Mantilla, circle and cycle of Leonardo Padura

Leonardo Padura Fuentes, probably the most read contemporary Cuban novelist outside of Cuba, the National Literature Prize in 2012 and the Princess of Asturias Prize for Literature in 2015, recommends the places where not only his life was developed, but also that characters in his novels.

Padura prepares coffee in a small coffee maker, then softens it in a large cup and drinks it directly. He is standing in the kitchen of his house. Watch the street through the window above the sink, the old Camino Real del Sur. The street of all his life.

Leonardo Padura is the journalist, the writer, the one who gave life to Mario Conde, this character who grows up and matures with him. But now it is also someone who has never moved. He said to me, sitting and supporting the dolls a little on the table of the dining room: "From all the places of Havana, my starting point, my back, my perspective, my dream creation, my own personality .. Here is Mantilla "

In 1943, Alicia Fuentes was 15 years old. Mantilla was then a town between Arroyo Apolo (now La Palma) and El Calvario, 12 kilometers south of Havana. The Fuentes family came from Cienfuegos and sent Alicia with her older sister, who was living with her husband in a wooden house next to the church of San Rafael de Arcángel

In front of the church stands found the cellar where Leonardo Padura, the father, he had his small business. Alice and Leonardo fell in love. Five years after the commitment, the marriage has come. In 1954, the young couple built his house. The same thing we are talking about now.

"When I was born, it was a normal neighborhood.May have almost all the necessary things: schools, pharmacy, warehouses, hardware stores, hairdressers, quincalla, a bus stop, two social halls for people to dancing … When you need something special, you went to the commercial area of ​​Havana.Always here in Mantilla it is said that he goes to Havana when you go to the Monte region, Reina , the area of ​​department stores. "

The big city was reached by two main roads: the 4 that went to Havana, and the 68 that ended in the tunnel of the line, in El Vedado. Both came from the location of Route 4, a reference point for Mantillenses

Leonardo was born one year after the construction of the house. When he was ten, the Revolution had triumphed six years ago, it was a boy who was playing ball. Every evening, around eight o'clock, he took the canteen with food for his father, who was coming back to cover the road as a bus driver. "This place was the social and economic center of neighborhood life, and a lot of people in my family worked there."

He says the 4 and 68 disappeared in the 1990s. he toppled the one-and-a-half-meter-high concrete sign that indicated Route 4 blue "It's like the demolition of a memento and a place where people felt entrenched." And these are wounds in the identity, in the sense of belonging to the people. "

There were also groves, Mantilla was an area with lots of land devoted to agriculture, mostly fruits, mangoes, avocados, plums.Padura's grandfather bought ripe mangoes on the farms. and sold them on a stand or in the single market.This was a very common way to make a living.At the famous Havana Cord (a failed plan for the cultivation and development of coffee in the 60s), there was not a single tree to make history.

Today in Mantilla, all that was before There remains only the church. The same where Padura made his first communion.

At the end of the 60's and the beginning of In the 1970s, young Padura began to expand his geographical universe. It was the time of the meadow, the meadow of the Viper. The moment of transition from adolescence to youth.

"This is a place that will later become the space of my novels." At one point, I decided that all cases that Condé would receive and resolve would come from his colleagues at the Pre-university In my last novel, The Transparency of Time Condé comes to see a meadow mate because they stole a black virgin, and from there everything is developed. "

Around from the meadow Viper's life for a student has become very attractive. There was the Alameda cinema, a first cinema where Padura saw Spartacus, La vida igual league, and the first part of El Padrino. There was the Coppelita de la Víbora (the small ice cream parlors took the name of Coppelitas thanks to Coppelia, the largest ice cream parlor, located in the heart of El Vedado); and there was also the library

In "La Polilla" Padura bought his first books: A yellow dog, The hollow needle, police stories … Today is a place ravaged by time, "Impoverished like all the Cuban bookstores of the 90", he says.

When the special period arrived, Padura had built a little bachelor apartment above his parents' house. His girlfriend Lucia lived in La Palma. But, with the ravages that began to cause the fall of the socialist camp, they realized that they could not live alone and decided to get married.

The apartment became home in '98, just like today. Even ten meters from the avenue – La Calzada de Managua – where screaming guaguas, trucks and other cars, the house retains a particular sound, similar to silence. This is not an absolute silence. From time to time, plants that hang from the walls, or stand on railings, allow to wander some faint noises from outside Mantilla.

It is the first of the concentric circles of the Padura Universe. Circle and cycle. Where he was born and where he always comes back.