Havana Red (9 page)

The Count moved away from the window and his memories as he felt the jungle call of his entrails galvanized by so much inactivity. The evening was
drawing to a close and apart from two dark, evillooking fish, which had absconded to the back of his fridge, he had no other edible products on the home front. He looked at his watch: seven forty-five, and dialled a telephone number.

“It's me, Jose.”

“Of course it's you, Condesito.”

“I'm really hungry.”

“Why you're ringing me so late? You never change . . . But you're in luck, because I got into a state looking for stuff here and there, and started late. Let's see what I can rustle up.”

“Anything will do.”

“Shut up, I'm thinking. I've got red beans on the stove and I was choosing the rice . . . Come round then, I've had an idea.”

 

“It's
paisa
mix,” Josefina announced, and her eyes shone with pride and satisfaction the way Archimedes must have looked just before he got out of his bath.

Skinny Carlos and the Count, like two rather dim-witted pupils, were listening to the woman's explanation. Feigning surprise was part of the ritual: the impossible would become possible, dreams reality, and then their Cuban longing for food would suddenly transgress any frontier of reality measured by quotas, ration-books and irremediable shortages, thanks to a magical trick only Josefina was capable of performing.

“My uncle Marcelo, who you know was once a sailor, fell in love in Cartagena de las Indias and lived in Colombia for several years. But the woman was
paisa
, as they call people from Medellín, and she taught him to prepare
paisa
mix, as Marcelo calls, or called it, may he rest in peace, the poor guy, for it's a typically
paisa
platter. Then, as I had some red beans on the boil when you called, I started thinking and had this idea: of course,
paisa
mix, and, right there, when the beans started to soften, I threw in half a pound of minced meat, so the meat cooked in the juice, you follow me? Then I cooked crackling from really big pigs, with some of their meat, ripe plantains, eggs for you two, for at this time of night eggs don't suit me because of my gall-bladder, a beef steak, with plenty of garlic and onion, and I cooked the rice with extra lard so it separates out right. You can eat the beans separately or put them on the top of the rice. How do you prefer them?”

“Both ways,” they chorused, and the Count sat behind Carlos's wheelchair. They followed in the footsteps of Carlos's mother to the dining-room, with the solemnity one adopts when visiting the holiest of holy places. Jose, Conde told the woman while downing spoonfuls of beans and meat, you've saved my life.

“Jose,” said Carlos, stretching out a hand to caress his mother's, “you beat your record. This is out of this world . . . I'm going to go
paisa
, I swear I am.”

As they ate, the Count must have related the temporary lifting of his punishment and the new case he was working on. It was another of the policeman's necessary rituals to tell Skinny and Josefina his stories, unfolding a plot in daily chapters, till the grand finale came.

“But that's all very nasty, Condesito.”

“So the guy, I mean the gal, didn't kick out, lash out or anything? Hey, you know I can't really believe that.”

“And that painter, with a wife and all. These things never happened in my day . . . What I don't understand one bit is why you had to mix poor Jesus Christ up in all this.”

The Count smiled and licked his fingers, streaming
in grease from the crackling. He wiped himself with a handkerchief and lit a cigarette, after swigging some of his second beer.

“Hey, Skinny,” he finally spoke, “you still got that copy of
La Viboreña
?”

“Of course.”

“You've got to lend it to me.”

“Fine, but read it here.”

“Don't arse around, let me take it.”

“Not even if I'd gone crazy. You were the one who threw it away and I kept it.”

“I swear on your mother I'll look after it,” the Count promised, smiling and making a sign of the cross with his fingers, and Josefina smiled as well, because the visible happiness of her son, an invalid for ten years, and of the other tormented, ever ravenous man who was also like her son, constituted the only scraps of happiness left in this world where bladders went on strike and you saw so much squalor. Happiness seemed a thing of the past, the time when her son and the Count shut themselves in of an afternoon to study and listen to music, and she was sure one day the house would be full of grandchildren and Carlos would hang his engineering diploma on the wall and the Count would present her with his first book and all would be sweetness and light, as life ought to be. But the knowledge she'd got it wrong didn't stop her smiling when she said: “I'll make some coffee,” and departed.

“Hey, Conde, Andrés called me this afternoon. He asked after you.”

“And what's he up to?”

“He's say's he's got problems in the hospital, but he'll come by tomorrow to talk.”

“Then tell him from me to buy a bottle and drop in to see us one of these nights, OK?”

The policeman had just downed his second beer and was peering into the darkness beyond the window. His stomach, body and mind were sighing in relief and he felt his muscles and brain distend, lose electricity, that he was on the verge of one of those moments of confidences and emotion he would share with Skinny Carlos, right there in his house. All the shields, armour and even masks he walked the world with – like any hunted insect – would tumble to the floor, and a necessary, much longed-for spiritual levity would replace the fears, wariness and lies he employed daily, as frequently as his blue jeans that daily clamoured for an emergency wash. And then he said: “I can't get the story of the Transfiguration out of my head . . . Do you know, I still remember when I heard it for the first time? What's more, Skinny, I think I'm getting the writing bug.”

“Fuck!” exclaimed Carlos, hitting the table with one of his heavyweight's fists. “What's happened? You fallen in love again?”

“If only!”

“If only!” repeated the other, who then looked incredulously at his bottle of beer: how the fuck had it emptied? And the Count waited calmly for the inevitable suggestion to come. “Hey, you bastard, go and buy a bottle of rum. This calls for a celebration.”

“Twenty-eight years ago,” the Count calculated.

He said it out loud so it seemed more credible, used his fingers to reckon up yet again the obscenely inflated figure, which represented so many, many years, and he began to accept it must be so when he felt the anxiety stirred by what had gone forever to be in denial. Then time changed into an irritating, identifiable feeling, like a pain spreading from his stomach and starting to oppress his chest; his mother was next to him, a tiny white headscarf on her jet-black hair and that linen – linen? – dress that crackled because of the macerated yucca juices in which she'd soaked it before subjecting it to trial by iron, and he fingered the bluish, gentle spume of prickly starch and the final severity of the now ironed cloth, as he felt it minutes before they went into church, and his mother gave her son that hug he would never forget. You're going to be a saint, she told him, you are my handsome boy, she told him, and the white purity of the material wrapped round them that Sunday morning passed through his pores and reached his soul: I am pure, he thought, as he walked towards the front row of pews to listen to the mass Father Mendoza would intone and receive at last that memorable wafer with an ancient flavour that should change his life: when it fell on his tongue, he would join a privileged clan: those with a right to salvation, he thought, and he looked at her again, and she smiled back at him, so
beautiful in her headscarf and white dress, twenty-eight years ago.

Father Mendoza jumped from the altar of memory to the real door where the Count had knocked twice. Although their spiritual relationship had never been renewed after that distant Sunday of purity he'd never revisited, the priest and the dissident had always maintained an affable relationship, in which the cleric insisted on calling the Count a mystic without faith and the latter on dubbing Father Mendoza a cunning old devil, capable of doing anything to win – or bring back – a believer to the fold. Nevertheless in subsequent years their dialogues had always taken place in the middle of the street, the result of casual encounters, for the Count had never gone back inside the local church or the adjoining house where the priest lived and where he'd received the necessary instruction in catechism in order to accede to communion with the holy and eternal.

“My Lord, can this be a miracle?” exclaimed Father Mendoza when his eyes, still bloodshot from sleep and clouded by the passage of time, allowed him mentally to locate the image of his morning visitor.

“Miracles are a thing of the past, Father. How are you?”

The priest smiled as he led him into his sitting room.

“Miracles still happen. And I'm a real ruin, or are you blind to boot?”

“As I can see, but you're not that bad. We're both growing old at a similar pace.”

“But I've got a forty-year lead. How can I help? Have you finally come to confess your multiple sins?”

The Count sat on the wood and straw sofa, for he hadn't forgotten how the high-backed rocking-chair was the only earthly property the priest defended like a
vehement, haggling merchant. As usual, Father Mendoza settled down in his armchair and began swaying furiously.

“Don't keep on, Father: that decision was for ever.”

“This is your greatest sin, Condesito: pride. And the other, I know for certain, is that you are afraid of yourself... Do you realize that one day you'll fall . . .”

“Don't be so sure, Father. Do you know when I was last here?”

“Twenty-eight years ago,” replied the priest, as if he didn't have to think twice, and the Count suspected he'd thrown out a figure and only by chance hit on the right number.

“Exactly twenty-eight years, but don't play at cheap miracles.”

The priest smiled again.

“Don't worry, it's not because of you that I remember . . . My father died on the day of your communion. I found out ten minutes before saying mass. It was the worst mass of my life, or the best, I don't know. And it was also the last time I doubted the goodness of God.”

“And why did you talk to us about the Transfiguration that day?”

The priest almost shut his eyes, as if needing to look within himself.

“So I'm not the only one who remembers that day, am I?”

“No,” the Count admitted.

“Wait, would you like a coffee? I can tell you I don't offer everybody coffee. Just imagine, twenty people come and see me every day, and I've still not worked the miracle of multiplying the little envelopes of coffee they give me in my ration book . . .”

Father Mendoza leapt from his chair as if propelled by the rocking and the Count's heart felt the vitality
the old parish priest exuded. He looked round the sitting room, at the wooden walls with scenes of the stations of the cross – all the fallen women were present – and the resplendent statue of Archangel Raphael, an exact replica of the one in the church, under which – twenty-eight years ago – the children taking part in the catechism had sat and listened to the lessons from Miss Merced and Father Mendoza. Just the fucking job, he thought when the priest returned with a cup of coffee, which his stomach, ravaged by alcohol and lack of sleep, was piously grateful for.

“Do you still smoke?” he asked the Count, who nodded. “Well, give me one. That's one pleasure I'll allow myself today.”

The Count took two cigarettes out of the packet and then lit the priest's and his. They both exhaled at the same time and were enveloped by the same cloud of smoke.

“I want to talk to you about the Transfiguration. Something has happened which reminded me of that passage, but I failed Bible History.”

The priest, who'd recovered his rocking speed, contemplated his cigarette before speaking.

“I knew you wanted to get something out of me . . . Do you know why I used the passage on the Transfiguration that day?”

His eyes tired of following the pendulum marked by the priest's face, the Count looked towards the painting which represented the arrival at Mount Calvary.

“You really want me to guess?”

“I'm sorry, I'm becoming old and stupid, and ask stupid questions . . . I did so because I felt very sick, and in that passage, when God appears before the apostles, Jesus understands the human soul more than
ever and tells his disciples: ‘Arise, be not afraid' . . . And not everyone can understand the dimensions fear can have. And that day, you understand, I went in great fear of death.”

 

“And after six days, Jesus taketh Peter, James and John his brother and bringeth them up into a high mountain apart. And was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun and his raiment was white as the light. And, behold, there appeared unto them Moses and Elias talking with him. Then answered Peter and said unto Jesus: Lord, it is good for us to be here: if thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles, one for thee, one for Moses and another for Elias. While he yet spake, a bright cloud overshadowed them: and behold a voice out of the cloud which said, This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased: hear ye him. And when the disciples heard it, they fell on their face, and were sore afraid. And Jesus came and touched them, and said: Arise, be not afraid. And when they had lifted up their eyes, they saw no man, save Jesus only.