“Are you serious?”
“As serious as Desiderio’s arse.”
Skinny laughed. The bastard couldn’t help it.
“You’re done for, man.”
“That’s what they say. Pour me some more rum. I’m running shit-scared.”
“Why, you idiot? Are there real problems?”
“I don’t know, but I can’t stop being scared… More rum.”
“You’ve got to forget all this, man… Conde, you’re well fucked, but you’re a good man. I know you’ve done no wrong, so quit being scared, right?”
“All right,” the other agreed, not overly convinced.
“Did I tell you Andres came to see me this morning?”
“Yesterday you told me he was going to come. What did that lunatic want?”
Carlos poured himself out more rum, downed a murderous gulp and pulled his wheelchair over until he was in front of his friend.
“Dulcita’s coming,” he said.
“Dulcita?” Conde was taken aback. “Dulcita?”
Dulcita had left for the United States more than ten years ago, and the Count remembered how often he and Skinny had spoken about the departure of the girl who’d been Carlos’s girlfriend for two years at school. Intelligent Dulcita, perfect Dulcita, the great laugh, who’d then left, leaving them to wonder why, oh why did it have to be her. And now she was coming back: “How come?”
“She’s coming to see her grandmother, who is apparently dying. Andres knows because they talked to him in order to get the medical certificate the Red Cross requires to negotiate the travel permit.”
“Fantastic, right?” the Count went on, getting over his shock.
Skinny finished his rum and put his hands on the Count’s knees, which felt the moist, red-hot heat of those voluminous extremities.
“More than fantastic, it’s brilliant. Do you know what Dulcita’s sister said to Andres? That if we weren’t angry and it wouldn’t hurt, she’d like to see us. But above all she wanted to see me.”
The Count started to smile, moved by an inevitable feeling of happiness that immediately languished and killed the stillborn smile.
“You tell me, Conde, do you think it right for Dulcita to see me like this?” He used his obese hands to indicate his body overflowing the wheelchair.
Mario Conde stood up, went over to the window and spat venomously. It wasn’t right, he thought, remembering that photo featuring Pancho, Tamara, Dulcita, Skinny and himself, coming down the stairs at school the day they’d put in for their university courses. Skinny, who was very thin in those days and walked on two legs, was in the centre, arms open wide and head to one side, as if awaiting crucifixion: Carlos and Dulcita had been a beautiful, lovely couple, eager for sex, life, happiness and love… No, it wasn’t right, he kept thinking, but he said:
“Hey, if she comes to see you and you want to see her, let her: you are you and always will be, and the person who loved you must still love you, or should go to hell.”
“Don’t talk shit, Conde, things aren’t like that.”
“Aren’t they? Well, they are as far as I’m concerned, because you’re my brother and it has to be like that… But if you don’t want to see her, well, don’t, and forget it.”
“That’s the fucking point, Conde, I do want to see her. But whatever way, it’s not exactly going to be a party for her to see me like this. Get me?”
The Count lit a cigarette and went back to the bed. He pulled the wheelchair even nearer, and Carlos’s face was only an inch or two from his.
“Skinny: don’t be such a pansy,” he said. “Don’t give up, for Christ’s sake, because if you do, we’re all fucked. Do it for yourself, for me and old Josefina; don’t let anything fuck you up: a bullet, the past, the war, or this damned wheelchair,” he declared breathlessly, and, against his usual custom of thinking everything through, he took Carlos’s face between his hands and kissed him on a cheek. “Don’t give up, brother.”
“But what the fuck is this!”
Of course. It just had to be the hottest summer he’d ever experienced, he concluded while undressing before getting in the shower. For several days now the Count had been pinching memory and flesh to try to remember other August temperatures like this cruel year’s, but the wall-scorching sun, the haze from the ceiling, the moisture wrapping round him in bed and the deep depression, able to sap his will and his muscles, told him it was impossible to recall a similar muggy heat. Or did the heat come from his body rather than the infernal atmosphere possessing the island? He looked at his watch: yes, it was still early for Sergeant Palacios to call him and he still didn’t know whether he’d dare call the Marquess.
When he got out of the bath, streaming water, the towel round his shoulders like a defeated boxer, the Count decided to finish drying himself on the ecstatic gusts from the fan. He flopped on to his hot bed and for a moment enjoyed the minimal privilege of solitude, felt the draught massage his drooping testicles and hit his anus particularly deliciously. He closed his legs slightly. Then, to help the draught, and impelled by a straightforward burst of onanism, he started lifting up his wet penis, sliding his fingers to the head that had been surgically uncapped, only to let it drop in a free fall that gradually became an upward tilt transmitting a warm, erect hardness to his fingers. He hesitated for a moment over whether to masturbate or not: and decided he had no reason not to try. No woman was out there waiting for that spare ejaculation, and as he stroked himself, even the heat in the air seemed to have abated. But his decision hit fresh doubts: whose turn was it? Still grasping his member but reducing the rubbing rhythm, the Count opened his much-fingered book of erotic memories and began to flick through the pages of women he’d loved by remote control when seeking to protect himself against the successive departures, deceits and disappearances they’d inflicted on him: on the last page – he always began at the back when he read an issue of the magazine Bohemia – he found Karina, naked, sucking a dazzling saxophone whose intense music caressed her nipples as it moved between her open legs, but he let her go, humiliated her with mental indifference, a form of revenge on a woman too painfully close to be called upon, and the fact is he could still feel her scent of ripened fruit, between a mango and velvety plums, which mingled with the deep, animal dampness from her desire-swollen sex: “No, not you.”
He likewise abandoned Haydee, trying not to remember shared alcoholic belches, miserable wretched bouts of drinking, rums poured on mouths, breasts and a doubly moist pubis, and that was why he fled, he tried not even to brush against her – though he failed to resist that painful temptation – because she’d been his best lover, so hard-working in bed the Count’s productivity couldn’t keep up with her and she’d replaced him with an Olympic-class fornicator (whose anus was she now kissing with her drilling, eschatological, reptilian tongue?); but he did pass without major upset on the memory of Maritza, his first wife, too distant and faded to be of use even for a summery masturbation, that pink scent from her virgin skin hardly perceptible now, always washed to face sex, at once clean and apprehensive; he breathed, more nostalgic than horny, the essential feminine fragance that nurse gave off, a nymphomaniac on the thin side, whose name he’d now forgotten but whom he always remembered because she’d initiated him in the pleasure of the other’s hand which strokes, rubs, allowing one to discover the value of another’s skin, giving the act of masturbation an unexpected dimension, only because it comes from other hands, from another skin; and, when her turn came, he almost stayed with Tamara, felt her on his fingertips, on the wrinkled sac of his testicles, as he revisited her rumbadancer’s butt and black nipples, the dark depths of her curly patches of down, and breathed in the strong aromas from her male colognes – Canoe is my favourite, she’d confess, allergic to other subtle, feminine perfumes – and then his hand stopped on the album – and on a glans gorged and ready to spit – to reach a final conclusion: none of them… He stretched a hand out from the position he found himself in, slipped it under his bed and extracted the Penthouse that Peyi had lent Skinny and Skinny had lent him and went on an immediate search for that shameless blonde – lots of hair upstairs, next to none down – who in the same position as he – in bed, legs open to the breeze or other possibilities – made her professional nakedness stand out against red, photographer-ready sheets: if there was a breeze in the photo – and there had to be – it must smell of moist, ploughed earth, and the woman must surely have exuded the same fertile, primary fragance. Better you than one concocted from deceit and memories, he told the blonde, as he leaned forward and continued to rub until he could no longer see the woman and felt his life being drained by those white drops spilling without rhyme or reason on the dusty tiles of his room, which now emanated, like a disturbing perfume born of his painful solitude, the sweetness of ejaculation…
But sexual relief didn’t relieve the heat: his body and brain burned, and he understood all had been in vain: there was only one remedy against that specific heat and that was a real woman, not one made from memories, scents recalled, or glossy paper, but a tangible female, able to smash the desperate abandon burning him cell by cell, without recourse to more or less individualist soothing, remedies or dilatory techniques.
Then from his bed he spotted Rufino, the new fighting fish who lived in his goldfish bowl. He’d been his companion for some ten days, ever since he’d gone hunting for a replacement for the old Rufino, who’d greeted the day face up, fins awry, as if searching for a non-existent wind in the pallid deep purple of the death of a fighting fish. Now young Rufino had stopped, as if exhausted by the effort of swimming in a sea of lava; the Count could almost see the drops of sweat as his eyes stared at the glass and he barely moved his tiny fighting piscatorial entrails: then he entered a slow descent, without a struggle, without fluttering a fin, as if defeated definitively, and the Count assumed that descent as his own, a bitter mirror, the reflection of a free fall from which he didn’t want or couldn’t escape, like the much heralded decline of the West or the now inevitable collapse of a flaccid, empty penis. Suicidal inclinations?
The Count lit a cigarette and embarked on another slow, pleasant suicide.
“But what the fuck can it be now!” he said, about to go back into the shower, when the telephone rang.
“It’s me, Conde.”
“Wait a minute, Conde, just a minute, don’t go chasing off. No, I really needed to speak to you in the street, you and me and no bother. And a cigarette for me too while you’re about it. Wait… Look, I don’t know what more they want to find out about you, because they know everything and know nothing, and I reckon they’re throwing stones at all the dummies to see if they get a hit. I’m not kidding, Conde, just listen, man. Fuck, it’s much hotter than yesterday, isn’t it? They wanted chapter and verse on you, on me as well, just so you know, but they’d already got all the answers, you bet they had. It’s incredible, man: they even know how many cigarettes we smoke a day, but I’m not daft and could see they didn’t really have anything to go on. There’s a reason why I’m police, I suppose? They wanted to find out what kind of relationship you have with the Boss, if you were friends or not, the whole of Headquarters knows that, whether I thought the Boss favoured you and if he’d ever covered up for you, that kind of thing. They went on and on, and I don’t know whether it was because of you or Major Rangel. What do you reckon? They’re already investigating him, that you know… Then they asked me if your fight with Lieutenant Fabricio was related to work or personal gripes, what we think about the investigations they’re carrying out, whether I thought you were an alcoholic, why you lived by yourself, just incredible. They also asked me about your informers, and even mentioned Candito’s name, whether you gave him protection so you could do clandestine business and such like, as if nobody did that, huh? And, listen to this, they knew you’d had a relationship with Tamara when you were on her husband’s case. Who did you tell that to, Conde? Well, they know about it, and that you didn’t see each other again afterwards, they know that too. And a thousand stupid little things as well, though nothing important: they asked me why you like going into churches, why you tell people you’d like to live in a house near the sea, if you still think about being a writer and the kind of things you like writing. Well, I just told them you liked writing things that were squalid and moving and so I got them off that kick. But, man, they know everything, you know? The worst fucking thing, Conde, is you suddenly feel like you’re living in a glass bowl, or a test-tube, I don’t know, that they watch you shitting, pissing and picking your nose, and know if you make little balls to throw or stick under a table. That scared me: they’ve got us down to a T, know everything we do and everything we don’t, and are interested in everything. I’m probably peabrained, but I didn’t imagine it was like that. It really makes you scared, Conde, really. No, there were three of them, I don’t know them, a captain and two lieutenants, they said, but they were in field dress and weren’t wearing stripes. In a second-floor office, next to the meeting room. They told me to come in, poured me coffee, and it was all very relaxed, a conversation between friends, inquisitive friends who wanted to find out every silly little thing. And they are vicious when it comes to questioning, you should see how cleverly they take you down a side alley, only to lead you back where they want you, but all as if they were quite uninterested, but I beat them at their own game: first because I know their ploys off by heart and I’m like a doughty lion, as you say, and second I don’t the fuck know what can be of interest to them. Yes, they say it’s necessary work, they’ve uncovered lots of irregularities, lax discipline, rule-breaking, which can’t be allowed, so they’ve been ordered to come and investigate everyone and anyone who’s done wrong will have to assume responsibility. And I can tell you one thing, Conde: they really don’t have anything against you or me, but they’ve got their knives out, doesn’t matter who, so tread carefully the next few days, the heat’s on. If you don’t believe me, well, you know who they told me they’d taken out of Headquarters today? Fatman Contreras… No, they didn’t tell me why and I didn’t stay around to find out, I don’t want to get burnt myself just for the fun of it, like some shit-brain, but if they took him out, it’s because they’ve got something on him, you can bet your butt on it, Conde, you bet they’ve got things on him … Poor Fatman, right?”
“It was Afon,” Pancho and Rabbit almost whispered, when he saw that the two cans of condensed milk he was keeping as his big treat for a cold, hungry night had gone missing. A vicious anger spread over his face, hammered his temples, dried his throat out, but he thought twice before reaching a decision: I’ve got no choice but to get angry. If I let this go, they’ll end up taking the pants off me, and I’m man enough, for fuck’s sake, he thought, then he thought again how he’d lose this argument, black Afon and his weightlifting biceps would skin him alive, and it didn’t make sense to be robbed, and end up split-lipped and black-eyed in front of a disciplinary tribunal, but in that jungle the laws were clearly written on backs of tigers, and the first law admonished that men are men, morning, afternoon and night, and the second said, “Better be dead than humiliated”, and if your food was stolen, and you knew who the thief was and decided to keep quiet rather than complain as you must in such cases (fists first), you took the first step on the road to total ignominy: if today they lifted food from your suitcase, tomorrow it would be your money and three days later you’d be washing the dishes for three or four fellows or, like Bertino, making beds for half the dormitory and saying he’d let them stick their fingers up his arse because they did it for fun and he didn’t have any complexes. Launched into compulsory communal life, cut off from paternal protection and having to defend their own lives and security, students in those camps were forced to protect themselves and show their primary instincts. It was a constant struggle for food, water, the best bed, a clean bath and the easiest work in a round of competition which soon gave way to aggression you could only meet with more of the same. A shout for a shout, a theft for a theft, a blow for a blow, was the third fundamental law of this cruel chemistry, without any scope for relativity. He slammed shut the wooden lid on his violated suitcase, and went out into the yard where Afon was peacefully playing volleyball, his weightlifting arms making some unstoppable hits.
The Count entered the playing area, grabbed the ball that flew by him and, carrying it under his arm, to protests from all the players, walked towards Afon, thinking, my voice mustn’t fail me, for fuck’s sake, and his voice didn’t fail him when he said: “I want my two cans of milk.” Then the players shut up and got ready to watch the spectacle in the making. Afon looked at the spectators and smiled at his fawning public, confidently and scarily. And he rasped: “What the fuck’s got into you, kid?” “You stole my cans of milk, you pansy,” the Count shouted and thought – he always thought everything through – he shouldn’t say anything else and threw the ball straight at black Afon’s mouth and, without thinking, he now threw himself after the ball, at the thief’s shocked face. He managed to strike him twice, on the neck, until one of Afon’s fists connected with one of his cheeks and knocked him to the ground, for what ought to have been the beginning of the end, when a voice called out from the sideline: “Afon, let the kid be and give him his condensed milk…” But, driven by the rage in his blood after receiving the hit to the face, the Count got up and returned to the attack, not thinking of anything or anybody, until four or five players managed to extract him from Afon’s lethal arm-lock, as the voice of Red Candito, hands on waist opposite the thief, said again: “Afon, you will give him his condensed milk back, won’t you?” “Afon was going to kill you, Conde,” Candito laughed, and finished his cup of coffee.
“Don’t bug me, Red, he wasn’t going to kill anybody… Why did he give me the cans of milk and not fight me?”
“Poor Afon, I don’t know how he was so strong, with the hunger that black suffered. Is the coffee good?”
“To die for,” the Count pronounced.
“Fact is I’m not too good at fixing coffee. Either it’s weak, or sweet, or too strong, or stewed…”
“This was really good,” the Count ratified, and reckoned he was a good judge of coffee. He lit a cigarette and passed his packet to Red Candito. The mulatto took one and leaned back in his armchair. At that effervescent evening hour, the hall in that building lived its maximum bustle of the day: the voices of children playing, a woman asking Macusa for salt, a radio blaring out Tejedor’s voice and another giving news of a train derailed in Matanzas, with dead and injured, as well as a gravel voice which shat on the mother of the owner of the lousy dog which had shat in front of the door to his room.
“Sometimes it makes you feel like going to the moon, Conde… You know I was born here, when we didn’t have a barbecue or toilet and this room was half what it is now and my parents, grandad, brother and I lived here, and we had to queue up to wash and shit in the communal bathrooms. But it’s not true you adapt to everything… It’s a lie, Conde. I can’t stand any more of this, and I sometimes start to wonder when I’ll be able to live properly, have a house, be quiet when I want and listen to music when I want and not the whole damned day… I’m up to here” – and he touched one of his red hairs. “You know, when I walk down the street, I’m obsessed with looking into other people’s houses and thinking which I’d like to have, and I try to work out why some people live in nice houses and the rest of us are born into places that stink of the plague, where we’ll live out the rest of our lives… When there’s a house I like a lot, I even imagine how I’d live there if it were mine… Can you understand that? And you know the guy who lives in the second room along, Serafina’s son? He’s a chemical engineer, Conde, and the cunt’s a real know-all, but he’s still stuck here… That’s why I have to accept my lot in this room, you know, and even thank God, because some people don’t even have this.”
“And that’s why you’re always in and out of church?”
“Well, at least people don’t shout there.”
“And what do you ask God for?”