it Is possible that no one, not even Leonardo Padura, have imagined that this modest first edition of his novel Past perfect (published by the Directorate of Publications of the University of Guadalajara in 1991) I was going to renew for always the whodunnit cuban and create a literary character unforgettable: Mario Conde.
At the beginning of the nineties, before the fall of the socialist camp and the beginning of the Special Period, a new reality is sifted on Cuba.
The crime novel, or would just languish and was not able to count the times they were living in. It was there when, in the midst of that "landscape after the battle", came a lieutenant investigator with a peculiar character, the vocation of a writer, and a series of personal conflicts and existential in respect to the reality that you lived, that his country was facing at that time.
Heir to the masters of the noir novel as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Leonardo Sciascia, and Manuel Vázquez Montalban, Leonardo Padura (Havana, Cuba, 1955) realized that it was possible to create a crime novel that had a relationship with the environment of the country, and to play or to denounce realities not only imaginary but concrete.
at The end of the writing of that first novel, the author also realized –just like the readers, to finish it– that the character is alive and you need to/you have a larger space to continue to develop: four novels (it has appeared, fortunately for all, in the other four, and the readers wait for more).
The "Tetralogy of the four seasons" (Past perfect, Winds of lent, Masks and Landscape of autumn) –so called because it narrates events that take place in the spring, the winter, the summer and autumn of 1989– is the territory where dwells this police overwhelmed and sad, "bastard recordador", faithful to his friends and to his own, and, above all things, stubborn in "the bastards don’t get away with it with impunity".
what is it that has made this character is set in the memory of its readers? Beyond the investigation and resolution of criminal cases, in which Mario Conde was involved, what matters and transcends is the story of an entire generation through the eyes and words of a character, few characters, who speak like everyone and could be anyone. The identification between him and his idiosyncrasies is absolute.
Padura, by means of Count (and vice versa), has become the chronicler of a fragment of the history of Cuba that we don’t see in newspapers, magazines or newscasts, in which there are no heroes or villains: only human beings living with "love and escualidez". People who aspire to live with dignity, not betraying themselves, to remain loyal to the certainties that make them be what they are. And Mario Conde ages (like all of us) to face a reality that is increasingly difficult to catch and understand, that it is necessary to approach free of prejudices in order to understand the codes that inhabit it.
ÁLVARO CASTILLO GRANADA
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