Havana Cuba. — Leonardo Padura considers that decent peoplehis most recent novel, which appeared a few months ago in Tusquets Editores, is the most detective of all the plots he has written.
“After several novels that were increasingly falsely detective, I felt the need to thoroughly practice the genre and write a story with several deaths and many crimes, physical, historical, and spiritual,” explains Padura in the Author’s Note that appears at the end of the book. book.
If that was what Padura wanted, he got it: decent people it is the most detective of all his novels. But not for this reason, as in all the other Mario Conde series, Padura fails to take advantage of the police plot as a pretext to critically address lurid aspects of Cuban society.
In decent peopleMario Conde, years after his retirement from the police, collaborates in the investigation of the murder of who is presented as one of the main repressors of artists and intellectuals in the 1970s, during the so-called Gray Quinquenio: Lieutenant Reynaldo Quevedo.
Like in the novel of my life, The man who loved the dogs Y hereticsin decent people, Padura once again resorts to the structure of two stories that run parallel, one in the past and the other in our days. The story of the investigation into the murder of Quevedo, which takes place in March 2016, on the eve of Barack Obama and the Rolling Stones’ visit to Havana, runs alongside the investigation by Lieutenant Arturo Saborit of the murder of two prostitutes. in Old Havana in 1910, in a plot that has as one of its protagonists the legendary pimp Alberto Yarini.
What both stories have in common is that the investigators, Arturo Saborit and Mario Conde, are two decent people who are forced to move in putrid environments that tire and suffocate them to such an extent that they end up disillusioned, retired from the police and with serious reservations about the ideals and values they once held.
In Decent Persons, as in his other latest novels and in the interviews he gives to the foreign press, Padura is increasingly critical of the Castro regime and the decadent stagnation to which Cuban society is subjected.
The references to Lieutenant Quevedo —“that twisted man who was the bulldog, the standard-bearer of ideological purity to whom the authorities had conferred the absolute discretion to decide the destinies of the inhabitants of the republic of Cuban arts”— that makes Padura in decent peopleThey remind us of repressors from the 70s like Luis Pavón, Lieutenant Quesada, Papito Serguera and others. You can check it in these two paragraphs that I allow myself to quote:
“A mediocre poet, with some minor military rank, he belonged to the sector of political intransigents and to the horde of those sick with that voracious hatred that envy and fundamentalism engender and whose effects multiply from the pedestal of power. A confessed Stalinist, with a dark and crouching personality, he had been chosen for his vocation as an inquisitor and perhaps for genetically encoded evil as the leading head of the process of persecution, harassment and marginalization suffered by too many writers and artists… ”.
“With all the intransigence, anger, malice and anger to which he owed his pre-eminence and always in the name of the necessary ideological, political, social and even sexual purge that the happy world inhabited by the new man demanded, Quevedo dedicated himself to for years to destroy lives and projects, to poison the land of creation by throwing salt at it, to burn heretics in their political bonfires, while promoting emergency poetry, theater, plastic arts, almost always opportunistic and lamentable, allegedly or presumably proletarian , which were raised as the revolutionary art of the Revolution, in and for the Revolution. As the speeches requested, as the documents stipulated, as the philosophy in practice demanded.
And he was close enough for him to say that as Fidel Castro demanded. Because there is no doubt that Padura is talking about the Commander when he refers to that Someone who “decided to hide under layers of oblivion, silence, looks to other sides, such infamous times and policies.”
Who other than the Maximum Leader had the power to order the implementation of those policies? Because Pavón, Quesada, Serguera and others were only the enthusiastic henchmen who carried out that barbarism that did so much damage to the national culture.
This new novel by Leonardo Padura, as daring and inconvenient as it has become, is likely not to be published in Cuba. Or maybe yes. Overall, so that it is not widely read, it will suffice to give it little promotion and a small circulation, smaller than usual in the case of Padura.
OPINION ARTICLE
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