Havana Black by Leonardo Padura

invaded his home well after ten o’clock at night.
    Cuqui, the sinewy, obedient little mulatta now living with Red, opened the door and smiled when she recognized the new arrivals, who greeted her with a kiss.
    â€œAnd where’s your husband?” Carlos asked, looking into the small room where someone was monologuing on television about the excellent forecasts for the next sugar cane harvest.
    â€œHe’s in church.”
    â€œAt this time of night?”
    â€œYes, he sometimes gets back at eleven . . .”
    â€œHe’s got a bad case,” interrupted the Count, and Cuqui nodded.
    She knew Candito’s friends had a right to certain confidences that were denied her.
    â€œIf you want to go and look for him, it’s just around the corner.”
    â€œWhat do you reckon, Conde?” hesitated Carlos. “He might not like that.”
    â€œI spend my life dragging Candito out of churches. Come on . . . Cuqui, get the coffee on, we’ll have him here in no time,” the policeman assured her, as he started pushing Carlos’s chair again.
    You could never have identified the Christian temple from its architectural appearance; it looked more like a warehouse, with a high tiled roof and double door, which when open hid the cross set there to indicate its function. Nevertheless, religious ecstasy spilled out of the place: the shouting and clapping of the faithful, intoning a rhythmic hymn of love to Jehovah,
came down the street, impelled irrepressibly by a faith too vehement by half, and strong enough to halt the three friends in their tracks.
    â€œThat has to be it,” commented Skinny Carlos.
    â€œYou really think we should go in, Conde?” asked Andrés, always on the reticent side, as Carlos and Mario exchanged glances. The chorus now sounded a couple of decibels louder, and the clapping quickened, as if the Jehovah they invoked was nigh.
    â€œNo, better not go in. I’ll just take a peek to see if Red can see me.”
    Without thinking why he did so, the policeman pulled down his shirt, as if trying to tidy his unkempt appearance, and crossed the small doorway to put his head inside the sacred precinct. And he was moved by what he saw: that church had nothing in common with the concepts of church stored in the Count’s Catholically trained brain. To begin with, there was no altar, always dominated by the image of the church’s patron saint; all there was on the clean, whitewashed wall was a simple wooden cross that bore no crucified Christ. The walls, also unadorned by saints and decorations, had large windows open to the night. Nonetheless, there wasn’t enough ventilation, and the Count’s face hit a hot, sweaty atmosphere exuded by the heaving mass of faithful gathered there, clapping like the possessed, while they sang in chorus with the short, thin black man who, without dog-collar or soutane, acted as the leader of that communion with the divinity, shouting periodically: “Yeah, you are, Jehovah!” enthusing the flock, which bellowed “Yeah, hallelujah!” The Count finally spotted Candito’s red head in the front rows and took a first step inside the church, when he was struck by a shocking disparity: he realized he was surrounded by people who knew of
God’s existence and praised Him with an apparently inextinguishable physical and spiritual vehemence, and he was forced back to the door, driven by his evident inability to belong to that crowd of redeemed believers. Tidying his shirt yet again, beneath which he carried a gun, the Count returned to the street, racked by doubt: who was mistaken: he or all those people gathered in that church without altars or Christ? Those people who believed in something that could save them or he, a man who could hardly think of a couple of things worth saving?
    â€œFucking hell,” he said to himself, as he reached his friends, and Carlos looked at him in alarm.
    â€œWhat