. The driver was a little old man with an Andalusian accent and a multicolored hat.

  “That’s the place.” I remember the stains on his teeth that flashed when he talked. As I paid him, he betrayed a certain anxiety about my eyes. “Buddy, buy yourself some dark glasses,” he told me.

  My Aunt Buza welcomed me half-solicitous and a bit taken aback too. She looked at me just like the taxi driver and talked about spells that could cure whatever was wrong with my eyes. Her husband greeted me gruffly and asked me if I knew how to drive. When I said no, he began talking about modern times, how a man of this century must learn how to handle machinery. Later, he coached me about the interview I had scheduled for the following morning.

  “Say only what’s necessary, don’t blow your nose, and lie: Say that you know how to drive.”

  To this day I have no idea what any of that had to do with the job for which I was interviewing. That night they set me up in a tiny room adjacent to the kitchen whose only charm was a large window looking out at Havana. Everything was so different from my hometown. I was struck by the city’s traffic, by the sea on the horizon which at night I could only imagine, and by Radio Progreso’s building right in front of me, from which flowed the station’s love stories that made my mother sigh. I was in Havana, I told myself, and now I would never leave its flame—which could easily become either pleasure or hell.

  But because I was still in a grieving phase—I don’t know if I’ll ever really get over it—the interview was a disaster. At 8 o’clock in the morning, we planted ourselves in front of the manager’s door at the Hotel Nacional. I was so nervous that I told my aunt’s husband I needed to go to the bathroom. He pointed the way, and I found myself in front of a mirror. I noted that I’d never been more cross-eyed. I was afraid my pupils would fall out of their sockets and drop into the bathroom sink.

  When I came back, they were already waiting for me. We went into the manager’s office. He was a man in his thirties, with a mole on his nose. He said something about Greek beauty, or Greek ideals of beauty, and that hotels were like the palaces of kings.

  “You have to understand, Jerónimo,” he said abruptly.

  “Maybe with dark glasses no one will be able to tell,” my aunt’s husband said.

  “But he won’t be able to use them at night, and a hotel is a living organism,” the man declared. “If there’s a single alien cell, its beauty is s
poiled.”

  On the way back, I remembered what the taxi driver had said. I needed to buy myself a pair of dark glasses. My mother had managed to convince her sister to have Jerónimo get me a job interview at the Hotel Nacional, where he’d worked since his youth. But the one thing my mother had not mentioned was my eyes. She had sent photos of me in profile, as if I were the most beautiful boy in the world. Now my eyes were going to force me back to my hometown, they were going to force me to grow old in that part of the world where only a tiny cemetery marks the turn to the single road that connects to Camagüey. “Stay a week if you like, then buy a ticket back,” suggested my Aunt Buza.

  “There aren’t any opportunities there,” I said.

  “In small towns, people get used to oddities like yours more easily,” she declared.

  That same day, in the afternoon, I went out and bought a pair of cheap glasses. I decided to walk all over Havana with my new face.

  At 7 the next morning I was already on the street. First, I explored all of El Cerro, then Marianao; by the time I began to stroll by Carlos III, it had been more than a week. I didn’t spend much. I didn’t turn the lamp on at night, I rarely flushed in the bathroom. In the morning I only drank coffee, and when I returned late at night, I ate whatever was left for me on the stove. I had the firm hope of finding work and staying in Havana. But everywhere I went, I was told there were no openings and everyone looked at me funny.