was ever heard of her again. Might she have left the island, like so many thousands of Cubans around that time? The Count reckoned it was the most likely explanation, although he didn’t discount the possibility she might still be living in Cuba, under her real name – Lucía, Lourdes, or Teresa, because nobody could, in real life, be a Violeta del Río – as a private individual, stripped of the lamé, limelight and microphones. It wasn’t a wild conclusion to draw: in years of such radical change in the lives of the country and its inhabitants, there’d been an infinite number of political, ethical, religious, professional, economic and even sporting transformations: Grandfather Rufino had suffered the banning of cockfights as if it were a prison sentence and the Count’s own father didn’t see another game of baseball to the day he died, because he couldn’t imagine or accept that the blue Almendares club had ceased to exist, a club he’d fanatically supported for every minute of the first thirty-five years of his existence . . . But no artist can stop being an artist from one day to the next, just like that – just as no policeman could totally cease to be one, however long he’d been off duty – something Mario Conde knew for a fact. Maybe that was why he was so intrigued by that press-cutting, slumbering inside a cookbook nobody had opened in years, as witnessed by its state of preservation as well as the fact, endorsed by history, that its contents were of no use in a country that had been on food rationing for almost half a century. Hare stew with sultanas? Eggs in foie gras aspic? Foyot veal cutlets? . . . You must be joking! Conde conjectured that the book must have belonged to the wife of Alcides Montes de Oca, although he thought he remembered that she’d died around 1956, the year the book of recipes was published. If, as Amalia Ferrero asserted, her brother Dionisio stopped living with them when the revolution was victorious, it was unlikely he could have left a cutting there which was published in 1960. Five people remained on his list: the deceased Alcides Montes de Oca and his two adolescent children, the aged, now blank-minded Mummy Ferrero and Amalia herself. How could one of them have been involved with a ’50s Havana cabaret singer? The Count couldn’t imagine, but some link must have existed between one of those individuals and the vanished singer of boleros, the seductress who’d been dubbed the Lady of the Night and who beat faintly in some remote cranny of the Count’s memory as a diffuse, almost extinct presence, still able to send out disruptive tremors.
It was gone three a.m. when the Count heard a rather authoritarian scratching on his kitchen door. He knew it was useless to try to ignore it, since stubbornness was the scratcher’s most pronounced trait, so he got up to open the door.
“Hell, Rubbish, what kind of time is this to be coming home?”
On the brink of the advanced age of fourteen, Rubbish retained his streetwise ways intact, and would prowl the barrio every night in search of fresh air, frantic fleas and females on heat. Ever since the Count had brought him home to live with them on that stormy night in 1989, the quarrelsome Maltese had insisted on his freedom, which the Count accepted, seduced by the character of the animal who, alerted by the faint, lingering scent of the evening’s feast on his clothes, now barked twice, demanding to be fed.
“All right, all right, grub’s up.”
Conde fetched a metal tray from the terrace. He opened the bag of leftovers from the paladar and tipped part of the contents onto the tray.
“But you eat it outside . . .” the Count warned, taking the tray out on the terrace. “We’ll talk tomorrow, because this has got to stop . . .”
Rubbish barked twice again, and wagged his battered tail like a shuttlecock, urging him to get a move on.
Back in bed, Mario Conde smoked a cigarette. With the dark eyes of Violeta del Río
It was gone three a.m. when the Count heard a rather authoritarian scratching on his kitchen door. He knew it was useless to try to ignore it, since stubbornness was the scratcher’s most pronounced trait, so he got up to open the door.
“Hell, Rubbish, what kind of time is this to be coming home?”
On the brink of the advanced age of fourteen, Rubbish retained his streetwise ways intact, and would prowl the barrio every night in search of fresh air, frantic fleas and females on heat. Ever since the Count had brought him home to live with them on that stormy night in 1989, the quarrelsome Maltese had insisted on his freedom, which the Count accepted, seduced by the character of the animal who, alerted by the faint, lingering scent of the evening’s feast on his clothes, now barked twice, demanding to be fed.
“All right, all right, grub’s up.”
Conde fetched a metal tray from the terrace. He opened the bag of leftovers from the paladar and tipped part of the contents onto the tray.
“But you eat it outside . . .” the Count warned, taking the tray out on the terrace. “We’ll talk tomorrow, because this has got to stop . . .”
Rubbish barked twice again, and wagged his battered tail like a shuttlecock, urging him to get a move on.
Back in bed, Mario Conde smoked a cigarette. With the dark eyes of Violeta del Río