Havana Blue (20 page)

“Hey, and what got into you, buying rum?”

“Conde, I'm in a right state. Either you drink rum or piss off as if I'd never seen you.”

“I'll drink rum, but let's change the subject, because I'm not the team manager, right?”

“If you say so.”

Skinny poured himself another shot and seemed to
have declared a truce. His deep breathing returned to normal.

“How you getting on with the Rafael thing, my brother?”

“It's getting better. We've got a good lead.”

“Did you see Miki?”

“Uh-huh. I've just come from his place. He was really odd. I thought he was more in need of a priest than a policeman.”

“And did you forgive his sins?”

“I consigned him and his three books to hell. For being a liar and a bad writer. Pour me some more, quick.”

“And what's the lead?”

“That lots of money passed through Rafael's hands and he'd probably run into difficulties with finances at the enterprise. Guess what the bastard did when he picked up a chick? He'd tell her his name was his department head's: see the kind of dick-head our pal is.”

“We'd all do the same, kid,” replied Skinny, gulping his rum down anxiously. The Count did likewise and didn't even think how good the rum was. “You had something to eat?”

“No, I don't feel like food. Let me down a few shots and then go to sleep.”

“Did you see the twin today?”

“Yes, around midday. Nothing new to report. I drank two whiskies with her . . .”

“Yours is a hard life, isn't it?”

The Count opted for another rum rather than to start another argument with Skinny. That's what he's after, the bastard, he's lost it after the baseball, he told himself, and used his feet to take his shoes off. He was beginning to feel comfortable, slumped in an armchair,
Jose was looking at television in the living room and he suddenly remembered the Mamas and the Papas and felt an urgent need to listen to music.

“I'll put something on,” he said and walked over to the sideboard where the cassette player stood. He opened a drawer and studied the cassettes Skinny had numbered and put in order. The complete Beatles; almost all of Chicago and Blood, Sweat and Tears; several tapes of Serrat, Silvio and Pablo Milanés; and one of Patxy Andión, selections from Los Brincos, Juan and Junior, Formula V, Stevie Wonder and Rubén Blades. What a mixture, hell, and he chose the tape of a record sung in English by Rubén Blades that he'd given Skinny as a present. He switched on the deck, gulped down a generous measure and poured out Skinny and himself some more rum. Now the pain had gone from his back and butt that had been tortured by Miki's armchair.

He liked that record and knew Skinny did, and they felt morbidly carefree singing the ballad “The Letter”, the epistle a friend writes to another who knows he's going to die, and they drank and drank like thirsty pilgrims. The bottom of the bottle was beginning to show; and Skinny moved his wheelchair over to the glass cabinet and pointed to the pint left over from the day before, and they thought great, we've got another pint of rum, we can handle it, and they wanted to down all that alcohol.

“This rum's delicious, right?” asked Skinny, smiling.

“You're coming out with the usual drunken shit.”

“But what did I say wrong, kid?”

“Nothing, that it's good rum blah blah. Of course it's good, you beast.”

“And what's this drunken shit? You can't open your mouth in this place now . . .”

He protested and started drinking again, as if wanting to clear his throat. Mario looked at him and saw a man so fat and so changed he didn't know how long he could count on Skinny, and the residue from all his nostalgia and failures started to rise to his brain as he tried to imagine Carlos standing up and walking, but his brain refused to process that pleasant sight. And it was the last straw.

“When was your last embarrassing moment, Skinny, I mean really embarrassing moment?”

“Hey, kid,” Skinny smiled and held his rum up to the light, “so I'm the pickled one around here, am I? And what are people who start to ask such things – cosmonauts?”

“Kid, try to be serious.”

“No, you beast, I don't make a habit of counting these things up. Living like this,” and he pointed to his legs but smiled, “living like this is embarrassing enough, but what do you want me to say?”

The Count looked at him and nodded, of course, it was embarrassing, but he knew how to set things straight.

“What was your most embarrassing moment?”

“Hey, just what are you after? You tell me yours.”

“Mine . . . Wait a minute. When I was learning to drive and turned into a service station, I braked badly and knocked over a tank containing fifty-five gallons of petrol. The bastards there all clapped.”

“And from all the shit in the past?”

“Well, every time I remember, I feel really sick . . . I don't know why. I feel the same when I remember the day Mad Eduardo put the boot into the campleader's face and I was afraid I'd insult Rafael's mother.”

“Yes, right, I remember that . . . Look, I get sick as
shit whenever a nurse has to take my cock so I can pee in the pot.”

“And the day I crouched down at university and my trousers split and my underpants had two holes as big as . . .”

“And the day we went to eat in Pinar del Río, you, me and Ernestico, when we were picking tobacco, and I said, well I'm going to put clean pants on, you never know when you might pull a country girly and it turned out the ones I'd put in my case were all brown patches.”

“And you still worry about that? I feel real fucking bad when I remember that second-year meeting, when they wanted to kick some guy out of the class because he'd been accused of being a queer, and I didn't stand up and defend him, because I was scared they'd mention the Venezuelan girl who was going out with me at the time, you remember, Marieta, she of the small butt and big tits?”

“Hey, sure, tell me more . . . Kid, one day a nurse came from the clinic to give me an injection. It was very late, and I didn't hear her come in and she caught me with my prick flying high from that magazine Peyi lent me.”

“That's fucking terrible,” and to round the session off they had recourse to another bottle. “Just like the day I went to grab the rail on the bus when the driver braked suddenly, and I grabbed that woman's tit, and she whacked me and called me everything from bastard downwards, and people started shouting, groper, groper . . .”

“And fuck, what about the day the Rank-and-File Committee designated me and another girl to persuade people not to come to school with such long hair, and I went along with it, though it wasn't in the rules? Shit, the things they forced you to do.”

“Wait a minute, you just wait one minute, I've one to beat you, you beast, the day I spoke,
señor
, with a lilt so they'd think I was Venezuelan and would let me in the Capri with Marieta. Incredible, how embarrassing . . .”

“Hey, and I'd rather not remember the day, yes, a drop more rum, the day when black Samson stole my tin of condensed milk in the cane-cutting camp and I knew he'd done it but played dumb so I wouldn't have to fight him.”

“Shit, life's one bowl of shit . . . And what happened to me today, Skinny, I can't, I'll die of embarrassment, of rum, I'll die,” and he shut his eyes in order to keep a hold on his brain's battered remnants of lucidity so as not to die of embarrassment yet again and confess, “Skinny, Tamara invited me to lay her, because, you know, she had to make the first move, because I was shit-scared, and we went upstairs and yes, her tits are just like we imagined, and we got into bed, and not a flicker, not a bloody flicker, and then it perked up and I came just like that, brother, we'd hardly started, and she said, not to worry, these things happen, not to worry. Hell, Skinny, things happen that make you want to commit suicide you're so embarrassed. Give me that bottle of rum, Skinny, come on, hand it over.”

Each morning seemed to dawn as if ripe for Armageddon. An apocalyptic clap from an eardrum-shattering bell that heralded the end of the world: even Rabbit had no option but to wake up. Their leader enjoyed ringing that bell all round the camp, and what's more he shouted “On your feet, up you get, on your feet”, and even if we were on our feet or standing up holding our hands to our heads, he went on ringing that bell, ding-dong dong-ding, up and down the huts, until one day a righteous, mud-caked boot flew out of the darkness and smashed into the camp-leader's nose. He fell on his backside and dropped the bell, and those who hadn't seen the big boot wondered, happy and relieved, why on earth he'd stopped.

Within a quarter of an hour we were all lined up on the wasteland between the huts and the refectory. Eight brigades, five from eleventh grade and three from thirteenth, in front of the general staff of the camp. It was an hour before sunrise, bitterly cold, and we could feel the dew falling, and knew something bad was in store. When Baby-Face Miki, one of the brigade leaders for thirteenth grade, walked by, he muttered: “Speak and die . . .” The camp leader held a towel to his nose, and I could almost see the shafts of hatred winging from his eyes. Behind me Pancho had wrapped himself in a blanket, but they'd forced him into the open air and he wheezed like a pair of rusty bellows and when I heard him I thought I too would soon be gasping for air.

The school secretary spoke: there'd been a very serious act of indiscipline, which would lead to the guilty individual's expulsion, and there'd be no appeals or let-offs, and if he had any civic spirit he should step up. Silence. How could there be such an act of indiscipline in a camp for high school students? This wasn't a farm for re-educating kids from reform school. That kind of person, he added, was like a rotten potato in a sack of healthy ones: it corrupted and rotted the rest; they always used potatoes as an example as we never saw an apple. Rabbit looked at me, starting to wake up. Silence. Silence. Did nobody dare expose the miscreant who was tarnishing the prestige of the whole cohort that would not now win the league table after expending so much effort cutting cane? Silence. Silence. Silence. Skinny raised his eyebrows; he knew what was coming. All right then, if the guilty person wouldn't step forward and nobody had civic spirit enough to denounce him, then everyone would be punished until that person was found, for things couldn't continue as normal . . . A cosmic silence followed the secretary's speech, and the smell of coffee being prepared in the kitchen became the first, most subtle of the tortures we'd suffer out in that cold. Pancho was still out of breath.

Then the oracle from Delphi spoke: “I'm here as a student,” said Rafael, “as a comrade and your representative elected by mass vote, and I know, just as you do, that someone here has committed a serious breach of discipline and could be taken to court for grievous bodily harm . . .” “Listen to him,” said Rabbit . . . “. . . for which we sinners will have to pay . . .” He had to have his Biblical touch. “. . . and it really affects us in the inter-camp competition, where we were almost sure of first place in the province. Can that be right
because of a single person's indiscipline? That the labours of one hundred and twelve comrades, yes, one hundred and twelve, because I'm now excluding the guilty party, should bite the dust? You know me, comrades, there are people here who've been with me for three years, you elected me president of the Student Federation and I'm just an ordinary student like the rest of you, but I can't approve of things like this, that besmirch the prestige of the revolutionary Cuban student body and force the school management team to take disciplinary measures against you all.” More silence. “And I ask you, since you are clinging to male pride and such like: Is it manly to throw a boot in the dark at the camp's supreme head? Similarly: is it manly to hide in the crowd and not show your face, knowing we will all suffer? Speak up, comrades, speak up,” he asked, and I shouted “Fuck your mother, you pansy!” at the top of my voice so everybody heard me fuck his mother, except the words didn't reach my lips because I was afraid of fucking Rafael Morín's mother there, in that cold, with Pancho all asthmatic, and Baby-Face Miki walking up and down the lines saying “Die”, the smell of coffee killing me and the camp leader pressing a towel to his nose because of a boot that had been flung his way.

 

 

When the Count entered headquarters he felt nostalgic for the peace and quiet of Sundays. It was barely five past eight. But it was Monday, and every Monday the world seemed to be coming to an end as if headquarters were preparing to evacuate before the outbreak of nuclear war: people couldn't wait for the lift and rushed up the stairs; there was no space in the parking lot and exchanges of greetings were limited to a quick
“All right then?”, “See you” or a garbled “Good day”; and suffering from the aftermath of his headache and dismal night, the Count preferred to respond with a wave of the hand and wait patiently in the queue for the lift. He knew he'd feel much better in half an hour, but the painkillers needed time to impact, although he wasn't reproaching himself for not taking them the night before. He felt so pure and liberated after talking to Skinny that he forgot he'd never told him what happened with Tamara and also that he should set his alarm clock. Another episode in the nightmare in which Rafael Morín was chasing him to put him behind bars opened his eyes at exactly seven am and he felt like dying at least twice: when he got out of bed and his headache kicked off and when, seated on the pan, he ruminated over the nightmare he'd been suffering all night and the terrible feeling of being chased that still floated in his brain. Then he burst spontaneously into song: “You're to blame, for all my sadness, for all my heartbreaks . . .” unable to fathom why he'd chosen that wretched bolero. He must be in love.