Havana Black (2 page)

While he got undressed, drinking a glass from the first deflowered bottle, the Count noticed how the death foretold of his fighting fish, Rufino, had been enacted: he was floating in the middle of water a dark, sickly ink colour, his gills open, like an aged flower about to drop its petals.

“For Christ's fucking sake, Rufino, what made you die now and leave me all alone . . . just when I was about to change your water?” he asked the motionless body, before gulping down his drink and casting corpse and liquid down his voracious lavatory.

Already clutching his second glass and unaware that he wouldn't say a word for three days, Mario Conde took his phone off the hook, picked the folded newspaper up from under the door and put it next to the lavatory in order to give that ink-stained paper the use it deserved when the time came. That was when he spotted it, tucked away on a corner of page two: it was an as yet unnamed flurry, drawn west of Cabo Verde on a map whose cold latitudes sent an electric shock of prescience through him: the bastard's heading this way, he thought immediately, and began to desire it with all his might, as if he could mentally attract that catastrophic, freakish engine of purification. And he poured himself a third glass of rum, and waited calmly for the cyclone to hit.

 

 

He woke up sure the hurricane had arrived. The thunder resounded so close by he couldn't fathom how
he'd seen such a becalmed sky only a few hours before. The short-lived autumnal evening had given way to darkness and, convinced it was thunder he was hearing, he was surprised by an absence of rain and wind, until a voice came on the heels of the last rumbling echoes: “Hey, Mario, it's me. Come on, open up, I know you're in there.”

A flash of lucidity pierced the hangover fogging his brain and a warning light winked in his consciousness. Not thinking to hide his naked parts reduced by fear, the Count rushed to open his front door.

“What you doing here, wild man?” he asked, the door open, feeling uneasy in his heart. “Something happened to Josefina?”

An explosion of laughter brought the Count back to the idea of his irrevocable acts, and skinny Carlos's voice alerted him to the magnitude of the disaster he'd just committed: “Fuck me, you animal, you've got a right titchy cock . . .” prompting more laughter, which was boosted by Andrés and Rabbit, whose heads had peered round the corner to check out Skinny's observation.

“And your mother's is even titchier,” was all he could manage, as he beat a retreat, mooning a pair of incongruously pallid buttocks at his adversary.

The Count had to swallow two analgesics to see off his impending headache, which he preferred to blame on his scare rather than the rum: skinny Carlos's unexpected appearance, in his wheelchair, had made him afraid something must have happened to Josefina. His best friend hadn't been to his place for a long, long time and he thought that the visit could only be triggered by some unhappy event. The morbid vision he'd had that evening, when he'd seen himself cast into the void unsupported by any wings, seemed
definitely out of reach: could he go and abandon his friends like that? Leave Carlos alone in his wheelchair and kill off old Jose with an attack of sadness? The water running down his face washed away the last cobwebs of sleep and doubt. No, he couldn't, least not for now.

“I thought the worst,” he said when he finally returned, cigarette between lips, to his living room and saw that Carlos, Rabbit and Andrés had helped themselves to the mortal remains of his last bottle of rum.

“And what do you think we thought?” rasped Skinny swigging away. “Three days not knowing where the fuck you'd got to, your phone out of order, not giving any damned warning . . . You went too far, you bastard, you went too far this time.”

“Hey, hold it, I'm not a kid.” The policeman rallied to his own defence.

Andrés, as usual, attempted reconciliation. “That's enough, gentlemen, nothing dire's happened.” And looking at the Count: “The fact is Josefina and Carlos were worried about you. That's why I brought him here. He refused to let me come by myself.”

The Count observed his best and oldest friend, transformed into an amorphous mass, overflowing the sides of his armchair, where he vented his anger like an animal destined for sacrifice. Nothing now remained of the lean figure skinny Carlos once was, because a mean bullet had mangled his destiny, had left him an invalid for ever. But there also, intact and invincible, was all the goodness of a man who increasingly persuaded the Count of the injustices of this world. Why did it have to happen to a guy like Carlos? Why did someone like him have to fight in a dark and distant war and ruin the best of his life? God cannot exist if such things occur, he thought, and the policeman's
distressed soul felt moved, almost to the point of splitting in two, when Skinny said: “You only had to ring.”

“Uh-huh, I should have rung. To tell you I resigned from the police.”

 

 

“Just as well, my son, you had me really worried,” sighed Josefina, and gave him a kiss on the forehead. “But look at your face. And that smell. How much rum did you drink? And you're so thin it's scary . . .”

“And guess what
we
found out,” interrupted Carlos, his fingers pointing up the Count's visibly reduced virility, and he laughed again.

“Conde, Conde,” interjected Rabbit anxiously, “you who are at least half a writer, please: elucidate a problem of meaning I have, tell me, what is the difference between pity and pithy?”

The Count looked at his interrogator, who could barely hide his outlandish teeth behind his upper lip. As usual he couldn't decide whether the grimace hid a smile or just his buckteeth.

“No idea . . . the aitch, ain't it?”

“No, the size,” replied Rabbit, releasing his dentures to laugh long and sonorously, and inviting the others to join in the joke.

“Don't take any notice of him, Condesito,” said Josefina, coming to the rescue and holding his hands. “Look, as I imagined these three who claim to be your friends would bring you here, and as I also imagined you would be hungry, and because anyone can see you are hungry, I started to think hard, now what can I cook these lads? And, you know, I couldn't think of anything special. The fact is it's really difficult to get things . . . And there and then a light went on and I chose the easy option: rice and chicken. What do you reckon?”

“How many chickens, Jose?” enquired the Count.

“Three and a half.”

“And did you add peppers?”

“Yes, for decoration. And cooked it in beer.”

“So three and a half chickens . . . Do you think that'll do for us?” The Count went on with his questions, as he pushed Skinny's chair towards the dining room, with a skill acquired from years of practice.

The final judgement from those round the table was unanimous: the rice could do with green peas, although it tasted good, they added, after ingesting three big plates of rice transfigured by chicken gravy and juices.

They shut themselves up in Skinny's room for their after-supper rum and chat, while Josefina dozed in front of the television.

“Put something on the deck, Mario,” insisted Skinny, and the Count smiled.

“The same as usual?” he asked, purely for rhetorical pleasure, and got a smile and a nod from his friend.

“You bet . . .”

“Now then, what do you fancy?” asked one.

“The Beatles?” responded the other.

“Chicago?”

“Formula V?”

“Los Pasos?”

“Credence?”

“Right on, Credence,” they both chorused perfectly as in a routine rehearsed a thousand times, over countless, knowing years. “But don't tell me Tom Foggerty sings like a black. I've told you often enough before that he sings like God, haven't I?” And the two nodded, revealing a deeply rooted accord, for they both knew that was right: the bastard sang like God, and started to show it when the Count pressed play and
Foggerty, with the Credence Clearwater Revival, launched into his unique version of “Proud Mary” . . . How often had he lived that scene?

Sitting on the floor, a tot of rum by his side and a lighted cigarette in the ashtray, the Count yielded to pressure from his friends and told them of the latest developments at Headquarters and his irrevocable decision to leave the force.

“I really couldn't care less what happens to those sons of a bitches . . . Every day there are more of them. Battalions of sons of bitches . . .” “Regiments . . . armies,” was the opinion of Andrés, who extended the quantitative, logistical power base of invaders, more resistant and fertile than roaches.

“You're crazy, Conde,” concluded Carlos.

“And if you leave the police, what will you do?” came the question from Rabbit, a viscerally historical individual, always in need of reasons, causes and consequences for the slightest incident.

“That's the least of my worries. I want out—”

“Hey, wild man,” interrupted Carlos, putting his glass of rum between his legs. “Do whatever you want, whatever, it'll be fine by me, because that's what friends are for, you know? But if you're going, enjoy, don't hide in a cloud of alcohol. Stand bang in the middle of Headquarters and shout: ‘I'm going because I fucking well want to', but don't slip out the back, as if you owed something, because you don't owe anybody anything, do you?”

“Well, I'm happy for your sake, Conde,” commented Andrés, looking at the hands he devoted three times a week to cutting open abdomens and sickly voice boxes, with a view to repairing what could be and excising and ditching what was worn out and useless. “I'm glad one of us is prepared to call a day on this
load of shit and sit it out and wait for whatever shows up.”

“A hurricane,” whispered the Count, taking another gulp, but his friend carried on, as if he hadn't heard him.

“Because you know we are a generation that obeyed orders and that is our sin and our crime. First, our fathers gave us orders, to be good students and citizens. We were ordered around at school, also to make us be good, and then we were ordered to work where they wanted us to work. But nobody ever thought to ask us what we wanted: we were ordered to study in the school they thought best, to pursue the degree it was our duty to get, to work at the job it was our duty to do, and the orders kept coming, nobody ever asked us fucking once in our damned lives if that was what we wanted. Everything was pre-planned, wasn't it? From playschool to the spot in the cemetery assigned for us, everything decided for us, and they didn't even ask what disease we wanted to die of. That's why we are a pile of shit, because we don't dream, we just exist to carry out our orders . . .”

“Hey now, Andrés, don't exaggerate,” said Skinny Carlos, trying to salvage a crumb of comfort, as he poured himself more rum.

“What do you mean ‘don't exaggerate'? Weren't you ordered to the war in Angola? Wasn't your life fucked up and you stuck in that shitty chair because you were a good little boy who always said yes? Did you ever dream of saying you wouldn't go? They told us that historically we had to obey and you didn't even think to refuse, Carlos, because they always taught us to say yes, yes, yes . . . And as for this fellow – ” he pointed at Rabbit, who had performed the miracle of hiding his teeth and for once seemed really serious at the threat
of the imminent lethal salvo – “apart from playing with history and changing women every six months, what has he done with his life? Where the fuck are the history books he was going to write? At what point did he give up on everything he said he wanted to be and never got to be in his life? Don't piss me off, Carlos, at least grant me the right to believe my life is a disaster . . .”

Skinny Carlos, who had long since ceased to be skinny, looked at Andrés. The friendship existing between them had been cementing for twenty years and there were very few secrets between them. But recently something had turned in Andrés's brain. That man they'd first admired when he was the best college baseball player, applauded by all his comrades, with the manly merit of losing his virginity to a woman so beautiful, so crazy and so desirable that they all would have loved to give up everything, even their lives, to her. The very same Andrés who would become the successful doctor they'd all consult, the only one who had managed an enviable marriage, two children included, and had been privileged to have his own house and private car, was now revealing himself as a man full of frustrations and rancour, which embittered him and poisoned the atmosphere around him. Because Andrés wasn't happy, was dissatisfied with his lot and made sure all his friends knew it: something in the projects he held most dear had failed, and his path in life – like all of theirs – had taken predetermined undesirable turnings to which they'd never consented as individuals.

“All right, let's assume you are right.” Carlos nodded resignedly, drinking a long draught and then adding: “But you can't live thinking like that.”

“Why not, wild man?” the Count intervened, puffing
out smoke and recalling that afternoon's alcoholic suicidal impulses.

“Because then you have to accept it's all a load of shit.”

“And isn't it?”

“You know it isn't, Conde,” declared Carlos, looking at the ceiling from his wheelchair. “Not everything, right?”

 

 

He collapsed on his bed, head thick with alcoholic vapours and Andres's lament for a generation. Lying there, he started to undress and throw each garment on the floor. He could already predict the headache he would have at daybreak, a just punishment for his excesses, but he felt his mind racing along enjoyably, strangely active, spawning ideas, memories and obsessions endowed with a feverish fleshly quality. With a supreme physical effort, he abandoned his bed and went to the bathroom in search of the analgesics that could thwart his recurrent migraine. He reckoned two would suffice, and dissolved them in water. He then walked to the lavatory, where he piddled a weak, amber trickle that splashed on the bowl's already stained edges and made him consider the proportions of his member: he'd always suspected that it was on the small side and now he was certain – pitifully so – after the strip show he'd offered his friends that evening. But mentally he shrugged his shoulders at its nonimportance, for, even as it was, the currently moribund strip of meat had always been an effective companion to his binary or solitary erotic outings, even rising up rapidly when necessity required it to be on a war footing. Ignore those sons of bitches, he told it, looking at it head on, right in the eye: don't feel pathetic,
because you're a good'un, aren't you? And he gave it a last shake.