The International Journal of Cuban Studies
(Online) ISSN 1756-347X
A man for four seasons
John Kirk applauds the portrayal of the disillusioned detective in the latest translation from Leonardo Padura's crime series, which chronicles the early part of Cuba's Special Period.
Havana Gold
Leonardo Padura
London: Bitter Lemon Press, 2008
286pp, £8.99
This is the final novel in the English-language version of Padura's Four Seasons series of novels, set in Havana in 1989, although in fact it is the second in the original Spanish. Again we have a murder set against the looming crisis of Cuba's Special Period as the implosion of the Soviet Union starts. And again the disillusioned detective Mario Conde sets out to resolve the crime in his own slow-paced, insightful manner. It is a formula that has worked throughout the four-part series as well as in two other novels, Adios Hemingway and the latest, and by far most sophisticated work in this genre, La neblina del ayer (2005, still untranslated into English). Leonardo Padura's recent presentation at the International Institute for the Study of Cuba will have illustrated the reason for his novels' popularity (now translated into sixteen languages) and his own personal success.
The plot is simple: the body of Lissette Delgado, a young teacher, is found after she has been raped, beaten and strangled. Mario Conde's mission is to find the killer, a challenge that takes him through the crumbling streets of Havana to his old high school, where Lissette taught. The Special Period is on the verge of arriving, along with massive dislocations in Cuban society - and the edgy atmosphere, complete with incipient social problems (drugs were virtually unheard of until this time), growing corruption, and generally demoralized environment, are all superbly presented.
Each of the crimes investigated by Conde in these novels is violent and each allows Padura to reflect on the radical changes afoot in Havana, of which there are many. Petty corruption was rampant. Censorship is addressed in the form of treatment received by the young Mario in a flash-back to his high-school days, when he was reprimanded for an essay on religion. Theft had also increased (even the police officers remove the radio aerial from the police cruiser when they park their car.
Class differences - in revolutionary, socialist Cuba - are indicated. Lissette's parents are well-connected and travel abroad, bringing back consumer items. Her mother lives in an upscale Havana neighbourhood, quite different from other parts of Havana. The police officers visiting the region display tremendous sarcasm as they talk about the privileged lifestyle of the upper echelons of the privileged nomenclatura. By contrast the limits of his own life constitute a dramatic contrast: "he opened the fridge and eyed the dramatic loneliness of two possibly prehistoric eggs and a piece of bread that could easily be a survivor from the siege of Stalingrad. He dropped the two eggs in heterodox fat tasting of mutually hostile fry-ups [...] A hundred per cent socialist realism, he told himself" (p. 187).
Mario Conde is very much an anti-hero: despite some steamy sex scenes he never manages to develop a solid relationship and his only real friend is Skinny Carlos. Even there the theme of failure is seen, since Carlos is no longer skinny, having come back from Angola paralyzed. Unable to express emotion, he is unable even to hug Carlos: "And he got up, wanting to give his friend a hug, but didn't dare. There were hundreds and hundreds of things he never dared to do" (p. 26). He spends his spare time drinking, listening wistfully to upbeat music of the 1960s, and reflecting with sadness on his past life as a police officer: "To catch, question, imprison, judge, sentence, accuse, repress, persecute, pressurize and crush are the verbs which conjugate the memories and entire life of a policeman" (p. 27).
Self-deprecating humour, an innate pessimism, growing frustration with the state of things in Cuba, along with a profound dislike of his chosen profession, round out the character of Mario Conde, so skilfully portrayed by Padura. Unlucky in love, increasingly frustrated with his profession, and dismayed with events in Cuba, Mario Conde's melancholy character is superbly developed in the series, truly masterful chronicles of Cuba in the early years of the Special Period.
John M. Kirk is Professor of Latin American Studies at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada and co-author with Leonardo Padura of Culture and the Cuban Revolution.
Copyright
Copyright for this work is held jointly between John M. Kirk and the International Journal of Cuban Studies under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative 3.0 Licence
IJCS Volume 1 Issue 1 June 2008
