An
image is worth…
I
have said before that my mystery novels (and maybe all my books) can
be considered Cuba travelogues. All the settings are places that I
know very well, located in Havana, a city where I spent the first
thirty years of my life. I have seen hundreds of movies at the Yara
Movie Theater, met friends at El Quijote Park, watched the sun go
down sitting on the Malecón seawall and visited the Cristobal Colon
cemetery, where many of my ancestors are buried.
Here
are some pictures I took during my last visit to Havana in the summer
of 2019. Key scenes from Queen
of Bones
happen in all these places and I wanted to share with my readers.
An
image, after all, is worth a thousand words…
The
Yara Movie Theater
Close
to Coppelia was the Yara Movie Theater, at the corner of L and
Twenty-Third Street. It had been the most popular meeting place in El
Vedado. Juan and his friends would usually agree to meet one another
“in the Yara,” since it was easier to locate someone there than
at the always-crowded ice-cream parlor. He wandered around outside
the theater, feeling lost and somewhat out of place among the women
in tight outfits and high heels and the guys yelling to one another
over the noise of car engines, motorcycle revving, loud salsa music
and street vendors hawking everything from shampoo to shoes. That was
new too. No public bartering had been allowed in Cuba during the
nineties. Things were changing, no doubt.
El
Quijote Park
They
passed by El Quijote Park, where the two-ton wire sculpture of the
man of La Mancha stood. The piece, created by Sergio Martínez, had
been a point of reference for Habaneros since 1980.
“Nice
park,” Juan said. “I had almost forgotten it.”
“Now
people call it Parque del Suicida,” Victoria said. “A young man
shot himself in the head here three years ago. He left a note saying
it was because of a love affair gone wrong. Very romantic.”
Juan
shuddered. “I don’t think it’s romantic. Poor guy.”
“It
happens all the time.” Victoria’s laser-like eyes flashed under
the hat. “Women set themselves aflame; men jump off bridges or
shoot themselves—when they can find a gun, which isn’t easy here.
The case was strange because the police never found the weapon.
People think that whoever discovered the body first took it and went
away without a word. The story I heard was that he put the gun inside
his mouth and pulled the trigger.”
Sunset
in Havana
Time
passed slowly as Sharon waited in the hotel room. The blue waters
turned a deep indigo under the watchful eye of the Morro Castle
lighthouse, and the sun, now red, sank beneath the horizon. Sharon
had a brief glimpse of a lime-colored flash that could very well have
been the green ray. A pity Juan wasn’t there to see it.
The
Havana Cemetery
The
unpretentious Lasalle mausoleum was tucked on a side street, away
from the main avenues. A cement vase on top contained three withered
red roses. OSCAR CHIONG and 1947–1999 had been engraved next to it.
Below were the names of Juan’s mother and other relatives, almost
weathered off the tombstone.
“Are
they all buried here?” Juan asked, perplexed. Unless the grave was
very deep, he couldn’t fathom how they had managed to get more than
four bodies in.
“Not
anymore,” Rosita said. “All the Lasalle folks have already been
moved out.”
“Mom
too?”
“Yes.”
Juan
blinked. “You mean she isn’t buried next to Dad? Why? Where is
she?”
“When
the body decomposes, only the skull and some of the bigger bones
remain. We put them in an ossuary after five years. This makes it
possible to bury other people in these spots, since space is
limited.”
Rosita
spoke mechanically, sounding bored. She must have repeated these
lines often. He thought of asking whether Catalina and Juan Pedro had
been separated and their vacant spots given to others, but decided it
was none of his business.
“There’s
still room in your mausoleum,” Rosita added cheerily. “We can
place up to three more bodies here.”
Queen of Bones by Teresa Dovalpage
Juan, a Cuban
construction worker who has settled in Albuquerque, returns to Havana
for the first time since fleeing Cuba by raft twenty years ago. He is
traveling with his American wife, Sharon, and hopes to reconnect with
Victor, his best friend from college—and, unbeknownst to Sharon, he
also hopes to discover what has become of two ex-girlfriends, Elsa
and Rosita.
Juan is surprised
to learn that Victor has become Victoria and runs a popular drag show
at the local hot spot Café Arabia. Elsa has married a wealthy
foreigner, and Rosita, still single, works at the Havana cemetery.
When one of these women turns up dead, it will cost Padrino, a
Santería priest and former detective on the Havana police force,
more than he expects to untangle the group’s lies and hunt down the
killer.
Teresa
Dovalpage was born in Havana and now lives in Hobbs, where she is a
Spanish and ESL professor at New Mexico Junior College. She has
published ten novels and three collections of short stories.
Her
first culinary mystery Death Comes in
through the Kitchen (Soho Crime, 2018)
is set in Havana and features Padrino, a santero-detective. It is
loaded with authentic Cuban recipes like arroz con pollo (rice with
chicken) and caldosa (a yummy stew). Her second mystery, Queen
of Bones, was also published by Soho
Crime in November 2019 and includes elements of Santería and, again,
food—clearly, the author loves to eat! Both novels are rich in
details about life in the island, the kind only an insider can
provide.
They
are the first two books of Soho Crime’s Havana Mystery series.
Upcoming are Death of a Telenovela Star
(June 2020) and Death under the
Perseids.
She
also wrote A Girl like Che Guevara
(Soho Press, 2004) and Habanera, a
Portrait of a Cuban Family (Floricanto
Press, 2010).
In
her native Spanish she has authored six novels, among them Muerte
de un murciano en La Habana (Death of a
Murcian in Havana, Anagrama, 2006, a runner-up for the Herralde Award
in Spain) and El difunto Fidel
(The Late Fidel, Renacimiento, 2011, which won the Rincon de la
Victoria Award in Spain in 2009).
Once
in a while she delves into theater. Her plays La
Hija de La Llorona and Hasta
que el mortgage nos separe (published
in Teatro Latino, 2019) has been staged by Aguijón Theater in
Chicago.
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