Havana Blue

by Leonardo Padura

  He studied the bottom of his glass and hesitated. He liked the distinctive taste of Scotch whisky and would always be ready to fight to the death for a bottle of Ballantine’s, and he felt so good, next to her, surrounded by those wise library shadows, and she looked so ravishing. And answered:

  “No, that’s OK, I’ve not had breakfast yet.”

  “Do you want something to eat?”

  “I do and need it bad, but thanks all the same, I’ve got a date,” he almost lamented. “They’re expecting me at Skinny’s.”

  “As thick as thieves as ever,” she smiled.

  “Hey, I didn’t ask after your son,” he said as he stood up.

  “Just imagine, with this palaver . . . No, around midday I told Mima to take him to his Aunt Teruca’s, over in Santa Fe, at least till Monday or till we know something. I think he’d find this upsetting . . . Mario, what on earth has happened to Rafael?” And she now stood up and folded her arms over her chest, as if the spirit of the whisky had suddenly abandoned her and she felt very cold.

  “If only we knew, Tamara. But get used to the idea: whatever it is, it’s nasty. Can you give me the list of guests at the party?”

  She didn’t react, as if she’d not heard him, and then unfolded her arms.

  “Here it is,” she replied, looking for a piece of paper under a magazine. “I put down all the ones I remember, I don’t think I missed anyone out.”

  He took the sheet and walked over to the lamp. He slowly read the names, surnames and positions held by the guests.

  “There’s nobody like me there, is there?” he asked and then looked at her. “No sorry policeman?”

  She folded her arms back over her chest and stared into the fireplace, as if asking it to do the impossible and bring forth heat.

  “I realized this morning how much you’ve changed, Mario. Why are you so bitter? Why speak of yourself self-pityingly, as if everyone else was a bastard, and you were the purest and the poorest?”

  He took her abuse and felt he’d got it all wrong about her; she was still an intelligent woman. He felt weak and vulnerable and needed to sit down, drink another whisky and talk and talk. But he was afraid to.

  “I don’t know, Tamara. Let’s talk about it some other time.”

  “I think you’re trying to run away.”

  “A policeman never runs away, he simply ups and takes his happiness with him.”

  “There’s no cure, then.”

  “And no getting better.”

  “Well, please tell me if you do find anything,” she said as they walked down the passage. She still had her arms folded, and Mario Conde, after winking at the ruddy exuberant Flora framed and hanging on the best wall in the room, wondered how Tamara Valdemira could possibly spend her time in a house that was so empty. Looking at herself in the mirror?

  Skinny Carlos is in the centre of the group. Arms splayed out, head tilting to the right, as if crucified, although at the time he didn’t think he’d ever be bearing a cross. He always fixed it so he was in the centre, in order to be the centre, or perhaps we nudged that way to turn him into the group’s navel, where he and we could feel good. He could deliver a joke a minute, make a wisecrack about the silliest thing that would drop from anyone else’s mouth like a lead balloon and earn a couple of polite smiles. He wore his hair long; I don’t how he managed to get through school-gate inspections; he was still very skinny, although we were in thirteenth grade and that day we’d done our university pre-enrolment. For his first choice he’d put civil engineering; he dreamed of building an airport, two bridges, and most of all, creating the design for a contraceptive factory, with distinctive production lines according to size, colour, taste and shape, able to meet all the requirements of the Caribbean, the place on earth where people screwed the best and the most, for that was his obsession: getting laid. His second choice was industrial engineering. Between Skinny and Rabbit, Dulcita was then Skinny’s fiancé, and if Skinny hadn’t been crucified, he’d surely have been touching her up and she’d be smiling, for she too liked a touch of porn. Her skirt, with the three white stripes on the hem, was the shortest of the lot, well above the knee: she was the most expert at rolling it up round the waist as soon as she set a foot outside school; her knees were rounded, her thighs compact and long, her legs appeared well-thrown and handmade, and her buttocks – as Skinny would say, using one of his catastrophically poetic similes – were as hard as hunger at five am, and yet all that was balanced out, compensated as it were, he added, by her not having an inch of tit. Dulcita is smiling happily because she’s sure she’s going for architecture to work with Skinny on his projects, and she’ll do the designs. And as second choice, she chose geology, since she was crazy about going into caves, especially with Skinny, to satisfy their joint obsession: a good lay. At the time Dulcita was perfect: she’d kill to help you, a terrific friend, sharp, intelligent and never stopped for anything: she’d bail you out in an exam or soften a girl up for you. She was top mate, a real good gal, and I never understood why she went to the United States. When they told me, I couldn’t believe it; she was one of us, what’s happened . . .? Rabbit can’t avoid displaying his teeth. God knows whether he ever laughed, with those teeth-and-a half you never knew; he too was very skinny and had gone for a history degree as his first choice and for teaching history as a second, and at the time he was quite convinced that if the English hadn’t left Havana in 1763, Elvis Presley would probably have been born in Pinar del Río, or River Pine City, or whatever the hell he’d have said, in those cane-cutter’s boots that were his school shoes, for going out every night as well as to Saturday-night parties. He was really thin, because he had no choice in the matter; in his place they chewed cable, not literally, but real cable, the ones Goyo brought from his work as an electrician; he’d say, spaghetti cable, cable and chips, cable croquettes. Tamara looks serious though she always looks best like that: she’s more . . . beautiful? The light brown lock of hair hanging languidly and rebelliously over her forehead and her right eye giving her airs of Van Gult’s Honorata, and there right next to Dulcita, they’d say Dulcita was always better, but Tamara’s something else, more than beautiful, nice and tasty, as delicious as the crack of a baseball cleanly hit, hot enough to give Mahomet a hard-on: but, no, you felt like eating her bit by bit, clothes and all, I told Skinny once, even if I’d shit rags for a week. And you also felt like sitting with her on a manicured lawn one afternoon, all alone, and leaning your head back on her bounteous thighs, lighting a cigarette, hearing the birds chirp and enjoying happiness. She’d chosen dentistry as her first choice and medicine as second, and it’s a pity to see her looking so serious, as if the future dentist had teeth that would never visit a dentist, and Rabbit would be her first customer, when I get you in my chair, she’d say, I’ll do my doctorate trying to get your buckteeth under control. My awful face hasn’t changed a bit: I’m on the far right, next to Tamara naturally, as always whenever possible; and look, with my trousers cut round the knee so my mum can turn the leg upside down, with the knee which is broader at the bottom and the bottom which is narrower sewn at the knee, it being the only way to get a spot of flares, which were the rage then. And gym shoes without socks, both patched over the toes: mine are crooked and always poked a hole through the same place: I’m also smiling, but it’s a forced smile, only halfway across the lips, on my starving scary face, with bags under my eyes, and I’m thinking I’m sure I won’t get literature, for they’ve almost shut down literary studies this year, I’m in a good position but it’s a lottery and I so much want to get in, and I put down psychology for second choice and not dentistry. That was Tamara’s fault, for I can’t stand the sight of blood so perhaps history would be a better option like for Rabbit, I don’t know, a psychology degree leads to somewhere, but I never knew how to decide. Taking decisions was always torture, and it makes sense that I didn’t feel like laughing in that photo we took coming down the steps at high school, on the eve of our final exams th
at we were all going to pass because in thirteenth grade they don’t fail anyone, unless there’s another Viboragate scandal and they set special exams in order to fuck us up, as happened to thirteenth grade last year, to Dulcita who’s so intelligent but is repeating a year because of all that, but we would pass, for sure. On the back of the photo it says June 1975, we were all still very poor – that is, almost all of us – and very happy. Skinny is skinny. Tamara is more than beautiful, Dulcita is one of us, Rabbit is dreaming of changing history, and I’m on my way to being a writer like Hemingway. The photo has yellowed with age: it got wet one day and one corner is cracked, and when I look at it I get a real guilty conscience because Skinny is skinny no more and Rafael Morín is the invisible presence lurking behind the camera.

  He pressed the bell four times, thumped on the door, shouted. There was nobody at home, and he jumped up and down, the almost palpable lavatory had aroused an urgent desire to piss, he couldn’t hold on and thumped on the door again.

  “I’m hungry, so hungry and nearly pissing myself,” the Count blurted out before greeting her or kissing her on the forehead and then rushing to lower his head to receive her womanly kiss. It was a tradition from the time when Skinny Carlos was very skinny and the Count spent every day in that house, and they played ping-pong and tried with dubious success to learn how to dance and studied physics in the early hours before their exams. But Skinny Carlos was skinny no more, and only he persisted in calling him that. Skinny Carlos now weighed in at more than two hundred pounds and moved around in fits and starts in a wheelchair. In 1981, in Angola, he’d got a bullet in the back, waist-high, and it severed his spinal cord. None of the five operations he’d undergone since had improved things, and Skinny awoke each morning with a new pain, another nerve or muscle that had been stilled forever.

  “Hey, my boy, you look bloody awful,” said Josefina when she saw him coming out of the lavatory and handed him a glass of watery coffee.

  “I’m on my last legs, Jose, and incredibly hungry.” And gave her the glass back after taking only one sip of coffee.

  Much relieved and cigarette already lit, he entered his friend’s room. Skinny was in his wheelchair, in front of the television and looking worried.

  “They say they’re seeing to the ground, and the game will go ahead. Hey, no, for Christ’s sake, no,” he protested as he saw his friend unwrapping a bottle of rum.

  “We need to talk, my brother, and I need two shots of rum. If you don’t . . .”

  “Fuck, you’ll be the death of me,” rasped Skinny, and he started to swing his chair round. “Don’t give me any ice, that Santa Cruz is so sweet.”

  The Count left the room and came back carrying two glasses and a corkscrew.

  “Well, how are things going?”

  “I’ve just been to Tamara’s, Skinny, I swear to you, the wench is hotter than ever. She doesn’t get older. She just gets better.”

  “Women are like that. Do you still want to marry her?”

  “Fuck off. You’re right about this rum. It’s really good.”

  “My friend, take it gently today. You look really shit.”

  “It’s a combination of sleep deprivation, hunger and incipient baldness,” he said, pointing to his receding hairline before taking another sip. “No news, the man’s still missing and no clue as to where the fuck he’s got to or why he’s vanished, whether he’s dead or alive . . .”

  Skinny was still edgy. He glanced at the television where they were showing music videos until the baseball game started. Of the people the Count knew, Skinny was, and by a long chalk compared to himself, the one who most agonized over baseball, ever since he’d been skinny and centerfield in the high school team. The Count had only seen him cry twice, and twice it had been brought on by baseball and his lament was a bolero, with big tears and sobs, and he became inconsolable.

  “Well, doesn’t life take funny old turns?” Skinny Carlos remarked as he looked back at his friend. “You looking for Rafael Morín.”

  “Not that many turns, Skinny, you know. He’s exactly the same, an opportunist bastard who’s really wheeled and dealed to get to where he’s got.”

  “Hey, not so, my friend,” retorted Skinny after lighting his cigarette. “Rafael knew what he wanted and went for it, and was made of the right stuff. It wasn’t for nothing that he got the best marks at high school and then in industrial engineering. When I went into the civil side, he was already being talked up like the star act at the circus. He was phenomenal: almost top marks right from year one.”

  “Are you going to start defending him now?” asked the Count, looking incredulous.

  “Hey, I don’t know what’s happened now, nor do you, and you’re the policeman. But things aren’t so simple, pal. The fact is he was good at school and, you know, I for one reckon he didn’t need to cheat at the exams when the Viboragate scandal broke.”

  The Count ran a hand through his hair and couldn’t repress a smile.

  “Fucking shit, Skinny, Viboragate. I thought nobody remembered that.”

  “If I wasn’t on my hobbyhorse, I think I would have forgotten it,” replied Skinny, pouring more rum out. “You get me going. You know, Miki dropped by this afternoon. He came to see me because he’s going to Germany and wanted to know if I needed anything, and while he was about it he asked me to lend him ten pesos. But I told him about the Rafael business, and he said you should make sure you go to see him.”

  “Why? Does he know something?”

  “No, he only found out when I told him and it was then he said you should contact him. You know Miki’s always been a bit of a mystery.”

  “And did Rafael survive Viboragate with a clean bill of health?”

  “Pour yourself some more if it improves your thinking. Right, he didn’t have problems, when the headmaster got the push, he was already at university, and the guy who almost got the rap was Armandito Fonseca, the student president for that year, right?”

  “Naturally, the shit went close, but it didn’t stick. Didn’t I tell you?”

  Skinny shook his head, as if trying to say “you’re beyond the pale” but then added:

  “That’s enough of that, Conde, you don’t know if he was involved or not, and the fact is they didn’t accuse him of fixing marks or letting out exam papers or anything like that. What always bugged you was that he fucked Tamara and you only jerked off thinking of her.

  “And what made your hands so sore, too much groping in the playground?”

  “And it also bugged you a lot, you told me as much, the fact we couldn’t study in Daddy Valdemira’s library anymore because Rafael had claimed that as his own . . .”

  The Count stood up and walked over to Skinny Carlos. He stuck out his index finger and placed it between his friend’s eyebrows.

  “Hey, are you with the Indians or the Cowboys? You know, I can’t curse your mother because she’s getting my dinner ready. But I can piss on you, easy as pie. Since when have you been a card-carrying time-server, hey?”

  “I hope he gets it where it really hurts,” said Skinny, slapping the Count’s arm and starting to laugh. It was a body-shaking guffaw, rising from his gut, shaking all his huge, limp, almost useless body, a deep visceral laugh that threatened to kill off his wheelchair, flatten walls and hit the street, turn corners, open doors and make Lieutenant Mario Conde collapse in stitches on his ass on his bed begging for another shot of rum to deal with the bout of coughing. They were laughing as if they’d just learned how, and Josefina, drawn by the din, looked at them from the doorway, and her face was deeply gloomy behind the hint of a smile: she’d have given anything, her own life, her good health which was now beginning to fail her, for nothing to have happened and for those men who were laughing still to be boys who always laughed like that, even if they had no reason, if only for the pleasure of laughing.

  “All right, that’s enough,” she said and walked into the room. “Time to eat. It’s almost nine o’clock.”

 
“Yes, mother darling, I’m the walking wounded,” said the Count and went over to Skinny’s wheelchair.

  “Hey, just wait a minute,” asked Carlos when the music stopped on the telly and the presenter’s overeager smile appeared on the screen.

  “Dear viewers,” said the woman, who wanted to look enthused and so happy at what she was about to say, “conditions are practically right in the Latino-americano Stadium to kick off the first game in the Industriales-Vegueros playoffs. While we wait for that interesting game to start, we will continue with our musical offerings.”

  She concluded, froze her synthetic smile and preserved it stoically for the video of another song, by another singer no one was interested in, which now filled the small screen.

  “Come on, let’s go,” Skinny suggested, and his friend pushed his wheelchair toward the dining room. “Do you think the Industriales stand a chance?”

  “Without Marquetti and Medina and with Javier Méndez injured? No, wild man, I think they’ve had it,” opined the Count, and his friend shook his head disconsolately. He suffered before and after each game, even when the Industriales won, for he thought that if they won that one, they were more likely to lose the next, and he suffered eternally, in spite of all his promises to be less fanatical and to ditch baseball: it wasn’t what it used to be, he would say, when Capiró, Chávez, Changa Mederos and Co played. But both knew they were incurable and the one most infected was Skinny Carlos.

  They went over to the table and the Count analysed Josefina’s offering: the traditional black beans; pork steaks in breadcrumbs, well done but juicy all the same, as the golden rule for fillets required; the grains of rice separating out in the dish, as pure white and tender as a virgin bride; a green salad, artfully displayed with a careful combination of red and green, the golden glow of ripe tomatoes and bunches of fried, curved green plantain. And on the table another bottle of Rumanian wine, red, dry and almost perfect plonk.