Leonardo Padura - Havana Gold

Hypnotized by her magic incantation, gawping incredulously, the four friends shook their heads.

“Because the potato is hard-hearted and this lot is of more noble mind.”

“Jose, where the hell do you get all this stuff?” asked the Count, on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

“Don’t be such a policeman and take the dishes to the kitchen.”

The Count, Andrés and the Rabbit voted to nominate it the world’s best ajiaco , but Carlos, who’d downed three big spoonfuls while the others were still blowing the steam rising from their bowls, pointed out critically that his mother had often cooked it better.

They drank coffee, washed up and Josefina decided to go to see the Pedro Infante film they were showing in the “History of the Cinema” because she preferred that story of tip-top Mexican cowboys to the argument the diners launched into with the first round of the night’s third bottle of rum.

“Hey, savage,” said Skinny after downing another line of rum, “do you really think the marijuana has to do with Pre-Uni.”

The Count lit his cigarette and imitated his friend’s alcoholic style.

“I don’t know, Skinny, I really don’t, but it’s my gut feeling. As soon as I stepped back into Pre-Uni I felt it was another world, another place, and I couldn’t see it like it was our Pre-Uni. There’s nothing stranger than going somewhere you thought you knew by heart and realizing it’s not what you’d imagined. I do think we were more innocent and kids now are more crooked or cynical. We liked to wear our hair long and be transported by our music, but we were told so often we had a responsibility before history that we finally believed we did and we knew we had to shoulder it, right or wrong? There weren’t the hippies or drop-outs there are now. This guy,” and he pointed at Rabbit, “spent the whole day harping on about being a historian and read more books than the whole history department put together. And this fellow,” it was now Andrés’ turn, “decided he was going to be a doctor and he is a doctor, and spent every day playing baseball because he wanted to get in the National League. And didn’t you spend your whole time chasing skirt and then get an average mark of 96?”

“Hey, Conde,” Skinny waved his hands, like a coach trying to stop a runner dangerously on course to a suicidal out, “what you say is true, but it’s also true there were no hippies, because they fumigated the lot… Every man jack.”

“We weren’t so different, Conde,” then Andrés intervened, shaking his head when Skinny went to offer him the bottle. “Things were different, that’s true, whether more romantic or less pragmatic, who knows, or maybe they treated us harder, but I think in the end life passes us all by. Them and us.”

“Listen to him speak: ‘less pragmatic things’,” Rabbit laughed.

“Don’t piss around, Andrés, what do you mean, passed us fucking by? You’ve done what you wanted to do and if you were never a baseball player, it was down to bad luck,” countered Skinny, who remembered the day when Andrés sprained his ankle and was out of his best championship. It was a real defeat for the whole tribe: Andrés’ injury put an end to all their hopes of having a pal in the dugout belonging to the Industriales, seated between Capiró and Marquetti.

“Don’t think that for one minute. What the hell happened to you? You don’t fool me, Carlos: you’re fucked and they fucked you up. I can walk and I’m fucked as well: I never was a baseball player, I’m a bog-standard doctor in a bog-standard hospital, I married a woman who’s also bog-standard who works in a shitty office where they fill in shitty papers that people clean themselves on in other shitty offices. I’ve two children who want to be doctors just like me, because their mother has put it into their heads that a doctor is ‘somebody’. Don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes, Skinny, or talk to me about life fulfilment, or any of that crap; I’ve never been able to do what I wanted, because there was always something more vital on the agenda, something someone said I ought to do and which I did: study, get married, be a good son and now a good father… And the mad things, mistakes and mess-ups you should make in life? Hey, and this isn’t the bottle talking. Look at me… No, no woolpulling please, even you lot said I was mad when I fell in love with Cristina, because she was ten years older than me and because she’d had ten or how ever many husbands and because she did crazy things and must be a whore and how could I do such a thing to Adela, from Pre-Uni and such a decent, good natured girl… You forgotten? Well, I haven’t, and whenever I remember I think I was a big arsehole because I didn’t jump on a bus and go after Cristina wherever she’d holed up. At least I’d have made one a hell of a mistake for once in my life.”

“Too lucid by far,” interjected the Count. “You’re worse than me.”

The Count, Skinny and Rabbit looked at Andrés as if the guy talking was somebody else: perfect, intelligent, well-balanced, successful, calm, confident Andrés, the Andrés they’d thought they’d always known and whom, clearly, they’d apparently never known at all.

“You’re plastered,” said Skinny, as if trying to protect Andrés’ image and even his own.

“Something’s badly wrong in the kingdom of Denmark,” pronounced Rabbit downing another shot. The clattering of his glass against the table emphasized the silence that had fallen over the dining-room.

“Yes, it suits to say I’m drunk,” smiled Andrés, asking for a re-fill. “Then we can all feel at peace thinking life’s not as shitty as the songs of drunks would have us to believe.”

“What songs?” piped up Skinny, trying to find a route to a more amenable conversation. Only the Count smiled, sourly.

“And today when I left Pre-Uni, I remembered Dulce. Do you remember the day she said she was off, Skinny?”

Carlos asked for more rum and looked at the Count.

“No, I don’t,” he whispered. “Come on, more rum, don’t be so stingy.”

“And have you never stopped to think what would have happened if Andrés hadn’t done his leg in and had married Cristina, and if you, Conde, hadn’t joined the police and had become a writer, and if you, Carlos, had finished university and become a civil engineer and had never gone to Angola, and had more than likely married Dulcita? Have you never stopped to think we can’t turn the clock back, that what’s done is done? Have you never stopped to think it’s better not to think? Have you never stopped to think that at this fucking hour of the day we’ll never buy another bottle of rum and that by now Cristina’s breasts must have sagged? No, it’s better not to think any more crap… Now give me what’s left in that bottle. And bugger the mother of any of you who ever thinks again.”

“No need to worry, they don’t bite. And I don’t start teaching until this afternoon,” Dagmar said as she tried to smile at him, undecided whether she was embarrassed by her dogs’ welcoming barks and bared teeth or was proud to be the owner of such diligent hounds. The Count found her in her doorway, defying the wind, waiting for him like a bride scouring the horizon for the boat that will bring back her beloved. The two ugly mongrels, eager to show their rapid reactions, soon subdued their ostentatious woofs and wagged their tails as they ended their wild act. She invited him in and pointed him to a sofa where the Count sank helplessly as into a bottomless swamp. He felt tiny and inferior under the high ceiling, even more remote now, in that airy, shadowy La Víbora house. “Yes, it’s true, I got on well with Lissette the moment she started teaching at Pre-Uni and I think we were friends. At least I felt I was her friend and I was much upset by…”