Havana Gold (2 page)

At the end of the afternoon, after queuing for petrol and discovering that Karina's mum had attached an Easter palm leaf to the rear-view mirror, after chattering about punctured cars, Lenten heat and winds, and drinking coffee at the Count's, they agreed she would call him as soon as she got back from Matanzas: she could return
Franny
and
Zooey,
it's the best Salinger ever wrote, the Count had remarked, unable to contain his enthusiasm, handing her a book he'd never lent anyone ever since he'd stolen it from the university library. That way, they could meet up and chat a bit more. OK?

The Count's eyes had remained glued to her and, although he recognized quite candidly that the girl wasn't as beautiful as in his first impressions (her mouth was too big, her eye-lashes fluttered rather sadly and
she was rather deficient in the backside department, he concluded critically) he was nonetheless impressed by her constant cheerfulness and unexpected ability, in the middle of the street, after lunch and under a murderous sun, to raise a virile extremity that had neither legs nor wings.

Karina accepted a second cup of coffee and it was now time for the revelation that would finally drive the Count mad.

“My father turned me into a coffee addict,” she said looking at him. “He drank coffee all day, whatever he could get.”

“And what else did he teach you?”

She smiled and swayed her head, as if chasing off ideas and memories.

“He taught me everything he knew, even how to play the saxophone.”

“The saxophone?” he almost shouted, incredulously. “You can play the saxophone?”

“Well, I'm not a musician or anything like. But I do blow that horn, as jazz musicians say. He loved jazz and played with lots of people, with Frank Emilio, with Cachao, with Felipe Dulzaides, the old guard . . .”

The Count hardly heard what she said about her father and the trios, quintets and septets he'd played in over the years, the jam sessions in the Grotto, Las Vegas and Copa Room, and had no need to close his eyes to
imagine Karina with the sax's mouthpiece between her lips and the instrument's neck dancing between her legs. Is this woman for real? he wondered.

“What about you? Do you like jazz?”

“You know . . . it's something I can't live without,” he replied opening his arms out to emphasize the depths of his passion. She smiled and appreciated his playacting.

“OK, I must be off. I've things to get ready for tomorrow.”

“So you'll ring me?” asked the Count almost imploring her.

“Of course, the moment I get back.”

The Count lit a cigarette, injecting himself with smoke and Dutch courage, before he made the decisive move.

“What did you mean by ‘separated'?” he blurted out, gawping like a half dopey pupil.

“Look it up in the dictionary,” she retorted, smiling and swaying her head once again. She picked up her car keys and walked towards the door. The Count pursued her to the kerb. “Thanks for everything, Mario,” she said and, after pondering for a moment, asked: “Hey, isn't it about time you told me about yourself?”

The Count threw his cigarette into the street and smiled as he felt he was back on safe ground.

“I'm a policeman,” he replied, folding his arms, in a gesture to accompany his revelation.

Karina looked at him, nibbled her lip, then asked, disbelievingly: “Canadian Mounties or Scotland Yard? I guessed as much. You look like a liar,” she said, leaning on Conde's folded arms and kissing his cheek. “Bye-bye, Mr Policeman.”

Detective Lieutenant Mario Conde was still smiling after the Polish Fiat disappeared round the bend in the Highway. He trotted happily home dreaming of future bliss.

But it was still only Ash Wednesday, however much he counted and re-counted the hours to their next meeting. The three days he had to wait gave him time enough to imagine the whole works – marriage and children included, after a prior period of lovemaking on beds, beaches, tropical foliage and British meadows, in hotels of diverse constellations, on moonlit and moonless nights and dawns, in Polish Fiats – and then he'd see her, naked, sax between legs, sucking the mouthpiece, before launching into a mellow, golden melody. All he could do was imagine, wait and masturbate, as the image of Karina, sax at the ready, became unbearably erotic.

As he'd decided yet again to settle for the company of Skinny Carlos and a bottle of rum, Conde pulled on a shirt and shut the door to his house. He went out into the dust and wind on the street, muttering that, though he found Lent enervating and depressing, right then he
belonged to a rare breed of policemen on the brink of great happiness.

 

“Aren't you fuckin' well going to tell me what you're up to?”

The Count smiled vaguely at his friend: what do I tell him? he thought. The almost three-hundred pounds of defeated body in that wheelchair creased his heart. He felt it too cruel to talk of imminent bliss with a man whose pleasures in life had been reduced forever to alcohol-powered conversations, gargantuan meals and a morbid fanaticism for baseball. Ever since he'd been shot in Angola and become a life-long invalid, Skinny Carlos, who was no longer skinny, had become a dirge, an infinite pain the Count bore with guilt-ridden stoicism. What lie shall I tell? Do I have to lie even to him? he wondered, smiling bitterly, as he saw himself walking slowly past Karina's, even stopping and trying to glimpse through the porch windows the woman's impossible presence in a shadowy room crammed with ferns and red and orange-hearted
malangas
. How come he'd never seen her, given she was the sort you scented a mile off? He downed his rum and declared: “I was going to lie.”

“Do you still have to do that?”

“I don't think I am what you think I am, Skinny. I'm not the same as you.”

“Look, guy, if you want to talk shit, just get it out,” he said, lifting his hand to signal the pause necessary to knock back another rum. “I'll just put myself on fastforward. But remember one thing: you may not be one of the wonders of this world, but you are the best friend I have in the world. Even if your lies will be the death of me.”

“Savage, I met a woman out there and I think . . .” he looked Skinny in the eye.

“Fucking hell!” exclaimed Skinny Carlos, also smiling. “So that was what it was all about. You're incurable, aren't you?”

“Give me a break, Skinny, I'd like you to see her. You know, you probably have, she lives just round the corner, in the next block, her name's Karina. She's an engineer, a redhead and fantastically sexy. I can feel her right here,” and he pressed his finger on the space between his eyebrows.

“Hey, you bastard, slow down . . . you're going too fast for me. Is she your latest?”

“If only,” the Count sighed, looking forlorn. He poured himself more rum and recounted his meeting with Karina, down to the tiniest detail (the whole truth, even about the shortfall in her rear, knowing full well how highly a good rump rated in Skinny's aesthetic judgements), and his future expectations (even the adolescent spying from the street he'd practised that
night). In the end he always told his friend the whole story, however happy or wretched it might be.

The Count saw Skinny stretch but not reach the bottle and gave it to him. The level of liquid was already down behind the label and he calculated that theirs was a twolitre conversation, but hunting for rum in La Víbora at that hour of the night would be a futile, desperate business. The Count regretted that reality: talking about Karina, in Skinny's room, surrounded by tangible nostalgia and posters that had faded with time, he was beginning to feel as relaxed as in the old days, when their whole world had turned on good rum, firm tits and, above all, the magnetic, magical orifice they always referred to in terms of its lushness, depth, hairiness and ease of access (Oh no, guy, look at the way she walks, if she's a virgin, I'm a helicopter, Skinny would say), not worrying a bit about who owned those limpid objects of desire.

“You don't change, you bastard, you know fuck all about that woman, but you're already like a horny mongrel. Look what happened to you with Tamara . . .”

“Hey, man, don't compare . . .”

“No shit, you're . . . So she lives just round the corner? You're not just dreaming this up?”

“No, I kid you not. You know, Skinny, I've just got to lay that woman. Either I lay her or kill myself, go mad or turn queer.”

“Better queer than dead,” his friend interjected smiling.

“Too true, savage. My life's gone flat. I need a woman like her. I don't know anything about her, but I need her.”

Skinny looked at him as if to say: You're incurable.

“I don't know, but I've a hunch you're talking shit again . . . You like rubbing salt in the wound . . . You're a policeman because it's what you fucking want to be. If you don't, then get out, and damn everything else . . . But then don't come telling me you really liked pissing on bastards and arseholes. I can't stand any more of your bellyaching. What happened to you with Tamara was already written in blood, my friend: she was never a dame for fellows like us, so forget her once and for all and make a note in your autobiography that at least you took out the sting and gave her a good fuck. And shit on the world, you savage. Come on, a drop more of the juice.”

The Count looked at the bottle and regretted the end was nigh. He needed to hear from Skinny's mouth the things he himself was thinking, and tonight, while the Lenten wind stirred up filth outside, while hope flickered deep down in the form of woman, being in his best friend's bedroom, speaking about everything under the sun, both cleansed and encouraged him. What will I do if Skinny dies on me? he wondered, breaking the chain that led to spiritual peace. He opted for suicide
via alcohol: poured out more rum for his friend, gave himself another shot and realized they'd forgotten to talk about baseball or listen to music. Let's go for music, he decided.

He got up and opened the drawer with the cassettes. As usual, he was appalled by Skinny's mix of musical tastes: anything went, from the Beatles and the Mustangs, to Joan Manuel Serrat and Gloria Estefan.

“What do you want to hear?”

“The Beatles?”

“Chicago?”

“Formula V?”

“Los Pasos?”

“Credence?”

“Huh-huh, Credence . . . But don't say Tom Foggerty sings like a black, I've told you he sings like God, haven't I?” And they both nodded their heartfelt agreement: the bastard sings like God.

The bottle expired well before the long version of
Proud Mary
. Skinny put his glass on the floor and moved his wheelchair to the edge of the bed where his friend the policeman was seated. He placed one of his spongy hands on Conde's shoulder and looked him in the eye: “I hope it turns out OK for you, my brother. Good guys deserve a bit more luck in life.”

The Count thought how right he was: Skinny himself was the best person he knew and luck had not run his
way. But he felt that was all far too pathetic and tried to smile, retorting: “You're the one talking shit now, guy. The good guys had their day long ago.”

And he got up wanting to give his friend a hug, but didn't dare. There were hundreds and hundreds of things he never dared do.

 

Nobody can imagine what night-time is like for a policeman. Nobody can know what ghosts visit him, what hot flushes assail him, the hell where he simmers on a slow burner or where fierce flames shoot around him. The act of closing your eyes can be a cruel challenge, conjuring up troublesome figures from the past, who never leave your memory, who return, night after night, with the tireless regularity of a pendulum. Decisions, mistakes, acts of arrogance, even the frailties of generosity return like irredeemable sins to haunt a conscience marked by each petty act of infamy committed in the world of the infamous. José de la Caridad sometimes pays me a visit, that black truck driver who asked, begged me not to send him to jail because he was innocent, and I questioned him over four days, it just had to be him, it couldn't be anyone else, as he collapsed and wept and repeated his innocence, until I put him behind bars to await a trial that found him innocent. Sometimes Estrellita Rivero returns, the girl I tried to hold back for a second before she took that fatal step and was shot between the eyes
by Sergeant Mateo who'd meant to hit the legs of the man running away. Or Rafael and Tamara waltzing out of death or the past, as if it were twenty years ago, he in a suit and she in a long white dress, like the bride she was soon to be. Nothing is gentle in the night of a policeman, not even the memory of that last woman or the hope of the next, because each memory and each hope – that will one day be a memory – is tarnished by the daily horrors in his life: I met her while investigating the death of her husband, the frauds, lies, bribes, abuses and fears of that man who seemed perfect from the heights of his power; I'll remember her, perhaps, because of someone's murder, another's rape or sorrow. A policeman's nights are murky waters: they reek foul and bear the colour of death. To sleep! . . . Perchance to dream! And I have learned there is only one way to defeat them: lack of consciousness, dying a little every day, and every dawn is death itself, when what should be joyful sunshine is torture to the eyes. Horror at the past, fear of the future: that's how a policeman's nights rush towards daytime. To catch, question, imprison, judge, sentence, accuse, repress, persecute, pressurize and crush are the verbs which conjugate the memories and entire life of a policeman. I dream I could dream other happy dreams, build something, possess something, hand something on, receive and create something: write. But it's the futile
delirium of a man who feeds on what has been destroyed. That is why a policeman's loneliness is the most fearful loneliness: it accompanies his ghosts, sorrows, guilt . . . If only a woman would play a lullaby on her saxophone to send this particular policeman to sleep. But, silence, only silence! Night has fallen. Outside an accursed wind ravages the earth.