Havana Gold (16 page)

“I've heard the odd comment.”

“And that a good policeman's after you?”

“I realized that, from the interrogations,” she said and they kissed again, in the middle of the street, as shameless as adolescents in full flood.

“Do you like being wooed in parks?”

“It's a long time since I've been wooed in a park. Or anywhere.”

“Which park do you prefer in La Víbora? Take your pick: Córdoba, Los Chivos, either of those on San Mariano, the Parque del Pescao, the one in Santos Suárez, on Mónaco, the one with the lion cubs in Casino and the one on Acosta . . . The best thing about this barrio are its parks, the most beautiful in Havana.”

“Are you sure?”

“More than sure. Which do you fancy?”

She looked him in the eye and ruminated. The Count lost himself in the depths of her eyes like an infatuated policeman.

“If you're only going to woo me, I'd prefer the one on Mónaco. If you've got itchy fingers, then the Parque del Pescao.”

“Let it be the Parque del Pescao then. I'll not be held responsible for myself.”

“And why don't you invite me to your place?”

She surprised him, anticipated an invitation he'd not dared to issue when they spoke on the phone and confirmed his suspicion that this woman was a woman and a half and there was no point in beating about the bush. Like Tarzan lusting after Jane.

“I ignored what you said,” she said with a smile. “I parked the car on the corner. Will you or won't you invite me? I like the coffee you brew.”

 

His hands shook as he united the two halves of the coffee pot. He was disturbed by the intimacy of love as intensely as in the old days of amorous initiation and he improvised on themes that flowed easily: the secrets about coffee he had learned from Josefina; “we must go and see my best friend Skinny and her, I can't understand how you've never met,” and he peered at his coffee pot to see whether percolation had begun, “they live round the corner from your house”; his preference for Chinese cuisine, Sebastian Wong, “the father of Patricia, a colleague at headquarters, prepares some amazing soups”; the idea for a story he wanted to write, on solitude and emptiness . . . He poured the first drops of coffee in the jug where he'd put two small spoonfuls of sugar which he beat into an ochre, caramelized paste; “while I was waiting for you I thought about writing something along those lines, I've
been wanting to write for several days,” and he poured the remaining coffee into the jug and yellow, probably bitter foam formed on the top, and he poured it into two big cups and announced, “Espresso coffee,” as he sat down opposite her. “Whenever I fall in love I think I can write again.”

“Do you fall in love so quickly?”

“I don't always linger so.”

“Love of literature or of women?”

“A fear of loneliness. A panic attack. Is the coffee to your liking?”

She nodded and looked at the window and the night.

“What have you found out about the dead girl?”

“Not much: she expected too much from life, was able and ambitious and changed boyfriends as often as her bras.”

“And what does that mean?”

“She was what the ancients and some moderns would call a little whore.”

“Why did she change boyfriends? Is that what you think about women? Are you the kind that would like to marry a virgin?”

“That's what every Cuban man aspires to, I suppose? I don't aim so high now: I'll settle for a redhead.”

She gave no sign she accepted his compliment and finished her coffee.

“And if the redhead was a little whore?”

He smiled and shook his head, indicating she'd misunderstood.

“I said little whore because that's what she was: she could go to bed with a man for a pair of shoes,” he explained and regretted telling her the truth: he wanted to bed her and intended to give her a pair of shoes, in fact. “I'm only interested in her changes of boyfriend as a policeman: that may be why she was killed. The dead have no privacy.”

“It's incredible, isn't it? That they can kill someone, like that, on any pretext?”

The Count smiled and finished his coffee. He lit the cigarette, his mouth urgently craving that complement to the enduring taste of the infusion.

“It's what usually happens. Someone is killed for no real reason, probably on the spur of the moment. It's often a mistake: criminals prefer not to murder but sometimes cross that line because they can't avoid it. It's a chemical chain reaction . . . I feed on such incontinence. It's sad, isn't it?”

She nodded and then took the offensive: she stretched her hand across the dark formica table top and took the forearm of the man who seemed to relish sadness, and started caressing it. A woman who knows how to caress, he thought, not a phantom passing . . .

“Oh, how beautiful you are, my love, how beautiful you are! Your eyes are like doves!”

He declaims biblically like Solomon, when, feeling as beautiful as Jerusalem, she abandons her coffee and chair and advances on him, never letting go of his arm, and pulls his mouth down to her breasts – like twin gazelles “that graze among the lilies” – so with his free hand he can fumble to undo her blouse and find himself not before two gazelles, but warm, wild tits, with ripe plum nipples that stir anxiously at the first flickering touch of his reptilian tongue, and, a baby again, he sucks, starting a journey to the origins of life and the world.

He penetrates her slowly, as if afraid to shed a petal, sitting on his chair, picking her up by the waist, light and amenable, lowering her on to his pole, like a sacred banner in need of protection against the rain and dusk. Her first cry takes him by surprise, she arches between his hands as if wounded by a silver bullet shattering her heart, then he hugs her tighter to feel the black forest of her magic triangle on his pubes, and lowers his hands to her buttocks to run over the perfect furrow dividing them ands lets his eager finger run unhurriedly, never pausing, from anus to vulva, from vulva to anus, carrying wet heat, feeling the urgent thickness at the root of his penis, rigid and prickly as it drilled, and the padded softness of her opulent, knowing lips that suck him like eager quicksand, and then he lets his finger wander between the folds of her anus and feels the louder cry provoked by the double penetration now becoming triple
with the savage tongue that tries to silence her, when all silence is impossible, because the deep sluices are open and the deepest rivers of their desires flow to a glory on an earth that has been recovered. The renascent gusts of the Lenten wind wrap them in tight embrace.

“You'll be the death of me,” are the words of love he articulates.

“I'll be the death of myself,” she laments, as she shivers all vulnerable, perhaps because of the wind, perhaps because of the moral and physical certainty of consummation.

Several days later, while ruminating on the tangible opportunities that come policemen's way – to find happiness and change their lives – Detective Lieutenant Mario Conde began to grasp the real extent of that suicide on a well-ridden saddle . . . But he can't think now, because Karina dismounts as if levitating and, rescuing the pants still hanging from one of the Count's thighs, she cleans the spume from his penis and, kneeling like a penitent, swallows it as if she'd been starving for days and now it's the Count who cries out, “Fuck, cunt,” the words he utters, astounded by the beauty of the prostrated woman whose head he can barely see, that says yes and yes again, with total conviction, and a reddish hair that opens up in the centre of the head in an unexpected cleft. While his penis begins to grow beyond what is possible, unimaginable, even permissible, the Count feels himself
powerful, animal, in full possession of his senses, until dictator-like he exercises the power he has been given, takes the woman's head in his hands and forces her to hit bottom and beyond, until he pours into her throat, that prisoner under sentence, an ejaculation he feels descend from the innermost reaches of his brain. You'll be the death of me. I'll be the death of myself . . . They kiss, on the brink.

 

I came across a quite unexpected façade yesterday. I must have passed that hitherto anodyne, filthy spot on the 10th October Avenue a thousand times, by the street corner which harboured the cockpit where Grandfather Rufino had, eight times, put his fortune on spurs that enriched and impoverished him in equal measure. But yesterday for the first time an alarm bell, specially aimed at my brain, forced me to look up and there it was, waiting for me from time immemorial: in the middle of a roughly classical triangle, the coat-of-arms of a well-to-do Creole, atop a building that wasn't at all well-to-do, worn by time and rain. Only the date remained mysteriously intact: 1919, on the chipped eave, under the battered shield. At the vortex of two cornucopias hurling tropical fruit into the air, the inevitable pineapples, soursops and anones, mangos and furtive avocados, no soft fruit, meat or greens, and where others would have placed castles or fields of azure, a prodigious
canebrake to which the date, architectural wealth and fruit-filled shield necessarily paid tribute, to its source . . . I love discovering these unpredictable heights of Havana – second and third floors, out-of-date baroque, bereft of spiritual contortions, names of owners long forgotten, cemented dates and glass skylights broken by stones, balls and the passage of time – where I always thought there was an air path to the sky. At that height, beyond human reach, exists the purest soul of the city that further down is tarnished by sordid, heartbreaking stories. Havana has been a city in its own right for two centuries and imposes its own laws and selects its own adornments to mark its unique resilience. Why was this city, this proud, exuberant city fated to be mine? I try to understand this fate I can't throw off, that I didn't choose, as I try to understand the city, but Havana eludes me, always takes me by surprise with its forlorn blackand-white photo shots and my perception is as worn and cracked as the old coat-of-arms of those who luxuriated on wealth from mangos, pineapples and sugar. After so much rapture and rejection, my relationship with the city has been marked by a chiaroscuro painted by my eyes: the pretty young girl turned sad hooker, an angry man a potential murderer, the petulant youth an incurable drug addict, the old man on the corner a thief wanting peace. Everything blackens over time, like the city where I pace, between crumbling arches, petrified
rubbish tips, walls peeled to the bone, drains overflowing like rivers born in the heart of hell and rocky balconies living on props. In the end the city that chose me, and I, the chosen one, resemble each other: we die a little each day, a long, premature death made from pinpricks, pain that is progressive, tumours that advance . . . And although I want to rebel, this city grips me by the neck and overwhelms me with its arcane mysteries. That's why I realize the decrepit beauty of a well-to-do coat-of-arms and a city's apparent peace are transient and mortal – a city I know I see through the eyes of love, that dares show me those unexpected delights from its sumptuous past. I'd like to be able to see the city through your eyes, she told me when I described my recent find, and I think it would be melancholically beautiful – perhaps, squalid and moving – to show her my city, but I know it's impossible, for she could never wear my spectacles, as she's beside herself with happiness, and the city will never reveal itself to her. Miller said Paris is like a whore, but Havana is more whorish: she only offers herself up to those who repay her in pain and anguish, and even then she doesn't yield up her whole self, doesn't surrender the innermost secrets from her entrails.

 

“The most solid proof of Jesus's authority is that he didn't need distance to wield it but exercised it from the closest proximity to his neighbour. Power dresses
itself in attributes (wealth, might, banking knowledge) that constitute its glory as it simultaneously creates remoteness. The powerful, when naked, feel impotent, but Jesus, the son of man, naked and barefoot, lived among men, remained among them and exercised over them the infinite sweetness of his infinite power . . .”

Always the infinite, the infinitely invariable, and the dilemma of power, thought the Count, who had last seen the inside of a church on the memorable day of his first communion. He'd prepared at Sunday catechism over many a month for that act of religious re-affirmation that he had to go through, knowing full well why: he would receive, from the priest's hands, a small piece of flour that contained the whole essence of the great (infinite) mystery; the immortal soul and suffering body of Our Lord Jesus Christ (with all his power) would pass from his mouth to his (equally) immortal soul. This would be a necessary digestive step to possible salvation or the most terrible damnation, he now knew, and the knowledge transformed him into an (infinitely) responsible being. Nevertheless, at the age of seven the Count thought he knew a lot of other things much better: that Sunday was the best day for playing the best games of baseball outside his house, for going off to steal mangos from Genaro's farm, for taking a bike ride – two or even three on each bike – to fish
biajacas
and swim in the Chorrerra river. Consequently, though delighted to dress him smartly
in white so he could take his communion, the Count's mother then seethed with an anger prohibited by the communion itself, as she heard the boy's final word: he wanted to idle around on Sunday mornings and would not be going back to church.

The Count couldn't imagine his return to a parish church, almost thirty years after defecting, would spark off the feeling he'd suddenly recovered a quiescent, not simply lost memory: the cavernous smell of the chapel, the tall shadows from the domes, the reflections of a sun dimmed by stained glass, the blurry glints from the main altar were all present in his memory of that poor, smallscale church in his barrio. Such memories were tangible in the inevitably luxurious church of the Passionists, with its Creole neo-Gothic finery, the highest domes decorated with filigree, celestial gold, the sensation of the smallness of humans provoked by a structure reaching for heaven and a profusion of hyper-realistic, human-sized images and gestures of resignation that seemed about to speak; became tangible in the church he'd now entered, in the middle of the mass, searching for the saviour he needed right now, namely Red Candito.