Havana Gold (15 page)

The Count smiled and wondered whether he'd made the right decision.

“I've a real problem, Jose . . .”

“The new girlfriend?”

“Hey, dear, you hit bulls-eye.”

“But you lot shout it to the heavens . . .”

“Well, she's says she's always lived round the corner, at number 75. But I've never seen her and Skinny's never heard of her. Give me a hand. Find out who she is, where she's from, anything you can.”

The woman started swaying on her chair again and looked at the screen. The heroine in the soap was having a lousy time. Fine, thought Conde, that's the price you pay for being a heroine in a soap.

“Did you get that, Jose?” the Count then insisted, craving the attention he thought he'd lost.

“Yes, I got you . . . And what if you don't like what I find out? Hey, Condesito, let me tell you something. You know you're my son too and that I'll find out what you want to know. I'll act like a policeman. But you're making a mistake. I'll tell you that for nothing.”

“Don't worry. You help me. I need some badly . . . And is the little fellow awake yet?”

“I think he's listening to music on his headset. He just asked me if you'd rung . . . There's some fried rice for you in the pot on the stove.”

“Hell, you really are my mother,” said the Count and, after kissing her on the forehead, he started to ruffle her hair. “But remember I want that info.”

The Count entered his friend's room, a plate in one hand and a chunk of bread in the other. His back to the door, his gaze lost in the foliage of the banana trees, Skinny was singing very quietly the songs he was listening to on his headset. The Count made an effort but couldn't identify the tune.

He sat on the bed behind the wheelchair and, after lifting the first spoonful to his lips, kicked the wheel nearest to him.

“Say something, savage.”

“You've put me on the scrap heap,” Skinny protested, as he took off his headset and slowly swung round the chair he was sentenced to.

“Don't gripe, Skinny, it was one day I didn't call on you. Yesterday life got very hectic.”

“You could have rung. Things must be going well: look at the bags under your eyes. So? Did you dance her?”

“We danced, but I didn't get to dance her. But look,” he said, pointing to his shirt pocket, “I've got her here.”

“I'm happy for your sake,” said Carlos, and the Count noted a lack of enthusiasm in that declaration
of happiness. He knew Skinny was thinking how a relationship like that would deprive him of nights and Sundays in the Count's company, and the Count also knew his friend was right, because at root nothing had changed between them: they continued to be possessive, like insecure adolescents.

“Don't have a go, Skinny, it's not the end of the world.”

“I really am happy for you, you beast. You need a woman and I hope you've just found one.”

The Count put down his plate that looked as if it had been washed clean and flopped onto Skinny's bed, glancing at the old posters on the wall.

“I think this is it. I'm in love like a dog, like a mongrel. My defences are all down: I don't know how I can fall in love like this. But she's beautiful, savage, and intelligent.”

“You're exaggerating. Beautiful
and
intelligent? Hey, you're talking a load of shit.”

“I swear by your mother she is. If it's a lie, she needn't save any more fried rice for me.”

“So, how come you didn't lay her?”

“She told me to wait, that it was too soon.”

“You see, she can't be that intelligent. How can she resist the ardour of a brilliant, handsome good dancer like you? I mean . . .”

“Just go to hell, will you? You know, Skinny, I'm fucking worried. That night, after listening to Andrés, I couldn't
stop thinking about what he said. I know he was half drunk, but he spoke with feeling. And now something really upsetting has just happened to me.”

“What's that, brother?” he asked, knitting his brows. In the old days he'd have swung his leg when asking a question like that, the Count told himself, as he recalled his conversation with José Luis.

“Can I tell you something, savage?” asked Carlos, as he interrupted the movement he was about to make in his chair. “If you put yourself in the skinny kid's place you'll realize that basically he's right. Remember one thing: a school is often like a prison, and he who talks, loses out. The pay-off for the piper. He'll have a reputation for being a snitch the rest of his life. Would you have talked? I don't really think so. But though he didn't talk, he gave you a crumb: something or everything's up. The marijuana scene, the teacher's affair with the head and God knows what else. That's why he didn't talk, because he knows something, or at least imagines he does. He's no cynic, Conde, it's the law of the jungle. What's terrible is that there's a jungle and it's got a law . . . Look at yourself: you spend your life remembering. Don't you recall how you knew about that fraud when the Water-Pre scandal broke and you shut up like the rest and you even went into the exams knowing all the answers in advance? Didn't you know that when they came to paint Pre-Uni they stole half the paint and so couldn't paint
inside the classrooms? And don't you remember how we won all the banners and all the competitions in the sugar cane because there was an insider in the warehouse who gave us sacks that weren't ours? Have you forgotten all that? Hell, what a policeman. My friend, you can't live on nostalgia. Nostalgia deceives: it only reminds you of what you want to remember and that can be very healthy at times, but it's almost always counterfeit currency. But, you know, I don't reckon you've ever been fit for life. You're beyond the pale. You fucking live in the past. Live your life now, guy. It's not such a sin. No kidding . . . You know, I don't often talk about it, but I sometimes start thinking about what happened to me in Angola, and I see myself back in that hole under the ground, three or four days without a wash and eating a mouthful of sardine and rice, sleeping with my face stuck in that dust smelling of dried fish that's all over Angola, and I think it's incredible anyone can live like that: because what's curious, is that it didn't kill us off. Nobody died from that and you learned something existed like another life, another history, that had nothing to do with all we were going through. That's why it was easier to go mad than die, stuck in those holes, without the slightest fucking idea how long it would be for and not once seeing the face of your enemy, who might be any of the people we met in the villages we passed through. It was horrific, brother, and what's more we knew we were there to die,
because it was war, and it was a lottery and you might strike lucky and get the number to get out alive: it was that simple, and totally out of your hands. So it was better not to remember. And those who forgot everything resisted best: if there was no water they couldn't wash, spent three or four days without washing their face or teeth and even ate stones if they could soften them up and never said they were expecting letters or talked about how they were going to die or were going to be saved, they knew there were going to be saved. Not me, I acted like you, shit full of nostalgia, and I'd start reckoning up how I'd got there, why the hell I was in that hole, until I got shot up and then they did take me out. I got my bloody number in the lottery all right, didn't I? I don't know why you force me to remember all that. I don't like remembering because I was a loser, but when I do think about it, like now, I draw two very clear conclusions: Rabbit is a bastard if he thinks that history can be re-written, and I'm fucked, as Andrés says, but all the same I want to keep living and you know it. And you know you're my friend and that I need you, but I'm not so selfish to want you to be fucked here next to me. And you also know that it doesn't make sense for you to spend your life blaming everyone else and blaming yourself . . . The skinny lad is probably a cynic, as you say, but try to understand him, pal. Come on, solve this case, find out what happened at Pre-Uni and do what
you have to do although it pains your soul. Then shag Karina and fall in love if you have to and enjoy it, laugh and screw, and if it all goes pear-shaped, take the pain, but keep living, because we have to, right?”

“I think so.”

 

“Huh, I'll be waiting on the steps at Pre-Uni, at seven? At seven then, and don't bring the car,” he'd said, with the morbid, premeditated idea of a possible journey into the world of melancholy. Skinny can go to hell, he told himself, he'd agreed his last love date seventeen years ago in that place that constantly hit at him from past and present, like a magnetic pole of memory and reality he couldn't and didn't want to escape. He was all set to dive into a swimming pool overflowing with nostalgia.

He got there at a quarter to seven and, between the reddish light of dusk and the lamps on the high plinth of the columns, he tried to read the day's paper while waiting. Sometimes weeks went by without him stopping to read the paper, he checked out the headlines and ditched it without remorse or hesitation: he wasn't at all gone on the idea of wasting precious minutes devouring news and comment that was self-evident. What might Caridad Delgado be writing about three days after her daughter's death? He should look out for that newspaper. The wind had died down; he could open the pages of the daily as he had nothing better on offer. The
front page informed him that the sugar campaign was progressing slowly but surely to another record of success and high figures; Soviet cosmonauts were still in space, breaking new records for staying up, indifferent to the disturbing pages of international news that spoke of the degeneration of their – previously so perfect – country, and oblivious to the war to the death unleashed between Armenians and Azeris; tourism in Cuba was marching – and this was a perfectly chosen verb – in giant strides, and had already tripled hotel capacity; for their part, workers in the culinary arts and services in the capital had already begun their arduous inter-municipal struggle to win the right to be provincial host for the 4 February celebrations, the Day for Workers in their trade: to that end they'd implemented initiatives and improved the quality of their services and striven to eradicate lacunae, that kind of ontological fatality the Count thought was a beautifully poetic way to describe the most basic of thefts. Then, no change in the Middle East: it got worse and worse, everything was getting shittier and on course for outright war; violence was on the increase in the United States; there were more disappearances in Guatemala, more murders in El Salvador, more unemployed in Argentina and more destitute in Brazil. Didn't I just land on a wonderful planet? What was a teacher's death among so many deaths? Could Long Hair and his tribe be right? And then, the baseball league was advancing
– a less sporting synonym for marching – towards the final strait with Havana in the lead; Pipín was about to beat his own record for apnoea immersion (and he recalled he was always promising to look that word up in the dictionary, perhaps there existed a less horrible synonym?). He closed the newspaper convinced that everything was marching, advancing or continuing on schedule and turned his mind to contemplating the sunset, also on schedule for that exact moment, 18.52, normal time. As he observed the sun's rapid descent he thought he would like to write something about the emptiness of existence: not about death or failure or disillusion, only emptiness. A man facing the void. It would be worthwhile if he could find a good character. Could he himself be that character? Sure he could, recently he'd been feeling too much self-pity and the result might be more than perfect: the entire darkness revealed, the entire void in a single individual . . . But that can't be, he told himself, I'm waiting for a woman and I feel fine, I'm going to shaft her and we'll get drunk.

Only he was a policeman and, although he sometimes thought he wasn't, he always thought like a policeman. He was in the territory of his own melancholy, but also in the domains of Lissette Núñez Delgado, and he thought that the void and death seemed too alike and that death in the singular, even on a planet strewn with corpses that had been more or less foreseen, still weighed as a risk on
the scales of that most necessary equilibrium: life. Only six days before, perhaps sitting on that same step on those stairs, a twenty-four year-old girl, full of the desire to live, might have enjoyed the beauty of that splendid sunset, oblivious to the world's wars and the anguish of a record apnoea, looking forward to the new pair of trainers she would soon own. Now nothing remained of the hopes and upsets of that woman: perhaps the memory with which she marked that building inhabited by millions of other memories, like his own; perhaps the amorous frustrations and even possible guilt of a head teacher who felt rejuvenated, perhaps the uncertainty of pupils who thought they'd pass in chemistry with ease thanks to that unusual teacher. By 18.53 the sun had sunk into the world's end – like memory – leaving in its wake the light from its last rays.

Then he saw her advancing under the blossoming
majaguas
and felt his life filling up, like his lungs, replete with the air and scents of spring, and he forgot about the void and death, the sun and nothingness: she could be everything, he thought, as he walked down the steps of Pre-Uni at the double and met a kiss and body that clung to his like a promise of the most desired, close encounter of the first kind.

“What's your opinion of nostalgia?”

“That it was invented by writers of boleros.”

“And apnoea immersion?”

“That it is unnatural.”

“And haven't you ever been told you're the most beautiful woman in La Víbora?”