Leonardo Padura - Havana Fever

“You’ll smoke one of these, won’t you? Now you see how I share my money around,” he said, smiling, and added: “and I’ll now invite you to lay some whores.”

Taken aback, Conde was at a loss for what to reply. In an existence entirely spent between the island’s four walls, he’d joined in the most diverse moral and physical adventures, some in, others out of the police, some drunk and others horribly sober. He’d never before been invited to have sex you paid for and he was shocked to feel doubt impishly coursing through his veins and wondered whether he might not like to try that for once.

“If you really want to be part of this scene, and nobody to suspect you, then you’ve got to go on, right to the bottom,” said Juan, as he took the first step.

“No, forget it,” he protested feebly.

“Hey,” the African threatened him, “I can see you’re a bit delicate. You won’t smoke pot and don’t want to shaft a little lady… You’re not queer by any chance, my friend?”

The knocking-shop, as his ex-confidant described it, was half way along the block. An old married couple, owners of a threebedroom house, rented them out by the hour to couples with nowhere to make love and to local whores and their customers. The best strategy to get a lay, according to the African, was to linger in the vicinity of the knocking shop and wait to be picked up by an available woman on the job. Suffering an attack of butterflies, the Count leaned expectantly on the wall, a virgin in terms of such experience. He lit a cigarette on his previous butt and looked at both sides of the street, where several people were wandering. Two women appeared ten minutes later. One was a mulatta, dyed blonde, and the other white, very thin, with bright red hair; the Count reckoned, with some difficulty, that they must be in their twenties, although they shifted from seeming older to being almost adolescent. The African immediately chose the white woman, and, with a yellow smile, casually asked how much she charged for the works.

“A hundred pesos,” came the reply, and Juan recoiled like a shocked punter. “You think that’s dear? Look, you big black, it’s twenty to be rubbed off, forty to be sucked off, sixty if you put it in but don’t kiss, eighty with a kiss and for a hundred you can stick it up my ass… And that’s not counting the fact you’re a black monkey and are getting to shaft a white woman with a pink cunt…”

“Can I give your cunt a feel?”

“Five pesos,” the girl responded, adroitly halting the advancing, simian hand.

The Count had begun to feel the first symptoms of asphyxia as he listened to the terms of the agreement between the African and this Juanita-of-all-trades and was about to faint when the mulatta flashed a smile that showed off two gold molars at the corner of her huge mouth, and whispered: “And does, papi , want general servicing?”

Conde did his best to smile, knowing he’d be unable to bed that woman, or even kiss her, and glanced at the African, who was relishing the situation. He then understood that all his moral openness was just a childish game in that insane world where sex acquired other values and uses, and became a source of sustenance, a way to put the miseries and tensions of life out of mind.

“No more arguing,” said Juan. “In we go.”

Conde felt the situation, so everyday for the African and the girls, was forcing him into his most stressful decisions ever: either he ran for it, found his way out of the barrio and salvation for his battered ethics, or followed the impulses of his morbid curiosity and participated in a purely commercial act, to the extent his stomach would allow. Refusing to think further, almost about to hurl himself into the pit of degradation, he got as far as the living room, where Juan was already caressing the small, firm buttocks of the white girl, agreeing terms with a respectable looking old man and paying the agreed amount, though hardly haggling over the hire terms: no drugs, no beating up, no shouting; only beer and rum sold by the establishment; paid for in advance; at an hourly rate…

Without looking at the house-owners – their eyes now glued back on the television, as if their lives depended on the news reports – the Count, in a kind of hypnotic trance, crossed the passage and followed the mulatta into the first bedroom, only to be rescued by an attack of nerves when he saw the African and his girl follow him in.

“But what?…”

“They’ve only got one free,” replied the African who took his first swig of rum from the bottle and began to wildly shower his companion with kisses.

For the rest of his life, however much he tried, Mario Conde could never remember what the room was like or what was in it, apart from a bed and the washbasin attached to the wall. However, he could never forget the precise, rapid gesture with which, once inside, the mulatta for hire dropped a packet of condoms on the bed and lifted up her skimpy blouse to present him with two breasts and two black aureolas, which she pointed at his chest as if he’d been sentenced to execution by firing squad.

An expert of sorts, the girl saw the scared look on Conde’s face and with a lascivious flourish of her tongue drew him near and bathed him in sickly-sweet breath.

“Don’ wan’ me titties, papi ? Gimme a lickle suck and gimme the hots?”

Right then Conde realized he’d exhausted his curiosity and that if he went any further he wouldn’t live long enough to cope with his repentance. He grasped the only dignified exit on offer.

“This isn’t my way. I can’t carry on with them in here,” and turned round to point at the African and white girl, only to find them completely naked already, not the least inhibited by the presence of others, and going at it hell for leather. And though he’d have preferred not to, he did see it: Juan the African’s knob, a huge black sausage, veins bulging, topped by a slavering, purple head, over bull’s balls entwined by curly black hair. Rationality restored, his mind fleetingly considered the spatial issue of whether the girl with scant breasts and protruding ribs could host that piece of firm meat whose back and belly she’d begun to lick with great relish, before her mouth swallowed it whole. He felt an emptiness between his own legs and concluded that his decision had been made.

“Wat’s the madder, mi amor ?” the girl yelped, afraid she’d lose the money that was in her grasp.

“This isn’t my way,” the Count repeated, clinging to these words of salvation.

Conde stayed under the shower, trying to clean that mindcurdling scene from his brain: the African’s cudgel-like prick, the white girl’s ribs, the mulatta’s nipples and reptilian tongue, her faked voice of passion and, above all, the sight of himself opening the door and taking a step backwards, the first in his noisy retreat into filthy streets where he finally recovered his ability to breathe.

The Count left his bathroom, wrapping a towel round his body, shaken by an awareness that he was upset by his own nakedness. Not sure why, he looked for his record player in a corner of the room. He placed it on the useless television stand, put Violeta del Río’s record on the turntable and activated it by moving the arm. He carefully dropped the needle into the first groove and sat on the distant sofa, as if he required that space in between. Resting his elbows on his knees and his head between his hands, trapped in a feeling of vertigo, he tried to clean his mind of the fetid traces of the experiment he’d let himself be dragged into and just listened to Violeta del Río’s voice, imploring, demanding, ordering: “Be gone from me”. He soon felt the melody change his skin, his hair and his nails, and realized he was recovering his sense of urgency to find out the real fate of that woman whose ghost had apparently returned to end an artificial silence, who had spent too long in a precarious vacuum. Like a man possessed, and powerless to resist, Conde sensed the latent spirit of that woman reduced to her voice, to her voice alone, slowly becoming blood of his blood, flesh of his flesh, transforming him into a living extension of the dead, as if Violeta del Río herself was beating at his temples, unexpectedly convinced that her voice was summoning him to reveal more than a single truth.