Leonardo Padura - Havana Gold

Only when he was in love did Mario Conde dare to think, mouth-wateringly, about the future. Switching on lights of hope for the future had become the most visible symptom of real amorous satisfaction, able to chase from his consciousness the nostalgia and melancholy he’d experienced in more than fifteen years of repeated failure. From the moment he had had to abandon university and shelve his literary aspirations, burying himself alive in an information bureau, classifying the horrors committed every day in the capital, in the country (types of crime, modus operandi, for hundreds of crimes and police reports), his paths in life had taken the most malevolent turnings: he’d married the wrong woman, his parents died within a year and Skinny Carlos came back from Angola in a wheelchair, with a broken back and languished like a tree stunted by bad pruning. Happiness and the joys of life had been trapped in a past that turned ever more utopian and out of reach, and only a propitious breath of love, in a fairytale, could restore them to his reality and life. Because, although in love with a remarkably lascivious redhead, Mario Conde knew his destiny was on course for the darkness of a lunar night: hopes of writing, feeling and behaving like a normal person with a stake in Lady Luck’s capricious lottery were increasingly remote, because he also knew his life was linked to Skinny Carlos’s fate – when Josefina left for ever he’d not allow his friend to waste away, sad and neglected, in a hospital for the disabled. Though he wasn’t at all prepared, sooner or later he’d have to confront fear of the future which kept him awake and made breathing difficult. Solitude was like an endless tunnel because – and this was one of the many things he did know – no woman would agree to share with him that tougher test that destiny – destiny? – held in reserve.

Only when he fell in love did Mario Conde allow himself the luxury of forgetting that life sentence and feel a desire to write, dance and make love, to discover that the animal instincts released by the sexual act could also be a happy spur to give body and memory to life’s dreams and forgotten promises. That was why, on that unique day in his amorous curriculum, he felt the desire to masturbate watching a naked woman blowing a viscous melody on a golden saxophone.

“Take your clothes off, please,” he asks and Karina’s winning and winsome smile accompanies the act of removing her blouse and trousers.

“All your clothes,” he demands and when he sees her naked, he represses one by one his desires to embrace, kiss, at least touch her, and undresses, watching her all the time: he’s surprised by the stillness of her skin, darkened only by her nipples and the hair around her sex, that’s a more subtle red, and by the precise origins of her arms, breasts and legs, joined elastically to the whole. Her slightly withdrawn hips, good for birthing, are much more than a promise. Everything on his learning curve with this woman is a surprise.

He then undresses the saxophone and feels its cold firmness between his fingers for the first time, assessing the unexpected weight of an instrument embedded in his erotic fantasies that is about to become a most palpable reality.

“Sit here,” he points her to the chair and gives her the sax. “Play something beautiful, please,” he asks moving to another chair.

“What do you want to do?” she enquires, stroking the metal mouthpiece.

“Eat you,” he says and repeats, “Play.”

Karina is still fingering the mouthpiece and smiling hesitantly. She lifts it to her lips and sucks, dribbling saliva that hangs likes silver threads from her mouth. She makes her bum comfortable on the edge of the chair and opens her legs. She places the sax’s long neck between her thighs and closes her eyes. A jagged, metallic lament begins to issue from the instrument’s golden mouth and Mario Conde feels the melody pierce his chest, while Karina’s serene figure – eyes shut, legs open towards fleshy, redder, darker depths, splitting her down the middle, breasts shaking to the music’s rhythm and her breathing – take his desires to unimagined, unbearable peaks, while his eyes scour her every cranny and his two hands slowly run the length and mass of his penis, which begins to ooze drops of amber that make handling easier, and he closes in on her and her music to caress her neck and back, vertebra by vertebra, and her face – eyes, cheeks, forehead – with the purplish head of his member, as if erupting and leaving behind the wet trail of a wounded animal. She breathes in deeply and stops playing.

“Play,” the Count insists, but his order comes out in a plaintive whisper and Karina exchanges cold metal for hot skin.

“Give me some of that,” she asks and kisses his inflamed head, triangular in its latest incarnation, before her whole mouth sets out in search of a melody she can join… Tongues in thrall they walk to his bedroom and make love on the cleanest sheets, that smell of sun, soap and Lenten winds. They die, resurrect, only to die again…

He completed the ritual of foam creation and poured out the coffee. She had pulled on one of the sweaters the Count washed that afternoon and, when she sat down, it covered the top of her thighs. She wore the sandals made by Candito. He had wrapped a towel round his waist and pulled a chair over very close to hers.

“Are you going to stay the night?”

Karina tasted her coffee and looked at him.

“I don’t think so. I’ve got a lot of work on tomorrow. I’d rather sleep at my place.”

“So would I,” he added not without irony.

“Mario, it’s early days. Don’t get too demanding.”

He lit a cigarette and stopped himself from throwing the match in the sink. He stood up and looked for a metal ashtray.

“I get very jealous,” he said trying to smile.

She asked him for a cigarette and puffed twice. He felt he was really jealous.

“Have you read the book yet?”

She nodded and finished her coffee.

“It depressed me, you know? But if you like it so much it’s because you’re a bit like one of Salinger’s children. You like a tormented life.”

“I don’t really. It wasn’t my choice. I didn’t even choose you: something placed you in my path. When you’re over thirty you learn to be resigned: you’ll never do what you haven’t yet done, and everything’s a repeat. If you’ve triumphed, you’ll have more triumphs; if you’ve failed, get used to the taste of failure. And I am used to it. But when something like you appears, you tend to forget all that, even the advice given out by Caridad Delgado.”

Karina rubbed the palms of her hands over her thighs and tried to extend the scant cover given by the pullover.

“And what will happen if we can’t go on together?”

The Count looked at her. He couldn’t understand how, after so much loving, she could even imagine such a thing. Though he couldn’t get the same thought out of his mind.

“I don’t even want to think about that. I can’t,” he said but, “Karina… I think man’s destiny is fulfilled by the quest, not by discovery, even though all finds seem to crown such efforts: the Golden Fleece, America, the theory of relativity… love. I prefer to search after the eternal. Not like Jason or Columbus, who died poor and disillusioned after so much searching. Rather a searcher after El Dorado, the impossible. I hope I never discover you, Karina, never find you on a tree, not even protected by a dragon, like the old Fleece. Don’t ever let me catch you, Karina.”

“It scares me to hear you talk like that,” she said getting up. “You think too much.” She picked up her saxophone that she’d abandoned on the floor and put it in its case. The Count looked at her bum, that the pullover no longer covered, small and red from the heat of the chair, and thought it didn’t matter she had such a small butt. He was contemplating a myth not a woman, he told himself, as the telephone rang.