Havana Red

by Leonardo Padura

  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 Afón,” 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 Afón 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 Afón 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 Afón, 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. Afón 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 shoute
d and thought – he always thought everything through – he shouldn’t say anything else and threw the ball straight at black Afón’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 Afón’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: “Afón, 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 Afón’s lethal arm-lock, as the voice of Red Candito, hands on waist opposite the thief, said again: “Afón, you will give him his condensed milk back, won’t you?” “Afón 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 Afón, 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?”

  Red took a last drag on his cigarette before crushing it on the clay ashtray and looked at his friend.

  “You having me on, Conde?”

  “No, I’m serious.”

  “I ask him to give me good health, peace, patience, to protect me, and I ask him to look after my friends, like you and Carlos . . .”

  The Count knew Candito was telling the truth and felt that those prayers, where he also figured, when prayed by his old friend Red, had an accumulated value that moved him. Because Red had not only stopped Afón from doing him over in the training camp, but had been loyal to him ever since, something the Count hadn’t always returned with the same sincerity: as a friend who’d never had any time to devote to Candito, and as a policeman who’d put the squeeze on him more than once, mercilessly taking advantage of the knowledge Red had of all the goings-on in the Havana underworld. In a real sense, the Count thought, I’m a selfish cynic.

  “If God exists, I hope he’s listening to you . . .”

  “What a self-interested bugger you are . . . And what are you into now, Conde?”

  “I’m after whoever killed a transvestite . . . But it’s not easy, I can tell you. It seems the transvestite was a mystic, read the Bible and then right when they killed him he was dressed up like a character from a play. But the best of the story is that they stuck two peso coins up his arse.”

  Candito looked at the ground, while he searched his memory.

  “It’s a fucker,” agreed Candito. “That’s something new on the scene. It means something, Conde. I expect they were paying him back . . . So, you want me to help you, I guess?”

  “No, not now. I just came to tell you you’ve got to shut up shop,” he said, and lit another cigarette.

  “Why, is there some bother?”

  “So it seems, but don’t ask me, because I really don’t know what the problem is and I can’t tell you anything anyway. Just do what I say and shut up shop.”

  Candito ran his hand over his head, as if he had to remove something stuck in his bright red hair.

  “It’s OK, Conde, you know the whys and wherefores . . . It’s a shame though, you know. I’m just trying to save a bit of money . . .”

  “And what about the mulatto the other day? The one the fight was over?”

  Now Candito smiled, but looked fed up and sad.

  “He said he’d come to speak to me so I’d let him in for a piss . . .”

  “I told you. You’re all mad.”

  “No, Conde, we’re not mad. You know your business and I know mine . . . That guy’s a debt-collector.”

  “What do you mean a debt-collector?”

  “What I said. People hire him to collect their debts: he collects money owed or any kind of debt: settling accounts, spying on wives, people wanting to get their own back on someone. And the guy’s a pro.”

  The Count shook his head, refusing to believe all that, though he knew it must be true coming from Candito.

  “But was it true the guy wanted a leak?”

  “Nobody gets in here just to piss. Everybody knows that, it was just bullshit. And if it was true he wanted a piss, then the poor guy was fucked, but I wasn’t going to get fucked, nor were you. Nor Carlos.”

  The Count shook his head, denying something words couldn’t deny.

  “Sure he wasn’t after me?”

  “He said not, but who knows . . .”

  “I’m the one who’s never in the know, Red. You know I’m beginning to feel as if I was no longer a player? It’s strange, but I understand less by the day. Either everything’s changing very quickly, or I’m losing it. I really don’t know, but my head feels like a football . . . How about another coffee, go on,” he asked, and lit another cigarette. “Let me tell you one thing, Red. After you shut up shop, make yourself scarce, try going to the beach for a week, or the moon, as you put it . . . But if anyone comes after you, the first thing you do is find me wherever I’ve gone to ground. Because if they put the heat on you, they’ll have to burn me too . . . Anyway, go to church tomorrow, and ask God, on my behalf as well, to lend a hand, if he can.”

  “What a character you’ve turned into, Conde!”

  “Hey, while we’re at it. As you’re shutting up the office, how about another beer to help the windingdown process?”

  The Count contemplated himself in the mirror: head on, in the eyes, observing the shifty rake of his profile, and when he’d finished the self-scrutiny he had to agree: it’s true, I’ve got a policeman’s face. And whatever will I do with this policeman’s face if they kick me out of the force? To start with, I won’t shave today, he told himself, and it was then he decided to call Alberto Marqués and accept his invitation. Nine o’cloc
k? That’s fine. On Prado and Malecón . . . Careful you don’t get knocked off your feet, my prince . . .