I will always love you, love you more, I need you so much at such a terrible time . . .
Your Nena
Mario Conde decided unilaterally, at a stroke, that his convalescence and relationship with antibiotics was over and asked Yoyi to stop by a market and get provisions for the indispensable celebration of this historic happening. The events of recent days, playing havoc with a routine he’d almost become used to, had frayed his nerves and set his brain to work at a dizzy speed. To calm such turmoil, Conde knew of no better cure than a good session of booze and chat.
The six bottles of rum, lined up on the iron and glass table, were a challenge. Skinny Carlos, who’d not been skinny for years, eyed them greedily, as if they were priceless jewels. The Count saw the bliss shining in his friend’s eyes, and wondered again if he was doing the right thing by giving him the means to commit gradual suicide. But when he saw him enjoying his first swig, with physical and mental relish, he thought that helping him depart that ravaged body with which Carlos had no desire to co-exist was the hardest test his sense of friendship and life itself had to face: at the same time it was a supreme act of love and he would be the main loser. When Skinny wasn’t around, where would Conde take his words, his thirst for rum, music and nostalgia?
“We have just one problem, Conde.” Carlos moved his chair to where his pensive friend had seen him take his first swig. “By the time your money’s gone, our taste buds will have developed bad habits. This rum is too good.”
“True enough, you savage, but it’s nothing to worry about,” answered the Count. “You always get used to the worst. We know that too well, right? Don’t worry, God will provide, as Candito told me and he’s never let me down.”
“Well, he’s providing pretty well for the time being . . .”
“Where are Rabbit and Candito?” enquired Pigeon, now holding a full glass.
“They’ll be here any minute,” replied Carlos, draining a half glass in one gulp.
Evening had come suddenly, as was usual in the last weeks of the Caribbean summer, but the heat was just as intense. Nonetheless, in Carlos’s backyard, under the trees and orchids that had just been watered, the temperature was tolerable.
“As we’re celebrating, let’s put some music on, hey, Conde?” Skinny enthused, pointing to the cassette recorder and the pile of tapes under the window.
“And listen to what?”
“The Beatles?”
“Chicago?”
“Formula V?”
“Los Pasos?”
“Credence?” asked Rabbit, the new arrival, bringing the curtain down on a routine Carlos and the Count sporadically rehearsed, proud and pleased to possess something that was unchanging and their very own, that nobody, not even time, hard knocks, frustrations, denials and absences, had been able to snatch from them. And death? Bugger death that fucking son of a bitch, Conde told himself, pointing an index finger at Carlos:
“Uh-huh, Credence . . .” immediately adding, as if put out: “But don’t go telling me Tom Fogerty sings like a black dude . . .”
“I know, I know, he sings like God . . . What do I know . . .” smiled Yoyi, tired of nodding his head to the ball the others kept hitting to and fro. “You lot are incredible, you’re not true, I swear by my mother . . . How often do you talk about the same old things?”
“So how’s your investigation going, Conde?” enquired Rabbit, now holding his glass of rum and not pausing to address the young man’s concerns.
“It’s going nowhere fast. The truth’s there, in front of my eyes, but I can’t see it.”
“What’s the latest then?” asked Carlos.
“I’m sure Dionisio’s death is connected to Violeta del Río’s, and that she didn’t commit suicide. But the only two people who can connect those deaths for me are Amalia Ferrero and her mother . . . The mother’s been mad for over forty years and Amalia swears she knows nothing.” “And you believe her?” interjected Yoyi.
“No . . . And that’s my problem. She’s been hiding something from the beginning, or perhaps did so to protect Dionisio . . . Or her mother? Or the memory of Alcides Montes de Oca? It looks as if he was definitely her father . . . But how do I persuade her to tell all?”
Carlos, Yoyi and Rabbit looked at each other and reached the same conclusion. Yoyi took on the role of spokesman.
“Give her up to the police, for Christ’s sake. Let them interrogate her like they interrogated us, they can try out all their subtle routines again: Sit there! Shut up! Hands by your sides! We’re the ones asking the questions and you’d better cooperate! Look me in the eyes! Were you like that, Conde?”
He opted not to reply.
“Manolo’s talked to her and got nothing out of her. But he reckons I exaggerate when I say Violeta’s death is connected to Dionisio’s. Although I did make him think a bit—”
“And what about Lansky and Montes de Oca? What’s their role, man?” Yoyi filled his glass with ice and poured himself another shot.
“That’s another part of the story. We may never find out what they were plotting but I’ve got a good idea—”
“Come on, out with it,” urged Rabbit.
“They wanted to get rid of Batista. Business was going downhill fast and Alcides Montes de Oca couldn’t stand him . . . He thought Batista was a disaster for the country. They were probably planning to kill him—”
“It sounds likely,” agreed Rabbit. “If they’d got rid of him they’d have had room to manoeuvre and wouldn’t have lost what they were setting up in town.”
“But something did happen to prevent them from doing just that, if it was what they were intending,” digressed the Count.
“Time had run out for them,” said Rabbit. “The war ended too quickly, and it was too late.”
“Maybe,” the Count allowed.
“And the mysterious black guy?” Yoyi interrupted. “Why doesn’t someone turn up to fit his description?”
Conde poured himself another rum. He looked into the bottom of his glass as if, down there, under layers of rum, an oracle existed that could give him answers and a blinding flash lit up his brain.
“Why didn’t I think of that before? Fucking hell—”
“What?” asked Carlos.
“That black guy doesn’t exist. He never existed. It was a charade to get more money out of us. Fuck—”
“So what about the fingerprints?” Rabbit’s logic put in an appearance.
“They could be anyone’s. An onion-seller in the street, the guy from the electricity . . . Anyone with a reason to go into the library—”
“Wait a minute, Conde,” Carlos tried to bring a little commonsense into the conversation. “Were those prints put there to sidetrack the police or by chance?”
“By chance, obviously. Somebody went into the library for some reason or other, but not to buy books. Nobody in the trade knew that was the library Yoyi and I were mining, because we didn’t tell anyone.”
“So what about the books that went missing, man?” Yoyi continued.
“No books went missing. They moved those six from their shelf and put them somewhere else.”
“So who moved them? It must have been Dionisio or Amalia.”
“Then who the hell killed Dionisio?” Rabbit didn’t seem very convinced by the Count’s hypotheses.
“Someone killed him who had nothing to do with the book trade. They killed Dionisio for another reason, because of something in the library, whatever that might be.”
“And you’re saying it wasn’t a book?” interjected Carlos.
“It looks that way,” said the Count, lifting the palm of his hand level with his eyes. “It’s all here but I can’t see what goes where.”
“It happens sometimes,” said Candito, waving at his friends.
“What you been up to, Red? You going to have a drink today?”
“No, not today.”
“Christ watching over you?” Conde smiled, though he immediately realized he’d
cracked a joke in bad taste.
“Yes, I’ve come from a wake,” Candito leant back on the wrought iron chair and looked tired.
“Who died?” inquired Carlos.
“The brother of a member of my church. You knew him, Conde . . . it was Juan Serrano, alias Juan the African.”
The Count put his glass on the ground and stared at his friend.
“What are you saying, Candito?”
“They found him yesterday. He’d been dead for two days. In an abandoned water tank in the yard of the Tallapiedra power station.”
The pain was a dead weight, anchored behind his eyes, a dark sludge he couldn’t erase, although he felt if he could put his hand inside his skull he’d grab it, wrench it out, and bring immediate relief. He’d given himself a double dose of analgesics and used up the entire contents of a pot of Chinese balm, but Conde predicted the headache wouldn’t go away and decided to confront it like a man.
When he strode up calle Esperanza, looking for the sick heart of the old barrio of Atarés, he couldn’t explain why he was there, or what he was after. As he walked along cracked pavements, skirting debris and petrified rubbish, he reflected that being born, living and dying in that place was one of the worst handouts that Lady Luck could send your way. Like one that brings you into the world in Burundi or Bombay or a Brazilian favela, rather than letting you see the light in Luxembourg or Brussels, where nothing happens and everything is usually clean, tidy and on time. Or in any other pleasant spot, faraway from that barrio where people were weaned on violence and historical frustration, grew up amid the most foul ugliness and daily moral degeneration, between Chaos and the blaring trumpets of the Apocalypse, all intent on atrophying a person’s ability to make ethical choices and transforming him into an elemental being, fit only to fight and kill to survive.
The stench, the landscape of devastated buildings, the urban rivers of human detritus, the ever bigger bars behind which the locals imprisoned themselves, the aggressive reactions as the means to express needs accumulated over generations and centuries. All this gave those condemned to grim life sentences here without trial or reason, crammed in slums, a shit life that could end when cold thrusting knives broke the heart of a person who, in a coda to so much misery, was granted the putrid bottom of an abandoned water tank as his grave.
Conde penetrated further into the barrio, nervously stroking the steel bar wrapped in a plastic bag, driven by an irrational desire to find an individual to unleash his hatred on, and he realized once the emotion of that first moment had passed, that the unnatural silence reigning over those streets two days ago, he’d not known why, had gone. Life – if that’s what it was – had returned to miserable normality in this circle of hell. After all, he was only one more dead man. Music again asserted its ownership of the air, vied with the cries of street-sellers; people huddled indolently on street corners, their looks as hazy as ever; women wilfully displayed mounds of flesh; bicycle-taxi drivers, come from the east of the country in search of a livelihood, sweated their wretched frustrations, pedalled against their ill-treated stomachs and battered backs. Oppression and despair had reclaimed the throne that had been momentarily displaced by pain and fear.
What codes had the African flaunted for his death to be decreed like that? Was it a debt of one, two or three thousand that decided that man’s fate? Were they laws of a nascent mafia, geared up to impose respect via exemplary punishment on transgressors and painful warnings to nosey-parkers? Conde remembered how almost fifty years ago a different mafia had viciously punished a journalist for being curious and putting himself where he wasn’t welcome, and how only four days ago, he himself had been lucky to escape with a beating and a couple of scars. But the poor African . . .
When Mario Conde reached callejón Alambique, in surprisingly good physical shape, he climbed to the third floor of that ramshackle building and walked, for the first time fearlessly, across the planks over the void. He passed by the door to what had been the African’s home, now sealed by the police, and made his way to the roof terrace.
The dazzling 10 a.m. sun gleamed on the cracked, discoloured tiles and the Count kneeled down by the air vent and put his arm in, up to and beyond his elbow. His pincer-like fingers extracted the plastic envelope he’d returned to its hidey hole with 700 pesos. He put the envelope on the floor, plunged his arm back in until his armpit hurt and felt a synthetic surface that eluded his fingertips. Almost horizontal, he pushed his arm in further, his fingers pulling a slippery surface towards him, so it rolled on to the palm of his hand that finally locked on something round, hard and familiar.
Not worrying unduly about the painful way he rubbed the skin on his elbows and knuckles, he extracted his arm and hand that was clutching a baseball wrapped in several layers of cellophane. Sitting on the tiles he removed the wrapping and examined a capricious ball that, on the field of play, could rule the desires and needs of so many. The African’s ball was quite ordinary, and very worn judging by its porous skin, frayed seams and soil stains that hadn’t quite obscured the black lines of a signature inscribed on the leather. Conde wet a finger with his saliva and gently cleaned the area around the scrawl and read the name written in tiny, awkward letters: Ricardo Lazo. He remembered the catcher who played for the Industriales and died in an accident many years ago, who in his glory days had been distinguished by the elegant way he received hits and, most of all, caught foul-flys. Despite his death and the passage of time, he reflected, Ricardo Lazo was still important in someone’s memory and he tried to imagine what that ball had meant to the man who’d just died for him to decide to hide it as his greatest treasure. How had he got hold of it? What great feats were suggested by that circumference that fitted a man’s fingers so perfectly, a shape measured in dreams? His questions would remain unanswered, at least while the Count was on earth and the African in hell. But perhaps they’d meet there in eternity, and the Count would ask for his forgiveness, say how sorry he was not to have given him the three or four thousand pesos he needed, the price he’d put on his life, and would then ask him all about that poor, worn ball that had clearly enjoyed the priceless fulfilment of a solid, resonant encounter with a wooden bat.
Mario Conde’s eyes clouded over and he realized he was crying. A feeling of frustration, rage and impotence released tears that kicks and blows to the head hadn’t. He was crying over the African, and himself, over the errors of their ways, the old baseball and unknown people who’d played with it and shared the dead exjailbird’s fate of living a wretched daily existence between the boundaries of the barrio, and who now tried to escape that larger prison down paths of violence. He was crying over the demise of so many dreams, hopes and historical responsibilities. He wiped his eyes vigorously on the back of his hand, gathered up the cellophane and put the ball back in place. He thought it ought to stay there until the tottering hulk collapsed, if not the whole rotten, fractured city. He tried to imagine someone, perhaps one of Juan the African’s children finding it buried in the mountain of debris, on that spot where a guilty man now stood, guilty of sins of omission and lack of will, sins of indolence and stubbornness, a man called Mario Conde.
Dazed by his headache he pocketed the envelope with the money and walked to the edge of the terrace. He surveyed the vista, the barrio and its clothes lines of threadbare garments, rickety huts for breeding pigeons and pigs, shaky television aerials, improvized zinc roofs beneath which slept the taxi-cyclists from Oriente and, in the street, the bustle of individuals trapped in the quest for a way to improve on a fate framed by that decay.
The scream escaped from his entrails, spewed out like vomit and ran over death-stricken terraces, cracked walls, rocky stairs, doors bereft of paint but plagued with bolts and locks and stinking streets, splashing, leaping, spreading through the air, until it reached the boundaries of the barrio and of fear, and went on unchecked, beyond and further, perhaps even over the sea, to sail stubbornly to where sorrows and memories are buried.
&nb
sp; “Bastards!” he shouted, in a hoarse voice, until he was out of breath, and then went on: “Bastards, I’m here,” panting, his horizon again clouded by tears and his head about to explode and shatter.
He opened his eyes slowly, almost warily, and realized the kicking pains had gone. Whom should he thank for the miracle? God, who seemed to exist a little less each day? Buddha the Enlightened One, or the earthly inventor of analgesics? The darkness now reigning over his bedroom confirmed it was night-time and he reckoned the pile of painkillers he’d ingested had put him out for two or three hours.
He heard someone banging on his door and realized the first knocks were what had woken him. He shouted: “I’m coming!” from his bed before sitting up.
A groggy Count welcomed Manolo for the first time in many days, and he almost smiled when he saw the policeman’s exhausted face.
“I heard you wanted to see me,” said Captain Manuel Palacios and the Count nodded.
“Come in, I’ll make some coffee.” “How come you’re asleep at this time of day?” Manuel asked, a touch envious.
“My head was throbbing,” explained the Count after he’d put the coffee in the percolator and shut the coffeepot. “Today’s been a strange one. What day is today?”
“Thursday. Why?” enquired Manolo, settling down on one of the kitchen chairs, his arms on the table, as the Count shrugged his shoulders, as if the day of the week were unimportant. “Not still furious with me?”
“I’m at odds with the world. I’m getting surer by the day that it’s a fucking awful place . . . But as it’s Thursday, I think I’ll forgive you.”
“Just as well,” he swayed his head, expressing no other feeling, and added: “I feel like fucking death warmed up . . . So what can I do for you?”
“Tell me what you know about Dionisio’s death.”
“Nothing new, we’ve reached a dead end. What about you?”
“I’ve got an idea, but both of us need to work at it.”
“Go on,” replied Manolo, seemingly indifferent.
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