“Friendship, memories and a few books.”
In Havana Fever , Leonardo Padura’s detective Mario Conde moves through a world where bookshops and libraries have disappeared. The year is 2003, 13 years after Conde quit the police department, and 13 years since the Crisis hit the island, “a galloping crisis that would soon dwarf all previous versions” as “the shortage of everything became a permanent state”.
Conde (“the Count”) was a detective in the Havana Police for ten years. His final year, 1989 — the year the Berlin Wall fell — is recorded in the four volumes of Padura’s Havana Quartet. Now, in 2003, he is a book scout, wandering the streets of Havana in search of rare books he can sell to foreign buyers. He had hoped to be a writer but that never happened. He likely lacks the self-discipline required. While an investigator, he worked off his hunches rather than any planned, deductive strategies. His book searches also depend on his instincts. Conde self-consciously defines himself as “the man who remembered”. When asked what he believes in, he responds “friendship, memories and old books.”
Padura constructs the narrative and mystery of Havana Fever from this triumvirate of beliefs. The mystery begins with memories in an old book and unfolds among the Count’s friendships.
The bibliomystery takes place during Cuba’s “Special Period” (Período especial en tiempos de paz), a period which Conde and his friends refer to simply as the Crisis. Cuba has suffered in the post-Soviet world that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. There is not enough money to buy food, much less to keep the lights on. The suffering is evident in Conde’s friends, like Skinny Carlos (“who was no longer Skinny”), a childhood friend confined to a wheelchair after fighting in Angola, who has grown increasingly fat and dependent on his friends for support. Another friend, Rabbit, bemoans the betrayal of their dreams, aspirations and their history in what he describes as a “historical exhaustion.” All this group still have is their friendship. They spend their evenings drinking together and remembering how things were, old music, memorable baseball moments, and their youth.
The losses of the Crisis include the bookstores and libraries, all of which are gone. “Hundreds of private libraries ceased to be a source of enlightmentment and bibliophilic pride, or a cornucopia of memories of possibly happy times, and swapped the scent of wisdom for the vulgar, acrid stench of a few life-saving banknotes” (14). Conde has been left as a bookseller without a bookshop. He must wander the streets searching for what books remain. When he makes a bibliographic find, he purchases the books and sells them on to foreign markets through his capitalist friend, Yoyi Pigeon. He is a conduit for their passage out of his country. He does not have the privilege of curation. He will not build a bibliographic space, what Kathy Liddle has described as a “cultural interaction space” .
Conde is aware of his complicity in te disappearance of Cuba’s literary and bibliographic culture. He has painful memories of what happened to the library he knew as a youth, where the librarian, Lame Cristóbal, first introduced him to literature and the love of the physical book. Cristóbal, seeing what was coming, begged him to steal some of the books from the library in order to protect them, but Conde was too young to understand. Years later, returning during a police investigation, he is grief-stricken by what he finds:
The plundering had been merciless and systematic, and apparently nobody had been held responsible for the vandalism. Conde thought how, in his grave, Lame Cristóbal must have felt that wilful profanation whiplashing his bones, destroying his poor life’s finest work as a handicapped librarian who loved his precious books.
When Conde (“the Count”) finds what could be the last, great, private book collection in Havana, he fears what will happen next: “His hands and economic interests were violating something sacred, and the Count anticipated his deed would provoke a chain reaction he still couldn’t imagine, but which was imminent.”
The discovery of this library intertwines the three strands of friendship, memory and old books. Conde discovers the Monte de Oca library, kept in pristine condition for 43 years by the owner’s illegitimate children. Conde is overwhelmed by the “simply fantastic” vision of the treasures of Cuban bibliographic history. It is, however, a newspaper clipping pressed into My Pleasure? An indispensable . . . culinary guide that inspires the first of the novels two investigations. It is the story of a bolero singer who disappeared in 1959. The picture strikes a chord in Conde and he sets out to learn why. The investigation reveals to him much of what has disappeared from his homeland.
Havana Fever is a bibliomystery, a detective novel. As such, the reader will normally expect to encounter at least one body. For Conde, the first body is that of Violeta del Rio, the bolero singer in the clipping. Neither he nor the reader ever encounters that body directly. When we are introduced to her, she is still passionately alive. The story develops when another body is produced, but again with no body shown. Instead, as pointed out by Goldman , we get the decaying corpse of Havana. The brother and sister caring for the library are desperately poor, enfeebled, almost “translucent.” The paralyzed Skinny Carlos has become grotesquely fat. Violeta’s only friend, a dancer once known as The Lotus Flower, is now a bitter, frail old woman consumed by memories of her former beauty.
This decay, the “historical exhaustion” that Rabbit rails against is the crime that Conde is investigating by seeking the story of the woman whose story was pressed into a book titled My Pleasure?. Conde has had the good fortune to find what may be the last great library in Havana, its shelves loaded with many of the rarest and most beautiful Cuban books. The brother and sister charged with its care were told 43 years before that “everything in this sanctuary is absolutely and eternally sacred.” When Conde first enters the library, “the smell of old paper and hallowed places floating in that mind-blowing room overwhelmed him” (13). However, the brother and sister are starving, and Conde himself is perpetually broke. So the sacred site will be violated so that people can live. One more island of books and the culture they represent will disappear.
Conde is the one who remembers, but Padura questions whether memory is enough. The Montes del Oce library will go the way of Lame Cristóbal’s school library, it’s books distributed to the wider world, leaving their Cuban home because there is nowhere for them anymore. Without a bookshop or a library, the books cannot accumulate and create a sense of place. When Conde first opens the library, he recognizes that “that space was like a sanctuary lost in time, and for the first time wondered whether he wasn’t committing an act of profanation.” (21). The library’s two caretakers are also breaking a vow, having promised their mother to maintain this “eternally sacred” place.
In an interview in 2013, Padura describes the novel as “a journey through paradise and through hell”
that novel is also a tribute to the golden era of the Cuban bolero and the great Cuban literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as a rather caustic look at the present; that is, a journey through paradise and through hell. .
Mario Conde first appeared as a police lieutenant in Pasado Perfecto (1991). We meet him early in the morning of New Year’s Day 1989, suffering one of the many hangovers Padura would document: “I don’t have to think to know the most difficult step would be opening my eyes” (pg 1). Although completed in 1990 Pasado Perfecto was denied publication in Cuba and had to be published outside the country by the University of Guadalajara Press . The second Conde novel, Vientos de Cuaresma (1994), won the annual Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC) award, making it possible to eventually publish both volumes in Cuba, as well as the subsequent two: Máscaras (1995), and Paisaje de oto (1998). The quartet appeared in English translation in 2007 as Havana Blue, followed by Havana Gold (2008), Havana Red (2005), and Havana Black (2006).
The quartet follows Conde through the seasons of his final year as a detective in the Havana police force. It is 1989, the year of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, an event that would have tremendous consequences for Cuba.
the Soviet bloc began to disintegrate, ending the generous economic credits and favorable trade relationships that had kept Cuba afloat for three decades. The U.S., which had maintained an embargo against Cuba, tightened the strictures. The following August, Castro announced his plan to stave off disaster, the Special Period in Time of Peace. It was the beginning of nearly a decade of precipitous hardship for many Cubans, as the economy shrank to almost nothing. Because of the lack of fuel, bicycles replaced cars, and oxen replaced tractors. Many Cubans went hungry; a Party official confessed to me that his family sometimes had little more than sugar water for dinner. Violence, theft, and prostitution soared, and there were riots in poor neighborhoods. In 1994, as many as fifty thousand Cubans fled on improvised boats in an effort to reach the United States.
Conde’s investigations have continued in several volumes that follow his investigations as he grows old with his friends.
- Adiós Hemingway, 2005.
- La cola de la serpiente, 2011 (Grab a Snake by the Tale, 2018).
- Herejes, 2013 (“Heretics”, 2017).
- La transparencia del tiempo, 2018 (The Transparency of Time, 2021)
- Personas decentes, 2022.
