The transparency of time.., p.33
The Transparency of Time--A Novel, page 33
“You really don’t know what serious things José did? Couldn’t it have been that, that he stole the Virgin?”
“I don’t think so, he seemed like a good man. But the truth is that I don’t know what in the hell he did over there during the war, whether José was one of the ones who was going around killing priests to make the great revolution … What he did say is that with the Virgin in a sack, he crossed the Pyrenees through a path he knew. He went across half of France with Her. In Le Havre, yes, I think in Le Havre, he made his way onto a ship as a stowaway that was coming to Havana and Buenos Aires. When he was discovered, they were on the verge of throwing him overboard. They punished him by making him clean the ship. Then, when he arrived in Havana, he recovered the Virgin whom he’d hidden, and escaped the ship … Ending up in Regla. And in Regla, he saw another Virgin, the one from here … From that moment on, he began to tell anyone who asked him that his was a Virgin of Regla. I think that even my grandmother believed that at the beginning…”
Conde lowered his gaze. The story sounded believable, although incomplete. “But those two Virgins don’t look alike at all … Well, they’re Black…”
“It seemed logical to me: to any person in Cuba, a Black Virgin has to be the Virgin of Regla, right? Later, my grandmother found out that it was not and he told her his story … Or, the other way around … But before my grandmother told me, I, who am curious, discovered what She really was: a medieval Virgin, authentic Romanesque, originally Black, older still than the Virgin of Regla of Chipiona. From what I later found out, over there, they called that statue Our Lady of la Vall, because she is one of the statues who disappeared in that time, during the Civil War, so in that respect, José was not telling a lie … In sum, before she died, my grandmother handed Her over to me and told me José’s story, at least what she knew, which could be true or not, although she confirmed what I already knew: that She was a Virgin who had spent centuries in the church of José’s hamlet and that José was not called Josep Bonet and everything else…”
“But the story doesn’t end there.”
Bobby shook his head. He gulped. Conde knew he was missing the essence of what he needed to know.
“I started to find out more,” Bobby continued. “I knew that one of these Virgins, if sold, could be worth up to three or four million dollars. Perhaps more. Because there are very few of those statues left in the world, in the South of France, in the north of Spain, a few in Germany, some in Poland. Today, they are museum or catalog pieces … Imagine, Saint Louis brought some when he returned to France from his Crusades in the Holy Land … But I never wanted to sell Her, Conde: I want Her for me, to leave Her to my children later and for them to do whatever they want. Worship Her or sell Her. But after I’m dead. That’s why I want to recover Her. Because it’s true what I told you, but also what José used to say: that Virgin has powers. I don’t know if it’s because She’s Black, medieval, because She is rare, perhaps because She came from Africa, from the Holy Land, like some historians say, I don’t know: but She has the power to give you peace. And strength … And health … It’s a mystery, but it’s true Conde, I swear it to you. Because of all of that, I want to recover Her without making a fuss … Because I don’t know if the Spanish government can claim Her as the country’s cultural patrimony, and because if I make noise, everyone will know what She is worth … Conde, almost no one knew that I had this Virgin. Now even the police know and those are statues that even appear in books … You’ll see, you’ll see…”
Bobby stood up and smoothed his robe before going upstairs, from where he returned with two books, one of them coffee-table size, with a leather cover, that he opened and placed on the little table, in front of Conde.
“Here She is … Our Lady of la Vall … Romanesque sculpture from the twelfth century. Disappeared from Her chapel in 1936. Unknown whereabouts.”
Despite the dubious quality of the printed image, Conde recognized Her immediately and had the feeling that the pieces were finally starting to fit together. The one in the book was the Virgin from the photos that Bobby had given him. She could also be the one that Platero had shown him on his computer, in a retouched and improved image.
“It’s obvious that José stole Her…”
“Or that he saved Her, as he said. The war was ongoing, they were burning churches…”
“The one in this photo has two hands…”
“The missing hand is one that José lost when he took Her … That’s what he said.”
“Do I have to believe that whole story about the Catalan and your grandmother, huh, Bobby?”
“I swear on what is most sacred that it’s true. Where in the hell else was I going to get a statue like this one, how was I going to obtain it? Where was I going to buy it?”
“So, what’s this Jordi Puigventós doing in Cuba?”
“Looking for my Virgin,” Bobby responded without hesitation. “That guy is a pirate and somehow he got wind of the Virgin existing and being lost … I’m sure it was René Águila … What I told you, Conde: people already know She exists and that She is in Cuba…”
“And for sale,” Conde specified.
“Yes, for sale. But who has Her, Conde, who? Whoever killed Raydel and the other kid?”
Conde nodded; he shook his head; he was thinking. “All of this means that the Virgin is still in Cuba … And whoever has Her is Raydel and Ramiro’s murderer or knows who killed them, and he recovered the darned Virgin … So, the good news is that they cannot sell Her because it would give them away.”
“Whoever has Her is someone who knows what the Virgin is worth. I’m thinking that it could even be the person who asked Raydel to steal Her … and then things got complicated.”
Conde had already considered that possibility, which seemed more and more probable, although it seemed strange that the fake Raydel would steal such a valuable Virgin, with which he hoped to become a millionaire and leave Cuba, and at the same time would carry off even the kettle to boil water. He had also calculated that the murderer could take the risk of selling Her to someone like Jordi Puigventós, capable of buying Her without too much thought, and once She was sold, try to escape with the money. How much money? Where would Puigventós get that money from? Conde piled up reasons and doubts to then spar with Bobby a little more.
“Who could buy that Virgin worth millions and that somebody took out of Spain, let’s say, to save Her? Worse still: Who would dare buy Her knowing that behind Her, there are at least two dead and behind the two dead, some Cuban policemen who, I can assure you, are not idiots and already know there’s a valuable Virgin stuck in this whole mess? Bobby, if that Virgin was stolen in Spain, over there, they can’t do business with Her either. No, I don’t understand … Do you think that Jordi would go so far as to…?”
“Puigventós knows a lot, Conde. To have the business he has … And here in Cuba, there are also people who know a lot and have cash and—”
“People from your guild?”
“Yes … But there are others who invest in things with assured value. Houses, jewelry, paintings … Now there are a lot of people in those businesses. It’s like a plague that’s been set loose. And some must have contacts to get things out of Cuba. And someone in Spain or Miami, someone with a lot of money, could want the Virgin: not to exhibit Her or resell Her, no … But rather to keep Her, for Her powers.”
“Don’t fuck around anymore with that thing about Her powers, Bobby.”
“Okay, I won’t fuck around anymore. But She has powers! She cured me! That’s what gives Her the most value! Don’t you understand?”
Conde shook his head and gave himself a few moments to think. He had begun to feel like he had before him the true entry to the spiral, but without yet possessing the certainty of where it would lead him … Or even whether it would lead him to that darned Virgin who was prompting the story that was getting more and more macabre. He had to do something. And he was going to do it.
“You’d have to be crazy to want to buy that Virgin, although … Bobby, get dressed right now. We have to go out.”
“Where to, Conde?”
“Where my hunches lead me. Come on, let’s go…”
* * *
“What in the hell is wrong with you, Bobby?”
“I’m just nervous. I’m scared…”
“It doesn’t seem to me like you’re very scared … Because you don’t care if you die, you son of a bitch … But I do … At least in this way … It’s going to hurt very much…”
“Ay, Conde…”
“Ay, nothing, take it easy, dammit … Red light!”
Bobby slammed on the brake beneath the traffic light, and Conde was about to slam into the windshield to then fly out of the small German artifact when, without transition, the driver went into reverse.
Conde thought he’d made the worst mistake and was risking his life in the most absurd way he could have conceived of. Bobby Roque turned out to be the most disastrous driver he’d ever seen in his life. Ever since he turned on the ignition of his VW Beetle and drove up Miramar’s Séptima Avenida, he had begun to make every possible blunder along the way. From running through stop signs and a red light to being on the verge of running over an old man, a motorcyclist, and even a dog who, in the most classic and disciplined style, was pissing on a fire hydrant.
Twenty minutes later, sweaty, clutching the seat and the door, Conde let out his breath when he was able to step foot on firm ground in front of the mansion of Elizardo Soler. And there, he went from a state of terror to a feeling of perplexity.
That house on El Vedado’s Calle 19 had attracted Conde’s attention, but, for some inexplicable reason, he had never asked to whom it belonged or had belonged. Something distinguished it from the area’s other mansions and large dwellings. Its singularity was not due only to the majestic proportions of a building that was exemplarily eclectic or to its magnificent state of conservation amid the buildings in need of paint and love and care, but rather to its capacity to give off an air of mystery, at least for the somewhat novelesque perceptions of the former policeman. That enigmatic condition, now that he thought about it, was perhaps due to the conjunction of the tower—lookout, crowned by a rooster wind vane, the roof gutters that imitated Gothic gargoyles, the pediment decorated with two cornucopias facing each other from which poured fruits native to the country and paradise, elements visible over the tall gates covered with metal sheets that were always painted black, and the dense vegetation, from which exotic date palms stood out.
“Bobby, I need you to tell me what Elizardo knows, because if he was in the know about what they stole from you and how much it was worth … For starters, tell me who in the hell this Elizardo Soler is who lives in this mansion and about whom I’ve heard some strange stories … Come, let’s sit down.” And he pointed at the benches in the park that was laid out on the next block, one of which was permanently occupied, for several years already, by none other than a bronze version of John Lennon. This would be the first time Conde used the park since the Beatle’s face was unveiled, at last rehabilitated as an exalted figure of the counterculture after his music had been stigmatized, for years, on the island as a product of capitalist and bourgeois ideological penetration.
Elizardo Soler, Bobby began to tell him when they sat down and Conde lit his cigarette, was the natural-born grandson, if you could call him that, of the former proprietor of the house, one of the members of the Sarrá clan. Like his entire family, Emilio Sarrá had left Cuba when the revolutionary government began to voice its revolutionary purposes. An illegitimate son of that Sarrá, whom the magnate had not been able to give his last name, but did give his affection, then came to live in the mansion with his mother, the dancer Adela Soler, in the fleeing aristocrat’s confidence that he would soon be returning to the island and his properties. If there was something Emilio Sarrá wanted to keep in this world, it was his tropical version of Xanadu, the mansion of dreams and glory of a stock of successful and well-heeled indianos, the owners of great fortunes of origins as dark as the Black Africans purchased and sold by many of them. To achieve it, Sarrá trusted in his lover and his offspring. His natural-born son, Octavio Soler, was, as Conde could imagine, Elizardo’s father. And at some point, Octavio had to fight to avoid that the house of his progenitor, in which he had lived until then as an occasional guest, be revolutionarily repossessed, as the sugar mill, the rum factory, several stores, and the Camagüey haciendas of his blood father had been repossessed. It was of great help in that effort to preserve the property the fact of having been, like other young bourgeois university students, an active collaborator of the anti-Batista revolutionary fighters in the Havana clandestine movement. Very soon, thanks to some friend with real power, his case was covered up, like the house’s garden, and Octavio Soler was considered the legal usufructuary and later owner of the mansion of the man whom, he said, was his biological father.
Meanwhile, Elizardo, Bobby continued, had been a wild bon vivant in his youth, a member of the clan of the children of powerful fathers. To finance the best possible life for himself, he had begun to empty the house as soon as Octavio died. In the mid-1980s, when Elizardo most needed it to move his life along, the government opened the so-called House of Gold and Silver, soon renamed the House of Hernando Cortez, where one could trade gold for trinkets. And Elizardo handed over a fortune in jewels in exchange for a new Russian Lada and some appliances that Cubans had no other way of accessing. Later, when the Crisis came, he sold furniture and decorations to maintain the rhythm of his expenditures and consumption in the midst of general sparsity. Then, like in a fairy tale, a French noblewoman appeared on his horizon who, if not rich, at least had a bit of money. Money enough, Bobby thought. Elizardo married her and went to live in Switzerland … Or was the woman Swiss and he went with her to France and, in reality, she was very rich? The fact is that he spent about ten years over there, between Paris and Geneva, while his mother took care of the house in Havana …
When Elizardo’s mother got sick, he returned. The family mansion was the magnet that dragged the Sarrás, like a call of their blood. For Eli, it was easier to return because he invoked his father’s name and his father’s friends, and they gave him special treatment … When he repatriated himself, with the experience of what he had lived and learned in Europe, he decided to change the focus of his interests, and instead of selling, he recycled himself as the buyer who would later sell and gain. From that time on, thanks to the connections established in his time as a seller who consumed everything and anything, to his knowledge, and to the relationships established in Paris and to the capital he managed to extract from his French or Swiss wife, he had entered the business, or the guild, with exceptional force and ability and, one would almost say, with crazy luck. Because, as if he had some kind of special magnetism, the most valuable and sought-after pieces came his way, the ones that brought him the most cash. But he soon diversified his interests and made himself a kind of representative of several painters, the mediator of some European merchants and gallery owners interested in Cuban art and … There was Elizardo Soler, earning money like a madman and living in that house of dreams, which would never see the return of the original owner, that grandfather Emilio Sarrá, from whom, Eli says, and with this Bobby finished his story, he received an inheritance in Spain, but that must be completely made-up.
“Urban legend,” concluded Conde, who had been connecting the story Bobby laid out with the information Miki Dollface had offered him earlier to confirm how both fit and complemented each other at the most basic level, even in the parts that were legend.
“Yes, I think Eli is a compulsive liar,” Bobby confirmed.
“Someone told me it’s possible he was also an agent…” Conde probed.
Bobby laughed heartily.
“If he’s a State Security agent, he’s the best in the world … With the dealings he gets involved in, the things he says and does, with how boastful he is…”
“But couldn’t he have been one? Maybe he no longer is, but if he was, he continues to be so … Like what happens to policemen. That might give him a certain impunity, or he might think he has it, I don’t know…”
“No, Conde, Eli is too much of a bigmouth and takes too many risks. Sometimes he says and does things that make you wonder whether he’s mad or pulling your leg. But an agent, a spy, any of those things, I don’t believe it … If he ever swears it to me, I’m going to think it’s another one of his lies, his boasting … Well, let’s go. Although the truth is that I don’t know what you’re going to get out of this conversation with Eli…”
Following Bobby’s steps, Conde at last crossed the threshold of the iron gate, walked across the granite paved path that led to the mansion, and his previous and foreseeable surprise multiplied. The house’s garden, cared for with obvious professional attention, was adorned by a true procession of marble sculptures of winged angels and crowned Virgins that seemed familiar to the former policeman. Couldn’t they be some of the valuable pieces stolen from the richest pantheons of Havana’s cemetery? The porch, which ran across the front and sides of the first floor, was protected by tropical awnings behind which were placed wicker and iron seats and tables with a fruit motif. In enormous cages, some birds of multicolored feathers and long golden beaks were resting in the midday heat. Conde identified them as toucans. And alongside the gigantic mahogany door that gave way to the mansion, like one more adornment, there was Elizardo Soler, smiling, dressed from head to toe in white, evoking a boy who was ready to receive his First Communion.
