Free Havana Black by Leonardo Padura Page A

and the onset of adolescence just as their older brothers’ had been marked by the Literacy Campaign and that of their parents’ generation by sexual initiation in the Pajarito or Colón neighbourhoods: it was tantamount to signing a Declaration of Independence, to feeling your own wings had grown, to knowing yourself physically and spiritually adult, although it really was not the case: now or ever. But they came to believe that all frontiers to adulthood were marked by that alluring avenue, which belonged to the sinful side in their adolescent lore, a slope they were to go up and down – or down and up – in droves, always aiming for an ice-cream at the top and the prize of the sea – always the sea, accursed and inevitable – at the bottom, though their only real obsession was to walk up and down the Rampa, unaccompanied by parents, hoping to find love on one of its street corners. It was almost a second baptism to ascend and descend that street that was like life itself, the only avenue in the city with pavements carpeted in polished granite, where you trod, aesthetically unaware, on unique mosaics fashioned by Wifredo Lam, Amelia Peláez, René Portocarrero, Mariano Rodríguez and Martínez Pedro, because your eyes were glued to the captivating neon signs of night clubs that were banned till the hurdle of a sixteenth birthday was cleared – The Vixen and the Crow, Club 23, The Grotto Cocktail Club – to the mysteries of the Cuba Pavilion and May Salon, exhibiting the last cry of the avant-garde, flanked by the two best cinemas in Havana, showing strange films with titles like Pierrot le Fou, Citizen Kane, Stolen Kisses or Ashes and Diamonds , which you struggled to see though they were impossible
to enjoy. And you also practised urban mountaineering to catch a fleeting glimpse of a few underfed tropical hippies, fake and already damned, or else take a mocking glance at those pansies who insisted on showing what they were, and conduct a drooling survey of the mini-skirts that had only just hit the island, first worn on that incline where all the rivers of the new times seemed to flow: including the first rapids of intolerance, whose rigours they had to flee, though they were still such young, correct and dewy-eyed students, when the politically and ideologically correct hordes started to persecute youths, armed with scissors ready to snip any hair that fell beneath the ear or widen trousers whose thighs couldn’t encompass a small lemon: sad recollections of scissors and armoured cars exorcising pernicious cultural penetration, led by four long-haired English lads who repeated such reactionary, pernicious slogans as All You Need Is Love . . . Politics and hair, consciousness and fashion, ideology and arse, the Beatles and bourgeois decadence, and at the end of the road the Military Units to Aid Production with their prison-like rigours as a corrective to shape the New Man.
    The Count was surprised by the exaggerated innocence of his own youthful initiation as he made that unexpected autumnal ascent, on the cusp of thirty-six, more than twenty years after he’d made his first ascent – or was it descent? – with Rabbit, Dwarf, Andrés, perhaps Pello as well, each armed with a cigarette, chewing a rubber band as if it were enemy chewing gum, with a dream in their hearts – or perhaps a bit lower down. ( All you need is love , right?) The Count rediscovered on that very same Rampa, which Heraclitus of Ephesus would have dialectically described as different, his hunting ground from the old days, now
all in darkness, closed clubs, a dingy Pavilion, the boarded-up pizzeria and the absence of that long-gone girlfriend he would wait for on the corner by the Indo-China shop, where they now sold what must be the last watches sent from a Moscow that was every day more distant and impervious to tears. It was all far too pathetic, but at once moving and squalid, as he