Havana Year Zero by Karla Suárez
Review by Cath Barton
‘Each of us holds within us the discontent of society and each of us reproduces it.’
Getting to the truth of anything is a journey with many twists and turns. Art and science, as the narrator of this story reminds us, had a common origin, but now the one deals with words, the other with numbers. Julia – that is the name she adopts – is a mathematician; her approach to reality is to intuit it — observe and then codify it. Leonardo is a novelist; he codifies feelings. But it’s not that simple. Leonardo is writing a novel in which everything is fact, or so he would have it – a non-fiction novel. And what he is writing about is something others are pursuing too, for their own reasons. With me so far?
Let me explain. That’s what Julia does, addressing an unnamed person to whom she is telling the story of what happened in Havana in 1993. The story, she says, starts in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall comes down and the Cuban economy, previously propped up by the Soviet Bloc, collapses. That same year a newspaper publishes an article about an Italian called Antonio Meucci who had apparently invented the telephone, in Cuba, some years before Alexander Graham Bell patented it in 1876. Julia hears that there is a document, somewhere in Havana, that proves this, and finding the document becomes a fascination for her in this year, 1993, when things have sunk to the lowest ebb, with shortages of food and fuel, ‘the streets empty at night, bicycles replacing cars, shuttered shops, mountains of trash.’ Julia sees in Meucci’s story a chance to give meaning to her days, a quest to make her solid and important again.
There are others involved – Julia describes them as variables in an equation – and they all have their own reasons for wanting to find Meucci’s missing diagram. Leonardo needs it for his perfect novel; Euclid, Julia’s former teacher, seeks celebrity in his field and ‘at worst, he might earn enough money to eat a little better’; Ángel wants to return a lost legacy to his former wife and so exorcise the ghost of the past. In a city and time when people cope by smiling, making love and dreaming, all the characters need dreams they can believe in.
Publication of Havana Year Zero by Charco Press brings Karla Suárez’s work to an English-speaking readership for the first time. In Christina McSweeney’s idiomatically convincing translation, Suárez conveys a powerful sense of the frustrations and contradictions of life in a noisy city in a time of extreme privations. Julia finds calm on the Caribbean shore or with her lover on a balcony at night in the rain. In the daytime, the sun beats down ‘like a punishment’ and a bus journey is a particular torture in which ‘You can’t precisely define anything other than the bead of sweat trickling down your spine, at about the same rate as the bus moves in the tropical sun; slow and laboured.’ But there is rum aplenty, and sometimes cake, although the tropical ice-cream is mostly water with very little flavouring.
Julia sees herself as the puppeteer, but nothing is as it seems for any length of time and she finds herself waylaid in a web of secrets and lies, unable to maintain her scientific objectivity as she becomes emotionally involved with Ángel. As she says, furious with him for sleeping with Barbara, the Italian tourist who wears a bra two sizes too small for her, ‘Why can’t love be more rational?’ The intricacies of the quest for Meucci’s lost document are many, and there are stretches of the narration when the focus on Julia’s explanations of her hypotheses becomes, for me, over-extended. That said, the bringing together of the mathematical and artistic viewpoints is fascinating: Suárez has a degree in electronic engineering and her knowledge is sure and conveyed with a light touch. Julia decides that everything that happens, at least in this Year Zero, is explained by chaos theory, and that this is as true about who has sex with whom in her group, and why they are all obsessed with Meucci, as it is about something small happening in one country having substantial effects on another on the other side of the world.
It is ironic that the telephone was indeed invented – the proof having been uncovered in 1994 by the telecommunications researcher Basilio Catania, as we are told in the book – in a country where, during the so-called Special Period when the action of the novel takes place, frequent electricity outages make finding one that works extremely difficult.
Havana Year Zero is, some longueurs notwithstanding, like a set of Russian dolls; its many layers fit together in a firm and satisfying way. And there is something rather special to discover when you reach the end of the book. A truth, you might say.
Havana Year Zero is published by Charco Press, 23rd February 2021