Now, as he sucked on his blackened pipe, like an anxious smoker with emphysema, Eligio Riego’s small eyes ranged over his audience, and he allowed himself a smile, before continuing: “We Catholics are too serious when it comes to the divine. We lack the vital, primitive happiness of the Greeks, Yorubas or Hindus who dialogue with their Gods and sit them at their table. I’ve always thought it wrong, for example, to ignore the humour that exists in the Holy Scriptures, to scorn the holy smile that God gave and communicated to us, and forget how Jesus’s first great miracle was to convert wine into water… A very clear sign from on high.”
“And what about devils, Eligio?” asked a know-all in the front row.
“Look, young man, the existence of devils attests to the existence of God, and vice versa. They need each other as Good needs Evil to exist. And that’s why evil is also everywhere: in hell, on earth, inside and outside. Moreover, if we follow the tradition of the Talmud, the angels appeared on the second day of creation. Hence Lucifer, the most beautiful of all these angels, has existed from that early date, do you see? Then the fall of Lucifer and his dissident band took place, and so I’ve heard, the devil has been characterized ever since by the fact that every third time he blinks, he blinks upwards, he cannot walk backwards or blow his nose; he never sleeps and is impatient, ambitious and never creates a shadow; his favourite food is flies, but he eats other things, which are always highly spiced, though he has an aversion to salt… But what most interests me about devils is their real artistic prowess: they say the malign one is an excellent musician and prefers stringed instruments. I always remember as an example how Juan Horozco y Covarrubias in his Treatise on True and False Prophecy, published in Segovia in 1588, states that he possesses proof of the devil’s artistic vocation. In his book the father recounts how he saw Lucifer, after the latter had taken on the body of a rather thick village girl, compose some beautiful profane verse and, as they say now, put them to music, so they could be sung to the accompaniment of a lute which, with a woman’s hands and arms, he played ‘like the most expert in the world’. Now, young man, I’m more interested in demons on earth than in hell, like Max Beerbohm, the English novelist who wrote Zuleika Dobson, that fascinating story of the planet’s most beautiful woman, who caused a love-sickness able to provoke the suicide en masse of all Oxford students in love with her devilish charms and, as one gleans from the novel’s final pages, also loved by those in Cambridge, where she was bound. It is one of the most diabolical stories I’ve read.. .” Eligio was emphatic, with his eyes receding when the Count opted to guarantee peace and quiet for his conversation with the poet and went out to reserve a table at the Louvre Cafe. Do you have any vintage rum? Yes, and Gold Medal. No, two vintage rums, without ice. No, not now, I’ll be back, keep the table, he warned the waiter, and went out to find Eligio Riego who, pipe in hand, was chatting at the exit from the lecture theatre to a young woman apparently melting under the heat from his words. Could he be the devil himself? I’ve no option but to interrupt, old friend, the Count told himself, and accosted him thus: “Forgive me, maestro… I’m your friend Rangel’s friend.”
“Young man, it’s a fabulous story about the tranvestite murdered wearing Electra Garrigo’s costume. Almost half demoniacal, you know? Like nearly everything involving Alberto Marques, who’s more shocking than Max Beerbohm… Look, young man, he and I have known each other and been friends from the forties, when we used to meet to prepare the issues of the magazine, often in Fat Lezama’s house, and I’ve always thought it was lucky this fellow was there to turn everything into a joke and puncture the atmosphere of poetic solemnity imposed by Lezama. We held poetry to be something entirely serious, transcendent, telluric, as they say now, and for him it was always a way to show off his cleverness, brilliance and talent. Because Alberto is one of the most intelligent men I’ve known, although I’ve always criticized the fact that he could sacrifice everything for a good joke, for the erotic chase, as he calls it, or one of his diabolically evil deeds, naturally. His break with Lezama and the whole magazine group in the fifties was one of his most shockingly evil deeds, but then I also understood him: he needed to be himself and shine alone. He was always like that, a loose cannon searching restlessly, and that was why I lamented the excesses committed against him, when they isolated him completely, just because they wanted to punish his irreverence and artistic rebelliousness. It was intensely sad, young man, and the ten years they delayed before trying to right this wrong was too long for him. But what was most extraordinary about Alberto’s dramatic character flourished in those difficult years: he displayed a dignity that was frankly enviable, and stopped writing and thinking about the theatre, which was all the more surprising in someone like him who lived for the world’s stages… Did I say he is an exhibitionist?… Careful with him. Alberto’s a born actor, one of the best actors I’ve ever seen, and he likes to invent his own comedies and tragedies. He exaggerates what he is or explains what he isn’t, so you really don’t know what goes… He says it is a form of self-defence. Perhaps this character of his is the reason why our friendship improves at a distance: we prefer to respect rather than engage with each other. I think he may understand me. No, my situation was different: I’ve always been a Catholic, though I’m not a mystic like your transvestite and in no way sanctimonious: as you can see, I drink large quantities of rum, smoke my pipes, and have never been able to deny myself the sometimes desperate contemplation of a girl coming into flower, because I’m convinced there’s no beauty on earth to surpass the heat which comes from youth. In a word, we are children of time and dust, and no poetry can spare us that. Other things perhaps, but the time allotted to each of us, no chance. That’s why I think life should be enjoyed on one’s own terms, provided the enjoyment doesn’t prejudice one’s neighbour, do you see? But there was a phase when it was thought that the vision of the world and life propounded by Catholic writers was inappropriate, that our fidelity was blemished by irrevocable spiritual fidelities and consequently we couldn’t be trusted, apart from being retrograde and philosophically idealist, you know? So we were discreetly sidelined. Nothing like what happened to Alberto and other people. The fact was, social commitment was confused with individual mind-sets and then extremists put us on the list of targets to be dealt with: we were ideologically impure and, for some, pernicious if not reactionary, when the preponderance of matter seemed clearly demonstrated, as they say out there. Someone with a Muscovite mentality thought uniformity was possible in this hot, heterodox country where nothing’s ever been pure, and then they unleashed a wave of hysteria against literature which left several corpses abandoned on the roadside and several walking wounded covered in scars… But I left the stage voluntarily: I couldn’t renounce something I’d always believed in (a lovely trait, as Alberto would say) or mistake the circumstantial for the essential. In any case I’d have betrayed myself if I’d let myself be defeated by what was transitory or, worse, if I’d pretended to change, as many people did. .. That’s why I trusted to silence but didn’t stop writing. The Marquess is different, as you’ll know if you’ve had a couple of conversations with him: his extreme sacrifice has the ingredients, many would say, of theatrical tragedy. But, I repeat, don’t be put off by what he says, try to see the truth in what he has done: he resisted all the insults, but stayed here, although only, as he says, to see the final fate of those who harassed him… The fact is he calls for the right to revenge, though he’d be incapable of transforming it into physical acts or public outrages. Look, young man, I’d also advise you, if at all possible, not to be misled by the many unpleasant incidents and stories you’ve heard about any of us: writers and artists aren’t as diabolical as is sometimes thought or alleged. Did they never tell you about the wrong-doings and hassles that occur among bank employees or workers in innocent canning factories or dozy members of a diplomatic mission? Don’t such things happen among you policemen? What I mean is that we don’t have an exclusive on back-biting, opportun
ism and ambition. Like everywhere, Good and Evil blend in each and every one of us. Young man: what more can I say, except to thank you for this vintage rum nobody could classify as diabolical which has warmed our conversation in a place that is so delightful?… Perhaps, as a result of some professional defect, you got the wrong person, and expected to hear a different opinion from me, but I profess two unchanging fidelities in my life: friendship and poetry. As long as I live I’ll write poetry, whether it’s published or not, whether it wins a poetry festival or not, whether they give me recognition for it or not. And friendship is a voluntary commitment one enters into, and if one does, it has to be respected: although we don’t agree on many things, Alberto Marques is my friend and when someone, you or anyone else, asks about him, the first thing I say is that he is my friend, and I think that says it all. Don’t you agree, young man?”
While he waited, Jose Antonio Morales’s eyes followed the extravagant flight of that pigeon. He observed how the bird soared dizzily, then tucked in its wings and performed strange pirouettes, as if discovering for the first time the vertiginous sensation of plunging into the void. It soared again, then disappeared behind the building, to return to the patch of sky visible from the corner of the yard where Jose Antonio awaited the accounts inspector. He thought how in his twenty-eight years as a bus driver he’d never seen pigeons while waiting for the results of the day’s takings and he felt more strongly than ever he would kill that woman.
Jose Antonio had till that day behaved like a balanced, responsible person, who’d never thought of killing anyone, at least coldly, with premeditation. Sometimes when he was driving his bus and suffered careless knocks from other drivers, he’d felt so under attack he even imagined he was carrying a sawn-off shotgun, seen in some Sicilian film, and that from his bus window he’d executed the dastardly violator of his rights on the road. But even those summary judgements of imagination had become less frequent over the years, as Jose Antonio got used to tolerating insouciant drivers whose existence now seemed as commonplace as ants in the sugar or roses on a rose bush. Or could it be he was growing old?
That was why he was surprised by this sudden command from his consciousness: he would kill that woman, and nothing in the world would stop him. The imperative appeared so clear-cut Jose Antonio feared it was all a snare set by love at first sight. It couldn’t be anything else, he told himself, as he signed the card for his daily takings and calculated he’d collected 47 pesos 35 cents, which meant 947 people had passed by the bus cashbox, not counting the firm’s employees who’d shown their pass and the inevitable bastards who always performed acts of magic to avoid paying or put in tokens rather than coins. In round figures: a thousand people, and only the face of that woman, someone in her early thirties, pleasant enough, a little on the thin side perhaps, dressed carefully though inelegantly, wearing next to no make-up, had imprinted itself on his memory and, into the bargain, with an order that again seemed irrevocable: namely, to kill her.
When he got home, Jose Antonio rehearsed a routine which complemented his routine on the bus: he went down the side passage, towards the terrace, left his seat cushion on a chair and washed his hands, soaping himself up to his elbows, as meticulously as a surgeon. He thought it the only way to get rid of the dangerous dirt from the buses, where everybody gets on, the sick and infirm, the dirty and healthy, the infected and the newly born smelling of eau-de-cologne. He picked up his cushion, whistled as he went through the back door, and met his wife, as always at this time of day, between laundry sink and kitchen. He kissed her on the cheek, was kissed by her, asked whether Tonito had come back from school and greeted the smell of fried onion and garlic, while she asked him how it had gone and he said all right. They ate, talked about the usual – the money that was never enough, the bad state of public transport, the unrelenting heat, the possibility she might go back to work in the factory – then he slept his two hours of siesta. He got up, put on his rubber sandals, drank the coffee his wife had just prepared and sat on the terrace to read the newspaper, and thought about that damned woman once again and tried to forget he would definitely kill her.
The following morning the woman didn’t appear. Jose Antonio Morales remembered he’d picked her up on his third round (left garage: 8.16 a.m.) at the stop on San Leonardo and 10 de Octubre (8.29 a.m.). However, he wasn’t relieved or too worried by her absence, for he knew he wouldn’t forget her and was determined to kill her. The woman didn’t show for another six days, until Tuesday – the same day he’d seen her the week before – she appeared, inelegant, without make-up, carrying a folder brimming with books and papers which Jose Antonio hadn’t seen on their previous encounter, and she threw her coin in the box, didn’t even glance at the driver who’d decided he was going to kill her. He looked at her, as he looked at all his passengers, shut the door and drove off, entering the huge, rather dirty thoroughfare of 10 de Octubre, previously dubbed Jesus del Monte.
That night, as he was watching the television news, Jose Antonio told himself that the idea he’d met her before, which was why he wanted to kill her, made no sense. In fact, until last Tuesday he’d never seen her, and perhaps he’d have lived his whole life without seeing her if, three weeks earlier, in the last settlement of routes for the second half of the year, he hadn’t taken the unexpected decision – for him, his wife, and the rest of the bus drivers – to change his route 4 for route 68, which began two minutes before his usual shift, and finished three minutes later, at 1.27 p.m. The decision was as spontaneous as it was irrevocable, and Jose Antonio then sought out explanations: he would earn thirty-two cents a day more, perhaps he was bored by the roads on route 4, the people who travelled on the 68 were slightly different, the minutes spent crossing the Apollo building estate were very pleasant… Perhaps on the day of decisions it had been very hot in the meeting-room and he’d felt very uncomfortable with his dirty hands. Or could it be he was growing old? Yes, he was now forty-seven and when he’d begun as a bus driver, just out of military service, he’d been barely nineteen, and all that time he’d been driving on route 4: ever since, every day five drives round Havana for eleven months in succession, driving through the same streets, at the same times, with the same stops and even picking up the same people who came to be his friends over the months and years, and he went to weddings, hospitalizations, some birthday parties and even several burials of his usual passengers, and he’d never thought of killing any of them. Nothing had interfered with the predictable routine and much less with what was logical for such a period: at twenty-one he’d got married, had a son whom he’d given his name, his own mother died peacefully, in her sleep, just after her sixty-second birthday, and they never called on him to fight in Angola, despite the fact that one day in 1975 he’d been summoned and, because of his military aptitudes, been told he belonged to the artillery reserve for unit 2154 and been asked if he was ready to fight as an internationalist soldier wherever the Revolution sent him, and he’d said he was. That night Jose Antonio slept peacefully, after making love with his wife, in the position they always adopted: she mounted him, put his penis in and her vagina rode the length of his member, Jose Antonio’s spine, mistreated by years of driving, resting flat on the mattress. The remainder of the week he also slept peacefully, although on Monday night he thought he felt a certain anxiety over the encounter he expected to have the following morning. But he shut his eyes and in four minutes fell, like the extravagant pigeon, into a dizzy sleep.
When you work for twenty-eight years as a bus driver you master, almost unthinkingly, all the tricks necessary to survive in the job: the lies you can tell the inspector when he catches you running several minutes ahead of time; the way to respond to irritable passengers, knowing when you can take the offensive or when you need to apologize or even pretend you didn’t hear the insult, how to ask for a coffee at some point on the route without having to join the queue: or begin a relationship with someone, according to your own sex, age and interests.
Jose Antonio saw her under the sign for the stop, carrying her folder, next to three other passengers. He stopped the bus ten yards before reaching the group and forced them to walk towards him. She was the last to get in and, when she went to put her money in, no doubt annoyed by him braking before the stop, he said: “I think we’re going to have to change buses.” If he’d said something concrete like: “The brakes are in a bad state,” or, “There was a pothole,” or something like that, the conversation would have taken off, if she’d been a very talkative person. But the riddle he’d set was unassailable. She stopped next to him, supported herself on a vertical bar and asked: “Why?” As he explained that the front right wheel brakes weren’t working properly, he asked her for her folder so he could place it on the bus rack and finally discovered she was an English teacher in an elementary secondary school in Luyano and that day she started her classes on the second shift at 8.55, and the bus left her there at 8. 42, giving her just enough time to arrive and get to her classroom, and if he switched buses…
The rest of September and the whole of October, she got on his bus on a Tuesday; he asked her for her folder, and they chatted thirteen minutes, which enabled him to find out she was Isabel Maria Fajardo, thirty-three years old, divorced, childless, and had been a teacher for some time, and considered herself a boring individual. What’s more, she gave him her address, and the third Tuesday in October invited him to drop by some day for a coffee. I’m always there after six, she said.
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