Havana Blue (12 page)

 

 

He pressed the bell four times, thumped on the
door, shouted. There was nobody at home, and he jumped up and down, the almost palpable lavatory had aroused an urgent desire to piss, he couldn't hold on and thumped on the door again.

“I'm hungry, so hungry and nearly pissing myself,” the Count blurted out before greeting her or kissing her on the forehead and then rushing to lower his head to receive her womanly kiss. It was a tradition from the time when Skinny Carlos was very skinny and the Count spent every day in that house, and they played ping-pong and tried with dubious success to learn how to dance and studied physics in the early hours before their exams. But Skinny Carlos was skinny no more, and only he persisted in calling him that. Skinny Carlos now weighed in at more than two hundred pounds and moved around in fits and starts in a wheelchair. In 1981, in Angola, he'd got a bullet in the back, waist-high, and it severed his spinal cord. None of the five operations he'd undergone since had improved things, and Skinny awoke each morning with a new pain, another nerve or muscle that had been stilled forever.

“Hey, my boy, you look bloody awful,” said Josefina when she saw him coming out of the lavatory and handed him a glass of watery coffee.

“I'm on my last legs, Jose, and incredibly hungry.” And gave her the glass back after taking only one sip of coffee.

Much relieved and cigarette already lit, he entered his friend's room. Skinny was in his wheelchair, in front of the television and looking worried.

“They say they're seeing to the ground, and the game will go ahead. Hey, no, for Christ's sake, no,” he protested as he saw his friend unwrapping a bottle of rum.

“We need to talk, my brother, and I need two shots of rum. If you don't . . .”

“Fuck, you'll be the death of me,” rasped Skinny, and he started to swing his chair round. “Don't give me any ice, that Santa Cruz is so sweet.”

The Count left the room and came back carrying two glasses and a corkscrew.

“Well, how are things going?”

“I've just been to Tamara's, Skinny, I swear to you, the wench is hotter than ever. She doesn't get older. She just gets better.”

“Women are like that. Do you still want to marry her?”

“Fuck off. You're right about this rum. It's really good.”

“My friend, take it gently today. You look really shit.”

“It's a combination of sleep deprivation, hunger and incipient baldness,” he said, pointing to his receding hairline before taking another sip. “No news, the man's still missing and no clue as to where the fuck he's got to or why he's vanished, whether he's dead or alive . . .”

Skinny was still edgy. He glanced at the television where they were showing music videos until the baseball game started. Of the people the Count knew, Skinny was, and by a long chalk compared to himself, the one who most agonized over baseball, ever since he'd been skinny and centerfield in the high school team. The Count had only seen him cry twice, and twice it had been brought on by baseball and his lament was a bolero, with big tears and sobs, and he became inconsolable.

“Well, doesn't life take funny old turns?” Skinny Carlos remarked as he looked back at his friend. “You looking for Rafael Morín.”

“Not that many turns, Skinny, you know. He's exactly the same, an opportunist bastard who's really wheeled and dealed to get to where he's got.”

“Hey, not so, my friend,” retorted Skinny after lighting his cigarette. “Rafael knew what he wanted and went for it, and was made of the right stuff. It wasn't for nothing that he got the best marks at high school and then in industrial engineering. When I went into the civil side, he was already being talked up like the star act at the circus. He was phenomenal: almost top marks right from year one.”

“Are
you
going to start defending him now?” asked the Count, looking incredulous.

“Hey, I don't know what's happened now, nor do you, and you're the policeman. But things aren't so simple, pal. The fact is he was good at school and, you know, I for one reckon he didn't need to cheat at the exams when the Viboragate scandal broke.”

The Count ran a hand through his hair and couldn't repress a smile.

“Fucking shit, Skinny, Viboragate. I thought nobody remembered that.”

“If I wasn't on my hobbyhorse, I think I would have forgotten it,” replied Skinny, pouring more rum out. “You get me going. You know, Miki dropped by this afternoon. He came to see me because he's going to Germany and wanted to know if I needed anything, and while he was about it he asked me to lend him ten pesos. But I told him about the Rafael business, and he said you should make sure you go to see him.”

“Why? Does he know something?”

“No, he only found out when I told him and it was then he said you should contact him. You know Miki's always been a bit of a mystery.”

“And did Rafael survive Viboragate with a clean bill of health?”

“Pour yourself some more if it improves your thinking. Right, he didn't have problems, when the headmaster got the push, he was already at university, and the guy who almost got the rap was Armandito Fonseca, the student president for that year, right?”

“Naturally, the shit went close, but it didn't stick. Didn't I tell you?”

Skinny shook his head, as if trying to say “you're beyond the pale” but then added:

“That's enough of that, Conde, you don't know if he was involved or not, and the fact is they didn't accuse him of fixing marks or letting out exam papers or anything like that. What always bugged you was that he fucked Tamara and you only jerked off thinking of her.

“And what made
your
hands so sore, too much groping in the playground?”

“And it also bugged you a lot, you told me as much, the fact we couldn't study in Daddy Valdemira's library anymore because Rafael had claimed that as his own . . .”

The Count stood up and walked over to Skinny Carlos. He stuck out his index finger and placed it between his friend's eyebrows.

“Hey, are you with the Indians or the Cowboys? You know, I can't curse your mother because she's getting my dinner ready. But I can piss on you, easy as pie. Since when have you been a card-carrying time-server, hey?”

“I hope he gets it where it really hurts,” said Skinny, slapping the Count's arm and starting to laugh. It was a body-shaking guffaw, rising from his gut, shaking all his huge, limp, almost useless body, a deep visceral laugh that threatened to kill off his wheelchair, flatten
walls and hit the street, turn corners, open doors and make Lieutenant Mario Conde collapse in stitches on his ass on his bed begging for another shot of rum to deal with the bout of coughing. They were laughing as if they'd just learned how, and Josefina, drawn by the din, looked at them from the doorway, and her face was deeply gloomy behind the hint of a smile: she'd have given anything, her own life, her good health which was now beginning to fail her, for nothing to have happened and for those men who were laughing still to be boys who always laughed like that, even if they had no reason, if only for the pleasure of laughing.

“All right, that's enough,” she said and walked into the room. “Time to eat. It's almost nine o'clock.”

“Yes, mother darling, I'm the walking wounded,” said the Count and went over to Skinny's wheelchair.

“Hey, just wait a minute,” asked Carlos when the music stopped on the telly and the presenter's overeager smile appeared on the screen.

“Dear viewers,” said the woman, who wanted to look enthused and so happy at what she was about to say, “conditions are practically right in the Latino-americano Stadium to kick off the first game in the Industriales-Vegueros playoffs. While we wait for that interesting game to start, we will continue with our musical offerings.”

She concluded, froze her synthetic smile and preserved it stoically for the video of another song, by another singer no one was interested in, which now filled the small screen.

“Come on, let's go,” Skinny suggested, and his friend pushed his wheelchair toward the dining room. “Do you think the Industriales stand a chance?”

“Without Marquetti and Medina and with Javier Méndez injured? No, wild man, I think they've had it,”
opined the Count, and his friend shook his head disconsolately. He suffered before and after each game, even when the Industriales won, for he thought that if they won that one, they were more likely to lose the next, and he suffered eternally, in spite of all his promises to be less fanatical and to ditch baseball: it wasn't what it used to be, he would say, when Capiró, Chávez, Changa Mederos and Co played. But both knew they were incurable and the one most infected was Skinny Carlos.

They went over to the table and the Count analysed Josefina's offering: the traditional black beans; pork steaks in breadcrumbs, well done but juicy all the same, as the golden rule for fillets required; the grains of rice separating out in the dish, as pure white and tender as a virgin bride; a green salad, artfully displayed with a careful combination of red and green, the golden glow of ripe tomatoes and bunches of fried, curved green plantain. And on the table another bottle of Rumanian wine, red, dry and almost perfect plonk.

“Jose, for heaven's sake, what have we got here?” asked the Count as he bit into a fried plantain and spoiled the beautiful salad by plundering a slice of tomato. “A plague on anyone who mentions work,” he warned and began to pile a mountain of food on his plate, determined to down at one sitting breakfast, lunch and dinner on a day that looked to be never-ending – or whatever – and then he gorged himself.

Mario Conde was born in a bustling dusty barrio that, according to family lore, was founded by his paternal great-great grandfather, a madcap islander who preferred to set up home, create a family and await death on barren land far from the sea and rivers and far from the arm of the law which was still pursuing him in Madrid, Las Palmas and Seville. The barrio where the Condes lived had never been elegant or prosperous, yet it expanded exponentially with the offspring of that crooked, absolutely plebeian Canary Islander who was so infatuated with his new name and his Cuban wife that he fathered eighteen children and forced them all to swear, each at the appropriate moment, to beget at least ten children and compelled the females to give their whelps the first surname of Conde as their badge of distinction in the barrio. When Mario celebrated his third birthday and his Granddaddy Rufino the Count first told him of Granddad Teodoro's adventures and his desire to found a dynasty, the kid also discovered that a pit for fighting cocks could also be the centre of the universe. At the time baseball was a vice he'd picked up in the barrio, while fighting cocks were an endemic pleasure. His Granddaddy Rufino, an enthusiastic breeder, trainer and gambler when it came to fighting cocks, took him to all the local pits and yards and taught him the art of preparing a cock to win every time: by first showering it with the finest, most sporting attentions a boxer could ever receive,
and then anointing it with oil the moment before it stepped in to the arena so it would never be caught by its opponent. Granddaddy Rufino's philosophy of never playing unless you were sure you would win gave the lad the satisfaction of seeing the cock he'd first met as a very ordinary egg die an old bird, winner of thirty-two contests and coverer of an innumerable quantity of hens as lively, if not livelier than himself. In those easygoing times of school in the mornings and work with cocks in the afternoons, Mario Conde also learned the meaning of the word “love”: he loved his granddaddy and was so miserable he was ill when old Rufino died, three years after the official outlawing of cockfights.

Now he'd satisfied the need for cold water that had almost dragged him from his bed, the Count began that Sunday morning by indulging in memories of his grandfather. Sunday was the day for fights in the most popular pits, and that was why he liked Sunday mornings. Not the dreary endless afternoons after a siesta when he would feel tired and sleepy till nightfall, nights weren't any better, everywhere was packed out and he'd always take refuge at Skinny's. However, there were other things that made Sunday nights tedious and drawn-out: there was no baseball game, and it was torture to hit the rum when Monday loomed menacingly. Mornings were a different story: Sunday mornings started with lots of hustle and bustle as in the story he wrote when he was at high school. It was a time to talk to everyone, and friends and relatives who lived away always came to visit the family, and you could set up a game of barehanded baseball and end up swollen-fingered and panting at first base, or play dominos or simply shoot the breeze on the street corner till the sun chased you inside. For some ancestral reason he
couldn't explain and because of the large number of Sundays he spent with Granddaddy Rufino or his band of sporting cronies, Mario Conde enjoyed Sunday at leisure in the barrio more than any of his pals, and after a cup of coffee he'd go and buy bread and the newspaper and generally never returned home till it was time for a very late Sunday lunch. His women had never understood that necessary ritual, why can't you stay at home the odd Sunday, there's lots to do, but Sunday is for the barrio, he told them, leaving no room for argument, when some friend asked: “Hey, has the Count left yet?”

And that Sunday he got up after slaking a dragon's thirst, with memories of granddaddy still floating around his head, and went onto the porch after putting the coffee pot on to boil. He was still wearing his pyjama trousers and an old padded coat, and he noticed the streets were quieter than usual for a Sunday because of the cold. The sky had cleared during the night, but an annoyingly biting wind was blowing, and he reckoned it had gone below fifty and was perhaps the coldest morning of the winter. As usual he regretted having to work on a Sunday. He had thought he'd go and see Rabbit and then lunch at his sister's, he recalled, and he waved at Cuco the butcher: How's life treating you, Condesito? He too must work that Sunday morning.