“This rum’s delicious, right?” asked Skinny, smiling.
“You’re coming out with the usual drunken shit.”
“But what did I say wrong, kid?”
“Nothing, that it’s good rum blah blah. Of course it’s good, you beast.”
“And what’s this drunken shit? You can’t open your mouth in this place now . . .”
He protested and started drinking again, as if wanting to clear his throat. Mario looked at him and saw a man so fat and so changed he didn’t know how long he could count on Skinny, and the residue from all his nostalgia and failures started to rise to his brain as he tried to imagine Carlos standing up and walking, but his brain refused to process that pleasant sight. And it was the last straw.
“When was your last embarrassing moment, Skinny, I mean really embarrassing moment?”
“Hey, kid,” Skinny smiled and held his rum up to the light, “so I’m the pickled one around here, am I? And what are people who start to ask such things – cosmonauts?”
“Kid, try to be serious.”
“No, you beast, I don’t make a habit of counting these things up. Living like this,” and he pointed to his legs but smiled, “living like this is embarrassing enough, but what do you want me to say?”
The Count looked at him and nodded, of course, it was embarrassing, but he knew how to set things straight.
“What was your most embarrassing moment?”
“Hey, just what are you after? You tell me yours.”
“Mine . . . Wait a minute. When I was learning to drive and turned into a service station, I braked badly and knocked over a tank containing fifty-five gallons of petrol. The bastards there all clapped.”
“And from all the shit in the past?”
“Well, every time I remember, I feel really sick . . . I don’t know why. I feel the same when I remember the day Mad Eduardo put the boot into the campleader’s face and I was afraid I’d insult Rafael’s mother.”
“Yes, right, I remember that . . . Look, I get sick as shit whenever a nurse has to take my cock so I can pee in the pot.”
“And the day I crouched down at university and my trousers split and my underpants had two holes as big as . . .”
“And the day we went to eat in Pinar del Río, you, me and Ernestico, when we were picking tobacco, and I said, well I’m going to put clean pants on, you never know when you might pull a country girly and it turned out the ones I’d put in my case were all brown patches.”
“And you still worry about that? I feel real fucking bad when I remember that second-year meeting, when they wanted to kick some guy out of the class because he’d been accused of being a queer, and I didn’t stand up and defend him, because I was scared they’d mention the Venezuelan girl who was going out with me at the time, you remember, Marieta, she of the small butt and big tits?”
“Hey, sure, tell me more . . . Kid, one day a nurse came from the clinic to give me an injection. It was very late, and I didn’t hear her come in and she caught me with my prick flying high from that magazine Peyi lent me.”
“That’s fucking terrible,” and to round the session off they had recourse to another bottle. “Just like the day I went to grab the rail on the bus when the driver braked suddenly, and I grabbed that woman’s tit, and she whacked me and called me everything from bastard downwards, and people started shouting, groper, groper . . .”
“And fuck, what about the day the Rank-and-File Committee designated me and another girl to persuade people not to come to school with such long hair, and I went along with it, though it wasn’t in the rules? Shit, the things they forced you to do.”
“Wait a minute, you just wait one minute, I’ve one to beat you, you beast, the day I spoke, señor, with a lilt so they’d think I was Venezuelan and would let me in the Capri with Marieta. Incredible, how embarrassing . . .”
“Hey, and I’d rather not remember the day, yes, a drop more rum, the day when black Samson stole my tin of condensed milk in the cane-cutting camp and I knew he’d done it but played dumb so I wouldn’t have to fight him.”
“Shit, life’s one bowl of shit . . . And what happened to me today, Skinny, I can’t, I’ll die of embarrassment, of rum, I’ll die,” and he shut his eyes in order to keep a hold on his brain’s battered remnants of lucidity so as not to die of embarrassment yet again and confess, “Skinny, Tamara invited me to lay her, because, you know, she had to make the first move, because I was shit-scared, and we went upstairs and yes, her tits are just like we imagined, and we got into bed, and not a flicker, not a bloody flicker, and then it perked up and I came just like that, brother, we’d hardly started, and she said, not to worry, these things happen, not to worry. Hell, Skinny, things happen that make you want to commit suicide you’re so embarrassed. Give me that bottle of rum, Skinny, come on, hand it over.”
Each morning seemed to dawn as if ripe for Armageddon. An apocalyptic clap from an eardrum-shattering bell that heralded the end of the world: even Rabbit had no option but to wake up. Their leader enjoyed ringing that bell all round the camp, and what’s more he shouted “On your feet, up you get, on your feet”, and even if we were on our feet or standing up holding our hands to our heads, he went on ringing that bell, ding-dong dong-ding, up and down the huts, until one day a righteous, mud-caked boot flew out of the darkness and smashed into the camp-leader’s nose. He fell on his backside and dropped the bell, and those who hadn’t seen the big boot wondered, happy and relieved, why on earth he’d stopped.
Within a quarter of an hour we were all lined up on the wasteland between the huts and the refectory. Eight brigades, five from eleventh grade and three from thirteenth, in front of the general staff of the camp. It was an hour before sunrise, bitterly cold, and we could feel the dew falling, and knew something bad was in store. When Baby-Face Miki, one of the brigade leaders for thirteenth grade, walked by, he muttered: “Speak and die . . .” The camp leader held a towel to his nose, and I could almost see the shafts of hatred winging from his eyes. Behind me Pancho had wrapped himself in a blanket, but they’d forced him into the open air and he wheezed like a pair of rusty bellows and when I heard him I thought I too would soon be gasping for air.
The school secretary spoke: there’d been a very serious act of indiscipline, which would lead to the guilty individual’s expulsion, and there’d be no appeals or let-offs, and if he had any civic spirit he should step up. Silence. How could there be such an act of indiscipline in a camp for high school students? This wasn’t a farm for re-educating kids from reform school. That kind of person, he added, was like a rotten potato in a sack of healthy ones: it corrupted and rotted the rest; they always used potatoes as an example as we never saw an apple. Rabbit looked at me, starting to wake up. Silence. Silence. Did nobody dare expose the miscreant who was tarnishing the prestige of the whole cohort that would not now win the league table after expending so much effort cutting cane? Silence. Silence. Silence. Skinny raised his eyebrows; he knew what was coming. All right then, if the guilty person wouldn’t step forward and nobody had civic spirit enough to denounce him, then everyone would be punished until that person was found, for things couldn’t continue as normal . . . A cosmic silence followed the secretary’s speech, and the smell of coffee being prepared in the kitchen became the first, most subtle of the tortures we’d suffer out in that cold. Pancho was still out of breath.
Then the oracle from Delphi spoke: “I’m here as a student,” said Rafael, “as a comrade and your representative elected by mass vote, and I know, just as you do, that someone here has committed a serious breach of discipline and could be taken to court for grievous bodily harm . . .” “Listen to him,” said Rabbit . . . “. . . for which we sinners will have to pay . . .” He had to have his Biblical touch. “. . . and it really affects us in the inter-camp competition, where we were almost sure of first place in the province. Can that be right because of a single person’s indiscipline? That the labours of one hundred and twelve comrade
s, yes, one hundred and twelve, because I’m now excluding the guilty party, should bite the dust? You know me, comrades, there are people here who’ve been with me for three years, you elected me president of the Student Federation and I’m just an ordinary student like the rest of you, but I can’t approve of things like this, that besmirch the prestige of the revolutionary Cuban student body and force the school management team to take disciplinary measures against you all.” More silence. “And I ask you, since you are clinging to male pride and such like: Is it manly to throw a boot in the dark at the camp’s supreme head? Similarly: is it manly to hide in the crowd and not show your face, knowing we will all suffer? Speak up, comrades, speak up,” he asked, and I shouted “Fuck your mother, you pansy!” at the top of my voice so everybody heard me fuck his mother, except the words didn’t reach my lips because I was afraid of fucking Rafael Morín’s mother there, in that cold, with Pancho all asthmatic, and Baby-Face Miki walking up and down the lines saying “Die”, the smell of coffee killing me and the camp leader pressing a towel to his nose because of a boot that had been flung his way.
When the Count entered headquarters he felt nostalgic for the peace and quiet of Sundays. It was barely five past eight. But it was Monday, and every Monday the world seemed to be coming to an end as if headquarters were preparing to evacuate before the outbreak of nuclear war: people couldn’t wait for the lift and rushed up the stairs; there was no space in the parking lot and exchanges of greetings were limited to a quick “All right then?”, “See you” or a garbled “Good day”; and suffering from the aftermath of his headache and dismal night, the Count preferred to respond with a wave of the hand and wait patiently in the queue for the lift. He knew he’d feel much better in half an hour, but the painkillers needed time to impact, although he wasn’t reproaching himself for not taking them the night before. He felt so pure and liberated after talking to Skinny that he forgot he’d never told him what happened with Tamara and also that he should set his alarm clock. Another episode in the nightmare in which Rafael Morín was chasing him to put him behind bars opened his eyes at exactly seven am and he felt like dying at least twice: when he got out of bed and his headache kicked off and when, seated on the pan, he ruminated over the nightmare he’d been suffering all night and the terrible feeling of being chased that still floated in his brain. Then he burst spontaneously into song: “You’re to blame, for all my sadness, for all my heartbreaks . . .” unable to fathom why he’d chosen that wretched bolero. He must be in love.
The lift stopped on his floor, and the Count looked at the clock on the wall: he was ten minutes late and wasn’t inclined or in the mood to invent some excuse. He opened the door to his cubicle and was blessed by Patricia Wong’s smile.
“Good morning, friends,” he greeted them. Patricia stood up to give him the usual kiss, and Manolo looked at him distantly and didn’t open his mouth. “What a nice smell, China,” he complimented his colleague and stopped for a moment to contemplate, as he always did, that impressive woman who was half-black and half-Chinese. Almost six feet tall and one hundred and eighty pounds distributed carefully with the best of intentions: her breasts small and no doubt very firm, hips like the Pacific Ocean, and buttocks that inevitably provoked a desire to touch or mount them and jump up and down, as if trampolining, to check out whether such a prodigious rump was for real.
“How are you, Mayo?” she asked, and the Count smiled for the first time that day on hearing that “Mayo” which was for Patricia Wong’s exclusive use. Besides, she helped his headaches with her little jars of Chinese pomade and fed his most hidden, never acknowledged superstitions: she was like a good luck charm. On three occasions Lieutenant Patricia Wong, the detective in the Fraud Squad, had presented him on a plate the solution to three cases that seemed about to evaporate in the innocence of the world.
“Still waiting for your father to invite me to eat another plate of bittersweet duck.”
“If you’d seen what he cooked yesterday,” she began as she struggled to fit her hips between the sides of the armchair. Then she crossed her long-distance runner’s legs, and the Count saw Manolo’s eyes were about to flee behind his nostrils. “He prepared quails stuffed with vegetables and cooked them in basil juice . . .”
“Hey, wait a minute, give us the full story! What did he stuff them with?”
“First, he crushed the basil leaves in a little coconut oil and boiled them. Then added the quail which was already bread-crumbed, basted in pork-fat and stuffed with almonds, sesame and five kinds of uncooked herbs: Chinese bean, spring onion, cabbage, parsley and a little something else, and finished it off with a sprinkling of cinnamon and nutmeg.”
“And was it ready to eat?” asked the Count, his morning enthusiasm peaking.
“But it must have tasted foul, I bet?” interjected Manolo, and the Count gave him a withering look. He wanted to say something cutting but first tried to imagine the impossible mixture of those strong, primary flavours that could only be blended by a man with old Juan Wong’s culture, and decided Manolo might be right, but he didn’t give up.
“Ignore the boy, China, his lack of culture will be the death of him. But you stopped inviting me long ago.”
“And you never ring me, Mayo. You even sent Manolo to bring me in on this job.”
“Forget it, forget it, it won’t happen again.” He stared at the sergeant, who’d just lit a cigarette at that hour of the morning. “And what’s up with this guy?”
Manolo clicked his tongue, meaning, “Leave me alone”, but he needed to talk.
“Oh, only a terrible row with Vilma last night. Do you know what she said? She reckons I invented an excuse about work in order to go out and lay someone else.” And he looked at Patricia. “And it’s all his fault.”
“Manolo, give me a break, please?” the Count pleaded, looking at the dossier open on the table. “You’re in a really bad state if you’re telling people I force you to do things . . . Did you explain to Patricia what we’re after?”
Manolo nodded reluctantly.
“Yes, he told me, Mayo,” Patricia intervened. “You know, I don’t hold much hope we’ll dig anything important out of the paperwork. If Rafael Morín is in some scam and as efficient as they say, he’ll have hidden his clothes before taking a dip. We can but try, I suppose.”
“You’ve got a team together?”
“Yes, two specialists. And you two as well?”
The Count looked at Patricia and then at Manolo. He realized his headache had disappeared but tapped his forehead and said:
“Look, China, just take Manolo along. I’ve got a number of things to see to here . . . I’ve got to read the reports which have come in . . .”
“There are none,” the sergeant informed him.
“You looked at everything?”
“Nothing from the coastguards or the provinces, the Zoilita business will gradually sort itself, and we’ve arranged to see Maciques at the enterprise.”
“All right, that’s fine,” the Count tried to wriggle out. He’d not seen eye to eye with statistics for some time and took pains to avoid that kind of routine research. “I won’t be much use to you there, will I? And I want to see the Boss. I’ll come and see you around ten o’clock, all right?”
“All right, all right,” parroted Manolo, shrugging his shoulders. Patricia smiled, and her slanted eyes vanished into her face. Could she see anything when she laughed?
“See you soon,” said Patricia, grabbing Manolo by the arm and dragging him out of the cubicle.
“Hey, China, wait a minute,” the Count asked, and he whispered in her ear. “What did the quail taste like yesterday?”
“What the kid said,” she whispered back. “Foul. But Dad scoffed the lot.”
“Just as well.” And he smiled at Manolo as he waved goodbye.
“Business deals involving lots of money are like jealous women: you can give them no reason to complain,” said René Maciques, and the Count looked at M
anolo; the lesson was for free and he’d got it quite wrong. René Maciques was barely forty and not the fifty he’d imagined; and was no librarian but a television presenter persuasively using his voice and hands and constantly trying to tidy his bushy eyebrows with index finger and thumb. He was wearing a guayabera that seemed enamelled, it was so white, with a white embroidered pattern down the sides that was even brighter, and he flashed a glib gleaming smile. Three gold pens poked out from one pocket, and the Count thought only an asshole would try to show off his status with a display of pens. “If one is involved in that kind of business, one has to look trustworthy, appear relaxed as if the deal were already signed and exude quiet conviction. As I said, like a jealous woman: because at the same time, one must hint, quite matter-of-factly, that signing is no life or death matter, that one is aware of more attractive options, although one knows this couldn’t be bettered. Big business is a jungle where every animal is dangerous and one needs more than a rifle over one’s shoulder.” And the Count thought, the king of the metaphor, this one! “And I know no comrade more adept than Rafael at doing deals. I had the opportunity to work a lot with him here in Cuba and in negotiations abroad, on really challenging contracts, and he behaved like an artist, sold at the top and always bought at below market price; and buyers and sellers were very satisfied, although they knew in the end that Rafael had hoodwinked them. And best of all: he never lost a customer.”
“And why did he spend his time sealing these deals if he had experts in the different areas?” asked Mario Conde at the cue for applause for the speech from an unexpectedly silver-tongued Maciques.
“Because he felt fulfilled doing it and knew he was the best. Each commercial area within the enterprise has its own expertise, whether according to line or geographical area, do you see? However, if the deal were very important or threatened to get stymied in some way, Rafael would advise the experts, draw on the business contacts he’d established over the years and enter the ring.”
Havana Blue Page 16
